May 4 (Reuters) – Drones attacked Khartoum airport on Monday, part of a sudden barrage of assaults in the last few days that has shattered months of relative calm in Sudan’s capital three years into its civil war, witnesses said.
Strikes launched since Friday have hit military targets and civilian areas in a city where people, ministries and international agencies had started returning since the army retook control there in March 2025, residents told Reuters.
Khartoum International Airport – where some of the earliest fighting erupted between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023 – received its first international flight in three years last week.
DRONES HAVE DOMINATED CONFLICT
Locals, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they believed the Rapid Support Forces were behind the new attacks. Neither the RSF nor the army has commented on them.
The Information Ministry said no one was wounded and no damage caused by the attack on the airport, which would return to operations after routine safety procedures.
Drone warfare has become the main tool of the conflict which has triggered what the U.N. calls the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, killing hundreds of thousands of people through violence, hunger and disease, and forcing millions to flee.
Witnesses told Reuters drones had struck Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman as well as the cities of al-Obeid to the west and Kenana to the south.
One killed five people in a civilian bus in southern Omdurman on Saturday, according to Emergency Lawyers, an activist group. Another on Sunday killed family members of Abu Agla Keikal, a tribal militia leader allied with the army who defected from the RSF earlier in the war.
The attacks come on the heels of another defection, by al-Nour al-Guba, a senior RSF commander who was welcomed by the army into Khartoum along with his forces late last month, causing fears of tensions within the army’s coalition.Â
Sudan’s war erupted after the RSF and the Sudanese army fell out over plans to integrate their forces and transition to democracy.
The RSF quickly took over Khartoum but was pushed out last year. It has since consolidated control of the Darfur region in the west, and opened a new front, also marked by repeated drone attacks, in the Blue Nile state along the border with Ethiopia.
(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
