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Drone strikes have taken out fourteen Sudanese power stations in a fortnight, leaving Merowe Dam standing alone

A three-week campaign against transformer yards in army-held Sudan has pushed the national grid toward collapse — and on 5 November a government minister told bankers the country is not approaching famine.

The sequence is now continuous. On 28 October a drone hit the Al-Markhiyat station north of Omdurman, according to AFP/Getty imagery carried by Al Jazeera and The New Arab. On Friday 30 October a drone carrying four missiles destroyed transformers at the Shendi main substation, the local security committee told the Associated Press. Before dawn on 1 November the Al-Dabbah station in Northern state and the Abu Hamad station in River Nile were struck; on 2 November the Aroma and Halfa El Jadida distribution stations in Kassala followed, per Sudan Tribune. “We heard a huge explosion that shook the houses, and then the power went out,” Abbas Wadaa, a resident of Al-Dabbah, told AP. Al-Dabbah hosts thousands of people who fled after the RSF seized El Fasher last year. Sudan Tribune counted fourteen power stations bombed in two weeks; AP identifies the Merowe Dam as the last major source still standing. The cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris, ordered maximum alert on 1 November.

Nearly all of that reporting concerns RSF drones hitting army-held territory. The American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project, publishing on 5 November, supplies the other half: “The SAF has intensified its own drone attack campaign in densely populated areas in RSF-controlled Sudan since October 2026, increasing the humanitarian toll on civilians.” AEI records army strikes on commercial centres, residential areas and heavily trafficked routes in west-central and central Sudan, including repeated strikes on Nyala, the RSF’s headquarters. It dates the RSF’s own drone campaign to late 2024, with the first Port Sudan strikes in May 2025 against the airport, fuel facilities and a power station, and rising frequency and lethality since June 2026. No other source in the window documents the reciprocal campaign in comparable detail.

Against that, Sudan Tribune reported on 5 November that at a meeting urging insurance companies to put deposit surpluses and investments into financing the 2026–2027 winter agricultural season — attended by Salah Mohamed Abdel Rahim, general manager of the Agricultural Bank of Sudan — the minister present “denied claims by external parties that Sudan is approaching famine.” The minister is not named in the published text. The denial runs against the IPC Sudan Food Insecurity and Malnutrition Alert issued by WHO on 12 October 2026, and against the joint WFP/FAO/UNICEF release of around May 2026 putting nearly 19.5 million people in acute food insecurity. Sudan Tribune notes the agricultural sector faces a severe financing crisis after a summer season disrupted by fuel and funding shortages, high production costs and declining support.

Assessment: Attacking transformers is the cheapest way to convert a military stalemate into a civilian emergency, and it is working on both sides of the line — which is why the AEI item matters more than any individual strike. The grid coverage skews toward army-held areas because that is where reporters and functioning phone networks are, not because that is where the harm is concentrated. Read the famine denial as fiscal positioning rather than epidemiology: a government trying to extract crop financing from domestic insurers cannot simultaneously concede a famine. The test in the next fortnight is whether Washington, Riyadh or the Quad respond to the grid campaign specifically, having pressed for a humanitarian truce since mid-October.

Sudan and Ethiopia close each other’s consulates over drone launch claims no Ethiopian official has answered

Khartoum says RSF drones are flying from Ethiopian soil and took the complaint to the Security Council. The entire public account of the rupture rests on two anonymous Sudanese officials.

On 1 November Sudan lodged a formal complaint against Ethiopia with both the UN Security Council and the African Union Peace and Security Council, accusing Addis Ababa of allowing the Rapid Support Forces to use Ethiopian territory to launch drone attacks on civilian infrastructure. On 2 November, according to a Sudanese government official speaking to AFP, “Ethiopia declared on November 2 the employees of the Sudanese consulate in Asosa in the Benishangul region persona non grata and gave them 48 hours to leave its territory.” Reuters put the number at six. On 4 November Sudan closed Ethiopia’s consulate in Gedaref and expelled its diplomats; Sudan Tribune reports Ethiopia withdrew three diplomats, and accounts differ on whether this was expulsion or withdrawal. The same Sudanese official said Khartoum had documented “Ethiopia’s support for the RSF militia, including by allowing them to use its land to attack Sudanese cities and civilian infrastructure,” calling the expulsions an escalation.

