Sudan's Army Drone-Bombed a Market Full of Civilians, Killing 153

Picture a market on a Monday morning. Women haggling over grain. Children running between stalls. Traders who came in from the countryside to sell what they could grow. Then the sky opens, and a drone drops multiple munitions on all of them.

Local authorities in Abyei district say at least 153 people died in the strike on the Amiet market, and that the number is likely higher. Those are not abstractions. Each figure is a mother who went out to buy food and did not come home, a father who will never see his child grow up, a family that will spend the rest of its life asking why.

Authorities in Abyei attribute the strike to the Sudanese army. Abyei sits in a disputed border zone between Sudan and South Sudan, a place that has been fought over, neglected, and forgotten for years. Now it has become another place where ordinary people are killed from the air by men who claim to be defending a nation.

We have to say this plainly, because the world keeps looking for a clean villain in Sudan's war. There isn't one. There are two armed forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and both have turned their guns, their drones, and their artillery on the people they claim to protect. The army has spent years selling itself abroad as the responsible, humane party, the reasonable alternative to the RSF's militias. Analysts who study the war have pushed back on that story, arguing that the difference between the two forces in how they treat civilians is far smaller than the diplomatic messaging suggests. A market bombing does not care about your press releases.

Consider what we already know about this war. It began in April 2023 with fighting in Khartoum, and it has since spread across Darfur, Kordofan, and other regions. Millions have been displaced, and famine conditions have been documented in several areas. UN investigators and rights groups have recorded mass killings, sexual violence, and attacks on hospitals and markets from both sides. The pattern is consistent: when a town falls, the civilians who could not flee become targets, and the aid that might save them gets blocked.

Drones have changed the calculus of this war, and not for the better. Aerial weapons let commanders strike from hundreds of kilometres away, with no soldier on the ground to witness the consequences. They make it easy to kill crowds and easy to call the result a mistake. Reports have pointed to foreign-made drones, including Turkish and Iranian models, being used in Sudan, and to outside powers supplying weapons and financing to the warring factions. Investigators have also documented gold smuggling networks that help fund the fighting, with supply chains reaching abroad. Every dollar that feeds these armies is a dollar taken from a Sudanese schoolteacher, a nurse, or a farmer.

This is the uncomfortable truth that our governments, our media, and our foreign partners keep stepping around. Sudan's war is not only a domestic tragedy. It is a marketplace. Foreign capitals and private interests are buying gold, selling arms, and brokering influence while Sudanese civilians pay the price in blood. The same powers that lecture Africa about democracy and human rights are often the ones keeping the guns loaded. If they truly believed in the values they preach, they would have cut off the weapons long ago.

And what of the African Union? Where was its outrage when the first reports of massacres came in? Where is its insistence that the Peace and Security Council act with the seriousness that Africa's people deserve? Too often the continent's institutions have issued statements, convened meetings, and then gone quiet. Silence in the face of 153 dead in one market is not neutrality. It is complicity by inaction.

We are not helpless, and Africa has shown what a better path looks like. Botswana built one of the most prosperous economies on the continent by protecting property rights, managing its resources transparently, and maintaining civilian rule. Mauritius turned itself from a sugar-dependent island into a regional financial and services hub through rule of law and institutional credibility. Senegal, after years of tension, completed peaceful transfers of power that proved democratic institutions can survive crisis. Ghana has repeatedly chosen the ballot over the bullet. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that when institutions are strong, when courts are independent, and when leaders answer to their citizens, violence loses its grip.

Sudan needs exactly that. It needs a ceasefire that is monitored, not merely announced. It needs an independent investigation into the Amiet strike and every other attack on civilians, with findings published and perpetrators named, whether they wear army uniform or RSF colors. It needs humanitarian corridors that actually open. It needs the International Criminal Court and UN human rights mechanisms to receive the resources and political backing they require. And it needs the states supplying drones, weapons, and financing to face hard questions about who is arming a war against civilians.

Here is what we demand. We demand that the African Union's Peace and Security Council convene urgently on Abyei and the wider Sudan crisis, and that it put civilian protection ahead of diplomatic comfort. We demand that the UN Security Council stop hiding behind procedure and impose targeted sanctions on commanders and financiers responsible for atrocities on both sides. We demand that every government with leverage over Sudan's warring parties, including those that sell them arms or buy their gold, be asked publicly what they are doing to stop the killing. And we demand that Sudanese civil society, lawyers, journalists, and doctors who have kept documenting this war be protected and supported, because they are the memory of the crimes that no one else will record.

To the Sudanese people who are burying their dead this week: we see you, and we will not let your dead become a footnote. To the generals in Port Sudan and their counterparts in Khartoum and Darfur: you do not get to bomb a market and then issue a statement about your commitment to the nation. To our continent's leaders: history will not ask how many meetings you held. It will ask how many lives you saved.

The question is not whether the killing in Sudan is wrong. Everyone knows it is. The question is whether we will keep accepting it. Share this. Press your representatives. Demand that your government name the Amiet market in every diplomatic conversation it has about Sudan. Because if 153 people dying in a market cannot shake us out of our silence, then nothing will, and the next market will be someone else's.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24