A drone strike on a busy market in western Sudan has killed 11 people and wounded dozens, including children, as the United Nations warns the country’s rapidly escalating air wars have killed more than 200 civilians in a week.
The attack on Adikang market, near Sudan’s border with Chad, ignited fuel stockpiles and sent flames tearing through the region on Thursday.
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Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, said in a statement on Friday that it had treated more than 20 wounded at a cross-border support hospital in Audrey, and that seven of the injured were children.
MSF described it as the second deadly drone strike in the same area in less than a month.
Drones are a key weapon used by both sides in the war between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday he was alarmed by the escalating scale of airstrikes on civilians in the war, warning that more than 200 people had been killed by drones across the Kordofan region and White Nile state since March 4.
“Despite multiple reminders, warnings and appeals, it is deeply troubling that parties to the conflict continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons in populated areas,” Turk said.
In West Kordofan, at least 152 civilians were killed in strikes attributed to the SAF, including about 50 when it simultaneously attacked a market and a hospital in Al-Muglad on 4 March.
Three days later, at least 40 people were killed in attacks on markets in Abu Zabad and Wad Banda. On March 10, at least 50 people, among them women and children, collided with a truck carrying civilians in Al-Sunoot.
A day before the Adikong strike, drones used by RSF crashed into a secondary school and health center in the village of Shukeri in White Nile state, killing at least 17 people, including female students, teachers and health workers, the Sudan Doctors’ Network said.
Mukesh Kapila, professor of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester, told Al Jazeera that the increase in the rate of drone attacks was significant.
“Drones have really entered the scene in Sudan in the last couple of years,” he said, adding that their use was now “accelerating” as a “preferred weapon of war, especially on the RSF side.”
The appeal of mounting an attack with a drone is brutally simple: “It’s cheap, it can be launched easily from anywhere, and the main effect is that it’s a weapon of mass terror.”
Kapila pointed to the pattern of targets – hospitals, water points, markets and displacement camps – as evidence that the aim was to “spread terror” as the strikes were used to project power beyond the more active frontlines.
The SAF has received Iranian-made drones, with Mohajir-6 combat UAVs recorded as arriving as recently as 2024, as well as Turkish and Russian military support.
The RSF, which has no air force of its own, is equipped through a network of supply routes running through Chad and other transit states, with reports suggesting the United Arab Emirates is a key enabler, allegations Abu Dhabi denies.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the war has now seen over 1,000 recorded drone strikes since April 2023. In the first two months of 2026 alone, ACLED recorded 198 strikes by both sides, of which at least 52 resulted in civilian casualties and killed 478 people.
According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Sudan accounted for more than half of all drone attacks recorded across the entire African continent in 2024, and by March last year, the SAF claimed to have shot down more than 100 drones in just 10 days.
The human cost of the nearly three-year war has been called the world’s greatest humanitarian emergency.
Some 33.7 million people, the largest such population anywhere on Earth, are now in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN, and more than 12 million have been driven from their homes.
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