Amiet market drone strike exposes Sudan war's regional reach

The Amiet market drone strike killed more than 150 people this week in a town that sits in one of Africa's strangest gray zones. Amiet is in Abyei, a patch of land contested by both Sudan and South Sudan, and the strike flattened shops and stalls in a crowded market. Reuters reports the attack was believed to be targeting a fuel depot used by Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, though the people who died were overwhelmingly civilians going about their day.

Awad Usham Al-Amin had fled Sudan's war and was scraping together a living in Amiet, offloading fuel deliveries and pushing a wheelbarrow through the market. He told Reuters he ran from one conflict as a refugee only to find another waiting where he landed, speaking with shrapnel wounds to his right hand and left leg. His account captures the Amiet market drone strike's harsh pattern: a war that keeps following people across borders, into the places they thought were safe.

A fuel network that crosses borders

Five diplomats and analysts following the conflict told Reuters the Amiet market was an established link in a fuel network serving the RSF's fight across Sudan. Large volumes of fuel imported into South Sudan are transported through Abyei, collected by RSF networks, then moved onward through Sudan in smaller shipments, the sources said. One diplomat said the Amiet market drone strike clearly targeted fuel storage facilities as well as a truck suspected of carrying fuel, while adding that RSF fighters remain present in Abyei, embedded in the community in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish from civilians.

Officials in South Sudan have facilitated the import and transit of fuel to RSF networks, according to the diplomats and experts Reuters spoke with. A spokesperson for the foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The picture that emerges is a war sustained by supply lines that stretch well beyond Sudan's borders, drawing neighboring territory into a conflict that involves proxy powers from across the Horn of Africa and the wider region. Related coverage has followed the same supply lines and their civilian toll, including a deadly strike on WFP aid trucks in Sudan's south, a drone attack on a displacement site in Blue Nile, and the UN's warning that foreign powers are fueling Sudan's war.

Drone strikes on markets are becoming a pattern

The Amiet market drone strike fits a pattern the International Committee of the Red Cross described in a statement this week that aerial attacks across Sudan in recent weeks have caused a worrying increase in civilian harm, with most of the attacks likely carried out by armed drones. Residential areas, markets, and areas sheltering displaced populations have been hit hardest, with hundreds of people reportedly killed. "The use of drones does not change the rules of war," said Lorenzo Caraffi, the ICRC's head of delegation in Sudan. "Technology does not absolve those who use it of their obligations under international humanitarian law."

ICRC-supported hospitals recorded more than 2,700 weapon-wounded patients in the first half of the year, before the Amiet market drone strike. The organization is sending essential medical supplies and specialist surgical teams to hospitals absorbing the influx of the war-wounded. It urges all sides to weigh the foreseeable humanitarian consequences of using armed drones in populated areas, warning that the attacks risk aggravating what is already the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

A war that keeps spilling outward

The United Nations says nearly one hundred thousand people have fled from El Fasher to neighboring Chad since the city fell one year ago, and almost one million have crossed into Chad seeking safety since the conflict began in April 2023. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the organization is alarmed by continued deadly drone strikes like the Amiet market drone strike, which are killing civilians, including children, and disrupting central services. Humanitarian agencies are preparing to scale up life-saving assistance in Darfur and Kordofan, but severe funding shortfalls continue to hamper the response.

Abyei has its own long-running territorial dispute between Sudan and South Sudan, and a strike of this scale risks turning the territory into a new theatre of the wider conflict. The war is now into its fourth year, aid agencies say the response is badly underfunded, and the Amiet market drone strike shows how the fighting reaches places that were supposed to be shelter. What happens in Abyei next will say a lot about whether Sudan's war stays inside its borders or keeps pulling the region in with it.