Drones Are Killing Sudan's Dialysis Patients and Both Generals Are Guilty

Twenty-five people in a hospital outside Khartoum lost their dialysis because the power went out. Their kidneys stopped working, and nobody came to help them. The hospital had no generator and no solar panels. When the drones struck the electricity supply, the machines went silent, and the patients were left to die slowly in beds that had been built to save them.

Let us say what happened plainly. Someone sent a machine across the sky to switch off a hospital. Someone else decided that a fuel depot, a power station, or a market was worth destroying. Sudan is a country where the people who are supposed to protect civilians have turned the sky into a weapon against them, and the world is still asking who is responsible.

Denise Brown, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, has spent months watching this unfold. Her words should shake every African capital. "This is not about politics," she said. "This is about people." She is right, and that is exactly why the politics must be confronted.

Consider what the drone campaign has done in recent weeks. Power stations and fuel stations have been struck repeatedly. Hospitals have lost electricity in the middle of surgeries. Women are giving birth in darkness. Markets and displacement camps, places where people go because they have nowhere else to go, have been hit. The UN has described these as apparent targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure, which international humanitarian law protects. Those are not the words of activists. They are the words of the UN's most senior official on the ground, choosing her language with care.

The economic damage falls on those who have the least to lose. In Khartoum, fuel queues stretch for kilometres. Tuk-tuk drivers, the men and women who carry workers to their jobs and produce to the markets, now wait days in a row for a few litres of petrol. No fuel means no fares. No fares means no food for their children. A single drone strike on a fuel depot becomes a family missing dinner in a city where most families have already lost everything else.

The aid pipeline is collapsing too. Hundreds of trucks carrying food, shelter, and medicine are stranded because there is no fuel to move them. The World Food Programme has suffered seven attacks on its convoys this year and twenty over the past two years. Each attack means lost lives and lost food, meant for mothers and toddlers who needed it most. Meanwhile, the WFP is cutting rations and cutting the number of people it can serve. UNICEF says severe acute malnutrition now exceeds emergency thresholds across many parts of the country, particularly where the fighting is worst. Children are wasting away in a country that once fed its own people and exported food to its neighbours.

This did not begin with the drones. El Fasher in October 2025 remains a wound that the world has not yet dressed. Conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan has reached levels Brown describes as sky-high, running into the thousands of documented incidents. Millions have been displaced, in some cases more than once. The drones are the newest weapon in a war that has already taught Sudanese people that nowhere is safe, not their homes, not their hospitals, not their roads.

So who is flying them? The UN has said it does not know where the drones are originating. That honesty matters, and we will not pretend otherwise. But not knowing the launch site is not the same as not knowing the war. The Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have both been accused by investigators and humanitarian actors of attacks on civilians. Both have drones or access to them. The UN Panel of Experts on Sudan has documented the flow of weapons, components, and funds into this conflict from abroad, including drone technology reaching the battlefield through networks that span several continents. Multiple investigations have pointed to foreign suppliers, including sources in the Gulf, though those governments deny involvement. Every drone that reaches Sudan arrived through a contract, a shipment, a bank transfer, and a decision by someone who knew what it would be used for.

Let us be direct about the outside world. Africa has seen this movie before. Mercenaries, arms dealers, and resource speculators arrive wearing the language of partnership and leave behind burned villages and gold mines run by militias. We have watched foreign powers compete for Sudan's gold, its ports, and its strategic position on the Red Sea, while Sudanese civilians pay the price in blood. The new scramble for Africa does not need colonial flags. It needs only money, weapons, and silence. Every government that sells arms to a warlord, every company that buys gold from a militia, every diplomat who shrugs at a dialysis ward going dark, is a participant in this war.

Sudan's crisis is not beyond solution. Africa has practical examples of how the continent can do better. Ghana has shown that competitive elections and peaceful transfers of power build the trust that keeps armies in barracks. Senegal's 2024 transition, which saw a sitting president accept defeat and a new government take office, proved that democratic institutions can survive crisis when citizens and courts insist on them. Botswana built decades of stability on strong institutions, property rights, and a judiciary that answers to the law rather than to generals. Mauritius shows that a country can grow its economy through transparency and open markets. Sudan's people have demonstrated the same courage in their revolution, when they marched for civilian rule and paid for it with their lives. Their demand was simple: a government accountable to its people, not to guns.

The solutions are concrete. The United Nations Security Council must demand an immediate halt to attacks on power, water, fuel, and health infrastructure, and it must back that demand with enforcement, not just statements. The arms embargo on Darfur must be enforced against every party and every supplier, with sanctions targeting the financiers, shipping companies, and procurement networks that keep drones flying. The African Union must stop treating Sudan as an afterthought. Its Peace and Security Council should convene urgently, demand independent investigation of every drone strike on civilian infrastructure, and make clear that any party that bombs hospitals will face consequences. Donors must fund the humanitarian response in full, because WFP cannot feed children on promises. And any future settlement must rest on a civilian transition with independent courts, a professional army under civilian control, and a plan to return every displaced family home.

So here is what we demand, and what every African citizen should demand from their own government. Name the drone operators and the suppliers, publicly and without delay. Freeze the assets of those who finance this war. Open humanitarian corridors and protect the trucks, the clinics, and the convoys. Stop selling weapons to any party in Sudan. And remember that silence is a choice. When a child in Khartoum dies because a dialysis machine went dark, the question is not whether this is complicated. The question is whether we will let it continue.

Denise Brown asked a community in Blue Nile to be patient while she had no food to give them. How long must they wait? How long must dialysis patients wait for electricity that someone has deliberately destroyed? We are Africans. This is our continent, our neighbours, our brothers and sisters. We will not accept hospitals going dark as the price of a war fought by men who will never sit in those wards. Stop the drones. Name the killers. Feed the children now.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS