A wave of drone attacks across Sudan has killed more than 160 people in recent days, according to medics and rights groups, as both the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensify aerial attacks that increasingly hit civilians. The United Nations said it was alarmed by the continued strikes, which are killing children and disrupting essential services.
The deadliest attack came on Sunday evening in Al-Dibab, a town in West Kordofan, a state in southern Sudan that is entirely under RSF control. Residents and medical workers said a drone struck a transport hub where villagers had gathered after a market day to find rides home. A witness, Ahmed Wadi, said the drone hit twice, ten minutes apart, and that he helped bury about 50 bodies, including his own brother. A medical source said 80 people died in total, including 30 of 47 wounded who had been taken to the nearby town of Al-Mujlad. The RSF's self-declared administration, known as Tasis, and the monitoring group Emergency Lawyers blamed the army. Emergency Lawyers also said the military bombed a market in Al-Mujlad on Saturday.
Other strikes hit widely separated areas. On Monday, a rare drone attack on the capital, Khartoum, killed three children aged two, four and six in the Imtidad Nasser neighbourhood near the airport; Emergency Lawyers blamed the RSF, which had not commented. Early Monday, a strike on Nyala, the RSF-held capital of South Darfur, killed 17 people, including seven RSF officers, according to medical and RSF sources. On Friday, an RSF drone attack on displaced people in Blue Nile province, on the Ethiopian border, killed 41, the rights group said. A military source also said air defences intercepted RSF drones aimed at the Atbara and Setit dams in Gadaref state in the east.
The war began in April 2023, when army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, fell out over plans to merge the paramilitary into the army. It has killed at least 59,000 people, according to the monitor ACLED, though aid groups believe the real toll is higher. About 13 million people have been displaced, in what aid groups call the world's largest humanitarian crisis. Drones have become central to the fighting: between January and April, they accounted for at least 880 civilian deaths, more than 80% of conflict-related civilian deaths.
The violence compounds severe hunger. The UN says 33.7 million people, including 17.3 million children, need food aid this year, and the global hunger monitor IPC warned that conflict and drought are worsening food insecurity in Darfur and Kordofan, where two displacement camps recorded malnutrition above famine thresholds. Diplomacy appears stalled: a senior UN official told the Security Council last week there was "no breakthrough on the horizon" because the warring parties believe they can gain on the battlefield with continued external support. The United States urged the council to push for a humanitarian truce and widen an arms embargo, but China and Russia opposed expanding it.