Sudan’s prime minister orders fuel released to Khartoum stations as drones hit the distribution chain

Sudan Tribune reported from Khartoum on 30 September that Prime Minister Kamil Idriss had ordered additional supplies of petroleum products released to service stations, after acute shortages took hold in the capital and in regional states, producing long queues and price rises. Idriss was photographed visiting a filling station in Khartoum the same day. What is established is the order, not the delivery: the account available to this desk does not show fuel reaching pumps, and no price-per-gallon figure or queue measurement was published alongside it. A government announcing supply during a shortage is performing a political act as much as a logistical one, and the photograph at the station is part of the announcement rather than evidence of its effect.

Three days earlier, on or about 27 September, Dabanga reported that Rapid Support Forces drones struck a fuel depot in El Gezira state that stores and distributes petrol and diesel across the state. The outlet based its account partly on video circulating online showing flames across parts of the site and partly on Civil Defence statements, which said teams had contained the fire, prevented it spreading to other tanks, and limited damage to the petrol and diesel tanks. No wire confirmation of the strike has been seen here, and no source connects the depot fire to the Khartoum queues. In the same report, the Sudanese Armed Forces said its air defences downed an FH-95 drone northeast of El Kokiti in North Kordofan, the second of that type it claimed to have shot down in a week; the claim is the army’s and is not independently verified.

The drone campaign’s documented centre is North Kordofan. North Kordofan state authorities said an RSF drone attack on 25 September killed two civilians and wounded 20 in El Obeid, hitting a displacement shelter and civilian infrastructure. On 26 September Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Abdulaziz Al-Wasil, lodged a complaint with the Security Council by diplomatic letter accusing the RSF of striking a King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre truck near the entrance to El Obeid. The letter is a primary document; the attribution of the strike within it is Riyadh’s. Of an attack attributed to the RSF on 15 September against El Obeid’s College of Development and Technological Sciences, in which the dean Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh said a security guard was killed and eight classrooms damaged, a student who had sat exams there the previous day, Omnia Aboul Gassim, told Reuters: “As you can see, the entire faculty is destroyed, and we feel that our dreams are destroyed, and our future is destroyed.”

Assessment: Read the week as a campaign against distribution rather than against front lines. Depots, aid trucks, shelters and a college are targets that degrade the state’s ability to supply and be seen supplying — which is why a prime minister at a pump matters to both sides. Distrust the causal chain that suggests itself: nobody has shown the El Gezira fire produced the Khartoum queues, and Sudan’s fuel economy has older problems. Distrust equally the shoot-down counts, which are belligerent claims. The Saudi letter is the significant item: a Quad member formally accusing the RSF at the Council in the same week Washington is squeezing the army over a visa.