MEFILES

UNICEF counts up to fifteen power stations struck in October as Sudan’s drone war shifts to infrastructure

The agency ties the strikes on electricity supply to a failing harvest and an expected 825,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition in children under five this year. A drone strike in Blue Nile on Tuesday killed nine civilians, according to a single local official.

UNICEF warned on 11 November that escalating drone attacks on Sudan’s power infrastructure, combined with severe drought, are compounding into a child survival crisis. The agency reported that up to 15 power stations were hit during October 2026, disrupting water supply, healthcare, irrigation and food production, and that failed rains have severely damaged prospects for the 2026–27 harvest. It estimated 825,000 children under five will suffer severe acute malnutrition this year. The figures reached this desk through allAfrica’s regional roundup rather than UNICEF’s own release. The pattern they describe is documented: on 1 November, Sudan Tribune reported RSF drones bombed the Al Dabbah and Abu Hamad power stations in Northern State, knocking both out of service and cutting electricity across northern Sudan, with one civilian killed in a strike on a fuel station. A day later, the cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris declared a maximum state of alert and threatened severe punishment for anyone supplying the RSF with coordinates for strikes on infrastructure.

The only hard kinetic event inside the past 48 hours sits at the other end of the country. On Tuesday 10 November, Sudan Tribune reported that a drone attack struck the village of Bani Shako, in the Keli administrative unit of Kurmuk county in Blue Nile, killing nine civilians and injuring several others. The attribution rests on one named speaker, Kurmuk Commissioner Abdel Ati Mohamed al-Faki, a government-side county official describing a strike in territory the same report says is held by the RSF and its ally the SPLM-North. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logged the incident as a “suspected RSF drone strike” on a village “near Ed Damazin” — a different geography from Kurmuk, and a discrepancy neither outlet has resolved.

The civilian ledger is also hardening in North Kordofan. UN News, reporting a Geneva press briefing on 10 November, described El Obeid as subject to “relentless” drone strikes and said Human Rights Council investigators find civilians there living in constant fear of attack from the air. The accompanying UNFPA photograph carried its own data point: El-Obeid Maternity Hospital is under increasing pressure as tens of thousands flee violence in neighbouring South Kordofan — pressure arriving from the south, not only from Darfur to the west. ACAPS recorded roughly 204,000 people, including nearly 39,000 children, fleeing into Al Obeid city and surrounding Sheikan locality between January and June 2026, and in its late-October country update named the city as the leading candidate to become Sudan’s next major urban siege and atrocity-risk flashpoint after El Fasher.

Assessment: The analytically useful thing in UNICEF’s statement is not the malnutrition number but the causal chain it draws. A campaign against transformers and turbines produces famine indicators without producing battlefield movement, and it does so in territory the striking party does not need to hold. That makes the hunger curve partly an engineering problem, and it makes drought — El Niño-induced, affecting roughly half the country — a structural multiplier rather than background. Two cautions. Attribution of individual strikes is being made by officials of the side that was hit, which is a claim, not a finding. And Khartoum’s threat to punish anyone passing coordinates is also a licence for domestic repression.

A state news agency says a returns assessment mission reached Bara in North Kordofan

SUNA reports that government humanitarian bodies, foreign organisations and UN agencies assessed services in Bara on Tuesday “in preparation for voluntary returns.” No independent account of the mission has surfaced.

The Sudan News Agency, carried by allAfrica on 11 November, reported that a delegation comprising the North Kordofan State Humanitarian Aid Commission, the Social Welfare Sector and partners in health, education, water and environmental sanitation arrived in Bara on Tuesday 10 November, accompanied by representatives of foreign and national organisations and UN agencies. The stated purpose was to assess basic services “in preparation for voluntary returns.” The named speaker, Bara Executive Director Mahmoud Al-Eisir, commended the Armed Forces and supporting forces. Every element of that account — that UN agencies were present, that the exercise was technical, that returns to a recently contested North Kordofan town are being contemplated — comes from the Port Sudan government’s own news agency. The Humanitarian Aid Commission is the SAF-side body that controls humanitarian access inside army-held Sudan, which makes a HAC-led returns assessment a political act as much as a survey of boreholes and clinics.

