The first cross-border commercial flight since the war started touched down at Khartoum International Airport late last month, carrying 300 Sudanese citizens home from Kuwait. Earlier this month, drones struck the airport and military facilities across Greater Khartoum, destroying whatever sense of recovery the capital had managed to gather in the months since the Sudanese Armed Forces retook it.
Three years after the SAF and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces turned on each other in April 2023, a clash that has displaced upwards of 11 million people and pushed whole regions into famine, the war has entered a fatally intensified register.
Foreign weapons, contested supply chains, a fracturing RSF command structure, and two rival administrations each claiming sovereign authority have produced a conflict that grows harder to end with every passing month.
Sudan’s Drone Creep
Drones have turned into Sudan’s primary killing mechanism.
They accounted for upwards of 80% of civilian deaths in the country in the first four months of 2026, killing at least 880 people, a toll that prompted UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to describe a decisive alteration in how the war was being fought.
“Armed drones have now become by far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” Türk said, noting that drone use allows fighting to run on through the advancing rainy season, permanently obsoleting the brief operational lulls of earlier years.
The strikes have vastly outgrown their original western epicentres to relentlessly blanket Khartoum, White Nile, and Blue Nile, hitting markets, hospitals, power stations, and oil infrastructure across an ever-wider stretch of the country.
“The international community is on notice that, unless action is taken without delay, this conflict is on the cusp of entering yet another new, even deadlier phase,” Türk warned.
The relentless drone creep into previously unthreatened urban interiors explains why Port Sudan lost its relative safety. The Red Sea city had served as the SAF government’s wartime seat and the main hub for global relief operations until repeated attacks in May 2025 forced the suspension of United Nations humanitarian air service and the evacuation of the airport terminal.
Cheap, long-range, and hard to intercept, such weapons have widened the war’s geography outside the bounds of previous ceasefire maps.
Sudan Accuses Neighbours Across Two Fronts
The drone strike on 4 May brought into the open an accusation that had been building for months.
At a press conference on 5 May, SAF spokesperson Brigadier General Asim Abdelwahab stated that the government had gathered evidence placing UAE-supplied drones at Bahir Dar Airport in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, originating flights conducting four separate attacks on Sudanese territory.
Sudan had already closed its diplomatic missions in the UAE last year after the Port Sudan attacks; the International Court of Justice later dismissed Khartoum’s genocide complaint against Abu Dhabi on jurisdictional grounds.
The UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the strikes on civilian infrastructure in the firmest terms, reaffirmed its call for an immediate ceasefire, and stated it had provided no military, supply, or financial support to the RSF.
A UN Security Council expert panel called similar allegations credible, a finding the UAE has consistently disputed.
Ethiopia’s foreign ministry called the SAF’s accusations “baseless.”
The rejection has firm roots in Horn of Africa geopolitics. Addis Ababa perceives a Saudi-Emirati bloc supporting Sudan’s military as a counterforce to its own interests, a perception sharpened by the long-running dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Satellite imagery and investigative reporting have documented RSF supply transit close to the Ethiopian frontier, and a Reuters investigation in February placed an RSF training camp in Ethiopia, with financial backing attributed to the UAE.
Regional security experts have consistently warned that drawing Ethiopia into direct confrontation with Sudan would lead to entirely new combat theatres.
Multiple Rulers Fracturing Command
The RSF’s declaration of a parallel administration in Nyala last July added a structural impediment to a war already sustained by outside patronage.
Alan Boswell of the International Crisis Group put the contradiction succinctly. “The RSF aims to be legitimate as a national actor. Yet [this government] makes de facto partition all the more likely, even if that is not the strategic intent,” Boswell said.
Boswell’s reading has since been borne out. In April, two high-ranking Sudanese generals defected in opposite directions, one toward the SAF and one toward the RSF, a development consistent with a force stretched across western Sudan with weakening central authority.
Armed groups in Kordofan and Blue Nile have found room to operate as both the SAF and RSF concentrate on their respective administrations, each financed in part by gold revenues and external patronage.
Political science professor Amal Ibrahim Al-Sheikh talked about going into a phase of fragmentation. “The conflict has shifted from a military confrontation into a war of interests among tribal, political, and economic alliances, which hinders any prospects for a comprehensive resolution,” Al-Sheikh said.
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