Drones turn Sudan’s ‘forgotten’ war into a relentless civilian killing field

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.

OBEID, Sudan — The first drone arrived around 3 a.m., its presence announced by a rip of antiaircraft fire drumrolling through blacked-out boulevards. More drones followed, once more plunging the residents of this besieged city into a 21st century version of the Blitz.

This is the civil war in Sudan as the conflict enters its fourth year: a staggeringly brutal conflict where stagnating front lines have given way to intense drone campaigns targeting rear-guard cities, many after sunset. On this March night in Obeid, five drones hit. On a typical night, more than a dozen will strike.

While much of the world’s attention in recent years has focused on Gaza and Ukraine, the Sudan civil war has killed well over 150,000 people — and that count is more than a year old. Some estimate the death toll is more than triple that number. The official death toll in Gaza has been put at more than 72,000, but that too is viewed as an undercount.

Nearly 880 Sudanese civilians were killed in drone strikes between January and April, making drones “far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths,” said United Nations rights chief Volker Turk in a statement in April. That surge in lethality underscores the potency of the high-tech but cheaply made drones.

A fuse recovered from a downed drone in Obeid, Sudan. Some drones drop bombs, while others function as missiles and slam into targets.

The war is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and its onetime ally, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, for control of the country. Both sides deploy plane-like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as well as quadcopters.

The drones have upended the cycle of war: The rainy season — which runs from June till September — normally heralds a lull in the fighting. Instead, Volker said, “increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated.”

The epicenter of the drone-fueled combat is in central Sudan’s Kordofan region, which is divided into North, South and West Kordofan states.

In Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, near-daily drone barrages have imposed a furtive rhythm to residents’ lives, making every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble.

Obeid has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army, and incessant attacks from UAV-stalked skies push soldiers to splatter mud on vehicles to obscure them from drone optics. Some drones drop bombs, some serve as missiles, while others reconnoiter.

Though government troops broke through the RSF’s blockade of Obeid last year, the militiamen are still positioned north, south and east of the city. The highway leading to Khartoum — the city’s sole supply route — is a frequent target. Every few miles you see the fire-roasted carcasses of vehicles that didn’t escape a drone’s gaze.

In peaceful times, Ramadan would normally see people hanging out in sidewalk restaurants and cafes after the daylong fast.

But in March, night attacks and the lack of street lighting — lights are dimmed to make targeting more difficult — meant few stayed beyond midnight. Sure enough, at 3 a.m. a drone punched into a grease oil depot on Obeid’s edge. Only after sunrise did people dare to leave their homes, and by then a ferocious fire was huffing thick plumes of smoke over the city.

“We’ll be here till tomorrow dealing with this blaze,” said Major Issa Hamdoun, a civil defense commander, as he watched his men manhandling the fire hose into the wreckage of the building.

Near him was Police Sgt. Yahya Sharif Mohammad. His uniform and scalp were lined with glistening rivulets of oil, water, soot and sweat.

“This is an industrial area, and there’s plenty of stuff around to catch fire,” he said, sidestepping a dribble of oily water.

It was unclear whether the attack was meant for a nearby power substation, but residents accuse the RSF of regularly targeting civilian infrastructure.

“It’s just wanton destruction,” said Ashraf al-Ahmad, the caretaker at the University of Kordofan, pointing to where a drone skimmed the top of a campus building, smashed through a wall and landed in front of the Environmental Studies lecture hall. Others struck the hall itself.

Navigating around the crater, Al-Ahmad trudged into the blown-out remains of the hall, his feet crunching on an underbrush of glass, wood splinters and insulation. Sunlight streamed through three large holes in the roof and through dozens of pinpricks picked out by shrapnel; on the ground lay twisted strips of corrugated metal and scaffolding, cast around the busted-up desks like streamers at a party.

“They hit this building, and the day before they hit another one on campus,” Al-Ahmad said. “What for? Even the students aren’t here now.”

Components from drones that struck Obeid, which has become a key logistics hub for the Sudanese army.

Observers say that, with the RSF unable to gain ground in recent months, it has resorted to drone fusillades to harass civilian populations away from the front line.

“The RSF can’t project force any other way right now, so they’re lobbing drones like aerial IEDs,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Sudanese army has landed punches as well, killing hundreds of civilians in what the U.N. and rights groups say are indiscriminate attacks. In April the army slung a succession of drones on the city of Nyala in the state of South Darfur, the seat of power of the RSF’s parallel government.

That both sides have been able to field drones underscores the international dimension of the fighting raging across Africa’s third-largest country, with the sheer number of players belying descriptions of Sudan’s conflict as a forgotten war.

