How Sudan’s shift to drone warfare is fuelling a civilian crisis

In the Imtidad Nasser neighbourhood east of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, residents are grappling with a terrifying new reality of skies filled with drones.“We heard the buzz of drones in the sky, but did not pay attention to it at first,” Ahmed Abdel Hamid, a resident of the area, told Al Jazeera about a recent drone attack by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).Then, anti-aircraft fire and two huge explosions shook the area, killing three children from a family in the community.A devastating wave of drone attacks across Sudan has killed more than 160 people in recent days, marking a lethal evolution in the conflict between competing military forces which began in April 2023.A rise in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary RSF has pushed the war deep into residential neighbourhoods, driven by shifting battlefield motives and a mutual desire to exhaust the opponent.Shifting military tacticsThe use of drones is a relatively new development in the brutal civil war, which is now in its fourth year and has killed at least 59,000 people, according to conflict monitor ACLED. Some 14 million people have been displaced from their homes, wi...