Two in Three Child Casualties in Sudan Are Now Caused by Drones

Sudan's children are losing their water, their food and, in some cases, their hands. Last October, a drone struck a power station somewhere in Sudan on nearly every day of the final week of the month. Up to 15 power stations were hit that month. No one should be able to read that sentence and keep scrolling.

We have to ask what kind of war treats a power station as a legitimate target. A power station does not carry a rifle. It pumps water into a clinic and keeps a vaccine refrigerator humming. When the grid goes dark, the people who die are not the commanders who ordered the strike. They are the infants whose formula cannot be mixed safely and the mothers who walk farther each day for water that may carry cholera.

UNICEF has now reported that two in three child casualties in Sudan this year were caused by drones. Think about that. Sudan's armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces have been fighting since April 2023, and in three and a half years the war has moved from the battlefield into the bedroom, the classroom and the water queue. Children are no longer collateral damage in this war. In too many places, they are its primary target, whether by design or by the reckless indifference that comes with weapons nobody is accountable for.

The timing is merciless. El Niño forecasts were already warning of drought across the region, and the damage in Sudan has already begun. The planting window for the 2026-27 cereal harvest has largely closed. Even if late rains come, they cannot restore fields that were never planted, irrigation pumps that cannot run, or farmers who cannot afford fuel because the fuel supply is itself crippled. UNICEF estimates that around 825,000 children under five will suffer severe acute malnutrition this year, the kind that kills quickly and quietly. Drought and drone strikes together form a lethal cycle. Failed rains empty the granaries. Strikes empty the water pumps. Hunger does the rest.

Consider Burie, a teenage boy whose hands were taken by an explosion. He now lives in a tent. In the mornings he studies online, and in the afternoons he gathers grass for animals, using the stumps of his arms with help from his friends. A child at fourteen or fifteen should be deciding which university to apply to. Burie is learning to live without hands in a country where the lights keep going out. He told the UNICEF team he must accept things as they are. No child should ever have to accept that.

We are told this is a conflict between two armed factions. That framing is a comfortable lie. Investigators from the United Nations and independent research groups have documented foreign supply lines feeding both camps, including drones, components and financing from outside Sudan's borders. Weapons from Gulf states, Turkey, Iran, China and elsewhere have reportedly reached the battlefield, sometimes through third countries and private brokers who never have to see the wreckage. Every one of those suppliers wraps its sales in the language of partnership, stability or development. Every one of them knows what these weapons do when they are used over cities. The arms dealers do not need to be in Khartoum or Darfur to share the blame. They only need to be paid.

Here is the hypocrisy we must name. Western governments lecture Africa about democracy and human rights, then keep trading with the sponsors of a war that is starving children. Foreign powers rush to host conferences about humanitarian access while the drones keep flying. The new scramble for Africa is not about flags anymore. It is about contracts, mineral concessions, port access and influence, and too often the price is paid in Sudanese lives. Whoever is buying the drones, whoever is selling the parts and whoever is looking away, they are not neutral. Neutrality is what you claim when you have decided that other people's children are an acceptable cost.

Sudan is not beyond saving, and it is not without people willing to save it. The Emergency Response Rooms and local volunteers have kept water and food moving through the worst months of this war, often at great personal risk. UNICEF and its partners have treated hundreds of thousands of children for severe malnutrition, vaccinated millions, repaired and solarised water systems serving close to eight million people, and reached more than 1.5 million children and families with protection and psychosocial care. This is what functioning institutions look like under fire. Yet the agency says its Sudan response is only one-third funded. Resilience cannot survive on goodwill and borrowed time.

The solutions are not mysterious. They are the building blocks that have lifted other African countries out of crisis. Botswana built its prosperity on predictable rules, property protection and disciplined public finance. Mauritius showed that small economies can thrive when institutions are independent and corruption is punished. Senegal demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power, enforced through courts and a free press, can outlast the most dangerous political moments. Sudan needs its own version of this discipline: a ceasefire that actually holds, a civilian transition with independent courts, and an energy system decentralised into solar microgrids that cannot be knocked out by a single drone run. Water systems and clinics should be designated protected infrastructure under international law, and the parties should be held personally accountable when they are not. Private investors should be encouraged to fund distributed solar power, but only where property rights are respected and procurement is transparent.

Accountability has to be more than a press release. The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing statements and start naming the states and companies that are arming this war. The UN Security Council should strengthen enforcement of the Darfur arms embargo, establish a sanctions regime with teeth against every supplier and financier, and mandate independent drone attribution so that no commander can hide behind anonymous wreckage. Donor governments must fully fund UNICEF's appeal, not in the form of symbolic pledges but as predictable multi-year commitments. Those who speak loudly about human rights must show it with money, sanctions and trade decisions.

And we, the citizens of this continent, have our own responsibilities. Demand that your government state, in public, which arms and drone suppliers it has refused to deal with. Demand that the African Union convene a session dedicated to Sudan's children, not its borders. Demand that every company profiting from dual-use technology be asked where its products end up. Share the testimony of children like Burie until the people who sell weapons can no longer pretend they did not know.

The question UNICEF asked is the question we must answer. Must Sudanese children face an existential threat before the world takes notice? It is already here. When the power goes out, the pumps stop. When the rains fail, the food runs out. Sudan's children are facing both at once. If the world is waiting for something worse, it will be waiting at their graves. We will not wait. We will demand the ceasefire, the accountability, the funding and the protection that Sudan's children have been denied for three and a half years. Not tomorrow. Now.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB