Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces launched drone strikes on the capital Khartoum and other Army-controlled cities on Wednesday (august 12, 2026), in what appeared to be their largest coordinated attack in months.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by war between its regular military, led by Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The capital Khartoum, which was recaptured by the Army last year, has been targeted by drone strikes before but had been enjoying relative calm for months.

A source in the Army said the RSF attacked the capital, the Kordofan city of El-Obeid, and the northern cities of Atbara and El-Damer “with a large number of drones, which our anti-aircraft defences engaged with”.

RSF spokesman Al-Fatih Qurashi confirmed in social media posts that the paramilitary group had targeted the airport and Army warehouses in Atbara, as well as fuel depots in Omdurman and a military airport in the country’s far south.

An AFP correspondent in the capital reported a drone attack at 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) along with the sound of anti-aircraft missiles from the direction of the Army’s Wadi Seidna base, just north of the capital’s twin city of Omdurman.

In Khartoum North (Bahri), just across the River Nile, two drones hit a mosque and an electricity transformer in the El-Droshab area, according to an eyewitness.

It was not immediately clear if air defences had shot them down.

Witnesses in the northern cities of Atbara and El-Damer — both also under Army control — gave similar reports of hearing explosions and seeing drones in the sky.

Some 120 kilometres southeast of the capital, in the town of Tamboul, civilians were in a “state of fear” after drones appeared above, a witness told AFP.

Two eyewitnesses in the town of Sifeiya, 90 kilometres from the South Sudan border, reported a drone strike on the local airport, which the Army uses as an airbase.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the attacks, hundreds of kilometres away from each other.

Across the country, aid workers estimate more than 200,000 people have been killed in what the UN calls a “war of atrocities”. The conflict has also caused the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.

Retaliatory strikes

Last month, the Army clinched a victory in the Kordofan region, pushing the RSF off a key highway connecting Khartoum to El-Obeid, the region’s largest city, which they had tried to seize for months.

The Emergency Lawyers — a rights group documenting atrocities on both sides of the war — on Wednesday (August 12) reported what appeared to be a retaliatory army attack against civilians in North Kordofan.

At least five civilians were killed and 10 injured in an attack by Army troops near the town of Jabret al-Sheikh, which the Army recaptured last month.

The Army and its allied militias have been repeatedly accused of attacking civilians in recently recaptured areas.

Daglo, seemingly on the back foot, has said he would “unleash” his fighters — already accused of war crimes including genocide — and his troops have since repeatedly threatened a large-scale retaliatory attack.

He and Burhan, allies until they fell out in a bitter power struggle, have spent most of the war in a relative stalemate, unwilling to hold negotiations while vying for a decisive battlefield advantage.

The RSF last year consolidated its hold on the vast western region of Darfur, and has since pushed to seize territory in Kordofan and along the southeastern border with Ethiopia.

The Army holds the country’s centre, north and east, and has tried to project an image of a return to normality in areas it controls.

But in Khartoum, 2.3 million people have returned from displacement, only to find vast amounts of uncleared war remnants, dilapidated infrastructure and limited electricity and water.

Published – August 12, 2026 09:33 pm IST

United Nations experts have found that Boeing 727s linked to a U.S. military contractor’s business ​network transported mercenaries, weapons and drones for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, according to a draft UN report due to be published in September.

The findings provide additional important details about the role the ‌aircraft played in supporting the RSF, the paramilitary force UN investigators have accused of committing genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. “The Panel received ​reliable information from four sources that the aircraft had transported RSF fighters and mercenaries, as well as military equipment, including drones and weapons,” the ⁠report said.

It cited two eyewitnesses in Nyala, the RSF’s main military and logistics hub in Darfur, and communications from two member States as sources of the information, without giving further details.

A Reuters investigation published on July 15 traced three aging Boeing aircraft operated by companies linked to Steven Shaulis, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier and longtime U.S. government contractor, from an airport in ‌Chad to logistics hubs used by the RSF in Sudan, Libya and Somalia.

Reuters reported that one of the planes – a Boeing 737 – had RSF fighters onboard when it was destroyed in May 2025, but much remained a mystery about the planes’ cargo. The news agency found no evidence ‌that Mr. Shaulis or his companies had been sanctioned or accused of wrongdoing by authorities.

Mr. Shaulis did not respond to questions about the UN report. He previously declined to ‌answer ⁠queries about his companies or the Boeing planes. The RSF did not respond to comment requests.

