IOM tracking puts Sudan's internally displaced at 8.59 million and returnees at 5.27 million
What happened
The International Organization for Migration's Displacement Tracking Matrix, as relayed by the Sudan War Monitor channel, reports about 8,585,611 internally displaced people across 185 localities in all 18 of Sudan's states. The same figures put roughly 5,273,334 returnees in 79 localities across nine states, and the Arabic-language source says 82 percent of those returnees went back to their areas of prior displacement inside the country. Children under 18 are described as making up nearly half of both the displaced and returned populations. The report says the data were drawn from more than 13,000 sites and dates the publication to Sunday, 18 October 2026, while the event record is timestamped 20 October 2026. No specific settlement is named, and no attack or incident is described.
Context and assessment
This entry is a population-level displacement update rather than a report of violence, so it marks a different kind of signal from the strikes and clashes that usually dominate a conflict map. Its significance lies in the scale it describes. Sudan's conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which escalated sharply in April 2023, has pushed millions from Khartoum, Darfur, Kordofan and other areas into shifting patterns of flight. A reported figure of this size, with returnees now recorded across nine states, suggests that movement is running in both directions at once and that the situation on the ground is changing faster than any single front line would show. Operationally, returns on this scale can indicate that some areas are judged safer for civilians, but they can also reflect economic pressure or the lack of alternatives. The record shows no related events in the database, so no direct link to recent attacks can be drawn from it. Readers should treat the figures as a snapshot of tracked movement, not as evidence of how stable any particular area is.
Sources and confidence
The entry rests on a single channel, Sudan War Monitor, which summarises IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix output in Arabic. The IOM figures themselves are the primary basis, but no second outlet or direct IOM publication is cited in the data, so independent cross-confirmation has not been established. The confidence score of 6.1 reflects a credible originating agency paired with a secondary, single-channel relay and a date discrepancy between the stated publication day and the event timestamp. Confidence would rise with a direct IOM or Displacement Tracking Matrix release, or with a second outlet repeating the same totals. It would fall if the figures were revised or if the underlying site counts could not be matched to the published tracking data.
Location
The location is recorded at national level, Sudan as a whole, rather than at any settlement, facility or town. The coordinates given, 16.0 north and 30.0 east, are a generic central point within the country and do not correspond to a specific place of incident. Sudan is a large country in north-east Africa, bordered by Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, with the Red Sea coast to the east. The Nile system runs through much of its eastern half, which is where much of its population and tracked movement is concentrated.
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Intel Mapper aggregates open-source reports from monitored Telegram and X channels, geolocates them, cross-checks duplicates across sources and assigns a confidence score. Entries are updated as new confirmations arrive. Read how we verify events.