A drone strike killed 14 people and injured dozens more in an attack Saturday on a market in central Sudan. It targeted the main market in Abu Zaeima, a town in Sudan’s arid North Kordofan region. The drone appears to have been sent by Sudan’s military, which is fighting the militia that controls the town, the Rapid Support Forces.
The Rapid Support Forces are also killing civilians with their drones. One of the militia’s drones hit a fuel station on Saturday in el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, which the RSF has partially encircled for months. Earlier, the RSF’s drones killed hundreds of people in attacks around El-Obeid. In a nearby village, an RSF drone killed 65 people at a funeral. And “a drone attack” by the RSF “hit a kindergarten in” the town of Kalogli in “south-central Sudan, killing 50 people, including 33 children.” Then it returned to kill paramedics at the scene.
People in Sudan had been hoping that the rainy season would bring a pause in their country’s three-year-old civil war, which has killed 400,000 people. In past years, the summer rainy season had reduced fighting, because the rainy season dissolves Sudan’s dirt roads into mud, and thus makes it harder for military vehicles to reach and conquer villages.
But drones make it possible for militias and armies to attack villages and town hundreds of miles away, even during the rainy season. Millions of people in Sudan lost power last year due to drone strikes on a key power plant.
So now, the rainy season brings Sudan’s long-suffering people no relief. And while rains don’t prevent drones from operating, the rainy season does make it harder for aid convoys to reach remote villages, by turning roads that aid trucks have to drive on into impassable mud.
In May,
At least 28 civilians were killed and dozens wounded on Tuesday when a drone operated by the Sudanese Armed Forces struck a crowded market in the city of Ghabesh in Sudan’s West Kordofan state, which is controlled by a brutal militia opposed to Sudan’s military, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both the military and the RSF have routinely committed human rights violations and murdered civilians in Sudan’s civil war, especially the RSF, which has committed genocide against certain ethnic groups, such as the Masalit people.
The drone strike hit the Ghabesh local market while it was packed with civilians, causing deaths and injuries of great severity. A doctors group said the the attack was accompanied by a campaign to cause starvation through deliberate food scarcity and rising commodity prices. Ghabesh market is one of the main commercial hubs in the region, serving hundreds of thousands of civilians across West Kordofan and neighboring areas as a primary source of food and household essentials.
Many deaths in Sudan’s civil war were not caused by drones. The Rapid Support Forces committed genocide against the Masalit people of western Sudan, without using any drones at all. And they slaughtered tens of thousands of the Zaghawa people, including thousands of children, after seizing the major city of El Fasher, again, without using drones. The RSF also has kidnapped thousands of people and held them for ransom, torturing many of them. The RSF has killed at least 250,000 people from non-Arab ethnic groups in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
But drone attacks on trucks carrying food and supplies are now increasing starvation in Sudan. They are cutting the flow of food to desperately poor areas.
