A Sudanese Army Drone Is Said to Have Hit Displaced Civilians in Blue Nile as Dengue Kills 39

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, in its Africa Media Review for 24 July, reported that a Sudanese army drone strike on Thursday 23 July killed several people after targeting a gathering of displaced civilians in Blue Nile, according to the rights group Emergency Lawyers. No casualty figure was given beyond “several.” The sourcing is thin and should be read as such: a single Sudanese legal-rights group, relayed through a media digest rather than the originating wire copy, which we have not seen. Blue Nile has had months of fighting between the army and an RSF alliance with Abdel Aziz al-Hilu’s SPLM-N, pushing displacement toward Ed Damazin. On 16 July Sudan Tribune carried the army’s own account of that campaign — the recapture of Kurmuk, and some 205 combat and supply vehicles plus four FH-95 drones destroyed. That is a belligerent’s claim, independently unverified.

The state’s confirmed emergency is biological. Sudan Tribune reported on 24 July that a dengue outbreak across Blue Nile has killed 39 people, citing the Preliminary Committee of the Sudan Doctors Union; committee member Adeeba Ibrahim Al-Sayyid told the paper the committee has tracked 350 confirmed cases across the state, including 76 in Ed Damazin. The report’s own figures sit awkwardly — “more than 300 infected” in one line, 350 confirmed in another. Elsewhere, a finding that complicates the standard reading of the war: Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab reported in January that it had identified new earthworks and embankments along key exit routes from El Obeid and around critical infrastructure, and assessed them as possible siege preparations by the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied groups. The lab withheld operational detail, citing civilian safety.

Assessment: Two things are being tested here. One is whether an allegation against the army travels as far as an allegation against the RSF: on the evidence of this week, it does not — the RSF’s border offensive has a specialist tracker, named villages and a fatality count, while a strike attributed to the SAF has one advocacy group and a paragraph in a digest. The other is what the dengue number measures. Thirty-nine deaths in a state with no functioning cordon is a siege statistic as much as a medical one. Treat the Yale earthworks finding as the corrective it is: both armies have shaped the ground around El Obeid, and the city’s suffering has more than one author.