Drone Strike on Darfur Market Kills More Than 100, Rights Group Says, as Death Toll Splinters

A drone strike on a crowded market in Nyala, the de facto capital of Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in South Darfur, killed more than 100 people on the evening of Monday, October 26, according to the Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers, though other accounts reported by Al Jazeera put the toll far lower, and no figure has been independently confirmed.

The strike hit a market in central Nyala that had drawn hundreds of RSF fighters that evening, along with civilians who sell tea, food and cigarettes there, according to two witnesses who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation. One, a cigarette vendor, said a drone struck around 8 p.m. local time and killed dozens of fighters as well as women selling food nearby. A second witness described a massive explosion that killed many fighters and roughly 14 civilians, and said Nyala residents often work near where fighters gather because unemployment in the city is so high.

Emergency Lawyers said more than 100 people were killed and 113 wounded, most of them women and children, and attributed the strike to the Sudanese military. The Sudan Doctors Network, a volunteer medical group, gave a markedly lower and delayed count, saying on Wednesday that it had documented at least 21 dead and more than 40 wounded, and that the toll likely came from shelling. It said its statement was held up by "difficulties in verifying the information" inside Nyala. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said a hospital it supports in the city received 36 bodies in the hours after the strike, 21 of them in civilian clothing, and treated roughly 150 wounded in its emergency room. MSF said a second strike hit a nearby civilian neighborhood.

No figure has been reconciled, and the Associated Press said it could not independently verify any of them. Adding to the confusion, Mohamed Didan, spokesperson for the Special Operations Forces, a militia fighting alongside the Sudanese army, said in a separate statement that a "precise and targeted" strike that day on the Dumaya camp west of Nyala killed more than 150 "militia recruits." It was not clear whether he was describing the same attack as the market strike or a distinct one, and the Sudanese army issued no statement specifically addressing the market strike itself.

A war now fought largely by drone

Sudan's civil war, between the army and the RSF, enters its fourth year with much of the fighting carried out by armed drones rather than ground offensives. Nyala, seized by the RSF early in the war, has become one of the paramilitary group's main strongholds in Darfur and a frequent target of strikes the RSF and its allies attribute to the Sudanese military and, at times, to Egypt.

The United Nations has documented the trend for more than a year. In a statement issued in Geneva in March, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said more than 500 civilians had been killed in drone strikes across Sudan between January 1 and March 15, with a single strike on a hospital in East Darfur killing at least 64 people. By early summer the pattern had shifted toward Kordofan: High Commissioner Volker Türk told the Human Rights Council that his office had documented 15 drone strikes on the besieged city of El Obeid in a single three-week period in June, killing at least 45 civilians, and cautioned that "the actual number of civilian casualties is likely higher." Markets have been struck repeatedly across the country, from West Darfur to Kordofan to the disputed Abyei region, in attacks the army and the RSF routinely blame on each other.

"Civilians are the ones paying the highest price."

Mubarak Bekheit, an aid worker in Darfur, used that phrase to describe the aftermath of the Nyala strike, telling the Associated Press that many people remained missing and that some bodies had still not been recovered from homes near the market days later. Dale Koninckx, an MSF project coordinator in Nyala, put the question more bluntly: "Why are markets being targeted?" He said people in the city have little choice but to gather in places like markets to find food.

Nyala's place in the war

Nyala fell to the RSF early in the war and has since functioned as the paramilitary group's administrative hub in Darfur, home to an RSF-aligned parallel civilian authority and to much of the force's regional command structure. That status has made it a recurring target: Sudan's army and allied forces have struck sites in and around the city repeatedly in recent months, usually describing the targets as RSF bases, command posts or gatherings of fighters, while the RSF and its allies have accused the army, and at times Egypt, of orchestrating strikes that also kill civilians. The pattern recurred almost exactly a week before Monday's strike, when a drone attack on Nyala's livestock market killed roughly 30 people on October 16, according to a medical source at a city hospital; that toll, too, was never resolved between the competing accounts of the army and the RSF.

The war between the army and the RSF, which began in April 2023, is estimated by humanitarian organizations including the International Rescue Committee to have killed well over 100,000 people, though no reliable nationwide count exists because of the difficulty of verifying deaths in active conflict zones. The UN Security Council has in recent months pressed both sides over the continued flow of weapons, including drones supplied by outside states, into the conflict, and UN officials have floated the idea of a mutual halt to drone strikes as a narrow, achievable step toward protecting civilians even as a broader ceasefire remains elusive.

A city already short of food

The strike lands on a city where hunger is already acute. The share of children in Nyala seeking treatment for severe acute malnutrition more than doubled between January and August this year, rising from 5 percent to 11 percent, according to UN estimates. Parts of Sudan have been formally classified as experiencing famine, and humanitarian agencies describe the overall war, now in its fourth year, as having produced the world's largest displacement crisis, with aid groups and the UN estimating well over 12 million people forced from their homes.

The strike happened on the same day that Luke Lindberg took office as the new head of the UN World Food Programme, October 26. In his first statement, Lindberg said "conflict is driving people into hunger," pointing to roughly 266 million people facing acute hunger worldwide even as the agency, working in 83 countries, says funding shortfalls limit how many it can reach. Sudan is among the countries most often cited by UN officials as an example of that dynamic: fighting that displaces farmers, closes markets and cuts off aid convoys, deepening a hunger crisis that outlasts any single battle.

What happens next

No independent investigation of the Nyala market strike has been announced, and in a conflict where humanitarian access is severely restricted and both sides have histories of disputing casualty figures, final numbers may never be firmly established. Emergency Lawyers and the Sudan Doctors Network, the two Sudanese groups most often cited by international media for casualty figures in this war, have both said in the past that verification is hampered by damaged communications networks, fear of retaliation among witnesses, and restrictions on movement in RSF-held areas.

Aid organizations including MSF have repeatedly called on both the Sudanese army and the RSF to stop targeting markets and other civilian gathering points, and UN officials have in past months urged the Security Council to consider a mutual ban on drone strikes against civilian areas. Neither side has agreed to such a measure, and strikes attributed to both the army and the RSF have continued through October in Darfur, Kordofan and the Abyei border region. Humanitarian workers in Nyala say they expect the final civilian toll from Monday's strike, like those from earlier attacks on the city's markets this year, to remain contested for weeks.