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Sudanese Army Seizes Ankush and Cuts RSF Supply Route on Kordofan Front
Sudan’s national army says it has captured Ankush after five days of search‑and‑clear operations from Ayal Bakhit, cutting a supply route to Al‑Khawi and forcing Rapid Support Forces to retreat south on the Kordofan front.
On Sudan’s Kordofan front, the national army reports a clear, if hard‑won, advance after days of desert fighting.
According to the account from the ground, Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) spent five days conducting search‑and‑clear operations in the desert before launching an offensive from the direction of Ayal Bakhit. That push brought Ankush under army control and severed a supply route to Al‑Khawi, a line that Rapid Support Forces (RSF) units had been using.
Once that route was reportedly cut, RSF fighters pulled back toward the south, mirroring earlier withdrawals from the northernmost desert towns in recent days. In this part of Kordofan, such retreats often follow the loss of a single track or junction that sustains fuel, ammunition, and food for isolated positions.
For civilians scattered along these routes, the impact is direct. When the army takes a settlement like Ankush, checkpoints change hands, trade flows are disrupted, and people must quickly judge which side will treat them as sympathizers or suspects. A supply line that once carried goods for markets can be repurposed for military convoys, leaving nearby communities more exposed and harder to reach with basic services.
For soldiers on both sides, this is a war of attrition shaped by logistics. The SAF’s description of multi‑day search‑and‑clear work points to small, mobile RSF groups using the terrain to slow advances. When the army claims to have cut Al‑Khawi’s supply route, it signals a belief that RSF units in that sector may now struggle to resupply or rotate, raising pressure on them to fall back again.
Kordofan sits between Sudan’s central heartland, Darfur, and the south, so control over its desert roads can influence whether RSF keeps freedom of movement between these regions. If SAF consolidates its grip on Ankush and the route to Al‑Khawi, RSF’s ability to shift fighters and extract resources from the area could narrow.
Aid groups trying to work in Kordofan face the same constraints as the combatants. Every time a route changes hands, the risk calculation for moving food, medicine, and staff shifts as well. In a landscape where front lines are fluid and often poorly marked, the capture of places many people have never heard of can determine whether displaced families are reachable at all.
What happens next will depend on whether RSF can regroup for a counter‑attack to reopen the Al‑Khawi line, and whether SAF can maintain its own extended supply chain from Ayal Bakhit through Ankush. Reports of new displacement or renewed clashes around these points will be early signs of whether this advance holds or triggers another round of back‑and‑forth fighting in the desert.