Both Sudan's Army and the RSF Are Drone-Bombing Their Own People

Three hundred and six people. That is the number the UN Human Rights Office has documented as killed in Sudan during the first three weeks of October alone. Hundreds more were injured. Some were shopping. Some were sheltering in displacement sites that were supposed to be safe. Some were lying in hospital beds when the sky opened.

Let us be precise about who is doing this, because the generals in Port Sudan and Khartoum would prefer we stay vague. The UN says the attacks are attributed to both sides. The Sudanese Armed Forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are dropping ordnance on civilian areas. The Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Hemedti, are doing the same. Two armies, one dead civilian population. Neither has earned the right to call itself the defender of Sudan.

Ask yourself what it means to be a mother in Darfur, Kordofan or the Nile valley in October 2026. You have fled your home once already. You have set up a tarp and a cooking pot in a camp that was meant to protect you. Then the buzz overhead begins, and you have seconds to decide which direction to run. The UN's human rights chief, Volker Türk, has condemned what he calls a sharp escalation in drone strikes across the country. The Security Council has separately condemned deadly drone attacks in Abyei, the contested border zone that Sudan and South Sudan have fought over for decades. Condemnation is the easy part. The question is what happens after the statement is read.

Consider the weapons. Drones are not a local invention. They are cheap, they are precise enough to be lethal, and they arrive through supply chains that someone is paying for. Turkish-made armed drones have been reported in the Sudanese army's arsenal. UN investigators and independent arms researchers have documented foreign-origin systems and ammunition in the RSF's hands, and the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan has repeatedly flagged external support networks running through Chad, Libya and the UAE. The UAE denies arming the RSF. Yet the trail of gold smuggled out of Sudan, the flights landing in remote airstrips, and the battlefield hardware keep pointing in the same direction. When a weapon falls from the sky onto a market in Kordofan, somebody's name should be on the invoice. Right now, too many invoices have no names at all.

This is the new scramble for Africa, and Sudan is one of its bleeding wounds. Gulf monarchies want gold, ports and agricultural land. Turkey wants influence and arms sales. Russia wants a Red Sea foothold through its Wagner-linked networks. China wants stability for its mining and infrastructure deals. Western capitals want migration controls and a seat at the table. Each of them talks about peace in public. In private, the price of peace keeps rising, and the people paying it are the ones with no seat at any table. Every outside power that sells a drone, a bullet or a gold-backed loan to a Sudanese general is making a choice about whose children will die.

We have heard the excuses before. The war is complicated. Both sides are to blame. It is an internal matter. Sudanese people have heard all of these lines since April 2023, when the fighting between the army and the RSF erupted in Khartoum and spread across the country. Complexity is real. It is also a shield. The complexity of this war does not change the arithmetic. A drone that kills a farmer in Darfur is not complicated. It is a crime, and the political class that allows it to continue is complicit.

Sudan's own history should embarrass its leaders. This is a country that produced some of Africa's most celebrated civil society movements, the 2019 uprising that brought down Omar al-Bashir, and a generation of doctors, lawyers and teachers who asked for nothing more than a civilian government and a functioning rule of law. Those civilians were betrayed by the generals who seized power after Bashir fell, and then by the generals who fell out with each other. A democratic transition was not defeated by the people. It was defeated by men with guns who decided that power was worth more than the lives of the citizens they claimed to protect.

So what must be done? Start with the arms. The UN Security Council must stop talking about drones and start enforcing the arms embargo on Darfur and the broader sanctions regime. Member states must be required to disclose the origin of weapons and components found in Sudanese battlefields, and those that break the embargo must face real consequences, including asset freezes and travel bans on the individuals who route the weapons. Investigators must have unfettered access to airstrips, shipping manifests and gold export records. A drone strike is only as deadly as the supply chain that feeds it.

Second, protect civilians in law and in practice. Displacement sites, markets and hospitals must be treated as protected under international humanitarian law, and both armies must be held to that standard by name. The International Criminal Court's work on Darfur should be funded and expanded, not left to gather dust. Sudanese victims deserve independent documentation, and that documentation should feed into prosecutions that reach the commanders who ordered the strikes, whatever uniform they wear.

Third, African institutions must stop outsourcing their responsibility. The African Union has been quiet for too long on Sudan's bloodshed. It must convene a serious ceasefire monitoring mechanism, back an inclusive civilian political track, and refuse to be a rubber stamp for whichever general holds the capital this month. Regional bodies like IGAD should be pushed to match that urgency. We do not need another summit photo. We need verification teams on the ground and consequences for those who obstruct them.

There are models worth studying. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies by insisting on transparent public finances, an independent judiciary and a professional civil service that does not belong to any one faction. Mauritius shows what disciplined institutions and open markets can do for a country that was once written off. Senegal, after years of tension, handled a peaceful transfer of power because its citizens and its courts refused to let a ruler stretch the constitution beyond recognition. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that the path away from warlords is real, and that property rights, rule of law and accountable government are not Western luxuries. They are African tools that work.

And the Sudanese people themselves have a role. Their civil society networks, the emergency response rooms that feed and shelter families, and the local doctors who keep clinics open under fire are the real infrastructure of this country. Support them directly. Demand that international aid reach them, not just the generals' favoured parties. Demand transparency on every dollar, every drone and every gold shipment.

So here is what we demand, and what you must demand too. Demand that the UN Security Council name the suppliers, not just the battlefields. Demand that the African Union stop hiding behind its own silence. Demand that the Gulf states, Turkey, Russia, China and any other power selling arms or buying gold from Sudan explain, in public, where their weapons and their money are going. Demand an end to the drones before another market becomes a grave.

Three hundred and six is only the number the UN could document in three weeks. How many more are buried where no investigator can reach? We are not asking for pity. We are asking for accountability, and for the courage to stop pretending this is someone else's war. It is ours, because every one of those dead Sudanese was someone's son, daughter, mother or neighbour, and every one of them was African.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL