Sudan's Warring Generals Are Bombing the Power That Keeps Children Alive

Picture a mother in Sudan this November, her toddler's lips cracked from thirst, a water pump sitting silent because the power station that drove it has been reduced to rubble. This is not a metaphor. It is the reality James Elder, UNICEF's Senior Adviser and Spokesperson, carried back from Sudan to the UN in Geneva. He did not reach for diplomatic language. He called what is happening an assault unlike anything Sudan has ever experienced.

Consider the timeline he laid out. In the final week of October, not one day passed without an armed drone striking a power station somewhere in Sudan. Across the month, as many as 15 stations were hit. Each strike is a switch thrown off in a home, a clinic, a classroom. When the lights go out in Sudan, they do not go out for soldiers. They go out for the nurse trying to keep a vaccine cold, the girl trying to study after dark, the grandmother waiting for water that will never come through a pipe that no longer has power.

And this is happening during a drought. Elder's warning was blunt: the attacks on critical infrastructure and the drying land are compounding each other. A country already hammered by war is now being squeezed by the sky and by the earth beneath it. Children are being cut off from water, from schools and from essential healthcare at the same time. Think about that. Not one catastrophe, but several, stacked on the backs of the youngest people in the country.

Let us be precise about who is fighting. Since 15 April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have turned Sudan into a killing field. More than twelve million people have been displaced, the largest displacement crisis on earth. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine conditions in Zamzam camp in Darfur in August 2024, the first time the world's hunger monitors had formally declared famine in the country's war. Two generals have spent more than two years proving that they would rather hold a ruined country than share a functioning one.

Both sides have used drones. Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2s and Iranian-designed Mohajer systems have been reported in the hands of the army. UN experts and independent investigators have documented foreign-made drones, munitions and logistics flowing to the RSF, with the United Arab Emirates named in UN Panel of Experts findings and in multiple investigations. Abu Dhabi denies these allegations. Whatever the final ledger shows, the pattern is unmistakable: foreign capitals are selling the instruments of Sudan's destruction, and African children are paying the invoice in thirst and darkness.

Here is what the world has already agreed on, and what too many governments have chosen to ignore. Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which applies to non-international armed conflicts like this one, prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Power that pumps water, runs hospital equipment and keeps food cold is not a military target. It is the lifeline. Every drone that strikes it is a violation of the same rules that the powerful invoke whenever it suits them to lecture the rest of us on human rights.

So we must ask the question directly. Who is accountable when a power station goes dark and a child dies of a preventable illness three weeks later? The general who ordered the launch? The commander who armed the drone? The foreign supplier who signed the contract and washed their hands? The answer is all of them, and none of them should be allowed to hide behind the fog of war.

This is the context that matters for every African. Sudan's suffering is not an isolated tragedy. It is what happens when a continent's security architecture fails to defend civilians, when regional bodies hesitate, when arms flow faster than accountability, and when the leaders who should protect their people treat them as collateral. The African Union suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, but suspension without a credible path back to civilian rule has become a shrug. We cannot keep pretending that outrage in Addis Ababa or Nairobi is the same thing as action.

The solutions are not mysterious. We know what works. Botswana has built one of the continent's most stable democracies on the back of transparent institutions, consistent elections and a respected judiciary. Mauritius has shown that good governance and open markets can lift a nation's living standards for decades. Senegal's 2024 transition proved that a people, backed by courts and a free press, can refuse to let a leader cling to power illegally. Sudan can follow that path, but only if its war stops and its civilians are protected.

So here is what must happen. The UN Security Council should adopt a resolution declaring power, water and health infrastructure off-limits to drone strikes, with the same clarity it applies to other protected sites. It should enforce the Darfur arms embargo that has been ignored for two decades, and it should sanction every commander, financier and supplier who keeps weapons flowing into this war, regardless of which flag they fly. The African Union and IGAD must set a binding timetable for a humanitarian ceasefire, tie any future readmission of Sudan to a verifiable civilian transition, and stop treating silence as neutrality. Investors and donors should back distributed solar mini-grids and water systems that are harder to destroy with a single strike, because a village of solar panels cannot be turned off by one drone. Those are investments in resilience that a free market can deliver, if governments get out of the way and enforce the contracts.

And what should we, as ordinary Africans, demand? We should demand that our governments name the drone suppliers. We should demand that the ministers who sit on the AU Peace and Security Council publish their positions on protecting civilian infrastructure. We should demand that the UN, UNICEF and humanitarian partners receive the access and funding they need to reach children before the next dry season kills them. We should demand that the private companies and sovereign funds profiting from Sudan's gold, land and arms explain themselves in public.

Sudan's children did not choose this war. They cannot vote out the generals. They cannot audit the arms deals. They can only wait, thirsty, in the dark, for adults who have the courage to act. So ask yourself, every time you flip a light switch tonight: who in your government has spoken up for the children whose lights have gone out? If the answer is no one, that silence is a choice. Make your representatives make a different one. Sign the petitions, press the parliaments, shame the institutions and refuse to let this story slip off the front page. Because a continent that will not protect its children from a drone is a continent that has forgotten what it is for.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL