Heglig/Panthou sits at the disputed border between South Kordofan state in Sudan and Unity State in South Sudan. All parties - the current Sudanese government, the current South Sudanese government, the tribal communities on either side - claim it. It is currently administered by Sudan. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, which ended the Second Sudanese Civil War, never fully resolved its status. In July 2009, the Permanent Court of Arbitration redefined the boundaries of Abyei, a contested county that lies between the two countries; the ruling placed Heglig and Bamboo oilfields outside Abyei's boundaries but did not explicitly assign them to either country, and did not address oil-revenue sharing. Sudan interpreted the decision to mean the area was Sudanese. South Sudan read it differently. Both read it correctly, if you accept either government's starting premises.

Heglig is situated within the Muglad Basin, a rift basin that contains much of South Sudan's proven oil reserves and extends north into Sudan. The Heglig oil field was first developed in 1996 by Arakis Energy (later part of Talisman Energy, the Canadian company that would sell out of Sudan under shareholder pressure in 2002). Today, the field is operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. Production peaked in 2006 and has been declining. Crude flows through the Greater Nile Oil Pipeline north to Khartoum and Port Sudan on the Red Sea - the pipeline, in other words, runs away from South Sudan, carrying revenue that South Sudan has historically claimed a share of. This is the economic physics that has produced the political crises.

In mid-April 2012, South Sudan's SPLA captured the Heglig oil field from Sudan at what became known as the First Battle of Heglig. During the ten days of occupation, South Sudan officially restored the town's name as Panthou. Sudan mobilized under President Omar al-Bashir and at the Second Battle of Heglig ten days later, drove the SPLA out. South Sudan withdrew. Clashes continued along the border for months. International observers, the African Union, and regional powers scrambled to prevent full-scale war between the two Sudans - war that, had it come, could have made the 1983-2005 Second Sudanese Civil War look modest. The oil field returned to Sudanese administration. The name returned to Heglig. The people who live in the surrounding villages, Dinka and Misseriya and others who knew the place by whatever name their grandparents used, continued their complicated daily lives across a border whose politics they did not design.

On 8 December 2025, the Rapid Support Forces - a Sudanese paramilitary force locked in civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023 - seized control of Heglig as it expanded its reach in the ongoing Sudanese civil war. The strategic and economic stakes of the oil field were such that on 11 December 2025, a remarkable three-party agreement was signed between the RSF, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and the South Sudan People's Defence Forces, designed to prevent the fighting from damaging the oilfield itself. The RSF withdrew. The South Sudan People's Defence Forces entered as a neutral security force. For a few weeks at least, Heglig was being guarded by the army of the country that officially does not administer it, under agreement from the two sides of a civil war that was otherwise consuming Sudan.

Heglig Airport has two gravel runways and, in the past, has hosted three Sudanese Air Force helicopter squadrons - Mi-8s and Mi-17s, Soviet-era workhorses that move easily across this kind of country. The runways are visible from the air as two gray streaks across the dry grassland. Around them, the oil infrastructure is unmistakable: processing facilities, storage tanks, the pipeline running north, the access roads radiating in all directions. What the map calls Heglig, the Dinka call Panthou. What Sudan administers, South Sudan claims. What belongs to the communities that have lived here for generations is a question no one in Khartoum, Juba, or the various international brokers has been able to answer to anyone's satisfaction. The trees, meanwhile, continue to fruit. The camels, goats, sheep, and cattle continue to eat.