Donkey carts and three-wheeled taxis hauled away the dead and the wounded. The staff at a hospital, run by the charity Doctors Without Borders, was so overwhelmed that security guards had to help unload victims.
Nyala, a city in southwestern Sudan, was attacked last week when a drone landed in a market where people were buying food for dinner and drinking tea in cafes, residents said. Many of the wounded had been hit by shrapnel or suffered severe burns, according to Dale Koninckx, the local project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders.
The use of drones in Sudan’s bloody civil war is accelerating, the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, said last month. The weapons have enabled the Sudanese military and its adversary, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, to reach far beyond the front lines and wreak havoc deep inside enemy territory.
But analysts say the use of sophisticated drones has not given either side a decisive edge in the civil war. Instead, they have become the No. 1 killer of civilians this year, adding to famine and a drought that the United Nations says now covers half of Sudan.
The main benefit of the drone war goes to the Turkish and Chinese companies making the drones, as well as the foreign powers who help to supply or fund them, analysts say.
“It’s a war of attrition,” said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King’s College London. “You are trying to grind down the other side and their willingness to sustain pressure and cost.”
The widespread use of drones in Sudan is part of a global trend that includes wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; in Sudan the warring parties have acquired sophisticated military technology through powerful foreign allies.
The Sudanese military has acquired drones made by Iran and Turkey, several analysts said, while the R.S.F. has relied on powerful Chinese drones supplied or operated by the United Arab Emirates.
A spokesman for the Sudanese government told journalists last week that a drone strike that hit the capital, Khartoum, had been launched from Ethiopia, which has strong ties to the Emirates. The Ethiopian government did not respond to a request for comment. The Emirates denies backing the R.S.F.
Drones are not unique to Sudan’s war. Many African governments as well as armed groups on the continent have scaled up their use of drones in recent years. But Sudan has experienced more drone attacks than any other African country since 2023, according to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. More than 300 people were killed in drone strikes in the first three weeks of October alone, Mr. Türk said.
Emergency Lawyers, a human rights group that is tracking the violence in Sudan, put the toll in the attack on Nyala at 103 dead. Doctors Without Borders said that it had treated more than 150 patients at the hospital that it runs in the city and that 36 others had been killed. Other casualties had been taken elsewhere.
Neither side in the war claimed responsibility for the attack, but Nyala is a stronghold of the paramilitaries. A spokesman for the Sudanese Army did not reply for a request for comment.
The Sudanese Army and the R.S.F. have used drones differently throughout the war, according to Mohamed Osman, a researcher on Sudan for Human Rights Watch. The army has used them to strike enemy commanders and supply chains, including fuel depots.
In Nyala, paramilitary commanders live in proximity to the civilian population, Mr. Osman said. Casualties in the attack included combatants, according to Human Rights Watch.
The R.S.F. has used drones to target civilian infrastructure, such as electrical grids in Khartoum and other major cities. Those strikes have affected hospitals and water supplies, threatening civilian life. Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.
Nafisa Hamid, a mother of five who sells onions at a market in Nyala, said in an interview that the war and its economic fallout had already pushed her to her limit before the attack last week.
“I am very afraid,” she said.
Drones have made it nearly impossible for life in Sudan to return to normal, even in areas once considered far from the battlefield.
El Obeid, a city in the North Kordofan region, has been a strategic target for the paramilitaries for months. During the summer, the R.S.F. appeared to be closing in on the city in preparation for a siege.
That direct threat receded when the Sudanese Army retook nearby towns, and a highway that runs north from El Obeid to the city of Omdurman, near the capital, remains open.
Even so, a report by the U.N. Human Rights Council last week said that “sustained drone attacks along the route continue to impede civilian movement.” It added that strikes on infrastructure in the city had disrupted “access to water, health care and other basic services.”
The increasing prominence of long-range drones in the war has come at a time when there is little movement along the front lines. Sudan is increasingly split; the R.S.F. holds Darfur and much of Kordofan in the west, while the Sudanese armed forces control Khartoum and much of the east.
Blue Nile State, near the border with Ethiopia, also remains heavily contested, and in recent weeks the Sudanese military has gained ground in parts of Kordofan.
While the drones have enabled the combatants to penetrate battle lines without having to launch costly ground offensives, they are unlikely to lead to a shift in battlefield positions.
“Increasingly sophisticated drone capabilities enabled both parties to strike far beyond immediate front lines,” the U.N. said in a report in September.
But it added that “greater technical capability did not bring greater civilian protection.”
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