KHARTOUM: Sudanese paramilitaries have carried out a rare drone attack in the army-controlled east, targeting Kassala airport near the border with Eritrea, a source from the army-backed government said on Saturday.
The paramilitaries have expanded the scope and frequency of their aerial attacks on army-held areas in recent weeks, after losing control of swathes of territory to the regular army.
“A drone targeted the fuel storage area at Kassala airport,” the army-aligned source told AFP, blaming the strike on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and reporting no casualties or damage.
Since April 2023, the regular army, headed by Sudan’s de facto leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, has been battling the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, in a brutal war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 13 million.
The conflict has left Africa’s third largest country effectively divided.
The regular army controls the center, east and north, while the RSF holds sway in nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur and parts of the south.
Kassala hosts around 318,000 civilians displaced by the conflict, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The city is some 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the nearest RSF-held territory, south of the capital Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman.
It lies about the same distance from territory controlled by an RSF-allied rebel group, the faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) led by Abdelaziz Al-Hilu.
The Kassala strike was just one of a wave of RSF drone attacks on strategic facilities held by the army in recent weeks.
A strike on power infrastructure in the northeastern city of Atbara plunged much of the country into darkness.
The paramilitaries have boasted a number of territorial gains in recent days after their loss of nearly all of greater Khartoum in March.
On Thursday, the RSF said it had taken the desert town of El-Nuhud in West Kordofan state, a key staging post on the army’s supply route to Darfur where its besieged garrison in the city of El-Fasher has been under attack for weeks.
Sudanese monitoring group Emergency Lawyers has said the paramilitaries made dozens of arrests in El-Nuhud and summarily executed more than 27 alleged army collaborators.
On Friday, the RSF said it had captured the town of El-Khoei, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of El-Nuhud.
Witnesses reported seeing regular army troops withdrawing toward the North Kordofan state capital El Obeid.
An army source said that a cargo plane was hit on Saturday as it landed in South Darfur state capital Nyala to resupply its RSF garrison.
The source did not specify who targeted the aircraft.
Residents reported hearing a loud explosion early in the morning from the vicinity of the airport.
In late February, the RSF and its allies signed a charter in Kenya announcing a plan to establish a rival government to the army-aligned government based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.