Seven strikes on Sudan’s power grid in a week, and a market in Nyala with five children dead

Sudan Tribune reported on 27 October that a drone strike on the Al-Markhiyat transformer station northwest of Omdurman was the seventh attack on the national electricity grid within a week. A source at the national electricity company, speaking anonymously to AFP, said “RSF militia drones targeted the Al-Markhiyat transformer station, disrupting the power supply across large parts of Khartoum and Al-Jazira states.” The sequence began on 20 October with a strike on the Tendelti transformer station in western White Nile, which cut the main transmission line to North Kordofan. Arab News, citing AFP and an unnamed government official, reported a coordinated attack on five power stations on Monday 26 October — two each in Al-Jazira and Gedaref — causing mass outages in the east. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logs that five-station strike on 27 October, citing the Guardian; either one date is wrong or these are two events.

UNICEF went on the record on Thursday 29 October: at least five children were killed and two injured in a drone attack on a market in Nyala, South Darfur, on Monday. The agency’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, Etleva Kadilli, gave the victims as three boys and two girls aged between seven and fourteen. UNICEF did not attribute the strike to any party. Nyala is RSF-held territory, which makes that omission consequential rather than incidental. The pattern is familiar there: on 17 October the SAF said it had killed dozens of RSF fighters in air attacks on Nyala, while the RSF said the army had drone-struck a livestock market and killed 30 civilians, among them 17 women and five children. Al Jazeera carried both accounts; neither was independently verified.

On Wednesday 28 October, the undersecretary of Sudan’s foreign ministry, Muawiya Osman Khalid, publicly accused Ethiopia of involvement in the drone campaign against civilian sites, fuel depots and power infrastructure, with the accusation extending by implication to the UAE. Sudan Tribune, carrying Reuters reporting, stated plainly that neither the Ethiopian government nor the UAE could immediately be reached for comment, and that “Reuters was unable to independently verify the flight data or the origin of the drones.” This is not a new allegation. The Security Council Report’s October forecast records persistent allegations that Ethiopian territory is being used to supply and launch RSF operations — a standing Sudanese position now escalated to ministerial level.

Assessment: The blackouts are observable; the authorship is claimed. Every count in the grid cluster rests on anonymous Sudanese government or state-utility sources, and no independent verification that the RSF launched these strikes was available. Hold that caveat alongside the Nyala strike, where the party with territorial control is the one the SAF has been bombing, and where UNICEF’s refusal to assign blame reads as a verification judgement rather than a diplomatic one. The strategic logic, as this desk reads it: open-source geolocation by the Centre for Information Resilience places the SAF advancing through North Kordofan from September. A force losing ground does not need to hold transformers — only to make the territory it cannot hold ungovernable.