Sudan famine warning deepens after deadly Nyala market strike

A drone strike on a crowded market in Nyala killed twenty-one people and wounded more than forty others on Monday evening, according to medical sources and residents cited by the AFP news agency. The attack landed in the north of the city, the largest in Sudan's Darfur region and the seat of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. No group had claimed responsibility by Tuesday, and medics could not say how many of the dead were fighters. The strike arrived on the same day that a Sudan famine warning from thirty governments, including the United States, Britain, Canada and the European Commission, demanded that Sudan's warring parties stop blocking food aid.

Nyala matters because it sits at the center of the war's other front. The Rapid Support Forces run a rival administration from the city, challenging the military-backed government in Khartoum, and the Sudanese army strikes Nyala regularly. A resident told AFP the market was a gathering place frequented by young men, including fighters with the paramilitary force, though that account does not establish who was killed. The Sudan famine warning gives that detail a grim context: when markets become targets, food becomes harder to find. A medic at Nyala Hospital confirmed the toll the following day. The attack was not the first on a Nyala market in recent weeks: Germany's Der Spiegel, citing hospital sources, reported that about thirty people died in mid-October when a drone hit a livestock market in the same city, an incident the paramilitary force blamed on the army.

A market attack in a city under regular fire

The Nyala strike fits a pattern that has reshaped Sudan's civil war. Both the army and the Rapid Support Forces now launch long-range drone attacks deep into territory held by the other side, and markets, power stations and residential districts have been hit repeatedly. Rights monitors have documented a sharp rise in drone strikes across Darfur in recent weeks, warning that civilian neighborhoods are increasingly caught in the fighting as each side expands its use of unmanned aircraft. Humanitarian workers said insecurity in Nyala was hampering rescue efforts, and aid groups renewed calls for safe corridors to reach the wounded and resupply clinics running low on emergency medical equipment. Those calls echo the Sudan famine warning, which treats access as the decisive question.

The war began in April 2023, when a power struggle over merging the army and the paramilitary force erupted into fighting in Khartoum. Since then it has claimed tens of thousands of lives and uprooted more than thirteen million people, creating what aid agencies describe as the largest hunger and displacement emergency in the world. The fighting has destroyed infrastructure, disrupted farming and food distribution, and pushed local markets toward collapse. That is why a single market strike in Darfur carries weight beyond its casualty count: markets are where displaced families buy what little food reaches them, and each attack makes traders and truck drivers less willing to travel. The Sudan famine warning is, at bottom, a warning about these broken routes.

Power cuts spread as the famine warning mounts

Elsewhere in Sudan, the state electricity operator reported drone attacks on power facilities across four states on Monday and blamed the Rapid Support Forces, which had not responded to requests for comment. The outages affected Sennar, Al Qadarif, White Nile and Gezira, according to the operator, and Reuters reported that it could not independently verify that account. The United Nations has warned that attacks on electricity infrastructure threaten essential services, including health care, adding a further strain to a system already stretched by war. Power cuts also hit water pumping and cold storage, which matters in a country where food spoils fast and clinics depend on refrigeration for medicines. The Sudan famine warning ties these outages to the same crisis, since clinics and markets cannot function without power.

Against that backdrop, the Sudan famine warning issued by the partner governments put numbers to the crisis. An estimated 19.5 million people, about 41 per cent of the population, are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, including five million facing emergency levels of hunger. Without immediate action, the number of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition could exceed the projected 825,000, and the number of areas classed as food insecure, first assessed at fourteen, is expected to double. The Sudan famine warning, first issued on October 23 and circulated by the United States State Department on Monday, named conflict as the main driver of the hunger crisis and blamed systematic obstruction of aid, alongside drought linked to El Nino that cut rainfall across more than half the country.

What the governments are asking for

The signatories urged both sides to lift all impediments on humanitarian assistance, allow full, safe and rapid access, and protect humanitarian personnel. In practice, they called for aid operations through all crossline and cross-border routes, including air access into Darfur, which would allow rapid deployment of aid operations and timely medical evacuations of aid workers. They also urged donors to increase funding and asked development and financial institutions to adapt their programs to the emergency. The Sudan famine warning carries no enforcement mechanism, so its force depends on whether the warring parties heed it. Sudan's foreign ministry rejected the warnings on Monday, insisting that the country's food security situation was reassuring and accusing critics of exploiting the humanitarian situation for political ends.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added his own appeal to the Sudan famine warning, calling the war a war against the civilian population and urging that the fighting cease, civilians be protected, and humanitarian aid reach people without obstacles. He stressed that Sudan's future must be forged by the Sudanese people through an inclusive political process. For now, the Sudan famine warning stands as the clearest international statement yet that the window to prevent famine is closing, while the strikes in Nyala and on the power grid show how quickly that window can narrow further. Aid agencies say the test in the coming weeks is simple: whether food, fuel and medicine can move freely, or whether the war keeps choking the routes they travel on.

Sources: Joint statement on famine risk in Sudan and AFP reporting on the Nyala market strike.