Sudan's War Crosses the Border, Killing Dozens in Chad and Sudan in a Single Week

Sudan's civil war, already the world's largest displacement crisis, spread openly across an international border this week. Chad accused the Sudanese army of striking a fuel market on its own soil on Thursday, killing 12 people and wounding seven, a day before a separate drone strike hit a fuel market just across the frontier inside Sudan, killing 13 people, including three Chadian nationals. The two strikes came eight days after Chadian officials said Sudanese aircraft and drones pursued a paramilitary convoy more than 100 kilometers into Chadian territory. Sudan's government has denied responsibility for the strikes on Chadian soil, but has not denied conducting the strike on its own side of the border.

The result is a week that diplomats and aid officials describe as the clearest sign yet that a war which began as an internal power struggle between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces is now bleeding into neighboring states.

A week of strikes along a porous frontier

The pattern began on August 20, when Chad's military said Sudanese army aircraft and drones tracked a Rapid Support Forces convoy that had crossed into Chad's remote Ennedi-Est province and bombed it more than 100 kilometers inside Chadian territory. Chad reported no casualties from that strike but raised its military alert level and moved reinforcements toward the border.

A week later, on Thursday, a Chadian security source said a strike hit a fuel market near the border used by Rapid Support Forces vehicles to refuel, killing 12 people and wounding seven. Chad's army pushed roughly 100 armored vehicles and signal-jamming trucks toward the eastern town of Tine, and a security official said the country's alert level had been raised to its maximum, with troops "reinforcing the position with equipment adapted to the new threat" posed by drones.

Then, on Friday, a drone strike hit a second fuel market, this one in Adikonq, just inside Sudan's West Darfur state near the Adré border crossing. Local sources said a Sudanese army drone fired a missile into the market, killing 13 people, including three Chadian nationals whose bodies were later carried across the border to the Chadian town of Adré, and setting fire to parked vehicles. It was the second time in five months that the same market had been hit; a strike in March killed at least seven people there. Sudan's military has framed such strikes as an effort to cut off fuel supplies reaching the Rapid Support Forces through markets along the Chadian frontier.

The toll

Taken together, the two market strikes this week killed at least 25 people and wounded dozens more. Chad's army reported no fatalities from the earlier Ennedi convoy strike. Those figures sit atop a much larger toll from more than three years of war: Sudan's army and the Rapid Support Forces have fought each other since April 2023 in a conflict that has killed more than 11,000 civilians in documented attacks and driven over 15 million people from their homes, according to figures compiled by wire services from monitoring groups.

Chad, a country of roughly 18 million people, is now sheltering more than 1.5 million forcibly displaced people, the overwhelming majority of them refugees who fled Sudan, according to operational data published by the UN refugee agency. Regional totals compiled through the agency's broader tracking of the Sudan displacement situation show hundreds of thousands more Sudanese have crossed into Egypt, South Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia and Uganda since the war began. Most of the refugees in Chad live in camps and transit sites strung along the same eastern border provinces, Ouaddaï, Wadi Fira, Sila and Ennedi, where this week's strikes took place, meaning displaced families already reliant on aid are now also within reach of the fighting they fled.

How the war reached the frontier

Sudan's war began in April 2023 as a power struggle inside the capital, Khartoum, between the army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. The two men had jointly seized power in a 2021 coup before turning on each other. The fighting quickly spread to Darfur, in Sudan's west, where the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias have been accused by rights groups and Western governments of ethnically targeted killings against non-Arab communities, and it has since displaced people across nearly every region of the country.

The Chad-Sudan border has functioned for two years as an unofficial supply route in the war. UN experts investigating the conflict have said weapons destined for the Rapid Support Forces have moved through Chad, an allegation that both the Chadian and Emirati governments deny. Fuel markets on both sides of the frontier, including the one at Adikonq, have become resupply points for Rapid Support Forces vehicles, which is why Sudan's air force has targeted them repeatedly over the past year even when the strikes land on Chadian soil or kill Chadian citizens.

The border tension is not isolated. Sudan's army said this week it shot down a drone that crossed into its territory from Ethiopia over Blue Nile state, the third such interception in a matter of days, and accused Addis Ababa of tolerating cross-border incursions. Ethiopia has denied the allegation. Taken with the strikes into Chad, the incidents point to a conflict that is increasingly testing the borders of three of Sudan's neighbors at once, even as none of the countries involved has formally acknowledged a state of hostilities with another.

Diplomatic fallout, and what happens next

Sudan's foreign ministry rejected Chad's accusation over the Thursday strike, saying it was too early to assign blame.

Sudan's armed forces "are carrying out their constitutional duty to protect Sudan's sovereignty, security and safety and to face any threats it faces, while respecting the sovereignty of its neighbours and without targeting their territory."

The African Union Commission issued a statement this week saying its chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, was following the border strikes "with concern" and calling on all parties to exercise restraint and take steps to keep Sudan's war from spreading beyond its own borders. Washington went further. Massad Boulos, the senior US adviser on African affairs, telephoned Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby and said afterward that the two men "discussed the recent SAF aerial strike on Chad and underscored our deep concern about the war in Sudan spilling across its borders, fuelling further escalation and threatening regional peace and stability," according to an account of the call. The US embassy in Khartoum separately condemned the strikes and attributed them to the Sudanese military.

The episode has also reshaped debate at the United Nations Security Council, where the United States has circulated a draft resolution that would extend the arms embargo currently limited to Sudan's Darfur region to cover the entire country, and would explicitly bar the transfer of drones and drone components to either side in the war. Council members were still weighing the proposal at week's end, and no vote had been scheduled.

On the ground, there is little sign of de-escalation. Chad's forces remain at their highest alert level along the eastern border, reinforced with armor and equipment intended to counter further drone incursions. Sudan's military has given no indication it will halt strikes on fuel markets it says supply the Rapid Support Forces, even those on Chadian territory. Aid officials say the fighting has already disrupted cross-border trade that border communities on both sides depend on for fuel, food and other basic goods, and that further strikes would deepen a humanitarian emergency in a region already hosting one of the world's largest refugee populations.