Yale imagery shows Sali camp razed

TLDR

• Yale's lab imagery from 29 October to 4 November shows the Sudanese army camp at Sali razed, per Sudan outlets.¹²
• The same report notes continued construction, IL-76 flights and truck traffic at an Ethiopian base in Asosa.¹²
• Al Jazeera Net's imagery analysis separately tracks new displacement shelters at Damazin and Roseires.³

Two Sudanese outlets reported on 7 and 8 November on a Yale Humanitarian Research Lab "Blue Nile Situation Update" dated 5 November, which uses satellite imagery to document fighting and logistics around Sudan's Blue Nile state.¹² The lab's report itself was not retrieved, so its findings below are as summarised by those outlets.

Why it matters: the imagery gives dated, checkable observations of a camp, an airfield and a convoy in a conflict with few independent witnesses, while the lab itself says imagery cannot show what shipments contain or where they end up.¹²

Driving the news:

• Sali: The Sudan Times says imagery from 29 October to 4 November shows the Sudanese army's camp at Sali razed, which it says supports the 3 November claim of control by the RSF and SPLM-N, the "Sudan Founding Alliance" (TASIS).²¹
• Asosa: Sudan Events says the lab saw continued construction at the Ethiopian National Defence Force base in Asosa from mid-September to early November, with a net increase of about 30 shipping containers in a first phase and at least 25 more after. It says an IL-76 cargo aircraft was seen at Asosa airport on 30 October and 4 November, and that open-source intelligence indicated the flights originated in the UAE.¹
• Vehicles: Sudan Events says 27 cargo trucks, most loaded, were seen on 3 October and 11 double-trailer trucks on 4 November, along with about 54 light combat vehicles, most of them white, which the lab suggested may be undergoing repainting before transfer to the Blue Nile front.¹
• Damazin and Kurmuk: the Sudan outlets say damage was seen at at least six civilian sites in Damazin, near a market and a mosque, and at military sites including near Damazin airport, consistent with local reports of drone attacks on 3 and 4 November. They report more than 800 new displacement shelters at Damazin within about a month and more than 20 light combat vehicles at Kurmuk, with road levelling and bridge repairs in late October.¹²
• Independent imagery: Al Jazeera Net's open-source unit says it tracked shelter sites with imagery from late September to 4 November, used a high-resolution Vantor image of 4 November to show a new strip of shelters on the eastern edge of the Damazin site, and measured the Al-Azaza gathering near Roseires at about 266,699 square metres across three blocks. It cites IOM figures of 119,782 people displaced between 11 January and 15 October 2026.³

The big picture: the outlets say the lab assessed the Asosa activity as consistent with supply to the RSF and its allies, while stressing that satellite observations alone cannot establish the contents or destination of shipments.¹² Sudan Events reports Ethiopia recently ordered the Sudanese diplomatic mission to leave Asosa.¹ The Al Jazeera Net analysis covers displacement, not the military activity, so it corroborates the scale of the Damazin shelters rather than the Yale findings on Sali or Asosa.³

The other side: no response from Ethiopia, the UAE or the RSF was found in the retrieved coverage. The UAE origin of the flights is Sudan Events' wording of an open-source indication, not a finding it attributes to the lab's imagery.¹

Single-source note: the Yale findings rest on two secondary summaries, which appear to draw on the same report; the primary page was not retrieved and the imagery was not reviewed. Al Jazeera Net's piece is in Arabic and its translated figures are approximate.