SUNA also reported that Foreign Minister Mohieddin Salem received World Food Programme Executive Director Luke Lindberg in his office the same day, with the minister reaffirming the government’s commitment to full cooperation and facilities for humanitarian partners. No WFP readout of the meeting has been retrieved, and the characterisation of Sudanese cooperation is the host government’s. The military framing around Kordofan is moving in parallel: Sudan Tribune, reporting from El-Khwei on 8 November, carried the army’s account of escalating operations against the RSF in West Kordofan, including the capture of new territory and the downing of a third long-range drone. Sudan Tribune flagged it as the army’s claim, including an image of personnel beside a burning vehicle during an operation the force said was to clear opposing positions.

Assessment: Returns language is how a war’s map gets ratified before anyone has agreed to it. Declaring a town fit for voluntary return asserts control, invites donor money toward reconstruction rather than displacement, and converts a contested locality into settled territory on paper. That is not an argument that the claim is false — it may well be true — only that the burden of proof sits with the side making it, and that a state wire is not proof. Two tests will settle it quickly. Whether any UN agency confirms it joined the Bara mission. And whether Lindberg travelled beyond Khartoum and Port Sudan into Kordofan or Darfur. A principal who does not leave the capital has been shown a narrative, not a country.

Ethiopia expels six Sudanese diplomats as rights groups press the Emirati supply line

Human Rights Watch published on 11 November citing a UN fact-finding mission on UAE-linked recruitment of foreign contractors for the RSF. Sudan’s own allegations against Ethiopia remain claims, and its casualty figure has no stated methodology.

Human Rights Watch, in a piece published 11 November, stated that the United Arab Emirates has provided the Rapid Support Forces with weapons and supplies and facilitated the hiring of private military contractors, and that Colombian contractors trained at UAE military bases were deployed alongside the RSF on the front lines of El Fasher, operating drones and artillery. The stronger instrument HRW cites is not its own: the UN Fact Finding Mission concluded that individuals and entities with links to the UAE “played a significant role in the recruitment, financing, transportation and deployment of foreign military contractors.” HRW notes the European Parliament criticised the Emirates in a resolution adopted in July 2026. Africa Defense Forum, writing on 10 November, reported that the UAE launders gold smuggled out of RSF-held territory and supplies the group with drones and other weapons, at least once through an airstrip in Chad, citing a United Nations report; ADF is funded by US Africa Command, and the underlying UN Panel of Experts material is the document that matters.

The eastern border has moved faster. On 4 November, Sudan’s foreign ministry accused Ethiopia of hosting multiple RSF drone launch sites and alleged the resulting attacks had killed hundreds of civilians and disrupted essential services — a ministry figure with no stated methodology, and an allegation that remains unestablished independently. Ethiopia responded the same day by ordering six Sudanese diplomats to leave the country, reported by Reuters and logged by the Council on Foreign Relations; that expulsion is the confirmed fact in the sequence. Khartoum has filed parallel complaints to the UN Security Council and the African Union Peace and Security Council. The precipitating incident, on 20 October, was a drone attack and fires at Alneam market in the disputed Abyei region. The Sudanese border affairs specialist Abdul Kareem Al-Almin Ahmed told Al Jazeera that Ethiopia’s alleged support for the RSF has opened differences within the armed forces over how to respond.

Assessment: Keep the two halves of this apart. A UN mission’s finding on Emirati-linked contractor recruitment and a foreign ministry’s unsourced claim about launch sites are not the same class of evidence, and Khartoum benefits from their being read together. What connects them is the mediation architecture: the Quad that has been drafting Sudan’s truce texts since 2025 includes the state most credibly accused by a UN body of supplying one belligerent. That is the mechanical reason the army’s rejection of the Quad truce has held for a year, and nothing this week changed it. Watch instead whether Addis Ababa’s expulsions draw a reciprocal move — that is how a proxy war acquires a second interstate front.