Khartoum state blames drones and looting as power fails across government-held Sudan

Altayeb Saadeldin, spokesperson for the Khartoum state government, told Reuters that “the targeting of the electricity sector in particular was very significant,” listing looting of copper wire, fuel and other components alongside drone attacks. He said the Merowe dam, described in the copy as Sudan’s main power source, had been among the targets hit, and that delayed annual rain had cut generation at other dams. An RSF source, speaking anonymously to Reuters, called the allegation that the RSF targeted the grid “incorrect and army propaganda” — a single unnamed source, not an institutional statement. The attribution of specific strikes remains a Khartoum state government claim, not independently verified in the copy. The precedent is on the record: allAfrica’s Dabanga feed reported drone damage to transformers at Merowe twice in one week in January 2025.

Reuters frames the war as increasingly a drone war in which both sides strike civilian infrastructure as well as military targets — a symmetry that cuts against both belligerents' preferred accounts. The humanitarian arithmetic behind the outages is thinner than the fighting. OCHA, via UN News on 3 August, reported that roughly $1.2 billion of the $2.9 billion required for Sudan’s 2026 response had been received — 41 per cent, eight months into the year. Displacement is running ahead of that funding: a UN figure reported by Al Jazeera on 20 August put more than 200,000 people newly displaced in Kordofan as fighting around El Obeid intensified.

Assessment: Grid attacks are the cheapest available form of siege. They do not require holding ground, they degrade a rival administration’s claim to govern, and they are near-impossible to attribute from open sources — which is precisely why the denial arrived through an unnamed source rather than a communiqué. Distrust the tidy causal list: looting, fuel shortages and a late rainy season would have produced cuts without a single drone, and a government under pressure has reasons to load the blame onto the enemy. The connection to the embargo file is direct. If drone technology is the thing a lapsed or diluted resolution fails to name, this is the damage that goes unaddressed.