The UN report reviewed by Reuters was compiled ⁠by the Panel of Experts on the Sudan, a group mandated by the Security Council to monitor an arms embargo imposed on Darfur in 2004. The draft report has been submitted to the Security Council for review ahead of publication.

Sudan’s civil war started in 2023 when leaders of the army and the RSF fell out over plans to integrate their forces during a failed transition to civilian government. The ​death toll since is estimated in the hundreds of thousands and the ‌fighting has worsened famine and disease, creating what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Deliberate steps to avoid detection

The planes identified by the UN were among the ones linked to RSF hubs.

The UN report said three 727s – one sold in Brazil to a Shaulis-linked company and two acquired from Michigan-based Kalitta Charters II – appeared in Chad from November 2024 and operated out of the military apron of N’Djamena’s airport. Kalitta’s attorney told Reuters the company had carried out extensive due ‌diligence before the planes were sold and no sanctions violations were flagged.

The UN panel said no movement by any of the three planes had been ​logged since they arrived in N’Djamena, adding that it suspected the Boeings were taking “deliberate steps to avoid detection while in flight”, without providing further details.

The report said that between January and July 2026, multiple Boeing 727s and some Ilyushin II-76 transport planes landed in Nyala at ⁠night.

Reuters tracked the movement of the Boeings from N’Djamena to RSF hubs in Libya and Sudan using satellite imagery, cell phone data and an open source video, but also found no record of the flights on independent trackers that monitor the signals aircraft normally broadcast while in the air. “The RSF utilized the N’Djamena-Nyala air corridor to transport fighters, foreign ‌mercenaries, and military equipment, including drones and weapons, into Darfur,” the UN report stated.

Mr. Shaulis and business partner Craig Munro are joint owners of Contractor Airways, the South African company that bought two of the 727s from Kalitta, according to records reviewed by Reuters. Mr. Munro told Reuters previously that Contractor Airways had never had any connection to the RSF. Reuters findings that the aircraft had landed in Nyala and Kufrah in Libya, he said, were “to the best of our knowledge, false”.

Chad’s Civil Aviation Authority said none of the Boeings had authorisation to operate from Chad, emphasizing that it did not manage military aviation nor provide services responsible for tracking flight movements. Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Sabre Fadoul has said questions about the planes were subject to defence secrecy, adding that Chad’s only involvement in Sudan’s war was through “diplomatic efforts to restore peace”.

Colombian mercenaries

The panel’s findings are part of ‌a broader investigation into violations of the 22-year-old arms embargo on Darfur.

Beyond the findings about the Boeing 727s, UN investigators also detailed the scale of the support provided to the RSF by Colombian mercenaries ​hired by a company in the United Arab Emirates, saying estimates of 1,500-2,000 men were credible.

The Colombian mercenaries – known as the Desert Wolves – set up a base in Nyala in March 2025 as they fought alongside RSF forces, operating drones and participating in planning during the siege and ⁠ultimate capture of the Darfur city of al-Fashir in October 2025, the report said.

The mercenaries were hired by a UAE-based firm, Global Security Services Group (GSSG), the report found. Unarmed men ⁠were gunned down in hundreds, women raped, and children abducted during the RSF assault on al-Fashir last year, in violence the UN has previously said amounted to genocide.

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to queries. Colombia’s government has previously apologised to Sudan for the presence of Colombian mercenaries in ‌the country. Reuters was unable to contact representatives for the Desert Wolves. GSSG did not respond to questions from Reuters.

A spokesperson for the UAE mission to the United Nations told Reuters that UAE authorities had investigated GSSG and found it “is not involved in any mercenary activity in Sudan and does not have links to individuals reported ​to be mercenaries in Sudan”. The spokesperson said GSSG “is acting in full compliance with UAE laws and regulations and international law”.

Published – July 29, 2026 01:09 pm IST

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.
| Photo Credit: AP

Fighters riding camels rounded up a couple of hundred men near the Sudanese city of al-Fashir at the weekend and brought them to a reservoir, shouting racial slurs before starting to shoot, according to a man who said he was among them.

One of the captors recognized him from his school days and let him flee, the man, Alkheir Ismail, said in a video interview conducted by a local journalist in the nearby town of Tawila in the country’s western Darfur region.

