A drone hit a market in the north of Nyala at around 8pm on Monday, killing at least 21 people and wounding 40, according to a medical source and witnesses cited by AFP and reported by Al Jazeera. A medic at Nyala Hospital gave the same toll but could not say how many of the dead were fighters rather than shoppers. One resident told AFP the market was frequented mainly by young men, in particular fighters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that controls the city.
Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, is not just an RSF-held city. Since July it has served as the seat of Tasis, the parallel administration the RSF declared to rival the army-backed government running the country from Port Sudan. That makes Nyala a target the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) returns to on a schedule: the army has struck the city repeatedly since the civil war began in April 2023, and most recently in a multi-day raid that opened on 16 October, hitting the airport, a training camp inside Nyala University and RSF armoured vehicles, according to Radio Tamazuj.
That mid-October raid is the direct predecessor to Monday’s strike. On 16 October a drone hit the Al-Mawashi livestock market in Nyala, killing at least 30 people; the RSF-aligned Tasis coalition put the wounded at 43, a medical source at 47. Tasis blamed the SAF and said the drone had launched from an Egyptian military base east of Al-Uwaynat — an accusation consistent with reporting in a separate rews story on Egyptian jets striking a Sudan gold mine. The army confirmed only that it had struck RSF command centres and fighters in Nyala; it did not address civilian deaths. Ten days on, the toll and the dispute over responsibility repeat.
A month of double digits
Monday’s 21 dead sit inside a much bigger count. On 23 October, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said drone strikes across Sudan had killed at least 306 people and injured hundreds more in the first three weeks of the month alone, according to UN News. Four incidents in that count stand out: strikes on displacement shelters in Ghubeish and El Nuhud, West Kordofan, between 6 and 10 October killed at least 25 civilians, including women and children, attributed to army-aligned forces; a 9 October strike near Abu Shendi, Blue Nile, attributed to the RSF, killed at least 31, most of them women and children; a 19 October attack on Amiet market and the Todach area in Abyei killed more than 80; and on 18 October, in Dibab, West Kordofan, a transport truck was hit twice in quick succession — a tactic known as a double-tap, aimed at killing rescuers along with the first wave of victims — for a toll of at least 139.
Türk called the escalation “deeply disturbing” and said it was “exacting a horrifying toll,” urging “both parties to the conflict, and their affiliates, to commit to a ceasefire” and warning that peace efforts “must squarely address the continued influx of arms that is fuelling the conflict.” Nearly two dozen countries were meeting in Geneva around the same statement to discuss a route to a ceasefire and a transition government, according to UN News; no agreement had been announced as of this week.
Infrastructure as a target
The Darfur strikes did not happen in isolation. On the same Monday that Nyala’s market was hit, a drone struck the Al-Markhiyat transformer substation in Omdurman, cutting power across large parts of Khartoum and Al-Jazira states, a source at Sudan’s national electricity company told Arab News. That followed a coordinated RSF strike the day before on six power stations that cut electricity to millions of people across Al-Jazira, White Nile, Sennar and Gedaref states — retaliation, by the government’s account, for the army’s campaign in Darfur. The electricity company separately accused the RSF of hitting five more substations in Sennar, Gedaref and Al-Jazira in the same stretch. The arithmetic of this exchange is straightforward even if the casualty counts are not: the army bombs the RSF’s seat of government in the west, the RSF bombs the power grid that keeps the army’s capital running in the east.
Two arsenals, two supply chains
The war has been fought mainly by drone for some time, and the hardware on each side comes from a different set of foreign suppliers. The SAF’s inventory, catalogued in an ACLED report on the war’s shifting supply lines, runs on Iranian Mohajer-6 and Ababil-3 airframes, Turkish Bayraktar systems and a Turkish-Pakistani YHIA-III line fed through what ACLED calls a Saudi-facilitated Pakistani pipeline — one that Saudi Arabia reportedly paused in April. The Mohajer-6 carries up to four Qaem precision munitions, with a 12-hour endurance and an 18,000-foot ceiling. The RSF, by ACLED’s account, has run since late 2024 on a UAE-backed network that moves Chinese hardware through Libya and Chad, progressing from basic loitering munitions to Chinese CH-95 and BZK-005 platforms with 12-hour endurance and payloads up to 850kg. ACLED also reports foreign personnel — described as Ukrainian, Spanish and Colombian operators — embedded with RSF drone units since mid-2025, and alternate RSF supply routes through Ethiopia and the Central African Republic after Chad tightened its border.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Iran | Sudanese Armed Forces | Mohajer-6, Ababil-3 |
| Turkey | Sudanese Armed Forces | Bayraktar |
| Pakistan (via Saudi-facilitated pipeline, paused April) | Sudanese Armed Forces | YHIA-III |
| China (manufactures CH-95, BZK-005) | UAE-backed network | hardware |
| UAE-backed network | Libya / Chad routes (rerouted via Ethiopia, CAR after border tightened) | |
| Libya / Chad routes (rerouted via Ethiopia, CAR after border tightened) | Rapid Support Forces | CH-95, BZK-005 |
Based on ACLED
Both sides also field cheap commercial platforms: modified DJI-type quadcopters rigged to drop 120mm mortar rounds, a far cruder but far cheaper tool than a Mohajer-6 or a CH-95, and one that puts strike capability within reach of any unit with a few thousand dollars and a workshop. ACLED’s strike counts for May, the most recent month it breaks out, put SAF strikes at roughly 70 nationwide and 17 in Nyala alone — the highest monthly figure there since the war began — against ten RSF strikes on Khartoum that month. Interception rates in that period ran to about 13% for SAF air defences against RSF drones, versus roughly 2.3% for RSF defences against SAF drones, a gap that helps explain why Khartoum’s power grid keeps getting hit.
The count behind the count
Aid workers put total deaths from the war, which began in April 2023, at more than 200,000, a figure repeated in UN statements this month. That number should be read as an estimate rather than a count: the CSIS analysis of the conflict puts the plausible range at 150,000 to 400,000, and ACLED’s own event-level tracking has logged just over 58,000 confirmed fatalities, which the project itself describes as certainly far below the true toll. Sudan’s statistical system has effectively stopped functioning in large parts of the country, which is also why the UN’s three-week, 306-death drone tally is itself a minimum: it covers only incidents OHCHR could document, not every strike that happened. More than 13 million people have been displaced, which the UN has called the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis, a scale tracked in earlier reporting on drone strikes across Khartoum and Kordofan and on the UN rights body’s earlier ceasefire demand.
The Geneva talks that coincided with Türk’s statement are the mechanism meant to stop this, and so far it has not. The next number to watch is the one OHCHR puts out when it closes its count for all of October: if the pace of the first three weeks holds, the month’s drone deaths alone will clear 400, a figure that would make October 2026 the deadliest month on record for Sudan’s aerial war, by the UN’s own method of counting.