Sudan: UNICEF says drones hit a power station every day in late October, with strikes from up to 1,500 km away

The war in Sudan is increasingly being fought with long-range drones aimed at the country’s infrastructure, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on 10 November, describing attacks by drones that it said travel up to 1,500 kilometres before hitting their target.

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who had just returned from Sudan, briefed journalists in Geneva. “In the last week of October, not a single day passed without a drone strike on a power station in Sudan,” he said, adding that up to 15 were hit during the month. He called it “an assault unlike anything Sudan has seen before”.

Children and civilians

According to UNICEF, two in three child casualties in Sudan this year were killed by armed drones. Elder said the weapons are “bringing war to places that were once safe”. He described meeting a teenager in El Obeid, whom he named as Buri, who lost both hands to an explosive and lives in a tent.

The agency’s alert comes amid fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). UN News, which reported the briefing, said that well over 15 million people urgently need shelter across the country and that drone strikes on civilians, markets and key public infrastructure continue to hinder aid operations.

Who is behind the strikes

Elder said it was impossible for humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF to establish who was behind “at least 15 strikes” on Sudanese power stations in October. Neither the SAF nor the RSF was quoted in the UN report as claiming or denying responsibility for the strikes on power stations, and this article does not attribute them to either side.

Water, food and disease

The UNICEF spokesperson linked the strikes to wider humanitarian damage. “When a power station is struck, water pumps stop, water treatment stops,” Elder said, noting that, unlike in Ukraine, damaged Sudanese energy sites are not repaired. Farmers are losing the ability to irrigate because generators are too expensive to run amid fuel shortages, he said, and the agency warned of pockets of cholera and a growing threat to the cold chain for vaccines and medicines.

UNICEF estimates that 825,000 children under five in Sudan are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year. Its response in Sudan is one-third funded, Elder said.

Geopolitiki has reported earlier on the pattern of attacks on the grid in Sudan: drones hit three substations in two states, blacking out Kassala and Merowe as the toll reaches 16 power stations in a week, and on the shelter crisis in Sudan: UN agencies say warehouses are empty and 15.4 million need shelter, with only one in ten reached.

The figures and descriptions above are UNICEF’s, as presented by the agency’s spokesperson and reported by UN News on 10 November; they have not been independently verified here.