In the space of a week, Sudan’s Kordofan region has witnessed a devastating wave of drone strikes and indiscriminate attacks on civilians that multiple sources have attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
At least fifty‑seven people were killed in just two days, according to United Nations human rights officials, with many of the victims being children. The pattern of targets – a market, a displacement camp, and a village water source – confirms how ordinary civilians remain directly in the line of fire despite routine protestations by the SAF regime in Khartoum that its actions are in defence of the Sudanese population.
On 15 February, an alleged SAF drone struck the busy Al Safiya market in Sudari locality, North Kordofan. UN human rights chief Volker Türk’s office reports that 28 civilians were killed and 13 injured when the drone detonated amid shoppers going about their daily business. The attack on a clearly civilian marketplace, with no suggestion of a military objective in the UN’s public account, immediately raised questions of proportionality and distinction in SAF’s use of airpower.
A day later, on 16 February, another alleged SAF drone hit a shelter for internally displaced persons in Al Sunut, West Kordofan. UN figures indicate that 26 civilians were killed there, including at least 15 children, and 15 others wounded. UNICEF confirmed the child toll, calling the strike a stark example of how families who had already fled violence were being killed in supposed places of refuge. For Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s Executive Director, the attack typified a wider trend in Kordofan: children killed, injured and displaced, and cut off from the basic services they need to survive.
These two strikes alone account for the 57 civilian deaths over 15–16 February cited by UN officials, who have warned that the escalating use of drones is having “devastating” consequences for civilians across Sudan. But evidence emerging from Sudanese civil society suggests that the pattern did not stop there. On the first day of Ramadan, 18 February, the village of Um Rasuma in West Kordofan became the scene of another lethal drone attack. The Darfur Network for Human Rights reports that a drone struck families gathered at the village’s main water source, killing 26 civilians, including 15 children, and wounding 14.
Rights monitors say the location – a communal well – was entirely devoid of military presence and have condemned the strike as a deliberate attack on unarmed civilians performing the most basic of daily tasks. Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese legal monitoring group, has called for an immediate ceasefire during Ramadan to guarantee civilian access to water and essential supplies. The Rapid Support Forces, have issued a statement describing a massacre at a water source known locally as Al‑Dawanki in Um Rusum on that same day, blaming SAF and referring to “dozens” of fatalities.
Taken together, these incidents present a deeply troubling trajectory. UN human rights mechanisms and UNICEF directly attribute multiple mass‑casualty strikes on clearly civilian sites in Kordofan to SAF drones. Sudanese human rights groups and legal monitors, meanwhile, are documenting further attacks – such as the Um Rasuma well strike – that fit the same pattern of indiscriminate or deliberately civilian‑targeted violence. As Médecins Sans Frontières treats around 170 people for drone‑related injuries across Kordofan in just two weeks, the picture that emerges is not of isolated mistakes but of a method of warfare in which civilian spaces have become acceptable targets.
