Eighteen Drone Strikes in One Week Are Plunging Sudan Into Darkness

Ask a Sudanese mother what it means when the lights go out. She will not talk about grid stability. She will tell you about the insulin that spoils without refrigeration, the newborn in an incubator that stops, the water pump that stops, and the sweltering night that becomes unbearable without a fan. In the past week, drones have struck electricity infrastructure across Sudan at a pace that should horrify every African capital, and yet the silence has been deafening.

Eighteen attacks on the power network in seven days. This is not an accident of war. It is a campaign, and campaigns have planners.

Let us be precise about what is known and what is not. On Monday, drone strikes reportedly hit three electricity substations: the facilities at New Halfa and Aroma in Kassala State in the east, and the al-Ghazali substation in Northern State. Videos circulating online show fires at the sites, with civil defence teams trying to contain them. Al Jazeera was unable to immediately verify the footage or the reports, and we will hold ourselves to the same standard. Facts first. Outrage built on facts, never the other way around.

What is verified is the pattern. The strikes caused widespread outages across parts of the country, and they are the latest in a concentrated sequence aimed at the grid itself. In the heat of the Sudanese dry season, power is not a luxury. It is the difference between a clinic that functions and one that does not, between clean water and cholera.

The Sudanese army's government has said the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group it has fought since April 2023, is being aided by Ethiopia in carrying out these attacks. On Sunday, Khartoum filed complaints with the United Nations Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, accusing Addis Ababa of involvement in attacks on civilian infrastructure. These are serious allegations between two African states. They demand evidence, not rhetoric. Any government that arms a force to strike civilian power stations must answer for it before the UN and the AU, and Ethiopia must answer clearly and publicly. But an accusation is not yet a finding, and the Security Council should investigate rather than simply absorb one side's narrative.

The same discipline applies to the defections. On Monday, the army reported that a group of RSF members surrendered in Damazin, the capital of Blue Nile State, following a video declaration by senior RSF commander Siddiq Ander that he had defected. The army says the commander provided information about the management of operations in Damazin, including what it describes as Ethiopian support for the RSF. Defections matter, because every fighter who walks away from a militia is a crack in its command structure. But we have seen before how defections are used as propaganda, and we will not take either side's word for what happens inside a militia.

Now, the uncomfortable truth that both armies would prefer we ignore. The RSF is responsible for some of the most documented atrocities of this war, including the mass killings, sexual violence and ethnically targeted violence reported in Darfur, and especially in El Fasher. The Sudanese Armed Forces, led by the generals who seized power in the October 2021 coup, have themselves been accused of indiscriminate bombing of residential areas. Sudan's two generals have spent three years turning a country into a battlefield, and the people paying the price are not the men who started this war. They are the nurses, farmers, teachers and children.

More than 12 million Sudanese have been displaced, according to UN estimates, and famine has been confirmed in parts of Darfur and Kordofan. Those are not abstract numbers. Each one is a family that fled with a plastic sheet and a child on the hip. When you strike the power grid in a country already facing famine, you are not targeting a military objective. You are targeting the ability of ordinary people to survive.

Why does this matter beyond Sudan's borders? Because the story is a mirror. Across our continent, we have watched military men seize power in the name of stability, then wage war on their own citizens, then ask the world to look away while they blame outsiders. Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, and now Sudan: the pattern is the same. Coups are sold as salvation, and what they deliver is a generation without electricity, without schools, without hope. Every time a junta hides behind the word "sovereignty," we should ask the question they fear most: whose sovereignty is being protected, and whose is being destroyed?

Foreign powers are also watching Sudan closely. Gulf states, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and others have all been accused of supplying weapons or political backing to one side or another, and the Sudanese gold trade has fuelled both armies' war chests. Every outside actor that sells arms to a warlord in exchange for gold or port access is writing a cheque that Sudanese children will one day have to cash. We will name them when the evidence is clear, and we will insist that the African Union and the UN enforce the arms embargo on Darfur and extend it to the wider conflict.

So what must happen?

The UN Security Council should authorise an independent investigation into the attacks on Sudan's electricity network, with a mandate to determine who launched the drones, where the components came from, and who gave the orders. The findings should be published, not buried in diplomatic cables. The Council should also impose targeted sanctions on commanders and financiers of both the SAF and the RSF who are responsible for attacks on civilians, and it should require any state accused of arming either side to answer under oath.

The African Union must stop treating Sudan's crisis as a diplomatic scheduling problem. The AU suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, and that suspension should stay until a genuinely civilian transition is underway with independent oversight. The AU should also commit a protected humanitarian corridor for power and water repair crews, because nothing says "we care" like fixing a substation the day after it is bombed.

Africa already has proof that a better path exists. Botswana built one of the continent's most prosperous democracies on property rights, transparent public finances and an independent judiciary, and it did so without a single coup. Ghana has transferred power peacefully through multiple electoral cycles. Senegal's 2024 election, when citizens and courts defended the constitution against an attempt to delay the vote, showed what civic courage can achieve. Mauritius shows what rule of law and open markets can build from modest beginnings. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that power can be won at the ballot box rather than the barrel of a gun.

And citizens have a role. Sudanese civil society, including the resistance committees, doctors' networks and local mutual-aid groups that have kept communities alive through this war, deserve the support of the regional bodies and donors who have too often preferred to deal only with generals. Demand that any peace process include civilian voices, women's organisations and independent journalists. Demand that every foreign government disclose its arms transfers to the parties in Sudan. And demand, loudly, that whoever is flying these drones answers for the darkness they have brought to millions of homes.

We are told that Sudan's war is too complicated to act on. It is not complicated for the mother watching her child's oxygen machine fall silent. It is not complicated for the farmer whose irrigation pump stops in the middle of the dry season. The lights are going out in Sudan one substation at a time. The question is whether we will keep watching, or whether we will finally demand that the people responsible be named, investigated and held to account.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA