MEFILES

Fifteen substations in a month: Sudan’s grid is being dismantled one transformer at a time

Drones hit power stations at Al-Dabbah and Abu Hamad on Sunday, days after strikes on oil and transformer facilities at Haya. Port Sudan blames the RSF; the wire reporting on the ground does not.

Residents of Al-Dabbah told the Associated Press they heard an explosion shortly after 4 a.m. on Sunday; at Abu Hamad, the local security committee said the substation was destroyed and taken out of service with no casualties. Both towns are in army-held northern Sudan. On Friday and Saturday, drones struck an oil pumping station and a near-complete transformer substation at Haya in Red Sea State, igniting several crude storage tanks — the second strike on Haya energy infrastructure in three days. The pipeline through Haya carries South Sudanese crude to the Bashayer export terminal. Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group tracking the campaign, counts fifteen substations targeted since early October, a figure cited by AP, which describes the Merowe Dam as the last major remaining power source. “We have a generator, but there’s no diesel in the city,” Seif al-Rawasi, a baker in Al-Dabbah, told AP, saying he would eventually have to close.

Port Sudan answered on two tracks. The cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris, ordered a maximum state of alert, instructed security forces to monitor “all conspiracies against the country,” threatened maximum penalties for anyone proven to have supplied the RSF with strike coordinates, and ordered the coordination of domestic and international media campaigns to criminalise the attacks — this per Graham Abdelqadir, information ministry undersecretary, speaking to reporters after the meeting and reported by Sudan Tribune. Separately, on Saturday the foreign ministry urged action against Ethiopia for allegedly allowing the drones to launch from the Assosa air base, with an official identified only as Khalid showing diplomats wreckage collected with Sudanese security services. Officials called it a proxy war waged on behalf of regional powers, “primarily the United Arab Emirates.” No Ethiopian or Emirati response surfaced inside the window; Addis Ababa has previously denied permitting cross-border incursions into Blue Nile.

Assessment: Note what AP does and does not say. It reports the strikes and the damage as observed, and attributes the blame to “Sudan’s government and a rights group.” No RSF claim of responsibility appeared in this window, and the wreckage shown on Saturday was examined by invited diplomats, not by anyone independent. That gap matters because Khartoum has now named a second patron in a week, and an Ethiopian front is also a convenient enlargement of the UAE file. The cabinet decision is the more legible document: a government that in one sitting tasks itself with a media campaign and threatens informants tends to produce arrests of journalists and local monitors. Watch transmission versus generation. Substations are repairable; a strike on Merowe is a different war.

Thirty-one governments warn of famine in Sudan, and not one of them is Arab, African or Asian

The joint statement issued through the US State Department asks the warring parties to lift aid impediments. In the same ten days, the army chief restated a surrender demand and the cabinet moved onto a war footing.

The statement, co-signed by thirty governments and the EU, says Sudan “is experiencing an alarming deterioration in its food security” and that the IPC-warned risk of famine in coming months “needs urgent action.” It calls on the parties to “lift all impediments on humanitarian assistance,” to permit cross-line and cross-border operations including air access to Darfur, and to stop targeting humanitarian personnel and civilian infrastructure. The Italian foreign ministry, summarising the text, puts 19.5 million people — 41 per cent of the population — in severe acute food insecurity, five million of them in emergency, and warns the number of children with severe acute malnutrition “could exceed the projected 825,000.” AFP renders the statement as expecting the number of food-insecure areas to double. On the date: Rome records ministerial adoption on 23 October; AFP and Al Jazeera date the release to the following Monday.

The signatory list, as published by AFP, runs from Australia to the United Kingdom via the EU member states, Norway, Switzerland and Canada, with the United States as issuer. No Gulf state signed. No African state signed. No Asian state signed. The deficit is structural rather than accidental: the two capitals most often named in Khartoum’s own accusations are not in the room, and neither are the neighbours who host the displaced. The same pattern holds at the mediation table. The Geneva consultative meetings of 20–22 October gathered 21 countries and five institutions to coordinate peace initiatives, with neither the Sudanese government nor the RSF represented. Pekka Haavisto, the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy, asked delegates to use their “respective channels of engagement” to “help create conditions conducive to a comprehensive ceasefire.”

On 6 October at Merowe, army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan ruled out negotiations: “The armed forces will continue with the option of military victory until the entire national territory is cleared of the rebellion.” Radio Tamazuj reported that the United States has proposed a 90-day humanitarian ceasefire followed by talks, and that the army has sought changes including full RSF withdrawal from the cities it holds. On Sunday, Chief of Staff General Yasir al-Atta said the armed forces are advancing toward Darfur and Kordofan — “We are going to fight the mercenaries” — and alleged RSF fighters are backed by the UAE president. He named no towns, units or dates, and no territorial change has been independently confirmed; this is a speech, not a battlefield development.

Assessment: The humanitarian architecture is now talking to itself. The famine statement is addressed to donors and to belligerents who have no representation in the forum that drafted it; the Geneva mechanism exists to coordinate mediators, not to negotiate. Meanwhile the parties have spent the same fortnight hardening. Treat the 825,000 as a projection whose underlying IPC product and coverage period have not been published in any of the coverage — it is the number signatories fear exceeding, not a count. And read the two desks together: electricity is what runs irrigation pumps at the start of the winter planting season, and there is no diesel. The grid campaign is a food-security event with a six-month fuse.