At least 15 people were killed and 23 others injured on Monday when strikes struck the Lagawa District in Sudan’s South Kordofan state, adding to a mounting casualty toll from a civil war that has become one of the most destructive and least reported conflicts in the world. The strikes hit a residential area in the late morning, according to local witnesses and aid organization contacts in the region, causing significant structural damage to buildings and overwhelming the limited medical facilities available in the district.

The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary organization that has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces in a devastating conflict that began in April 2023, issued a statement attributing Monday’s strikes to the Sudanese Armed Forces. The SAF had not issued any official comment on the incident by Monday evening, consistent with the pattern of mutual denial and counter-accusation that has characterized the conflict’s information environment throughout its duration. Independent verification of the attribution remained impossible given the severe restrictions on media access to South Kordofan.

Rebel factions operating in the South Kordofan region used Monday’s incident to issue a renewed call on the United Nations Security Council to take action against the use of aerial drones against civilian populations in Sudan. The call echoed a series of similar appeals made over the preceding months, none of which had produced binding UN action. Drone strikes have become an increasingly prominent feature of the conflict, and humanitarian organizations have documented their use resulting in civilian casualties across multiple Sudanese states.

The death toll in Sudan’s civil war has been staggering. The United Nations estimates that more than 150,000 people have been killed since the fighting began, with figures from some analysts running considerably higher given the difficulty of documenting casualties in areas with no functioning civil administration. More than 10 million people have been internally displaced, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world, a distinction that has drawn relatively little sustained international attention compared to other conflicts of lesser humanitarian scale.

South Kordofan occupies a particularly sensitive place in Sudan’s conflict geography. The state, which borders South Sudan to the south and had been the site of previous cycles of conflict involving the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, has been contested throughout the current war. Its agricultural resources, including some of the more productive land in war-affected Sudan, and its proximity to oil-producing regions have made it a strategic objective for both the SAF and RSF. Civilians have borne the consequences of that strategic competition at enormous human cost.

Humanitarian access to South Kordofan and other conflict-affected regions of Sudan has been severely limited throughout the war. Aid organizations report that both the SAF and RSF have at various times blocked, delayed, or taxed humanitarian convoys, and that the climate of insecurity has made it impossible to operate sustained relief programs in many areas. The World Food Programme has warned repeatedly that famine conditions are present or imminent in multiple Sudanese states, with the situation in Kordofan among the most acute.

International diplomatic efforts to end the Sudan conflict have moved in fits and starts, with multiple ceasefire agreements negotiated and subsequently collapsed over the course of the war. The most recent round of talks, facilitated by a joint international mechanism involving the African Union, the Arab League, and various Western governments, had produced no durable ceasefire as of Monday. Sources familiar with the negotiations described both the SAF and RSF leadership as deeply resistant to any agreement that would require them to share power or submit to accountability mechanisms.

The regional dimensions of the Sudan conflict added further complexity to any peace process. Several neighboring governments have provided varying degrees of support to one side or the other, reflecting their own geopolitical interests and ethnic or political affiliations. The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Eritrea have all been implicated at various points in providing material support to the conflict parties, allegations that have complicated multilateral diplomacy and made a comprehensive regional framework for peace elusive.

Monday’s strikes came on a day when international media attention was focused overwhelmingly on the Iran-U.S. standoff, a pattern of distraction that Sudan’s advocates have noted with increasing bitterness over the course of the conflict. Journalists and advocacy organizations have repeatedly pointed out that the international community’s attention and diplomatic energy tends to follow crises in strategically central locations, leaving less geopolitically prominent conflicts like Sudan’s to fester with minimal sustained coverage. The result, they argue, is a feedback loop in which inattention enables impunity, which enables further atrocity.

Local civil society organizations in Lagawa and the surrounding area were attempting Monday afternoon to compile a full accounting of the casualties and coordinate basic medical assistance for the injured. Several of those organizations, which have functioned as the primary documentation and assistance infrastructure in the absence of effective government services, said they were operating with severely depleted resources and desperately needed international financial support. Their appeals, issued through social media and in contacts with international journalists, reflected the improvised and under-resourced nature of the civilian response to a crisis of enormous proportions.

The United Nations Sudan mission issued a brief statement Monday condemning attacks on civilians and calling for an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire, language it has deployed with depressing regularity throughout the conflict without producing the desired effect. Diplomats familiar with the Security Council dynamics around Sudan acknowledged privately that the likelihood of meaningful collective action from the council remained low, given the conflicting interests of its permanent members regarding the conflict parties and their regional backers. For the people of Lagawa District on Monday, those geopolitical calculations meant that the dead remained uncounted and the injured untreated for hours after the strikes.