Drones knock out five more Sudanese substations in two days as Khartoum turns to loyalty policing

Drones struck substations at Al Dabbah in Northern State and Abu Hamad in River Nile State on Sunday, knocking both out of service, Sudan Tribune reported, citing government sources in Abu Hamad locality. The same strike hit an old out-of-service thermal station that once supplied the city, cutting power to Abu Hamad and surrounding villages; local sources said one woman was killed near a targeted fuel station in Al-Multaqa. On Monday three more distribution stations were hit, in Kassala and Northern states. The run-up was heavier still: AP reported that Um Dabakir in White Nile State, the country’s largest thermal plant at 500 megawatts, was struck late on 28 October — a claim resting on a single Sudan Electric Holding Company employee speaking anonymously because he was not authorised to talk to media — and that a drone “carrying four missiles” destroyed transformers at Shendi’s main substation two days later.

The totals do not agree. Al Jazeera, carrying Anadolu copy, counted 18 strikes on the electricity network in the past week. Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group, told AP that 15 substations had been targeted since early October. Sudan Tribune ran its own count of 14 power stations bombed in two weeks. Three windows, three units, three methods. Attribution is in the same condition: the army-led government and Emergency Lawyers blame the Rapid Support Forces, and AP’s wire language is “blamed on the RSF” rather than an assertion of its own. No RSF claim of responsibility appears in any of the reporting reviewed. The Sudan Doctors Network warned that outages threaten hospitals, dialysis, blood banks and refrigerated medicines and vaccines.

The cabinet’s answer, delivered in Khartoum on Sunday after a Council of Ministers session chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris and read out by information undersecretary Graham Abdel-Gadir, was only partly about electricity. Ministers raised the state of alert “to the highest level, both officially and among the public,” ordered monitoring of “all conspiracies being plotted against the country,” and announced “the maximum possible penalties ... on anyone proven to have supplied the enemy with coordinates of strategic and civilian sites.” They also directed coordinated domestic and international media campaigns involving ministries, institutions and individuals to condemn the attacks, and called the targeting of civilian services “an indication of the successive defeats suffered by the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia.”

Assessment: Three incompatible tallies circulating in the same 48 hours is itself the finding: nobody independent is counting, and every number in play originates with a belligerent government or a monitor working inside its territory. Use the Emergency Lawyers figure and name them. The cabinet readout deserves more attention than the condemnation language it is wrapped in. Facing a grid it cannot defend, the state has reached for two instruments it can control — prosecuting civilians suspected of passing coordinates, and an information campaign it describes openly as such. Loyalty policing is the cheapest substitute for air defence, and it will outlast the strikes.