PORT SUDAN: A drone attack on a busy market in Sudan’s North Darfur state killed 10 people over the weekend, first responders said on Sunday, without saying who was responsible.

The attack comes as fighting intensified elsewhere in the country, leading aid workers to be evacuated on Sunday from Kadugli, a besieged, famine-hit city in the south.

Since April 2023, Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been locked in a conflict which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced nearly 12 million and created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis.

The North Darfur Emergency Rooms Council, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating aid across Sudan, said a drone strike hit Al-Harra market in the RSF-controlled town of Malha on Saturday. The attack killed 10 people, it said.

The council did not identify who carried out the attack, which it said had also sparked “fire in shops and caused extensive material damage”.

There was no immediate comment from either the Sudanese army or the RSF.

The war’s current focal point is now South Kordofan and clashes have escalated in Kadugli, the state capital, where a drone attack last week killed eight people as they attempted to flee the army-controlled city.

A source from a humanitarian organisation operating in Kadugli said on Sunday that humanitarian groups had “evacuated all their workers” from the city because of the security conditions.

The evacuation followed the United Nations’ decision to relocate its logistics hub from Kadugli, the source said on condition of anonymity, without specifying where the staff had gone.

Kadugli and nearby Dilling have been besieged by paramilitary forces since the war erupted. Last week, the RSF claimed control of the Brno area, a key defensive line on the road between Kadugli and Dilling.

After dislodging the army in October from the western city of El-Fasher — its last stronghold in the Darfur region — the RSF has shifted its focus to resource-rich Kordofan.

Like Darfur, Kordofan is home to numerous non-Sudanese Arab ethnic groups. Much of the violence that followed the fall of El-Fasher was reportedly ethnically targeted.

Communications in Kordofan have been cut, and the United Nations declared a famine in Kadugli last month.

According to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, more than 50,000 civilians have fled the region since the end of October. Residents have been forced to forage for food in nearby forests.

The conflict has effectively split Sudan in two, with the army controlling the north, east and centre while the RSF dominates all five state capitals in Darfur and, with its allies, parts of the south.

Doctors without Borders (MSF) said on Sunday that measles was spreading in three of the four states in Darfur, a vast region covering much of western Sudan.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2025