Sudan militia seizes oil hub, disrupting crude exports

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Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have captured the country’s main oilfield and pipeline facilities in a fresh battlefield victory that will disrupt crude exports from the neighbouring country of South Sudan and deprive the Sudanese Armed Forces of significant revenue.

The capture of the area is a major blow to the SAF in Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year civil war.

It also complicates the delicate balancing act of South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, who has sought to protect his country’s oil exports that cross the frontier and transit through army controlled Port Sudan while tacitly accommodating supply routes for the RSF near his border, officials and experts in the region said.

The Heglig oilfield produced about 60,000 barrels a day last year but has been pumping dwindling quantities of crude in 2025 as a result of damage and lack of maintenance during the civil war between the RSF and its erstwhile allies in the SAF.

Heglig is also a central hub for pipelines transporting most of landlocked South Sudan’s estimated recent oil production of 165,000 bpd to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. South Sudan depends on oil for nearly all of its export earnings.

The RSF said on Telegram that it had captured Heglig on Monday. News agencies reported that a contingent from the Sudanese army had withdrawn into South Sudan alongside oil workers, after the army base had been overrun and oil facilities shut down.

“The liberation of the Heglig oil zone marks a pivotal point in the path towards freeing the entire homeland, given the area’s economic importance as a major resource that the Port Sudan clique [SAF] has long relied upon to finance, expand and prolong the war,” the RSF said.

Transit fees and debt repayments negotiated at the time of South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 constitute a significant portion of the revenues earned by the government led by the Sudan Armed Forces.

Neither the South Sudanese government nor officials in Port Sudan responded immediately to requests for comment. However, a former senior Sudanese official confirmed reports that oil exports from South Sudan and production in Heglig had both stopped.

The fall of the area constitutes another major blow to the SAF, which has been on the back foot since losing control of its last stronghold in western Sudan at El Fasher in October. The RSF has since pushed east into central Sudan, where last week it captured the garrison town of Babanusa.

The militia, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and which is allegedly armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates, has been accused of carrying out some of the worst atrocities in the civil war in recent months.

The SAF has also been accused of bombing vital aid routes, including recently at the town of Adre on the border with Chad, causing civilian casualties.  

The oilfield at Heglig is operated by China’s CNPC in a joint venture with Malaysia’s Petronas, ONGC of India and Sudan’s state-owned Sudapet. But the former official said working conditions at the oilfield and along the pipeline were already becoming impossible even before the final RSF attack.

Staff at the facility evacuated into neighbouring Unity state in South Sudan on Monday after shutting down operations, according to several news agencies.

The RSF said they would protect installations and ensure the safety of engineering and technical teams.

“Our forces affirm that they will secure and protect all vital oil facilities in the area to safeguard the interests of the people of the sisterly Republic of South Sudan, who depend heavily on oil that flows through Sudanese territory to global markets,” it said.

The resurgence of fighting in Sudan coincides with an increase in diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict. The RSF last month endorsed a humanitarian truce called for by the US and the regional powers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.  

But the paramilitary organisation has continued advancing into Kordofan, while the army under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has refused to sign up to peace plans so long as the UAE, which it has accused of backing the SAF, is involved. The UAE strenuously denies it has supplied the RSF with drones and other sophisticated weaponry.