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 tactics

The 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, with 4.5 million fleeing the country.

In the meantime, the SAF and the RSF have continued to vie for control of different parts of the country, mostly through ground invasions and fighting – and often at the cost of civilians. The massacre in el-Fasher in the west of the country last year – described by Amnesty International as “ethnic cleansing” – propelled the crisis to international headlines. RSF fighters murdered tens of thousands of inhabitants of the city after holding it under siege for 18 months and then capturing it – at the time the last SAF stronghold in the Darfur region.

Now, the intensified reliance on drones by both sides reflects a deliberate shift towards long-range, preemptive operations. For the SAF, drones offer a crucial tool to navigate complex geography and neutralise RSF advantages.

Military expert Abu Bakr Abdel Rahim said the army’s main motive for escalating drone strikes deep inside the Darfur and Kordofan regions is “targeting command and control centres, fuel and ammunition depots, and main supply routes, especially those linked to the borders with Libya, Chad and South Sudan”.

Geography plays a pivotal role in this strategy. “The Darfur region is vast, separated from the army’s current concentration areas in Kordofan by desert distances and long, militarily exposed roads, making ground advance highly complex without massive engineering, aerial, and logistical cover,” Abdel Rahim explained.

Through these targeted strikes, Abdel Rahim noted, army leadership seeks to weaken the RSF’s “ability to assemble its forces and launch counterattacks, or reclaim the strategic areas it lost”. Furthermore, by striking cities like Nyala, the army aims to “strike their morale, make them feel insecure even in their rear control areas, and disrupt any efforts to establish parallel administrative entities”.

Competing battlefield narratives

Military officials say there are specific tactical goals behind the recent escalation. Mohamed Didan, spokesperson for the SAF’s Special Action Forces in Kordofan, stated in a Facebook post that the army launched “75 air strikes targeting fixed and moving targets, along with infantry forces, vehicles, commanders and individuals from the Rapid Support Forces” across Kordofan, West Darfur and South Darfur.

Didan directly linked the RSF’s recent drone attacks on Khartoum to their battlefield losses, attributing the escalation to “the killing of about 80 mobilised personnel for the forces in strikes that targeted them in the Al-Dabbab area in West Kordofan”.

He added that the RSF is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, “as happened at Khartoum airport, fuel stations in Damazin, and the electrical transformer station in Tendelti city in North Kordofan state last Tuesday, which led to the blackout of cities in the state and the neighbouring North Kordofan state”.

In response, the RSF issued a statement on Monday accusing the military of using drones to carry out “massacres in the livestock market in Nyala and al-Na’am market in Abyei, and at a truck station in the al-Dabbab area in West Kordofan“.

A Sudanese government official, speaking to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, said the military’s use of drones is strictly tactical. “The army does not target civilians, but it considers all military and logistical sites and supply lines of the Rapid Support Forces as legitimate targets,” the official stated.

Mounting civilian death toll

Civilians are paying the highest price for all this. The deadliest recent attack occurred near a market in al-Dabba town in West Kordofan, where a drone struck a transport hub, killing 80 people.

Early on Monday, an army drone attack hit the RSF stronghold of Nyala, killing 17 people, while a strike by the paramilitary group on a gathering of displaced people in the Blue Nile province killed 41 individuals.

The United Nations has condemned the strikes. “We are alarmed by the continued deadly drone strikes across the country that are killing civilians, including children, and that are disrupting central services,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, told reporters.

An investigative report by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) revealed that 21 different drone models have been used since the war erupted.

A diverse international supply chain is behind their procurement of these weapons, which have been found to originate mainly from six countries: Belarus, Iran, China, Russia, Sudan and Turkiye.

According to the CIR investigation, the RSF has deployed 10 different types of drones, while the SAF has used five different models. The overall result is a terrifying and rapidly mechanising conflict where the skies offer no sanctuary to the civilians below.