KHARTOUM – In Sudan’s Kordofan, now the fiercest battleground between the army and rival paramilitaries, 53-year-old trader Hamed Hamidan always keeps one eye on the sky, looking out for the drones that punctuate daily life. 

“They never leave the city,” Hamidan told AFP by text message from South Kordofan’s Dilling, where the army in January broke a long-running siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 

“They have caused constant fear,” he said. Three years into the war between Sudan’s army and the RSF, near-daily drone strikes now kill dozens at a time, striking markets, homes and hospitals without warning. 

Both sides have increasingly relied on advanced drone warfare in their battle for territory, drawing frequent condemnation from the United Nations and pointing to the steady flow of supplies from foreign backers. 

The UN said this week drone strikes killed more than 500 civilians between January and mid-March, illustrating “the devastating impact of high-tech and relatively cheap weapons in populated areas.”In El-Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, where the RSF has attempted to reimpose a siege for months, civilians say they can now distinguish the different types of drones overhead. “Before Ramadan, the drones never left the sky,” said Othman Abdel Karim, a 46-year-old civil servant, referring to the Muslim holy month, which ended last week. 

“We can now tell them apart, the suicide drones, the strategic ones,” he told AFP. 

Both sides deploy two kinds of drones. 

The first are cheap and small, some hardly bigger than a camera, and sometimes assembled from commercially available parts, fighters mount a bomb on. They are known as “kamikaze” or suicide drones, because they explode on impact. So-called “strategic” drones are advanced and costly, with ranges of up to hundreds of kilometres and the ability to deliver heavy payloads before returning to base. 

According to Amnesty International, the RSF’s arsenal includes Chinese drones obtained via their allies, the United Arab Emirates, which denies arming the paramilitary. The army has deployed Turkish and Iranian drones. 

The omnipresent threat has wreaked havoc on society. 

“When these drones hit any site, a market, a hospital, a school, as we have seen recently, the impact goes beyond immediate casualties,” said Grace Wairima Ndungu of Mercy Corps, one of the few aid groups still operating in Kordofan. 

“Families lose access to food,” she told AFP, as traders leave for safer places, prices rise in towns already threatened by famine, and aid access becomes even more difficult. –Nampa/AFP