Sudan's Warring Generals Are Bombing Commuters From the Sky

Eighty people went to a market and never came home. On Sunday evening in Al-Dibab, in Sudan's West Kordofan state, a drone struck a transport hub where ordinary people were waiting for trucks to carry them back to their villages. It struck twice, ten minutes apart. The first blast hit the crowd. The second hit the people who ran toward the first. Mostly commuters, mostly people who had spent their day selling or buying whatever they could, were turned into bodies in the dust.

Ahmed Abakar Wadi, speaking by satellite phone because the region's communications have been cut, counted fifty bodies that he helped bury. One of them was his brother Mohamed. Forty-seven more wounded were carried to Al-Mujlad, where thirty of them died. Let that settle. Eighty human beings, and every one of them had a mother somewhere who will never hear them come through the door again.

Then, the same day, a drone hit a house in the Nasser Extension neighbourhood just east of Khartoum's airport. Three children, aged two to six, and a man were brought to the morgue. A toddler is not a military objective. A house is not a military objective. But in Sudan's war, the sky has become a weapon that does not ask who is underneath it.

The Evidence Nobody Wants to Read

Let us be precise, because precision is what separates a column from a rumour. The Sudanese army, known as the SAF, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, have been fighting since 15 April 2023. The RSF-declared administration, which calls itself Tasis, says the army carried out the Al-Dibab strike. All of West Kordofan is under RSF control, which means this is the RSF's territory, and the RSF's people are the ones now counting the dead. That is a claim, not yet an independently verified fact, and an honest editorial must say so. But it is also a claim that fits a pattern no honest observer can ignore.

Both sides have been using drones. The UN has warned that drone attacks have become a leading cause of civilian death in this war. Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 and Iranian-designed Mohajer-6 platforms have been reported in army hands, supplied through a web of foreign deals. On the other side, UN Panel of Experts reporting on Sudan has documented supply networks feeding the RSF, with the United Arab Emirates named in connection with those flows. Abu Dhabi denies arming the RSF. The Emirates' denial deserves to be recorded. It also deserves to be tested against the evidence, the way every government's denials should be.

Look at what the record already shows. The RSF stands accused by the UN, the International Criminal Court's prosecutors and independent researchers of mass atrocities in Darfur, including ethnically targeted killings in El Fasher and across the west. The army has faced its own allegations of indiscriminate bombardment in populated areas. Two armed forces, both with the blood of civilians on their hands, both reaching for drones because drones are cheap, deniable and far from the front line where a commander would have to look a victim in the eye. This is the reality of a war with no referee, fuelled by foreign money that never has to attend the funerals.

Aid workers estimate that more than 200,000 people have died since the war began. That figure is an estimate because the killing has outpaced the counting. The war has also produced what aid agencies describe as the world's largest hunger and displacement crisis, with more than twelve million people driven from their homes by the UN's count. Each of those numbers is a family. Each family is a village that no longer exists.

Why This Is Bigger Than One Strike

Sudan did not begin as a drone war. It began as a power struggle between two generals who each spent years as partners in the same system of looting and repression that ruled Sudan under Omar al-Bashir. Gold, grazing land, border trade and state security contracts were the prizes. The people who paid were the same people who always pay: farmers, herders, market women, schoolchildren, and the displaced families living in camps that the outside world visits only for photo opportunities.

The new scramble for Africa does not wear the red coat of the nineteenth century, but it recognises the same map. Gold from Sudan's mines moves through networks that enrich armed actors and their foreign partners. Gulf states, Turkey, Russia, Iran and others are buying positions, port access, mining concessions and arms markets across the Horn and the Sahel. Each of them will tell you it is only doing business. Each of them is also feeding a war that is killing Sudanese children in their sleep.

And the West? Washington, London, Brussels and Paris will lecture us about democracy, human rights and the rule of law, the same values they claim to hold dear. Yet when a drone kills eighty people at a bus stop, the response is a statement of concern, a press release and a meeting that produces nothing. Those values are not a costume to wear on good days. If they mean anything, they mean that the people who fund, arm and shield the killers must pay a price.

What Must Change

Here is what a serious African and international response looks like, not in theory but in practice.

First, an independent investigation into the Al-Dibab and Nasser Extension strikes, with forensic access to the impact sites and drone debris. Attribution must rest on evidence, not on whichever faction controls the microphone that day. The African Union's Peace and Security Council should demand that investigation and publish its findings.

Second, an arms embargo that actually bites. The UN Security Council already has tools for Sudan. What it lacks is the will to enforce them against suppliers, including states that sit on the Council's own doorstep. Every drone component, every shipment and every financial transfer feeding the killing must be traced, sanctioned and exposed. Any state that continues to supply either army should face consequences, regardless of how profitable the relationship is.

Third, a civilian-led path back to governance. Sudan's pro-democracy movement, which brought down Bashir and then paid for it in blood, remains the country's best hope. Its representatives, the women's groups, the doctors' committees and the local councils that keep neighbourhoods alive, must be included in any negotiation, not sidelined by generals and their foreign patrons.

Look to the places in Africa that have chosen the harder road. Botswana built a diamond economy around transparent institutions and property rights, and it kept its democracy while many neighbours did not. Mauritius proved that a small island with no natural resource bonanza can become a stable, rule-bound economy through open markets and accountable government. Senegal showed in 2024 that a peaceful transfer of power is possible when citizens and courts refuse to let leaders rewrite the rules. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that the path of institutions, competition and accountability beats the path of warlords and drones.

The Call to Action

We are Africans. This is our continent and this is our future, and we will not outsource our conscience to the very powers that profit from our wars. So here is what you do. Share the names of the dead, not just the numbers, because a name is harder to forget than a statistic. Write to your own representatives and demand that your government support an independent inquiry into the drone strikes, an enforceable arms embargo on Sudan, and a seat at the table for Sudan's civilians. Press the African Union to stop issuing communiqués and start naming the suppliers who keep these drones flying. Press the UN Security Council to tell the world which states are arming this war.

Eighty people went to a market and died at a bus stop. Three children, aged two to six, died in their own home. Those deaths were not an accident of war. They were the product of choices made in headquarters, funded by bank transfers and protected by silence. Silence is the thing that keeps the drones flying. Break it. Say the names. Demand the investigation. Refuse the lie that Sudan's suffering is too complicated to fix. It is not too complicated to stop the next drone from taking off.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24