The drone attack struck a market without warning, sparking an inferno and sending oily smoke skyward. Those who could, scrambled to escape the heat. Many others stood no chance.
The attack on Monday on Amiet market in Abyei, a region disputed between Sudan and South Sudan and contested by the factions in Sudan’s civil war, caused particular shock because it hit a civilian area, rather than a military target.
More than 150 people were killed and the toll was likely to rise, according to Yohana Akol Ngor, the current minister of information in Abyei.
“What stood out was that bodies had been charred and reduced to ashes,” he said in an interview, adding that he had visited the market on Tuesday. “The victims were buried in two cemeteries.”
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that it was providing care to more than 20 people who had been wounded in the drone strikes, including several critical cases.
Local officials in Abyei blamed the Sudanese military for the attack, which South Sudan’s government condemned, summoning Sudan’s ambassador to the capital, Juba. A spokesman for the Sudanese military did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
On Tuesday, fires still burned. Video footage showed that parts of the market had been burned to their foundations. Trucks had been stopped in their tracks by the blast, their tires melted.
The strike, which took place when the market was busy and far from the front lines, was further evidence that Sudan’s civil war — like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflicts within the Democratic Republic of Congo and between Ethiopia and Eritrea — has become dominated by drones.
Easier to procure and operate than conventional airstrikes, drones have allowed armed groups to hit their enemies across vast distances, and both Sudan’s armed forces and the paramilitary it is fighting against have shown a disregard for civilian life. Hundreds of people have been killed in drone strikes this month alone, according to witnesses, humanitarian organizations and media reports, though precise numbers are difficult to determine.
Abyei is an oil-rich province claimed both by South Sudan, a nation born in 2011 after decades of civil war, and by the Sudanese government, itself now trapped in another devastating conflict.
Since the fighting erupted in April 2023, between Sudan’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, around 14 million people — more than a quarter of the country’s population — have been forced to flee their homes. The country’s health ministry puts the civilian death toll at more than 11,000, but some estimates are as high as 400,000 killed.
In one brazen attack, the R.S.F. attacked Port Sudan over successive days in May 2025, hitting the city’s airport and a hospital. The strikes, which the paramilitary said were on military targets, demonstrated the group’s ability to project drones across hundreds of miles of open territory, a significant display of force that showed that nowhere in the country was safe.
Drones are less costly than other weapons and do not require a large expenditure of resources. They allow the combatants to put pressure on civilian areas as the war has reached an effective stalemate, according to Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London.
The United Arab Emirates has constructed an economic supply chain that enabled the R.S.F. to source drones from China, while the S.A.F. had access to both Iranian and Turkish drones, he said. The Emirates denies it backs either side in the war.
“The drones aren’t cheap,” he said, but “in Sudan, going after basic civilian infrastructure is a way of putting pressure on the civilian population and therefore ultimately on the combatants.” Despite their toll, the attacks are unlikely to alter the underlying dynamics of the war, he said.
On the ground, the war has settled into what some analysts describe as a de facto partition of the country. The R.S.F. controls Darfur in the west, while the S.A.F. holds sway over the capital, Khartoum, and the east. Parts of Kordofan, a central region that includes the city of El Obeid, are contested, as well as Blue Nile state near the border with Ethiopia.
The recent strikes show that, despite the relative stasis, the threat of the war remains undiminished to civilians across the country.
Dozens of gold workers in northern Sudan were killed earlier this month when warplanes bombed an open air mine near the Egyptian border. Last week, dozens also died in an attack on a market in the town of Nyala, an R.S.F. stronghold.
The United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, on Tuesday condemned the “relentless drone attacks across Sudan.” He cited an attack in Khartoum that killed three children and other attacks in South Darfur state and White Nile state.
“These attacks are taking a devastating toll on communities already struggling with the consequences of more than three years of conflict,” he said through his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric.