A Rapid Support Forces drone struck a vehicle travelling from White Nile province to Omdurman, on 2 May, killing five civilians. Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group tracking violence against civilians, described the attack as part of an ongoing campaign of targeting people on public roads.
The strike was the second on the Sudanese capital in a week, hitting a city that had enjoyed months of relative calm after the Sudanese Armed Forces recaptured it in early 2025.
Over 1.8 million displaced residents had returned, and the airport had resumed domestic flights. Khartoum had, by almost every external measure, started to recover.
What the past weeks of strikes, civilian movement, intelligence-harvesting apologies and North Kordofan mass flight point to is a contagion of portable aerial warfare: commercial drones have evolved into a replicable, migratory doctrine for armed groups.
A Return that Outpaced the Peace
The readiness with which civilians flooded back to the capital speaks to the desperate preference for familiar ruins over the exhaustion of prolonged displacement. Many among the 1.8 million who returned chose the shell of a city over the overcrowding of the shelter.
Westward, the situation grew steadily bleaker. The International Organisation for Migration recorded displacement as being especially heavy in North Kordofan, where nearly 43,000 individuals fled localities including Ar Rahad, Bara, Jabrat al-Sheikh and Um Ruwaba in the final months of 2025, with displacement accelerating into 2026 as the RSF pressed eastward from its Darfur stronghold.
Women and girls who reached northern reception points recounted sexual violence during flight; parents searched for children lost at armed checkpoints. “One thousand days of conflict have taken an unbearable toll on Sudan’s people,” IOM Director General Amy Pope said in January.
Escalating violence in North Darfur late last year had displaced more than 100,000 people, and ongoing clashes in the Kordofan region forced roughly 65,000 people to flee in recent months.
The Apologiser Who Revealed the Collaborator
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s recent public apology for military violence against health workers evolved into a troubling disclosure of tactical entanglement.
Sudan’s de facto head of state publicly apologised for attacks on medical personnel and simultaneously disclosed that the medical workers had provided the SAF with intelligence on RSF movements during the battle for southern Khartoum. “The information they provided was behind the victories achieved by the Armed Forces in southern Khartoum areas,” al-Burhan said.
The World Health Organization had already documented 213 attacks on healthcare facilities during the war, resulting in over 2,000 deaths; the Preliminary Committee of the Sudan Doctors’ Union had reported 222 medical personnel killed and 378 injured since April 2023.
Al-Burhan’s apology came as a confirmation of health infrastructure’s absorption into the battlefield.
Sudan as the Sahel’s Rehearsal
Sudan has transitioned into an exported catastrophe. The drone tactics that the RSF and SAF traded across Khartoum’s skies – targeting airports, hospitals, fuel depots and civilian vehicles – have spread westward with alarming speed.
Islam and Muslims Support Group (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-affiliated armed group operating across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, conducted five times as many drone drop attacks through November 2025 as it did in 2023 and 2024 combined.
After a coordinated assault on 25 April struck Bamako’s primary military base, Kidal, Gao, Sévaré and Mopti simultaneously, observers began drawing the Sudan parallel openly.
JNIM’s blockade, launched last September, destroyed more than 300 tankers by late 2025, causing fuel prices to more than double and closing petrol stations across Mali, leaving citizens waiting for hours in line at stations still operable. That is precisely the siege tactic the RSF had used against Khartoum’s power and water infrastructure.
The International Crisis Group recorded JNIM’s involvement in 16,023 violent incidents resulting in a total of nearly 40,000 deaths in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin and Togo between the group’s founding and the end of 2025. JNIM has expanded the weaponisation of drones and supply corridors into a unified targeting doctrine.
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