Drone Strikes Hit Fuel Depot in Central Sudan as Army Chief Rejects US-Brokered Truce

A Rapid Support Forces drone strike set a fuel depot ablaze in central Sudan before dawn on Sunday, and explosions shook a paramilitary stronghold in Darfur hours later, as the country's army chief publicly rejected American pressure to accept a truce in a civil war now in its fourth year.

The attacks came as General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan's de facto leader, remained shut out of this year's United Nations General Assembly after Washington withheld his entry visa, tying it to acceptance of a 90-day humanitarian truce. Burhan has refused, and the fighting that has displaced millions of people ground on regardless.

A Depot in Flames

Drones operated by the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, struck the Um Aleila fuel depot near Abu Haraz, about 20 kilometers northeast of Wad Madani, shortly after dawn prayers on Sunday, according to local reporting from the area. A resident, Awad Ahmed, said a powerful explosion shook the area before flames and thick black smoke rose over the storage tanks. Civil defense crews said they contained the blaze to the petrol and diesel tanks and kept it from spreading across the wider facility.

Wad Madani is the capital of Al Jazirah state and was recaptured by the Sudanese army from the RSF last year after the paramilitary group had occupied and looted the same depot during its 2023 takeover of the city. Sunday's strike was the first reported attack on the Wad Madani area since the army retook it, and it came alongside separate explosions reported in Nyala, the RSF's main stronghold in South Darfur, where residents said they heard an aircraft overhead before two blasts went off. Both sides also reported drone interceptions elsewhere in the country, though accounts of the wider strikes could not immediately be independently confirmed, and no casualty figures had been released.

A War Now in Its Fourth Year

The violence is the latest flashpoint in a conflict that began in April 2023, when simmering tension between Burhan's army and the RSF, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into open war for control of the state. The army has since recaptured the capital, Khartoum, and Wad Madani, while the RSF controls most of Darfur and has besieged the city of El Obeid in North Kordofan.

The toll has made Sudan, in the UN's own description, the world's largest displacement and hunger crisis. According to the UN humanitarian affairs office, more than 9 million people remain displaced inside Sudan's borders, with millions more having fled abroad. A separate UN accounting found that an estimated 33.7 million people — roughly two-thirds of the population — were expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2026, with 21 million facing acute food insecurity and more than 20 million requiring emergency health assistance. Aid delivery has been repeatedly disrupted by attacks on relief convoys; the U.S. mission to the UN noted this month that more than 50 metric tons of World Food Programme supplies were destroyed in an aerial attack on clearly marked trucks in South Kordofan.

Washington's Leverage, Khartoum's Defiance

The renewed strikes landed just as a dispute over Burhan's UN travel spilled into public view. Diplomatic sources told wire services that the United States had conditioned Burhan's entry visa on his acceptance of a 90-day humanitarian truce proposed by Massad Boulos, the White House's senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, forcing the general to miss his own address to the General Assembly's high-level week. Sudanese activists called the move "political pressure," and the country's UN ambassador asked Secretary-General António Guterres to intervene, while a UN spokesman said Guterres was "deeply concerned" by the episode.

Burhan has not backed down. "We will not backtrack on what we said: we do not want a visa to any country, nor do we want their permission," he said over the weekend, arguing that an unconditional truce would simply let the RSF regroup for further attacks. Boulos, speaking days later, said Washington still had "a number of tools" to pressure both sides, including sanctions, visa denials and a push to widen the decades-old arms embargo on Darfur to cover all of Sudan — a change he said was overdue given how drone warfare has transformed the conflict since the embargo was first written two decades ago.

That argument echoed remarks delivered at the Security Council earlier this month by Ambassador Jeffrey Bartos, the U.S. representative for UN management and reform, when the Council extended Sudan's sanctions regime for only a short, technical period rather than a full year.

"The current sanctions regime is over twenty years outdated and is insufficient to address the realities of the war today," Bartos told the Council in his explanation of the council's vote, calling for the arms embargo to be expanded across all of Sudan's territory.

Who Bears the Cost

For residents of Al Jazirah state, the immediate concern is fuel. The Um Aleila depot is a primary storage and distribution point for petrol and diesel supplying Wad Madani and surrounding farming communities, and any prolonged damage threatens to deepen shortages in a region the army had held up as a symbol of recovery after recapturing it from the RSF. In Darfur and Kordofan, the population caught between the two armies continues to face the war's more severe consequences: families living in famine-affected displacement camps, aid convoys attacked en route, and health facilities that the UN says are more than a third out of service nationwide.

What Happens Next

The Security Council's rollover of sanctions buys negotiators only until October 9 to agree on a longer-term framework, and diplomats remain divided over whether to widen the arms embargo, as Washington wants, or preserve the narrower, decades-old measure. Boulos has said he still hopes to steer both the army and the RSF toward a civilian-led political process backed by the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the Arab League, the European Union and the UN. But with Burhan publicly spurning the visa ultimatum and fresh strikes hitting both an army-held state capital and an RSF stronghold within hours of each other, there is little sign either side is ready to accept a pause in the fighting, let alone the broader political transition the truce was designed to open the door to.