Army Drones Hit RSF Lines Around El-Fasher as Siege Tightens

Image by Martin Foskett / Knelstrom Media

​By Martin Foskett | Newswire | Knelstrom Media

EL-FASHER, SUDAN The Sudanese army said it carried out a series of drone strikes on Rapid Support Forces (RSF) positions around El-Fasher, seeking to dislodge units pressing in on the last major Darfur city still under government control as a days‑long surge in violence pushed an already starved population further into the margins. Independent verification was not immediately available.

Residents described short, clipped bursts of engine noise overhead before concussions rolled in across the city's low concrete blocks. Army officials framed the strikes as "direct engagements" with RSF formations operating from the northern and western approaches, including areas near the former UNAMID/Joint Forces compound, which Yale researchers assess the RSF has likely seized in recent assaults. Local emergency groups reported smoke plumes rising beyond the market road and the old bus station, grey ribbons over a city that has lived under siege long enough to recognise the shapes.

The escalation follows a 19 September drone attack that hit a mosque during prayers, killing at least 70 people, according to Sudanese authorities and rescue groups. The army blames the RSF; the RSF denies deliberately targeting civilians. In El-Fasher, blame has become a kind of weather, ever‑present, bitter, and of little practical use to a family boiling leaves for dinner.

El-Fasher's slow constriction has been mapped in ditches and berms that ring the outskirts, turning roads into channels and neighbourhoods into corrals. Humanitarian officials warn of disease and hunger tightening in tandem with the lines. Only fragments of the health care function. Water creaks on and off. The city's soundscape, drones, mortars, silence—works in three keys.

Officials in Port Sudan describe the drone strikes as necessary to break RSF momentum, citing the militia's use of looted vehicles and makeshift launch sites threaded through displacement zones and abandoned workshops. They and outside analysts contend the RSF benefits from foreign materiel, claims that remain contested. Community leaders caution that any air operation in the packed northern districts risks compounding the harm. The city's displaced are now experts in triangulation—listening for the first thud, counting to the second, deciding whether to run or hold.

The government's security committee has alleged that foreign supply lines are fuelling the RSF offensive; analysts have also described external backing for both sides, though independent verification varies and remains contested. In practical terms, the drones keep flying and the trucks keep moving, and El‑Fasher absorbs the arithmetic.

Away from the front edges, the textures are small but telling: shutters wired shut with coat hangers; a child pushing a punctured football that scuffs rather than bounces; the breath‑held pause before the call to prayer in case the sky has other plans. Army spokesmen stress that today's sorties were calibrated to hit launch points and command nodes. Emergency volunteers talk instead about detours, how to lift a casualty without crossing a line of sight, how to navigate a city that punishes movement.

Analysts note the army's expanding use of unmanned systems as both a compensatory tactic and a message. The RSF's own drone capacity has grown over the months, with frontline accounts describing a constant whine at altitude, the sound of calculations made somewhere out of reach. Between them sits a city of exhausted civilians who have learned to identify models by tone: sharp mosquito for the small ones, heavier bee‑swarm for the big.

For now, the frontline remains a loop. One side pushes in, the other blasts it back. The sand shifts, the map changes by inches, and every inch carries a human cost. Tonight, El-Fasher waits on the familiar tremor, the distant thud that tells people to sleep in their doorways in case the house decides to fold.