Eighty per cent. That is the share of civilian deaths in Sudan’s war that armed drones now account for in the first four months of 2026 — at least 880 people, according to figures cited by the UN’s human rights office in May. In two years of brutal conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), no single weapons system has reshaped the battlefield, or the civilian death toll, as quickly or as decisively.
The drone is the most important political fact in Sudan today. It has changed who fights, where they fight, and what the fight looks like for ordinary people. It has also internationalised the conflict in a way that ground combat never did, because the drones themselves arrive in shipping crates from the Gulf, Iran, Turkey and increasingly from Chinese and Russian export channels — making Sudan, in effect, a live arms-trade laboratory for a class of weapon African militaries have, until now, mostly only studied from a distance.
The conflict began in April 2023 as a power struggle between SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. By early 2026, after the SAF retook central Khartoum, the war fragmented geographically. The RSF holds most of Darfur. The SAF holds the centre and east. Kordofan — the strategic land bridge between them — is now the active front. South Kordofan in particular, around El Obeid and Dilling, has been under siege-like conditions for months, and it is there that the heaviest drone strikes have landed.
In late May, the SAF intensified drone attacks on RSF positions in Nyala, the largest city under RSF control in Darfur. Earlier this month, RSF drones hit South Kordofan in an attack that killed dozens. Both sides now treat aerial bombardment of urban civilian targets as a basic instrument of war. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights has described drones as the single largest cause of non-combatant deaths in the country — an extraordinary milestone in a conflict that until recently was defined by close-quarters infantry battles and shelling.
Two structural features make this trajectory difficult to reverse. The first is supply. RSF drones are largely traced to Emirati and other Gulf channels; SAF drones to Iranian and Turkish sources. Both pipelines have proved resistant to international pressure because the geopolitical alliances behind them — Abu Dhabi’s bet on RSF as a counterweight to Islamist-aligned SAF networks, and Tehran’s bet on SAF as a foothold near the Red Sea — are themselves load-bearing parts of broader regional strategies. Cutting off the drones means asking patrons to abandon proxies. So far, they have not.
The second is asymmetry. Drones flatten the cost curve of inflicting damage. A single fixed-wing loitering munition costs a fraction of an artillery barrage and removes the political risk of pilot losses. For an armed group like the RSF, with no air force and a contested supply chain, drones offer the ability to project force at strategic depth without committing infantry. For the SAF, drones substitute for the manned air-power advantage it has progressively lost as RSF air defences improved. Both sides, in other words, now have institutional incentives to escalate aerial bombardment rather than dial it back.
The humanitarian arithmetic is grim. Much of the country, including Kordofan, faces an increased risk of famine and acute food insecurity. The 2026 Blue Nile campaign — in which the SPLM-N captured Keren Keren and Dukan south of Kurmuk in early May — has opened a new front that further fragments humanitarian access. Fertiliser shortages tied to the wider Gulf crisis are projected to depress the coming harvest. UN agencies are warning of a famine season this year worse than 2024’s, with the difference that civilians are now also being killed from the air at a scale Sudan has never before experienced.
For Kenya and the East African Community, the implications are direct. Sudan’s collapse is no longer a Horn-of-Africa problem confined to migration and remittance shocks. Drone proliferation in Sudan creates a regional precedent. The same suppliers, the same shell companies, and the same technology will reach other African conflict theatres — South Sudan, eastern DRC, the Sahel — faster than any continental arms-control framework can respond to. Africa’s response to drone warfare has so far been largely defensive: airspace closures, jamming, importing counter-UAV systems. None of that addresses the underlying supply chain.
The AU’s Peace and Security Council has not treated drone proliferation as a stand-alone agenda item. IGAD’s mediation track on Sudan has been functionally dormant for months. The Jeddah process has produced ceasefires that did not last. Each round of failure has been followed by another delivery of drones.
What to watch is whether the SAF’s intensified Nyala campaign produces a strategic shift in Darfur, or simply more dead civilians. Watch, too, whether the AU finally elevates drone proliferation to a continental policy file — and whether any African government, Kenya’s included, names the connection between Gulf-supplied drones in Sudan and the regional security architecture Nairobi has hesitated to challenge publicly. The longer the silence, the more Sudan’s war will write the doctrine for everyone else’s.
