The RSF Is Bombing Sudan's Power Stations and Plunging Millions Into Darkness

Imagine your child's nebulizer goes silent in the middle of the night. The fridge holding your insulin stops humming. The water pump that fills your family's tank goes dead, and the only light left in the house is a phone screen at 5 percent battery. That is not a metaphor for northern Sudan this week. It is the literal condition of people who did nothing to deserve it.

On Sunday, drones operated by the Rapid Support Forces struck the Al Dabbah and Abu Hamad power stations in Northern State. The strikes also hit an old thermal station that had long been out of service, yet still stood as a symbol of the power that once reached the city. The result was widespread blackouts across Abu Hamad and the villages around it. In Al Dabbah, a drone hit the transformer station, cutting power to the town and the rural communities that depend on it. The same attacks targeted a military headquarters and fuel stations in Al-Multaqa, about 25 kilometres southeast of Al Dabbah. Fuel stations. In a country where ordinary people already queue for diesel, the RSF chose to hit the fuel.

This was not a single bad day. According to Sudan Tribune, RSF drones have struck 14 power stations across Sudan in just two weeks. Fourteen. Do the arithmetic a Sudanese engineer would do: each substation that goes dark is a hospital running on generators it may not have fuel for, a water station that stops pumping, a school that closes, a cold-chain vaccine store that spoils. Infrastructure strikes do not kill in headlines. They kill slowly, in wards and kitchens, among the old, the newborn and the sick.

Let us be precise about what this is. The Rapid Support Forces are a paramilitary organisation that has been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023, when a power struggle between their commanders turned Khartoum into a battlefield. Since then, the war has produced one of the largest displacement crises on earth, with millions of Sudanese forced from their homes and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. The RSF has been widely documented, by UN investigators and independent human rights monitors, as responsible for mass atrocities, ethnically targeted killings and sexual violence, particularly in Darfur and in the siege of El Fasher. Deliberately cutting power to civilian areas is not a tactical oversight. It is a choice to make ordinary life impossible and to punish populations for living where the enemy is.

International humanitarian law is not vague on this. The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, and they prohibit starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Power and water are the foundations of survival in a Sudanese summer that regularly pushes past 45 degrees Celsius. Knocking them out is an attack on the civilian population, full stop. Whoever orders these strikes, and whoever supplies the drones and the targeting data that make them possible, bears responsibility under that law.

And that is the question we must keep asking: where do the drones come from? Drone warfare has become the cheapest way to project violence across a continent. A commercial-grade drone, modified with an explosive payload, costs a fraction of a conventional air strike. It can be launched from a pickup truck and flown over a border with minimal oversight. Sudan's war has been fed by external suppliers, and investigators have repeatedly pointed to the United Arab Emirates as a source of support for the RSF, a claim the UAE denies. Meanwhile, the Sudanese army has received drones and weapons from its own foreign partners, Turkey among them. Every government that sells a drone to a faction in a war it claims to oppose has blood on its hands. Every government that looks the other way has chosen its convenience over our people.

Think about who benefits from this darkness. The RSF gains leverage over a population it can no longer protect. Foreign backers gain a battlefield where their hardware is tested and their influence is bought. Gold, land and trade routes shift hands in the chaos, while the Sudanese people, who rose up peacefully in 2019 to demand civilian rule and an end to the military's grip on the state, are told to wait. They waited. They have been waiting for years, in the dark.

This is the pattern across our continent. Outsiders arrive with weapons, money and interests, and they dress their ambitions in the language of partnership. The new scramble for Africa has many more players than the old one: Western capitals, Gulf monarchies, Turkey, Russia, China, all competing for access, resources and strategic position. Some of them lecture us about democracy in one breath and arm the men who destroy it in the next. If the West truly believes in the values it preaches, it cannot bankroll militias that cut off the electricity of hospitals. If Gulf states truly want stability, they cannot fuel a war that has left millions starving. We will hold every one of them to the standard they claim for themselves.

But we will not let Sudan's own generals off the hook either. A military that seized power, broke a transition and then turned its guns on civilians cannot claim to be the guardian of the nation. Neither can a paramilitary that burns villages and calls its atrocities a liberation. Sudanese civilians are not a bargaining chip between two armed men. They are the nation.

So what must happen? First, the UN Security Council must enforce and expand its arms embargo on Sudan, with real monitoring, real sanctions on the individuals and companies moving weapons and drones into the country, and real consequences for any state found supplying either side. Second, the Council must formally name attacks on power, water and fuel infrastructure as violations of international humanitarian law, and refer those responsible to the International Criminal Court. Impunity is the oxygen of this war. Starve it.

Third, the African Union, which suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, must stop issuing statements and start leading. It should convene the warring parties under a binding humanitarian truce that includes a clear protocol for protecting power stations, water systems and hospitals, and it should back that truce with regional pressure, not polite diplomacy. ECOWAS and IGAD have the regional mandate and the diplomatic reach. Use them.

Fourth, the humanitarian community must treat restoring basic services as a priority, not an afterthought. Decentralised solar power, which can be installed in weeks and does not depend on a single vulnerable substation, can keep clinics and water pumps running. Donors should fund it now, and the private sector should be invited to build it, with transparent contracts and local ownership.

We have seen what good governance can do on this continent. Botswana built one of Africa's most prosperous economies on the back of strong property rights, transparent diamond revenue management and a credible, independent judiciary. Mauritius shows what open markets and institutional discipline can achieve. Senegal demonstrated in 2024 that a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power is possible even after a tense election, when institutions hold and citizens refuse to surrender their vote. Sudan's own people proved in 2019 that they will march, organise and sacrifice for civilian democracy. They deserve leaders and partners who match that courage.

Here is what you, the reader, can do. Demand that your government name the RSF's power station strikes for what they are. Ask your foreign ministry whether any company or state under its jurisdiction is supplying drones or weapons to either side in Sudan's war, and demand a public answer. Support the Sudanese civil society groups, medical networks and mutual aid committees that are keeping their neighbours alive without a single watt of official support. Share the facts, because silence is the one thing the people cutting power need from us.

Fourteen stations. Two weeks. Millions in the dark. We cannot pretend we did not see it. The lights in Abu Hamad and Al Dabbah should not be a question of which armed group wins the next round. They should be on, because a child in Sudan deserves to sleep under them. Demand that the Security Council act, that the African Union lead, and that every foreign capital selling death to Sudan be forced to stop. The darkness is not natural. Someone switched it off. It is our job to make them switch it back on.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL