Terror from the skies: drones are redefining warfare in Sudan, and massacring its civilians

Strikes with huge death tolls are an increasing occurrence as UAVs ‘bring the war to places that were once safe’

The first drone struck the busy transport hub near a market in Al-Dibab as hundreds of people gathered to board trucks to take them back to their homes.

Ten minutes later on the evening of 18 October, a second drone hit the same site in the town in West Kordofan state, Sudan. At least 139 people were killed.

Eight days after the “double-tap” attack – designed to maximise casualties by killing and injuring emergency responders, volunteers and bystanders on top of the original victims – a drone hit a busy market in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

Emergency Lawyers, a rights group tracking violence in Sudan, put the death toll from that attack at 103. “I lost my 19-year-old son,” a Nyala resident told Agence France-Presse. “We buried him alongside more than 70 bodies in a single site.”

These are just two of a relentless series of mass casualty drone strikes in recent months in Sudan, where the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has risen sharply, becoming the leading cause of civilian deaths by far in the country’s civil war. Drones killed at least 306 people and injured hundreds more in the first three weeks of October alone, according to the UN.

Sudan’s civil war broke out when a power struggle between the armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces erupted into violence in the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023. A humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded in the intervening years. Estimates of the death toll so far vary from 150,000 to more than 400,000. Millions more have been driven from their homes. Vast swathes of the population face acute food insecurity.

The dynamics of the warfare have evolved over the past 42 months. At the start, the army relied on fighter jets, attack helicopters, tanks and long-range artillery. The RSF heavily depended on pick-ups mounted with machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, in addition to anti-tank weapons and rocket launchers.

A Sudan investigator at the Centre for Information Resilience, which conducts open-source investigations, said the organisation first documented the use of weaponised drones in the conflict in July 2023, and that the frequency has increased significantly over time. “Now you hear about a drone strike nearly every day,” he said.

A CIR investigation published last month identified 21 unique UAV models – both surveillance-reconnaissance drones and combat drones – that had been used in Sudan since the start of the war.

It found 10 models used by RSF and aligned forces, manufactured in Belarus, China, and Russia; and five models used by the Sudanese army and aligned forces, manufactured in Iran, Sudan, and Turkey.

A Sudan investigator at CIR said FPV drones – often smaller quadcopters used as kamikaze drones – were common earlier in the war, but that the warring parties were increasingly turning to larger UAVs with very long ranges that could carry precision-guided munitions.

Ali Mahmoud Ali, a Sudan analyst at the conflict monitoring group Acled, said the Sudanese armed forces usually used drones to hit RSF bases and cut fuel and other supply routes to areas controlled by the group, while the militia often targeted infrastructure, such as power stations, water stations, airports, and hospitals “to send the message” that it could “destabilise SAF [army] regions”.

He added that drones helped secure troops on the ground for whoever had the upper hand in the air, making ground operations easier. “The key weapon in peripheral warfare is the drone,” Ali said.

Between January and April of this year, drone strikes accounted for at least 880 civilian deaths – more than 80% of all conflict-related civilian deaths in that timeframe – according to the UN Human Rights Office.

CIR data shows the most-struck targets are commercial spaces such as markets, residential areas, and military assets and sites.

Ali Salih*, a resident of El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, has grown accustomed to drone attacks in the area and, like other residents, lives with the constant fear of when the next one may strike.

He recalled being at home when the most recent drone attack hit the city, a strike he said killed three people and injured several others. “Although we try to continue our daily lives, the repeated attacks make things difficult, especially for people living near areas that may be targeted,” he said.

In early November, Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, said the intensifying drone attacks were disrupting electricity, water and fuel supplies, as well as hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid.

“We need help passing the message to whoever needs to hear it, that this must stop,” she said. “People who need life-saving dialysis can’t get it. Women are giving birth with no lights in the hospital. Operations can’t take place.”

James Elder, a spokesperson for Unicef, said on Tuesday two-thirds of child injuries and deaths in Sudan this year were caused by drones. “They are bringing the war to places that were once safe,” he said. “People here talk about three things: safety, education and water. Armed drones are taking all three.”

Drone warfare is also affecting regional dynamics. On 19 October, a drone strike allegedly targeting an RSF fuel depot in Abyei, a border region disputed by Sudan and South Sudan, killed at least 153 people when it hit a market in the area.

Sudan’s foreign ministry said late last month that a wave of drones used in attacks by the RSF on electricity infrastructure in army-held areas were supplied by the United Arab Emirates and launched from Ethiopia. Both the UAE and Ethiopia deny supporting the RSF.

Not only have drones reshaped the civil war, they have also “muddied the water of attribution”, a Sudan investigator at CIR said. Christy Cooney, a researcher at the NGO Avaaz, said drones enabled the combatants to attack each other across vast distances from far behind the frontlines and offer a degree of unpredictability over ground attacks. “There’s obviously no warning,” he said.

Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, said the mass killing carried out by the RSF in the town of El Fasher last year, which the UN has said had “hallmarks of genocide”, was made technically possible by the presence of drones and “the tactical integration of UAV systems into a repertoire of civilian hunter-killer targeting”.

He said the tactics and strategies being implemented by the army and RSF could become the future of war around the world if there was no international control on how wars involving UAVs were fought.

“What we are seeing here is the coming attraction of the future – unbridled civilian target-focused application of now increasingly cheaper, effective point-and-click warfare,” Raymond said. “What is happening in Sudan this year with drones will redefine the next decade-plus of war more than the tank and the biplane did in the first world war.”