Drones and depravity - Sudan's 'abandoned' crisis

Peter Power, the head of the UN children's fund (UNICEF) in Ireland, has seen his fair share of conflicts and humanitarian crises around the world.

But he has never come across anything like Sudan.

"The levels of violence, the depravity," he told RTÉ News, just after he left the capital Khartoum following a three-day visit last week, "is definitely more than I have ever, ever experienced - particularly sexual violence".

He described the systematic sexual violence being used as a weapon of war as "beyond belief".

That is being perpetrated mostly against women and girls and is particularly severe in the western Darfur region, which was the scene of the 2003-2005 genocide carried out by the notorious Janjaweed militia.

In October last year, after an 18-month siege, the city of El Fasher, capital of the northern Darfur region, fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the successors to the Janjaweed.

Around 10,000 men, women and children were massacred, something a Guardian newspaper investigation later described as "the fastest and largest killing spree this century".

That investigation also found that US and UK intelligence reports predicting a massacre went unheeded.

When pressed, Mr Power was reluctant to talk more about the atrocities he had been told about during his visit.

Even thinking about it was difficult, he said.

"I've struggled with the evil that men can do this week - I have really struggled with it," he said.

"How men can do what I've heard they have done? It's beyond evil."

The war in Sudan has raged for more than three years, causing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

According to UN data,13 million people have been displaced.

19 million people, some 40% of the population, don’t have enough food - 10m of them children.

3.6m children are classified as being malnourished.

The conflict has its origins in a civil war being fought between forces loyal to the Sudanese Army General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on one side and the notorious paramilitary RSF, under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, on the other.

But both factions have plenty of external support - some of them attracted to Sudan’s rich natural resources, including gold reserves.

Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia have largely taken the Sudanese Army’s side, while the United Arab Emirates is widely linked to the RSF, despite Abu Dhabi’s denials.

There have also been reports of Russian and Ukrainian forces active in the country.

"Diplomacy is paralysed as both SAF and RSF leaders have little incentive to do a deal since they and their regional backers continue to profit from Sudan’s war," according to a report by the International Rescue Committee.

"Large quantities of gold flow out of the country, while increasingly advanced weapons move in the opposite direction," the report found.

Like in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, drones have become a defining feature of Sudan’s war.

"When I was in Khartoum, there were drones above and causing damage [on the ground,]" said Mr Power.

He said that although the city had been largely retaken by the government forces, drones continued to fly overhead.

"Even our humanitarian convoys now see drones surveilling them all the time," he said.

Since the beginning of 2026, UN humanitarian convoys have been targeted by drone attacks in four separate incidents, according to UNICEF.

The UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk said that Sudan was seeing a "sharp increase" in the number of civilians killed by drone warfare - a thousand people in the first five months of this year.

After three years of war, the level of destruction he saw in Khartoum was "astronomical," Mr Power said.

"There are virtually no buildings untouched, and so many destroyed, including the airport.

"The number of bombed-out aircraft as we were landing had to be seen to be believed."

Khartoum was once a big city, full of modern buildings and bustling with commercial activity, he said.

"It's just been dragged back 20, 30 years," he said, adding "it’s shocking".

Given its scale, the question for observers of Sudan’s war is why it hasn’t attracted more global attention, or funding.

Following a sharp drop in international aid donations from Europe, as EU countries pivoted to increased defence spending, combined with the dismantling of the US government aid branch USAID, humanitarians have struggled to keep operations going.

According to UNICEF, a 71% funding gap has disrupted essential services, as have the ongoing security challenges.

That is "forcing difficult decisions about where UNICEF can operate and which children can be reached".

Experts said that the war was often cast as an "intractable struggle" between two warring generals, with few countries or regional groups willing to expend the political capital required to broker a solution, especially with multiple conflicts raging around the world.

"Attempts to generate more international attention for the Sudan war have often struggled due to competing global crises, including the Ukraine war, and more recently the US-Israeli attack on Iran," said Magnus Taylor, Horn of Africa Deputy Director of the International Crisis Group, an advocacy group.

But he said that more international attention to the conflict, particularly the plight of the Sudanese people, wouldn't necessarily help end the war at this stage, given the deep involvement of external actors.

"The conflict is now bound up with complex regional and geopolitical dynamics, including intra-Gulf rivalries, that help sustain the fighting and risk tipping the Horn of Africa into a wider regional crisis," he said.

The failure to act earlier is seen by some a dereliction of duty on the part of the international community.

"Please don’t call this the forgotten crisis," said the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Denise Brown, as the war entered its fourth year in April.

"I’m referring to this as an abandoned crisis."