The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have, for the first time, extended their military campaign to Port Sudan—the eastern stronghold of Sudan’s military-led government—by launching a drone attack, on May 4, that struck the Osman Digna Air Base and nearby civilian structures.
Though no casualties were reported, the symbolic impact is profound: this Red Sea city, once considered a bastion of relative calm amidst a nation in ruin, has now joined the list of conflict zones in Sudan’s spiralling civil war. The army condemned the attack as a reckless escalation, describing the drones as “suicidal” in nature.
The assault underscores a new phase in the two-year-long conflict, which has fractured the nation into rival fiefdoms controlled by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. Port Sudan had effectively become the seat of government after Khartoum fell early in the war, hosting UN agencies and serving as a refuge for hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians. That presumed immunity has now been shattered, as video footage circulating online shows towering black smoke and halted air traffic, with the airport closed and flights suspended.
What began as a power struggle over the transition to civilian rule has devolved into a cataclysm of unprecedented scale. With over 150,000 lives lost and millions teetering on the brink of famine, Sudan’s third civil war is proving to be its most ruinous. Efforts to unify the RSF under the national military structure failed ahead of the war, triggering full-scale hostilities between former allies turned foes. Despite recent SAF gains, including retaking the presidential palace in Khartoum, analysts caution that no decisive victory looms. Instead, Sudan remains locked in a cycle of destruction, its institutions fractured, its people besieged, and its path to peace increasingly obscured by smoke and ruin.