A burial site for the victims of a drone strike, in El Obeid, North Kordofan State, Sudan, on January 14, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Sudan paramilitaries launched a large-scale drone attack in the east on Thursday (December 18, 2025), a military source told AFP, with strikes hitting a key power station, causing major outages and killing three.

Since April 2023, Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions more and devastated infrastructure.

“We’ve been without power since 2:00 am (0000 GMT),” Abdel Rahim al-Amin, an official in Port Sudan, told AFP. “We hope it will be restored soon.”

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The attacks “led to power outages in several states”, the national electricity company stated.

In recent months, the RSF has been accused of launching drone attacks on vast areas controlled by the army, targeting civilian infrastructure and causing power cuts affecting millions.

“At dawn this morning, the militia launched 35 drones against the cities of Atbara, Al-Damer and Berber in River Nile State, targeting civilian infrastructure,” a military source told AFP on condition of anonymity, attributing the strikes to the RSF.

Strikes on Thursday in government-controlled Atbara in River Nile State targeted transformers at the Al-Muqrin power station, the national electricity company said, after witnesses reported flames and smoke was seen rising above the city.

An official at the power plant told AFP an initial strike targeted the plant in Atbara overnight. A second strike hit rescue workers, killing two and injuring another person.

The River Nile State government in a statement confirmed two rescue workers were killed, saying that they were killed “by militias who have no respect for human life”.

The damaged power station is a strategic hub in the Sudanese electricity grid, receiving power generated by the Merowe Dam — the country’s largest source of hydroelectric energy — before its redistribution to other areas.

According to witnesses, power outages have spread to several states, including those along the Nile and the Red Sea — where Port Sudan, the interim seat of the pro-military government, is located.

Emergency Lawyers, an NGO which documents the atrocities of the conflict, reported airstrikes in Atbara that hit civilian homes, killing a young girl and injuring four.

Global outcry

The fire at the power station was still burning on Thursday morning, the Sudan Electricity Company said.

The RSF has not commented on the incident, though it has been using long-range drones to strike army-held areas since it lost control of the capital.

Last month explosions were heard in Atbara, which is around 300 kilometres (185 miles) north of Khartoum.

The war in Sudan has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations.

It prompted global outcry in October, as reports of mass atrocities emerged after the RSF seized the city of El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in the western Darfur region — following a bitter 18-month siege.

Since then, the violence has spread to the neighbouring region of Kordofan in the south, where more than 50,000 civilians have been displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The UN also said on Thursday that more than 1,000 civilians were killed during three days of attacks by the RSF on the Zamzam displacement camp in April, demanding a war crimes investigation.

Sudan’s army chief and de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan was expected in Cairo on Thursday “to discuss ways to resolve the Sudanese crisis”, the spokesman for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said.

Hopes for a breakthrough in talks on Sudan’s war were rekindled last month when US President Donald Trump said he would help end the conflict after Prince Mohammed urged him to intervene during a visit to Washington.

Before the power outages on Thursday, Khartoum had seen relative calm since the regular army regained control this year, even as the RSF continues to mount attacks in several regions.

Published – December 18, 2025 09:44 pm IST

File image of Sudanese soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces. File
| Photo Credit: AP

File picture of Sudanese soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) unit, led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of the military council, secure the area where Dagalo attends a military-backed tribe’s rally, in the East Nile province, Sudan.
| 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

Shelling by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed at least seven people and wounded 71 others in El-Fasher, a medical source said Sunday, as the paramilitary group launched its fiercest offensive yet on the besieged city.

El-Fasher, the last major city in the vast western Darfur region still under army control, has become the most violent front line in the war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted in April 2023.

In recent weeks, paramilitary forces have escalated their long-running siege, launching fierce artillery barrages and ground incursions into densely populated neighbourhoods, the city’s airport and the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp.

The few hospitals still operational have been repeatedly bombarded and the local police headquarters captured by the RSF.

The medical source, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the true toll from Saturday’s attack was “likely higher”, as many injured had been unable to reach the hospital due to the intensity of the RSF’s strikes.

Among the wounded, mostly suffering from shrapnel injuries, 22 were reported to be in a critical condition, according to the source, who was reached via satellite internet to bypass a communications blackout.

Local activists said the attack struck several neighbourhoods in the city’s west near the airport, which RSF forces have sought to capture.

‘Kill box’

The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, is seeking to wrest full control of the region from the army after being pushed out of the capital Khartoum earlier this year.

Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab revealed Thursday that the RSF had constructed more than 31 kilometres of berms — raised earth barriers — “creating a literal kill box” in the city, the report said.

Its imagery also identified munitions impact damage at the city’s water authority, which supplies El-Fasher with fresh drinking water.

Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said the RSF had confined the Sudanese army and its allied militias to less than five square kilometres in the city.

