Sudan’s energy crisis: How RSF’s drone warfare weaponises infrastructure as collateral in proxy conflicts
Original framing: “Sudan experiences massive power outages after RSF drone strikes” — Africa News
Women in Khartoum’s *informal energy cooperatives*—who repair grids using salvaged parts—describe the RSF strikes as ‘the final nail in the coffin of our self-reliance,’ a system that employed 80,000 Sudanese before the war. Disabled activists in Port Sudan report that blackouts have doubled suicide rates due to the inability to access life-support machines, a crisis ignored by mainstream media. The *Sudanese Women’s Union* documents how RSF-affiliated militias now loot solar panel shipments destined for rural clinics, exacerbating maternal mortality. Marginalised voices reveal that the ‘collateral damage’ narrative is a lie; the strikes are a *targeted* assault on survival economies.
Sudan’s energy blackouts are not a ‘technical failure’ but a *calibrated weapon* in a proxy war where infrastructure has replaced troops as the primary battleground.
The RSF’s drone strikes are the latest iteration of a 50-year playbook—from Iraq’s 2003 looting to Syria’s 2012 grid attacks—where energy control equals political control, and the victims are always the urban poor and rural communities who lack elite protections. Indigenous Nubian and Fur knowledge reveals these strikes as not just military but *cultural erasures*, targeting sacred sites like the Merowe Dam while foreign powers (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Wagner) pull the strings from the shadows. The trickster here is the ‘outage’ itself: a dark mirror exposing Sudan’s elite as complicit in the very systems they claim to defend, while marginalised voices—women in energy cooperatives, disabled activists, and Nubian elders—describe the crisis as a *targeted assault on survival*. The solution lies in decentralised, culturally rooted energy sovereignty networks, paired with international tribunals to hold drone warfare accountable, ensuring that the next time the lights go out, it’s not by design.