Armed drones operated by both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces caused more than eighty per cent of recorded civilian deaths in Sudan's civil war during the first four months of 2026, killing at least 880 people, the UN Human Rights Office said in a briefing on Thursday. Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva that drone use had now spread well beyond the Kordofan and Darfur theatres into Blue Nile, White Nile and Khartoum states.
The May 4 strike on Khartoum International Airport, which the SAF said was carried out by RSF drones, disrupted all flights from the recently re-opened airport and killed sixteen ground staff. Recent RSF drone operations in southern Kordofan, near El Obeid and Dilling, have targeted electricity substations and water-purification facilities, deepening the humanitarian crisis in cities that have been under siege-like conditions for months.
Sudan's east-west divide has solidified through the spring. The SAF, having recaptured Khartoum in March, has pushed its lines southwest into Kordofan to secure supply routes to central Sudan; the RSF, anchored in Darfur after seizing El Fasher in late 2025, has consolidated control of gold deposits and the cross-border route to Libya and Chad. The line of fighting now runs from southern Kordofan through Bahr el-Ghazal toward the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic.
Drone supply chains have become a focus of UN investigation. A panel of experts report leaked to Reuters this month attributed Iranian-origin Mohajer-6 and Shahed-136 components to SAF operations and Emirati-routed Wing Loong II and FH-95 components to RSF strikes, although Tehran and Abu Dhabi have both rejected the findings. The UN Security Council Sudan sanctions committee will meet in late June to consider new listings.
The humanitarian picture continues to deteriorate. The World Food Programme said this week that twenty-six million Sudanese now face acute food insecurity, and that fifteen localities in Kordofan and Darfur are formally classified as Phase 5 famine, the highest level. Cross-border refugee flows into Chad and South Sudan have continued at roughly twelve thousand people a week, the UN Refugee Agency reported. The Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has also begun to spill into refugee corridors.
Diplomatic activity has been muted. African Union–led mediation in Addis Ababa, which had aimed to convene a humanitarian conference for late May, has been postponed to mid-July after the SAF refused to attend any session that included direct RSF participation. Saudi Arabia and the United States, the two original sponsors of the 2023 Jeddah talks, said this week they would continue separate parallel tracks rather than attempt a relaunch.