SAF air campaign enters its second week as drone strikes push the recent toll above 160
The army is bombing cities it does not hold; the RSF is flying UAVs into cities the army does. Both are hitting urban infrastructure, and the UN says children are among the dead.
Sudan Tribune reported from Khartoum on Thursday that the Sudanese Armed Forces continued airstrikes against RSF positions in Darfur and Kordofan, and that for roughly two weeks the army has run a large-scale aerial operation with near-daily attacks on RSF-held cities in both regions, hitting military targets and civilian infrastructure. Mohamed Didan, spokesperson for the SAF’s Special Action Forces in Kordofan, claimed in a Facebook post that the army had carried out “75 air strikes targeting fixed and moving targets, along with infantry forces, vehicles, commanders and individuals from the Rapid Support Forces” across Kordofan, West Darfur and South Darfur. That is a belligerent’s claim on social media, unverified. Didan also attributed the RSF’s drone escalation against Khartoum to battlefield losses, citing “the killing of about 80 mobilised personnel” in strikes at Al-Dabbab in West Kordofan — again, an army claim.
Al Jazeera, in a reported feature published 22 October, put the toll of a wave of drone attacks across Sudan “in recent days” at more than 160 people killed. That is the outlet’s own aggregation over an undefined window, not a UN or ACLED count; Al Jazeera separately cites ACLED’s cumulative figure of at least 59,000 killed since April 2023. In the Imtidad Nasser neighbourhood east of Khartoum, resident Ahmed Abdel Hamid told Al Jazeera: “We heard the buzz of drones in the sky, but did not pay attention to it at first.” Anti-aircraft fire and two explosions followed; Al Jazeera reports three children from one family were killed, an account resting on that resident and the outlet’s own reporting. Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said the UN is “alarmed by the continued deadly drone strikes across the country that are killing civilians, including children, and that are disrupting central services.” An unnamed army official told Al Jazeera: “The army does not target civilians, but it considers all military and logistical sites and supply lines of the Rapid Support Forces as legitimate targets.”
Assessment: Treat the 160 figure as an outlet tally, not a monitoring product — the window is unspecified and no UN or ACLED number corroborates it. The structural point survives the sourcing problems: this is now a reciprocal campaign against infrastructure in cities each side cannot take, which is what armies do when ground momentum stalls. Didan’s framing — RSF drones as revenge for Al-Dabbab — is an admission dressed as an accusation, conceding that the UAV war is the RSF’s substitute for manoeuvre. Two threads to pull: the reported drone strike in Abyei on 20 October, which would mark spillover across the South Sudan border, and the Tendelti transformer strike that reportedly blacked out whole states. Displacement totals in-window diverge sharply — dpa says more than 14 million, Africanews some 11 million plus 34 million in need. Do not split the difference.