The Sudanese army has received UAVs and military support from Iran, Turkey, Russia and Egypt; the latter is running drone operations from a base near Sudan’s border. Saudi Arabia is giving Sudan billions of dollars’ worth of UAVs and air defenses purchased from Pakistan, and even fifth-generation Chinese fighter jets.

How the RSF appears to have an inexhaustible supply of drones has been the subject of speculation, but observers say it has a wealthy Persian Gulf patron of its own in the United Arab Emirates.

The Emirates has consistently denied those claims and insists it backs no side in the war. But Sudanese officials, U.N. investigators and open-source experts say the UAE has created what they describe as a transcontinental logistics pipeline utilizing airports, seaports and transit highways — in Chad, South Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic — to deliver drones and the mercenaries who operate them to the RSF.

Serial numbers and other markings that could be used to identify a drone’s provenance have been filed off.

That logistics network has proved to be “dynamic and flexible,” Raymond said. Earlier this year, Somalia — whose seaports, airports and military bases have been used for Emirati materiel transfers, investigators say — severed bilateral agreements with the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt denied UAE overflight permissions.

But the shipments continued through ever-more circuitous routes, and used other nations as launchpads for RSF attacks. In April, Sudan’s military said it had “conclusive evidence” that UAE-supplied drones that hit Khartoum’s airport were launched from Ethiopia, calling it a “direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence.”

The UAE and Ethiopia vociferously denied the charges as “fabrications” and “baseless.”

Pinning down the drones’ provenance is made intentionally difficult.

In a ditch near a military outpost on Obeid’s periphery, an army engineer walked through a graveyard of RSF drones shot down in recent days. He gingerly stepped over the broken wing of what appeared to be a Chinese-made CH-95 drone, then picked up pieces of a smaller drone’s electronic innards and showed them to a visiting journalist: All identifying serial numbers had been meticulously scraped off.

Arms researchers shown images and videos of the smaller drone’s components say its fuselage has been copied by dozens of Chinese companies even now selling similar models on China’s equivalent of Amazon, AliExpress. The engine is identified as one often used by model airplane hobbyists. Most of the components are off-the-shelf and difficult to trace.

Though the drones’ origins may be subject to debate, there is no question of their impact, supercharging displacement in a conflict that has already forced more than 14 million out of their homes.

The result can be seen in Al-Mina camp, a tent city abutting Obeid’s northern entrance that is now hosting no fewer than 49,000 people, with more coming by the day, said Mounir Ibrahim, a social researcher with the government.

“We’ve had people who have been here for two years, and others who came just a few days ago,” Ibrahim said, gesturing toward a warehouse that served as a temporary reception center for hundreds of new arrivals.

“There isn’t enough food or medicines for everyone. People are still waiting for tents.”

Fatima Mustafa, 39, fled the town of Bara, 38 miles north of Obeid, six months ago. The first sign of trouble came when an RSF drone fell near her home and injured her son, 15-year-old Mohammad Hamdan. She pointed to the scars left by the shrapnel and stitches all over his skull.

But that was just the prelude to the RSF’s assault on the town.

“Three of them entered our house and forced us to give them whatever money we had. When I told them I didn’t have anything, they did this,” she said, raising her left hand and showing the stump where her thumb used to be.

In a nearby tent was Zuhoor Musa Abdul Rahman, a 30-year-old housewife who recounted with unnatural calm the horrors that spurred her to flee El Fasher, a city some 300 miles east of Obeid.

The RSF overran El Fasher in October, massacring and looting at a such a scale that piles of bodies could be seen in satellite imagery, their blood darkening the sand around them. The scene recalled the gruesome rampages of the RSF’s forebears, the janjaweed militias who terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region a generation ago.

When the army withdrew from the city, Abdul Rahman decided to escape with her eight children, husband, two brothers and sisters and other relatives.

The men wore women’s clothing in an attempt to evade RSF militiamen, but they were found out. Abdul Rahman said one of her brothers, Hussam, was taken to a pickup truck, where one of the fighters stabbed him in the back with a knife. Both of her sisters’ husbands were also killed. Her brother, 19-year-old Azzam, remains missing.

It took 20 days to reach Obeid, mostly by foot but also by hitching rides on the occasional donkey cart or livestock truck. By the time they got to the city, only 12 family members were still with Abdul Rahman. The rest, she said, were either dead or missing.

“I’ve lost more than 100 people from my family alone,” she said, her voice rising in anger for a moment before reverting to the monotone she normally spoke in.

“I know each of their names, and they’re all gone.”

Her face remained impassive even as tears formed and began to travel down her cheek. She cried in silence, her shoulders moving slightly with the sobs. No one moved to comfort her.