The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against all travel to the whole of Sudan, citing the ongoing military conflict in Khartoum and other parts of the country. Its advice, last refreshed on 11 May 2026, notes that there have been several ceasefires but that these have been regularly broken. The practical position for anyone caught there is stark: the British Embassy in Khartoum is closed, there are no British consular staff in the country, the UK government is no longer evacuating people, and its ability to provide consular support is severely limited and cannot be delivered in person.
The reason the picture is worth watching now is the direction of the fighting. On 26 June 2026 the UN Security Council was briefed on Sudan by Rosemary DiCarlo, the Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, and by Hannan Sulieman, the Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF. The Council was told that an estimated 500,000 civilians are at risk as fighting intensifies in and around El Obeid, and that an escalation there would place hundreds of thousands of people at immediate risk of large-scale violence. The warning was framed against what has already happened in El Fasher, where the UN says more than 1,500 grave violations against children were verified in 2025.
The scale numbers put to the Council are severe. The UN reported that it has verified more than 5,700 grave violations against children since the fighting began, and that an estimated 825,000 children under the age of five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year. It also flagged a shift in how the war is being fought: the growing use of drones is making the conflict more unpredictable and more lethal, and nearly 80 per cent of reported child casualties in the first four months of 2026 were linked to those devices.
Operator implication: Sudan is a no-access, no-support environment, and nothing in the current picture softens that. There is no consular safety net, no state evacuation route, and no reliable read on where front lines sit from one week to the next. The two markers to track are the fight for El Obeid, which would open the Kordofan corridor further, and the spread of drone use, which is exactly the change that makes movement and static positions harder to risk-assess. For any duty-of-care assessment the answer on Sudan remains do not travel.
