Who Attacked Sudan’s Power Stations?

 Sennar, Al Qadarif, White Nile and Gezira lose electricity as drones hit stations across the army-held east.

Sudan’s war has found a target that requires no battlefield: the equipment that keeps a country functional.

Sudan’s state electricity company said on Monday that drone strikes hit power stations across the south-east, cutting supply in Sennar, Al Qadarif, White Nile and Gezira states. The operator named stations at Sinja, El Hawata, Al Fao and Mashkour, and Al-Junaid in Gezira, describing severe damage and major destruction of equipment.

Its accusation was explicit — the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces knocked out power in four states covering about half of the territory still held by the army — and its warning was starker: the stability of the entire national grid is now in question. The RSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Reuters could not independently verify the account. No deaths were reported.

That last point is why the story matters more than it appears. Nobody died in this strike, and the front line did not move. But the failure mode of a destroyed grid is measured in weeks, not minutes. Water pumping stops. Hospitals fall back on generators whose fuel is scarce and priced in a war economy, and whose spares must arrive overland.

The United Nations has warned repeatedly that attacks on power infrastructure threaten health and other services for millions of people already hit hard by this conflict, and aid groups have warned this month of an imminent collapse of Sudan’s health system as fighting displaces people through the planting season.

The escalation is not an isolated incident but a shift in method. Sudan’s army and the RSF have been fighting since April 2023, when the two fell out over how to merge their forces in a planned transition to civilian rule.

In the weeks around this attack, both sides intensified drone warfare: a series of strikes hit Nyala, held by the RSF, and Khartoum’s airport, held by the army.

On 19 October, at least 153 people were killed in a strike on Amiet market in the disputed Abyei region — local authorities blamed the army, while a Sudanese officer said it targeted fuel tankers arriving from South Sudan bound for the RSF, insisting civilians were not targeted; that account, too, could not be verified.

Three children were killed in a drone attack on Khartoum the same day, and 41 displaced people were killed near the Ethiopian border on 10 October in a strike blamed on the RSF. The UN, meanwhile, extended an arms embargo — but only for Darfur.

Drones are now the weapon of choice precisely because they collapse distance: a paramilitary force without an air force can reach a transmission station 500km behind the front, at a cost far below what the target cost to build, and with no pilot to lose. The defender faces the worst arithmetic in warfare — a grid has dozens of nodes, each cheap to damage and expensive to rebuild, and every one of them must be protected.

For the four states now in darkness, the question is how long darkness lasts. Transformer procurement, turbine spares and grid synchronisation are not things a country at war can improvise, and Sudan’s engineering workforce has spent three years being killed, displaced or unpaid. If the national grid is the objective, the campaign does not need to win. It needs only to keep arriving, once a month, at a station somewhere in the east.