Two caveats carry the story. Ethiopian authorities did not respond to AFP’s request for comment, and nothing retrieved contains an on-the-record Ethiopian confirmation of the Asosa expulsion; the two wire accounts may draw on the same official pool. Second, the chain running from RSF drones through Ethiopian territory to Emirati supply is Khartoum’s framing, not an independently established fact, and the links should be kept apart. The regional pattern is real enough: Addis Ababa has expelled diplomats from three neighbours in five weeks — ten Eritrean diplomats and the closure of its own Asmara embassy on 1 October, an Egyptian diplomat in October, six Sudanese on 2 November — accusing Sudan, Egypt and Eritrea of backing Tigrayan rebels who launched an offensive in September. Khartoum rejects that.

Across the border from Asosa, residents of Ad-Damazin, the Blue Nile state capital, reported drone strikes through the night of 4 November, according to AFP. On 3 November the Council on Foreign Relations tracker, citing Sudans Post, reported that the RSF and allied militias had “reportedly captured the Sali military base, continuing its offensive campaign in the Blue Nile region of southeast Sudan” — a single outlet relayed by an aggregator. On 5 November Radio Tamazuj reported that TASIS forces, the RSF’s political affiliate, claim control of military positions in Blue Nile. That is a claim by a party, not a confirmed event. No independent verification of any specific capture appeared in the window.

Assessment: Both governments have reasons to want this quarrel visible. Addis Ababa is fighting a Tigray front it blames on a Sudanese-Egyptian-Eritrean axis, and consular expulsions are the cheapest available signal. Khartoum has spent eighteen months trying to internationalise the question of who supplies the RSF, and an Ethiopian launch-site allegation at the Security Council extends that campaign to a state with no Gulf protection. Until an Ethiopian foreign ministry statement exists, treat the rupture itself as better established than its stated cause. The thing to watch is Blue Nile: overnight strikes on Ad-Damazin plus TASIS claims plus the UN envoy’s warning make a coherent southeastern front, and no geolocated evidence for it.

Canberra sanctions Burhan and Hemedti on the same day, as the UN envoy reports the only diplomacy still moving

Australia designated four individuals and one entity under its autonomous framework on 5 November, naming both commanders in a single release. The same day, Guang Cong told the Security Council Sudan–South Sudan security talks had resumed.

The Australian government’s media release, published on the Foreign Minister’s own site, imposes Magnitsky-style human rights sanctions and travel bans on four Sudanese individuals and targeted financial sanctions on one entity. Two are named: Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan, Commander-in-Chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo Mousa, commander of the Rapid Support Forces. The release attributes to both parties “serious human rights violations and abuses, including attacks on civilians, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and extrajudicial killings” — symmetry is the instrument’s point. According to DFAT the measures build on sanctions Australia has already imposed on thirteen individuals under the UN Security Council’s Sudan framework. Canberra also issued a class-based humanitarian permit for Sudan, pre-empting the standard objection that designations obstruct aid. “Australia unequivocally condemns violence against civilians and humanitarian personnel,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong said, per the ABC’s live blog.

Also on 5 November, Guang Cong, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, briefed the Security Council on implementation of resolution 2046. Per the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs readout, he warned that Sudan’s conflict continues to threaten stability in Abyei and the wider border region, condemned the deadly drone attacks on Amiet market in October, and called for civilian protection and accountability. He welcomed the resumption of bilateral security discussions between Sudan and South Sudan, urged progress on Abyei’s final status, and flagged worsening insecurity and humanitarian conditions in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. That border-security channel is the only forward diplomatic motion in the window; it is not a ceasefire track. On Amiet, Khartoum’s own position is unreconciled: army statements have both denied responsibility for the market strike and justified it as targeting RSF fuel supplies.

Assessment: An Australian designation costs Burhan and Hemedti almost nothing in practice — neither banks in Sydney. Its value is categorical: a middle power with no stake in the war has now put both commanders in the same paragraph, which is the framing Khartoum has spent two years resisting, having built its diplomacy on the premise that it is a state fighting a militia. The two unnamed designees and the entity are the part worth chasing; an entity listing usually points at a procurement or gold-financing vehicle, and that is where sanctions have any mechanical effect at all. Note too that the UN’s only reported progress is a border file between two governments, not between the belligerents.