“It’s the smallest it’s been since the siege began,” he told AFP.

The besieged population — estimated by the UN at some 300,000 — has endured severe shortages of water and food for over a year, according to humanitarian workers.

Famine was officially declared in three displacement camps around El-Fasher last year, and the UN warned it could spread to the city itself by last May.

A lack of data has so far prevented an official declaration of famine, but the UN estimates that nearly 40 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, with 11 percent severely so.

Many have resorted to eating animal fodder, while desperate attempts to escape into the desert often end in death from exposure, starvation or violence.

‘Massacres’

“The pattern of life is ending,” said Raymond.

“They are dying in poverty, crossfire and bombardment and they’re being killed as they’re trying to leave,” he added.

Yale’s satellite images show that cemeteries had been expanded over the past months.

“The most worrisome part will be when there’s no one left to dig the graves anymore.”

The RSF, which recently announced the formation of a parallel government in the region, would control all five Darfur state capitals if it were to successfully capture El-Fasher.

Experts have warned that the city’s non-Arab Zaghawa tribe may face a similar fate to the non-Arab Massalit tribe in West Darfur’s state capital of El-Geneina, where UN experts found up to 15,000 people, mostly from the tribe, were killed in 2023 massacres blamed on RSF forces.

Both warring sides have been accused of war crimes, but the RSF has, in particular, been accused of genocide, sexual violence and systematic looting.

In the early 2000s, the paramilitary force led a government-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000 people.

“The Janjaweed are about to win the entire genocide that began in the early 21st century,” Raymond said.

“And the world isn’t going to do anything about it.”

Published – August 31, 2025 10:33 pm IST

A Sudanese military air strike on a market in North Darfur killed more than 100 people, a pro-democracy lawyers’ group said Tuesday, as fighting raged across the war-torn country.

The Emergency Lawyers said the air strike on Monday also left hundreds injured in Kabkabiya, a town about 180 kilometres (112 miles) west of El-Fasher, the state capital that has been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since May.

The war between the RSF and the regular army has so far killed tens of thousands, uprooted over 11 million and created what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

“The air strike took place on the town’s weekly market day, where residents from various nearby villages had gathered to shop, resulting in the death of more than 100 people and injury of hundreds, including women and children,” said the lawyers’ group, which has been documenting human rights abuses during the conflict.

They described it as a “horrendous massacre committed by Army air strikes”.

In footage sent to AFP purporting to show the aftermath of the strike, people were seen sifting through rubble as the charred remains of children lay on scorched ground.

The footage, which AFP was unable to independently verify, was supplied by civil society group the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees.

Though some drone attacks have been attributed to the RSF, the Sudanese military is the only party with fighter jets and maintains a functional monopoly on the skies.

In a statement Tuesday, the army accused RSF-affiliated political groups of “spreading lies” and said its forces “target rebel activity bases”.

Bus shelled

Darfur, a region the size of France, is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population but more than half of the country’s displaced population.

Nearly all of it is now controlled by the RSF, which has also taken over swathes of the southern Kordofan region and central Sudan, while the army holds the country’s north and east.

Both forces are wrestling for full control of the war-torn capital, 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) east of El-Fasher.

In Omdurman, part of greater Khartoum, paramilitary artillery fire on a passenger bus killed at least 15 people, a medical source told AFP.

The Al-Nao hospital, one of the last facilities receiving patients in the area, also “received 45 injured from different areas”, the source said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“We haven’t seen bombing this intense in six months,” one eyewitness to the passenger bus shelling told AFP, also requesting anonymity.

Most of Omdurman is under army control, while the RSF holds Khartoum North (Bahri) just across the Nile River.

Residents have continuously reported shelling across both sides of the river, with bombs and shrapnel regularly striking homes and civilians.

According to the United Nations, up to 80 percent of health facilities in Sudan’s worst affected areas are barely operational or closed.

‘Escalation campaign’

The lawyers’ group flagged other incidents around Sudan including one in South Darfur state capital Nyala, where they said three neighbourhoods were hit with barrel bombs on Monday evening.

They could not confirm a toll.

In North Kordofan state, a drone that had crashed on November 26 exploded on Monday evening, killing six people, the lawyers reported.

They said recent strikes across the country were part of an “escalation campaign… deliberately concentrated on densely populated residential areas”, contradicting claims by warring parties that they only target military objectives.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians and deliberately bombing residential areas.

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch accused the RSF and allied Arab militias of carrying out numerous abuses against civilians in South Kordofan state from December 2023 to March 2024.

The rights organisation accused the groups of “war crimes” including “killings, rapes, and abductions of ethnic Nuba residents, as well as the looting and destruction of homes”.

The group also urged the United Nations and the African Union to deploy a mission to protect civilians in Sudan.