RSF Drones Are Switching Off the Lights on Sudan's Children

Picture a maternity ward at night. The generator sputters, the incubators go quiet, and a nurse counts breaths by torchlight. Now picture ten thousand of those wards, scattered across three Sudanese states, all at once. That is what the Rapid Support Forces have just done.

According to a Sudanese government official speaking on condition of anonymity, the RSF launched a coordinated drone attack on five power stations. Two were hit in Al-Jazira, two in Gedaref, and one in White Nile. The result was blackouts across large parts of all three states. Those are not remote border villages. Al-Jazira is the agricultural heartland of central Sudan, the Gezira scheme that once fed much of the country. Gedaref sits on the Ethiopian frontier. White Nile runs along the river that gave Khartoum its life. These are the arteries of a nation, and someone decided to cut them with explosives delivered from the sky.

We need to be precise about what happened and who is responsible. The attack has been reported by one anonymous official, and it must be verified independently. But the pattern behind it is not in doubt. The war between Sudan's army and the RSF began on 15 April 2023, when the two former allies turned their guns on each other and on the people caught between them. Since then, the UN has warned repeatedly that attacks on power stations, water systems and health facilities threaten millions of civilians who already face the world's largest hunger crisis. Those warnings have now become a grid-by-grid record of destruction.

Let us be clear about the law. Under customary international humanitarian law, which binds every party to this conflict regardless of treaty status, civilian infrastructure indispensable to survival is off limits. Power stations keep clinics running, pumps moving water and bakeries open. Striking them is not a tactical accident. It is a decision to make ordinary life impossible and to punish a population for the crime of living in territory the enemy wants.

Think about who bears that cost. Not the generals in Port Sudan or Nyala. Not the commanders who sign off on drone strikes from air-conditioned compounds. It is the mother who cannot refrigerate her child's insulin. It is the farmer whose irrigation pump goes silent in the middle of the dry season. It is the student who studies by a phone screen that will die by morning. These are the people the RSF claims to be fighting for, and they are the ones it is plunging into darkness.

This did not begin with drones, and it will not end with them. The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias that the Bashir regime unleashed on Darfur in the early 2000s, a campaign that the International Criminal Court has been investigating for two decades. Its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, rose from that brutality to command a force that has been accused of mass killings, sexual violence and ethnic targeting, most devastatingly in El Fasher. Investigators and UN panels have also alleged that foreign states, including the United Arab Emirates, have supplied the RSF with weapons and funding. The UAE denies these allegations. Africa's leaders, and the world's capitals, should not wait for the verdict of a courtroom to decide whether a government is feeding a war that is killing its people. The evidence of drones, supply chains and funding networks is already public and must be pursued without fear or favour.

And the army is not clean either. The Sudanese Armed Forces have been accused of indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian areas, and the country's generals have a long record of crushing civilian protest. Revvmark condemns violence by any party, in Khartoum or in Darfur, in Port Sudan or in Nyala. Our loyalty is not to a uniform. It is to the Sudanese people, who have been the victims of every faction that has held a gun since 1956.

Here is what should keep every African awake. Sudan's war is being fought with imported technology, financed by outside money, and sheltered by a diplomatic silence that would never be tolerated if the victims were in Europe. Over twelve million Sudanese have been displaced. Families are eating leaves. And yet the story is treated as a sideshow to Gaza, Ukraine and the next summit. The new scramble for Africa is happening in our own neighbourhood, with drones instead of gunboats, and the same old logic: someone else's resources, someone else's suffering, someone else's profit.

So what should happen? First, the UN Security Council must stop treating its own warnings as press releases. It should enforce the Darfur arms embargo that has existed since 2004 under Resolution 1556, and it should sanction the commanders, financiers and suppliers feeding the war, wherever they sit. The ICC should accelerate its Darfur investigations and extend them to the drone campaigns now hitting civilian infrastructure. The African Union, which suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, must go further: name the external backers, demand an end to the drone war, and back a genuine civilian-led transition with the same urgency it once gave to other crises on the continent.

Sudan itself has shown what is possible. In 2019, ordinary Sudanese, organised through the Sudanese Professionals Association and neighbourhood resistance committees, brought down a thirty-year dictatorship through sustained, nonviolent civil disobedience. That movement proved that Sudanese citizens demand institutions, not warlords. Botswana, which has built decades of stability on rule of law, transparent resource management and peaceful transfers of power, shows what a state looks like when it treats its people as citizens rather than hostages. Mauritius and Senegal show that independent courts and competitive elections are not Western luxuries. They are African achievements. Sudan can reach that standard too.

On the energy question specifically, the answer is not to beg the warlords for mercy. Sudan and its neighbours should invest in decentralised solar mini-grids for hospitals, water stations and schools, so that a single drone strike cannot switch off a province. Private investors and insurers should price the risk of infrastructure attacks honestly and back systems that can survive them. Civil society groups, including Sudanese doctors' networks and human rights lawyers, must keep documenting every strike, every name and every grave, because justice begins with a record that cannot be erased.

To the Sudanese reader: demand that your leaders, whichever faction they serve, publicly commit to protecting power stations, water systems and hospitals as off-limits. Demand that the army and the RSF open humanitarian corridors. Demand to know who is financing the drones.

To the African reader in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra and Johannesburg: ask your own governments what they are doing to stop the flow of weapons and money into this war. Ask your diplomats whether they have raised Sudan at the African Union or the UN this month. Ask your media why a blackout in Gedaref gets less coverage than a celebrity wedding.

To the diplomats and capitals that claim to champion human rights: you cannot lecture Africa about democracy while quietly protecting the financiers of a war against civilians. Either you believe in the principles you proclaim, or you do not. Sudan's children are watching to see which.

The lights going out in Al-Jazira, Gedaref and White Nile are not an accident of war. They are a choice, made by people who expect us to forget by morning. We must not forget. Sudan's darkness is a test of whether African institutions and African citizens will defend the civilians their governments and armed groups have abandoned. Let us be the generation that turns the lights back on.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL