Drone strikes have taken out fourteen Sudanese power stations in a fortnight, leaving Merowe Dam standing alone

The sequence is now continuous. On 28 October a drone hit the Al-Markhiyat station north of Omdurman, according to AFP/Getty imagery carried by Al Jazeera and The New Arab. On Friday 30 October a drone carrying four missiles destroyed transformers at the Shendi main substation, the local security committee told the Associated Press. Before dawn on 1 November the Al-Dabbah station in Northern state and the Abu Hamad station in River Nile were struck; on 2 November the Aroma and Halfa El Jadida distribution stations in Kassala followed, per Sudan Tribune. “We heard a huge explosion that shook the houses, and then the power went out,” Abbas Wadaa, a resident of Al-Dabbah, told AP. Al-Dabbah hosts thousands of people who fled after the RSF seized El Fasher last year. Sudan Tribune counted fourteen power stations bombed in two weeks; AP identifies the Merowe Dam as the last major source still standing. The cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris, ordered maximum alert on 1 November.

Nearly all of that reporting concerns RSF drones hitting army-held territory. The American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project, publishing on 5 November, supplies the other half: “The SAF has intensified its own drone attack campaign in densely populated areas in RSF-controlled Sudan since October 2026, increasing the humanitarian toll on civilians.” AEI records army strikes on commercial centres, residential areas and heavily trafficked routes in west-central and central Sudan, including repeated strikes on Nyala, the RSF’s headquarters. It dates the RSF’s own drone campaign to late 2024, with the first Port Sudan strikes in May 2025 against the airport, fuel facilities and a power station, and rising frequency and lethality since June 2026. No other source in the window documents the reciprocal campaign in comparable detail.

Against that, Sudan Tribune reported on 5 November that at a meeting urging insurance companies to put deposit surpluses and investments into financing the 2026–2027 winter agricultural season — attended by Salah Mohamed Abdel Rahim, general manager of the Agricultural Bank of Sudan — the minister present “denied claims by external parties that Sudan is approaching famine.” The minister is not named in the published text. The denial runs against the IPC Sudan Food Insecurity and Malnutrition Alert issued by WHO on 12 October 2026, and against the joint WFP/FAO/UNICEF release of around May 2026 putting nearly 19.5 million people in acute food insecurity. Sudan Tribune notes the agricultural sector faces a severe financing crisis after a summer season disrupted by fuel and funding shortages, high production costs and declining support.

Assessment: Attacking transformers is the cheapest way to convert a military stalemate into a civilian emergency, and it is working on both sides of the line — which is why the AEI item matters more than any individual strike. The grid coverage skews toward army-held areas because that is where reporters and functioning phone networks are, not because that is where the harm is concentrated. Read the famine denial as fiscal positioning rather than epidemiology: a government trying to extract crop financing from domestic insurers cannot simultaneously concede a famine. The test in the next fortnight is whether Washington, Riyadh or the Quad respond to the grid campaign specifically, having pressed for a humanitarian truce since mid-October.