Fifteen substations in a month: Sudan’s grid is being dismantled one transformer at a time

Residents of Al-Dabbah told the Associated Press they heard an explosion shortly after 4 a.m. on Sunday; at Abu Hamad, the local security committee said the substation was destroyed and taken out of service with no casualties. Both towns are in army-held northern Sudan. On Friday and Saturday, drones struck an oil pumping station and a near-complete transformer substation at Haya in Red Sea State, igniting several crude storage tanks — the second strike on Haya energy infrastructure in three days. The pipeline through Haya carries South Sudanese crude to the Bashayer export terminal. Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group tracking the campaign, counts fifteen substations targeted since early October, a figure cited by AP, which describes the Merowe Dam as the last major remaining power source. “We have a generator, but there’s no diesel in the city,” Seif al-Rawasi, a baker in Al-Dabbah, told AP, saying he would eventually have to close.

Port Sudan answered on two tracks. The cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris, ordered a maximum state of alert, instructed security forces to monitor “all conspiracies against the country,” threatened maximum penalties for anyone proven to have supplied the RSF with strike coordinates, and ordered the coordination of domestic and international media campaigns to criminalise the attacks — this per Graham Abdelqadir, information ministry undersecretary, speaking to reporters after the meeting and reported by Sudan Tribune. Separately, on Saturday the foreign ministry urged action against Ethiopia for allegedly allowing the drones to launch from the Assosa air base, with an official identified only as Khalid showing diplomats wreckage collected with Sudanese security services. Officials called it a proxy war waged on behalf of regional powers, “primarily the United Arab Emirates.” No Ethiopian or Emirati response surfaced inside the window; Addis Ababa has previously denied permitting cross-border incursions into Blue Nile.

Assessment: Note what AP does and does not say. It reports the strikes and the damage as observed, and attributes the blame to “Sudan’s government and a rights group.” No RSF claim of responsibility appeared in this window, and the wreckage shown on Saturday was examined by invited diplomats, not by anyone independent. That gap matters because Khartoum has now named a second patron in a week, and an Ethiopian front is also a convenient enlargement of the UAE file. The cabinet decision is the more legible document: a government that in one sitting tasks itself with a media campaign and threatens informants tends to produce arrests of journalists and local monitors. Watch transmission versus generation. Substations are repairable; a strike on Merowe is a different war.