SPLM-N Launches Attacks in Kurmuk County, Blue Nile
Rebels attack army positions near town at Ethiopian border
Forces of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army–North (Al-Hilu faction) carried out operations that led to the capture of the villages of Deim Mansour, Bashir Nugo, and Khor al-Budi in Blue Nile State.
These attacks near the Ethiopia-Sudan border follow an incursion last week in Bau County along the South Sudan border.
In a statement, SPLM-North said that it “inflicted heavy losses in lives and military equipment on the Islamic Movement’s army and its militias following fierce battles on Tuesday morning in February 2026. The People’s Army seized combat vehicles, tanks, and a depot containing military drones.”
Sources on the government side acknowledged fighting in the area, without giving specific details. Last week, SAF claimed to have repulsed attacks in Bau County after inflicting heavy losses on rebel fighters.
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Blue Nile State is a secondary theatre in Sudan’s civil war, but it has seen an uptick in violence in recent months, following the formalization of an alliance between SPLM-North (Al-Hilu) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Although the RSF has no historic presence in this region, it is allegedly now supporting SPLM-North via Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region.
Since a previous civil war (2011-2018), SPLM-North controls a southeastern enclave of Blue Nile State around Yabus. The rest of the state remains in the hands of the Sudanese military, supported by a breakaway SPLM-N faction led by Malik Agar, a former rebel leader and one-time state governor.
Agar’s SPLM-North signed a peace deal in 2020 and joined the government, but some of his fighters under a local field commander, Joseph Tuka, rejected the deal and affiliated themselves with Abdelaziz Al-Hilu, chairman of the SPLM-North forces that control the Nuba Mountains.
After the RSF mutiny in 2023, Malik Agar was promoted to deputy chair of the Sovereignty Council, solidifying his position in the government and helping SAF cement its political support and military control in Blue Nile.
Throughout the war, Agar has served as a key interlocutor between the Sudanese government and the South Sudanese government in Juba, where he has long-standing political and personal connections. He remains an influential political figure in Blue Nile, and his forces have fought alongside the Sudanese military and are partly integrated into it in Blue Nile State.
An estimated 200,000 Sudanese refugees, displaced by past fighting in Blue Nile State, live in Maban County of South Sudan.