The war in Sudan is spilling into the Central African Republic and complicating plans to draw down the UN peacekeeping mission there, the Secretary General’s special representative, Valentine Rugwabiza, told the Security Council. She pleaded with the Council, as it prepares to renew the mandate of the mission, MINUSCA, to maintain the mission with adequate force levels and capabilities during what she called the critical consolidation phase.
The fragility has a date and a place. On June 30, armed groups attacked Am-Dafock, on the Sudanese border, killing civilians and members of the national security forces, displacing 17,000 civilians and injuring six UN peacekeepers. Rugwabiza said that without MINUSCA’s rapid response, attacks in the border area with Chad and Sudan would have produced significantly more fatalities, and that state authority was restored after five days of control by the armed group, whose fighters retreated across the border into Sudan. Violence is also multiplying around mining sites and pastoral corridors in the northeast and southeast. In the southeast, 26 serious incidents attributed to suspected Lord’s Resistance Army members were recorded between June and September, including the abduction of 68 civilians, around 40 of them children.
The warning lands against real progress, which is what makes the drawdown question hard. Since July 2025, 1,907 fighters have been disarmed and demobilised, though their economic reintegration remains difficult. As of October 1, 127 of the country’s 177 municipalities had installed their councils; the remaining polls, postponed for lack of money and logistics, are due on October 25. Against that, nearly two million Central Africans, 31 percent of the population, faced acute food insecurity between April and August, and the UN humanitarian plan was only 46.6 percent funded at the beginning of October.
The Council must decide before mid November whether to renew the mandate of a mission that still fields more than 12,000 peacekeepers and has already closed several bases. The United States has argued for larger troop reductions. Other members warn against a hasty withdrawal, and the Secretary General has recommended extending the mandate by one year while preserving the military capabilities needed for rapid intervention. Three hostages held since December 2025, including the sub prefect of Bambouti, were released on Monday after months of mediation, a reminder of both the insecurity and the local negotiation the mission underwrites.