Sudan’s war is increasingly being fought from the sky and from far away, and children are paying the heaviest price, the UN children’s agency said on Tuesday. Speaking in Geneva after returning from El Obeid in North Kordofan, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder described a combined onslaught of drones and drought that he called “an assault unlike anything” in the country’s history.
According to Elder, an armed drone struck a Sudanese power station on every single day of the final week of October, and as many as 15 stations were hit over the month. Some of the aircraft now fly up to 1,500 kilometres to reach their targets. UNICEF says it cannot determine who is responsible for the strikes on the grid, in a conflict that has pitted the Sudanese Armed Forces against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since 2023.
The damage spreads far beyond the lights going out. Electric pumps move and clean the country’s water, so each strike pushes families towards costly, unsafe supplies; pockets of cholera have reappeared, including among displaced people. Vaccines and medicines that need refrigeration are at risk, and farmers cannot irrigate while fuel is scarce. Elder noted that, unlike Ukraine, Sudan rarely manages to repair what is destroyed.
Drought is compounding the crisis. With El Niño already taking its toll, the window to plant cereals for the 2026-27 harvest has largely closed. By UNICEF’s reckoning, around 825,000 toddlers and babies will be severely and dangerously malnourished before the year is out. In the first nine months of 2026 the agency recorded 410 child victims, dead or wounded, and roughly 270 of them were hurt or killed in drone attacks. Elder recalled meeting Buri, a teenager who lost both hands to an explosive and studies online each morning from a tent.
The agency is asking for three things: a halt to attacks on power and water systems, safe passage for aid across front lines, and sustained, flexible funding to keep basic services running.
