A drone attack carried out by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed 41 civilians in the Blue Nile region near the Ethiopian border, the rights‑monitoring group Emergency Lawyers reported.
The strike targeted a camp for displaced people in Abu Shandi, a remote area of Blue Nile state. Initial accounts from local witnesses and humanitarian workers suggest the majority of the victims were women and children.
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) condemned the attack, calling the reports “horrifying” and asserting that the region has been under sustained assault for weeks, “displacing thousands of civilians and exposing many more to grave harm.”
The incident occurs amid a bitter power struggle that has erupted between the Sudanese army and the RSF since 2023, a conflict that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 14 million people from their homes.
While the army largely controls central and eastern Sudan, the RSF, headquartered in Darfur, commands swaths of western and southern territories. Both forces have reportedly employed unmanned aircraft in recent weeks, a trend that has escalated the already dire humanitarian crisis.
Humanitarian agencies warn that the country now stands as one of the world’s worst crises, with millions in need of medical care, food, and shelter. The international community watches as the RSF’s aerial operations threaten to widen the toll on innocent civilians.
