May 4 (Reuters) – Sudan’s armed forces blamed a drone attack on Monday that targeted Khartoum airport on the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia, the latest in a barrage of assaults in recent days that has shattered months of relative calm in Sudan’s capital, three years into its civil war.
Reuters could not independently verify the claims. Neither country immediately commented on the allegations made late on Monday. Sudan has often accused the UAE of supporting Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries, a charge the Gulf state denies, and had accused Ethiopia of getting involved in the conflict earlier this year.
Strikes launched since Friday have hit military targets and civilian areas in a city where people, ministries and international agencies had started returning since the army retook control there in March 2025, residents told Reuters.
Witnesses said Monday’s drone attacks targeted Khartoum International Airport – where some of the earliest fighting erupted between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023 – and which received its first international flight in three years last week.
Army spokesman Brigadier General Asim Awad Abdelwahab said the government had evidence that attacks on several states beginning on March 1 had taken off from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport, referring to information from a drone downed in mid-March that he said linked it to the airport and to the United Arab Emirates. He said the army linked another drone launched from the same airport to the Monday attack.
“What Ethiopia and the UAE have done is direct aggression against Sudan and won’t be met with silence,” Abdelwahab said.
DRONES HAVE DOMINATED CONFLICT
Locals, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they believed the Rapid Support Forces were behind the new attacks. The RSF has not commented on them.
The Information Ministry said earlier no one was wounded and no damage caused by the attack on the airport, which would return to operations after routine safety procedures.
Drone warfare has become the main tool of the conflict which has triggered what the U.N. calls the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, killing hundreds of thousands of people through violence, hunger and disease, and forcing millions to flee.
Witnesses told Reuters drones had struck Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman as well as the cities of al-Obeid to the west and Kenana to the south over the weekend.
One killed five people in a civilian bus in southern Omdurman on Saturday, according to Emergency Lawyers, an activist group. Another on Sunday killed family members of Abu Agla Keikal, a tribal militia leader allied with the army who defected from the RSF earlier in the war.
The attacks come on the heels of another defection, by al-Nour al-Guba, a senior RSF commander who was welcomed by the army into Khartoum along with his forces late last month, causing fears of tensions within the army’s coalition.
Sudan’s war erupted after the RSF and the Sudanese army fell out over plans to integrate their forces and transition to democracy.
The RSF quickly took over Khartoum but was pushed out last year. It has since consolidated control of the Darfur region in the west, and opened a new front, also marked by repeated drone attacks, in the Blue Nile state along the border with Ethiopia.
In February, Reuters reported that Ethiopia was hosting a camp to train thousands of fighters for the RSF and had upgraded the nearby Asosa airport airport for drone operations.
(Writing by Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Lincoln Feast.)
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