RSF Drone Strikes on Five Power Stations Plunge Eastern Sudan Into Mass Blackouts

In Al-Fao, a town in Sudan's Gedaref state, the power went out early in the morning, and Babiker Youssef was thinking about his son's insulin. The boy is diabetic, and the medicine has to stay refrigerated. Speaking by phone, Youssef said he feared that if it spoiled he would not be able to replace it. "We have no idea when the power will come back," he said.

The outage traces to a coordinated drone attack that a Sudanese government official attributed to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. According to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the drones struck five power stations: two in Al-Jazira state, two in Gedaref, and one in White Nile state. The result, the official said, was power cuts across large parts of all three states.

All three states are held by the Sudanese army, which has been fighting the RSF, once its ally, since April 2023. The account of the strikes rests on that single unnamed official; the reporting does not describe independent confirmation of which stations were hit or how badly.

The pattern is not new. Electricity has been cut for days at a time after earlier paramilitary drone strikes on power stations and hydroelectric dams. The United Nations has repeatedly warned that regular attacks on power infrastructure endanger health care and basic services for millions of people already living through what it describes as the world's largest hunger crisis.

Drones now define the war. Both sides use them in sophisticated attacks across the country, and strikes have killed dozens of civilians at a time. A UN tally found that in the first three weeks of October alone, drone strikes killed more than 300 people and wounded hundreds more. Aid workers estimate the war as a whole has killed more than 200,000 people in a country of roughly 50 million, Africa's third largest by area. Most hospitals have been forced to close, at least 8 million children are out of school, and large areas have no access to basic services.

For farmers in Al-Jazira, the strike came just as things were improving. Abdelhafez Daafallah, 54, speaking from the town of Al-Junaid, said electricity had begun to recover about three months ago. The power station the militia had earlier destroyed had just been repaired, and he had hoped his irrigation pumps would run again. Instead the station was hit. He has been unable to work his land for nearly four years. Farmers in the state have struggled to rehabilitate and replant their fields since the army retook Al-Jazira from the RSF last year.

In Gedaref, Ibrahim Mohammed, a 37-year-old grocer, said he had already been living with several hours of outages a day before the strike. Now he has chicken in his fridge and two options: lose the whole stock or sell it at any price, which he said is a loss either way.

The blackouts land on an economy already under strain. Sudan faces unprecedented inflation, and its currency has lost more than 25% of its value in recent weeks. What to watch now is how quickly power is restored, whether the stations can be repaired as one was earlier this year, and whether attacks on electrical infrastructure continue.