A drone strike hit a market in Nyala, South Darfur, at approximately 8pm local time on Monday, killing at least 21 people and injuring more than 40 others, according to medical sources and witnesses cited by AFP. Nyala serves as the de facto capital of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and residents told AFP the market was frequented by armed men, including RSF fighters. The Sudanese military, which has been at war with the RSF since April 2023, regularly strikes the city. The Nyala attack is one data point in a broader pattern: both sides are now prosecuting the war through drone strikes against civilian-adjacent targets. The RSF launched strikes earlier this month targeting Khartoum's airport, dams, and power stations in the government-controlled east. On Tuesday, an RSF drone hit the al-Markhiyat transformer station, disrupting power for millions across Khartoum and Gezira state. That followed Monday's coordinated RSF strikes on six power stations, cutting electricity to millions in Gezira, White Nile, Sennar, and Gadarif states. A government drone attack earlier this month on a disputed border region between Sudan and South Sudan killed more than 150 people — a single strike with a casualty toll that would dominate global headlines in almost any other context. The escalation to drone warfare has compressed the cycle of retaliation and expanded the blast radius of each attack into civilian infrastructure that entire populations depend on. The underlying war began in April 2023 when a power struggle over military integration erupted into open combat in Khartoum. Since then, the conflict has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 13 million people, and created what the UN describes as the world's largest hunger and displacement crisis. Neither side has demonstrated the capacity or willingness to distinguish military from civilian targets. On Monday, the United States, the European Union, and 30 other countries issued a joint statement warning of an "alarming deterioration" in food access and calling on the warring parties to "lift all impediments on humanitarian assistance." The statement, released through the US State Department, amounts to a diplomatic plea with no enforcement mechanism attached. The drone escalation changes the arithmetic of this war. Strikes on power grids and water infrastructure don't just kill people at the point of impact — they degrade the systems that keep millions alive in a country already facing famine. Each transformer station destroyed, each dam targeted, pushes the civilian population deeper into a crisis that will outlast any ceasefire by years. What remains absent is any external actor with both the leverage and the will to impose consequences on either side. The joint statement from 32 countries names the problem accurately but proposes nothing beyond appeals. Sudan's drone war is escalating in a vacuum of accountability, and the civilian cost compounds with each strike.
