Strikes with huge death tolls are an increasing occurrence as UAVs ‘bring the war to places that were once safe’
The first drone struck the busy transport hub near a market in Al-Dibab as hundreds of people gathered to board trucks to take them back to their homes.
Ten minutes later on the evening of 18 October, a second drone hit the same site in the town in West Kordofan state, Sudan. At least 139 people were killed.
Eight days after the “double-tap” attack – designed to maximise casualties by killing and injuring emergency responders, volunteers and bystanders on top of the original victims – a drone hit a busy market in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.
Emergency Lawyers, a rights group tracking violence in Sudan, put the death toll from that attack at 103. “I lost my 19-year-old son,” a Nyala resident told Agence France-Presse. “We buried him alongside more than 70 bodies in a single site.”
These are just two of a relentless series of mass casualty drone strikes in recent months in Sudan, where the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has risen sharply, becoming the leading cause of civilian deaths by far in the country’s civil war.
