• Washington is keeping protection from deportation in place for now for Sudanese covered by Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and the US Department of Homeland Security said on 19 October that announcements on the future of the programme would be issued in due course, with the number of Sudanese beneficiaries estimated at about 6,800 people. (Source: Reuters citing the US Department of Homeland Security) • Sudanese nationals lodged about 31,000 asylum applications in European Union countries and associated countries between March 2025 and August 2026, with Greece and France accounting for more than 75% of them — about 13,000 applications in Greece and 11,000 in France — while more than 11,000 applications remained without a first-instance decision at the start of August, and applications in the first eight months of 2026 approached 15,000, an increase of nearly two-thirds over the same period in 2025. (Source: European Union Agency for Asylum, via InfoMigrants and Al-Mashhad Al-Sudani) • The UN-backed global hunger monitor (IPC) warned in an alert dated 12 October of a growing risk of famine in conflict-affected areas of Sudan amid drought linked to the El Niño phenomenon, as rainfall from July to September was the lowest in more than three decades nationwide and the lowest in North Darfur since 1984, and the World Food Programme expected an additional 350,000 people to face severe hunger by the end of 2026, rising to an additional 1.2 million by August 2027, noting that $276 million was available for its operation as of 17 October and that it needed an additional $134 million. (Source: Reuters, 23 October 2026, citing the IPC and the World Food Programme (WFP)) • In her briefing to the Security Council on 16 October, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo warned of the continued escalation of fighting, the worsening suffering of civilians and the risks of the conflict spreading to countries of the region, and called on the parties to the war to stop drone attacks and on external parties to help end the conflict instead of fuelling it. (Source: United Nations — Security Council meeting 10245 on Sudan and South Sudan, 16 October 2026) • The Security Council will hold a special session on 4 November to discuss developments in the Abyei area disputed between Sudan and South Sudan and the renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA), deployed since 2011, whose current mandate expires on 15 November 2026 under resolution 2802 (2025). (Source: The Citizen (Sudanese) and the United Nations) • The Chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has re-established the Sudanese Petroleum Corporation, seven years after it was dissolved in 2019, and reconstituted the Petroleum Council under his chairmanship, with membership including the ministers of petroleum, finance and justice, the director of the General Intelligence Service, the head of the Investment Authority and experts, and appointed retired Naval Major General Dr Ismail Osman al-Hussein Abushok as the corporation's Secretary-General, as part of arrangements the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum said aim to reorganise the energy sector and activate the Petroleum Wealth Law. (Source: Media of the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, circular of 21 October 2026, via Al-Muhaqqiq and Akhir Khabar)
— Editorial Team