At least 28 civilians were killed in two drone strikes in Sudan, one at a Darfur market and the other on a Kordofan road, pushing this year’s drone attack death toll past 500.
Health workers in two cities, nearly 500 miles apart, reported the latest deaths to Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday via satellite internet to bypass a communications blackout.
Despite repeated U.N. calls to halt drone attacks and protect civilians, Sudan’s warring sides, the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, continue near-daily strikes, leaving dozens dead each time.
On Wednesday, a strike at a market in Saraf Omra, North Darfur, killed 22 people, including an infant, and injured 17, a local clinic worker told AFP.
“The drone hit a parked oil truck, which caught fire along with part of the market,” said Hamid Suleiman, a vendor at the market, which serves Saraf Omra and surrounding towns in remote Darfur.
Hundreds of kilometers to the east, far from the RSF’s strongholds in Darfur, another drone strike set fire to a truck traveling on a North Kordofan road in army territory.
“Six bodies arrived at the hospital yesterday, three of them charred, in addition to 10 wounded,” a medical source at a local hospital in El-Rahad told AFP, blaming the RSF for the attack.
The civilians were traveling between the army-controlled towns of El-Rahad and Um Rawaba.
Drones from both sides have repeatedly attacked Sudan’s central east-west highway, which runs through North Kordofan state capital El-Obeid and connects Darfur to the army-controlled east.
Since April 2023, the war between the former allies has killed tens of thousands and uprooted about 11 million people, creating the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis.
The U.N. says more than 500 civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and mid-March alone, particularly in Kordofan, currently the war’s fiercest battlefield.
The marked increase in drone warfare shows “the devastating impact of high-tech and relatively cheap weapons in populated areas,” the U.N. rights office said.
Last week, on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, a strike blamed on the army at El-Daein Teaching Hospital in Darfur killed 70 people and injured 146.
Days earlier, another drone strike blamed on paramilitary forces killed 24 people in the Chadian town of Tine, raising fears of a spiraling regional spillover.
In an interview with France 24, Chad’s information minister, Gassim Cherif Mahamat, said the army had been deployed along the entire 1,300-kilometer desert border and that N’Djamena was planning a “proportionate response” in the event of a new attack.
The U.N.’s new special envoy for Sudan, Pekka Haavisto, began his first visit to the country this week “in support of peace,” he said.
The U.N. has repeatedly advocated for a truce and called on member states to refrain from foreign interference, with little result.