“He told them, ‘Don’t kill him,’” Ismail said. “Even after they killed everyone else – my friends and everyone else.” He said he had been bringing food to relatives still in the city when it was captured by the Rapid Support Forces on Sunday – and, like the other detainees, was unarmed. Reuters could not immediately verify his account.

Ismail was one of four such witnesses and six aid workers interviewed by Reuters who also said people fleeing al-Fashir had been gathered in nearby villages and men separated from women and removed. In an earlier account, one of the witnesses said gunshots then rang out.

Activists and analysts have long warned of revenge killings based on ethnicity by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) if they seized al-Fashir – the last stronghold of the Sudanese military in Darfur.

The U.N. human rights office shared other accounts on Friday (October 31, 2025), estimating hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters may have been executed. Such killings are considered war crimes.

The RSF, whose victory in al-Fashir marks a milestone in Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year civil war, has denied such abuses – saying the accounts have been manufactured by its enemies and making counter-accusations against them.

RSF says men removed for interrogation

Reuters has verified at least three videos posted on social media showing men in RSF uniforms shooting unarmed captives and a dozen more showing clusters of bodies after apparent shootings.

A high-level RSF commander called the accounts “media exaggeration” by the army and its allied fighters “to cover up for their defeat and loss of al-Fashir.”

The RSF’s leadership had ordered investigations into any violations by RSF individuals and several had been arrested, he said, adding that the RSF had helped people leave the city and called on aid organisations to assist those who remained.

He said soldiers and fighters pretending to be civilians had been taken away for interrogation. “There were no killings as has been claimed,” the commander told Reuters in response to a request for comment.

Several eyewitnesses told global medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) that a group of 500 civilians and soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied groups tried to flee on October 26, but most were killed or captured by the RSF and its allies.

“Survivors report individuals being separated by gender, age, or perceived ethnic identity, and many who remain held for ransom, with sums ranging from 5 million to 30 million Sudanese pounds ($8,000 to $50,000),” MSF said in a statement on Friday.

The RSF’s capture of al-Fashir entrenches the geographical division of a country already reduced by the independence of South Sudan in 2011 after decades of civil war.

In a speech on Wednesday night, RSF head Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo called on his fighters to protect civilians and said violations will be prosecuted. He appeared to acknowledge reports of detentions by ordering the release of detainees.

Most of the fighters holding back the RSF advance in al-Fashir came from the Zaghawa ethnic group whose enmity with the largely Arab RSF fighters dates from the early 2000s, when, as the Janjaweed militias, they were accused of atrocities in Darfur.

Alex de Waal, a genocide expert and specialist on Darfur, said the reported RSF acts in al-Fashir looked “very similar to what they did in Geneina and elsewhere,” referring to another Darfur city the RSF took during the latest war’s early stages as well as the early 2000s conflict.

The U.S. said the RSF had committed genocide in Geneina and the attack is under investigation by the International Criminal Court. The Sudanese army and others accuse the United Arab Emirates of supporting the RSF, charges the Gulf state denies.

‘We can’t say they are alive’

Mary Brace, a protection adviser at Nonviolent Peaceforce, an NGO working in Tawila, said those arriving “are women, children, and older men generally,” adding that trucks organised by the RSF have taken some people from Garney to Tawila while others have been taken elsewhere.

The RSF on Thursday posted a video it said showed the provision of food and medical aid to people displaced in Garney. Aid workers said the force may also be trying to keep people in towns it controls to attract foreign aid.

Some 260,000 people were still in al-Fashir around the time of the attack, but only 62,000 have been counted elsewhere, and only several thousand of them in Tawila, which is controlled by a neutral force.

In another of the testimonies obtained and verified by Reuters, Tahani Hassan, a former hospital cleaner, said she fled to Tawila early on Sunday after her brother-in-law and uncle were killed by stray bullets.

On the way, she and her family were apprehended by three men in RSF uniforms who searched them, beat them and insulted them, she said.

“They hit us hard. They threw our clothes on the ground. Even I, as a woman, was searched,” she said, adding that their food and water was also spilled on the ground.

They eventually made it to Garney where the fighters separated women and children from the men, most of whom they did not see again, including her brother and a second brother-in-law.

“We can’t say they are alive, because of how they treated us,” Hassan said. “If they don’t kill you, the hunger will kill you, the thirst will kill you.”

Published – November 01, 2025 07:03 am IST