Drone strikes have taken Sudan’s grid apart, and nobody can agree how many stations fell
Five outlets published five different counts of the power stations hit in roughly one week. Satellite imagery confirms damage at four substations; nobody has claimed the campaign.
Between 26 October and 4 November, drones struck transformers, substations and fuel depots across at least ten Sudanese states, including targets hundreds of kilometres from any ground held by the Rapid Support Forces. On 29 October the Um Dabakir thermal station in White Nile State lost four transformers and three generating units, taking 500MW offline and cutting White Nile and North Kordofan from the grid, according to the station director’s statement carried by AP. The Shendi main substation was destroyed on 30 October by a drone carrying four missiles, per the local security committee. On 1 November the Al-Dabbah and Abu Hamad substations were knocked out; AP reported the Al-Dabbah station guard, Mohammed al-Nour, was killed. “We heard a huge explosion that shook the houses, and then the power went out,” Al-Dabbah resident Abbas Wadaa told AP.
The counts diverge sharply. Sudan Tribune put the figure at 14 stations in two weeks on 1 November, then at more than 19 in seven days by 6 November. Asharq Al-Awsat said 15 “in days”; Anadolu said 16 in one week across seven states; the fact-checking outlet Misbar said 17 substations across ten states. Misbar’s 7 November analysis of Sentinel-2 imagery is the only independent technical work in the window: it found visual changes consistent with strike damage at Al-Rawma, Shendi, New Halfa and Al-Ghazali, some out of service. That corroborates damage, not authorship. Sudan’s government and the Emergency Lawyers group blame the RSF; AP reported the RSF did not immediately comment, and no claim of responsibility surfaced.
Assessment: The gap between 14 and 19-plus is not sloppiness, it is the condition of reporting Sudan: no utility is publishing a consolidated list, and every number traces back to a ministry briefing or a count of local reports. Treat any single figure as a floor. Note what the cabinet did on 1 November — chaired by Kamil Idris, it ordered a maximum state of alert and separately directed coordination of domestic and international media campaigns to criminalise the attacks. An information operation instructed on the record by a cabinet is a reason to read subsequent government casualty and damage claims as advocacy. The one hard structural fact — that Merowe Dam now carries the load — rests on a single anonymous utility employee quoted by AP.