(Reuters) – Drone attacks cut power across Khartoum and the surrounding state, authorities said on Thursday, as Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries pressed on with a campaign of long-distance attacks more than two years into their war with Sudan’s army.
The RSF, which has largely been pushed out of central Sudan in recent months, has switched tactics from ground assaults to drone attacks on power stations, dams and other infrastructure in army-held territory.
Drones struck Khartoum state on Wednesday night, the Sudanese Electrical Company said in a statement. Staff were trying to put out large fires and assess and repair the damage, it added.
The war between the two forces has devastated the country, pushed more than 13 million people out of their homes and spread famine and disease. Tens of thousands of people have died in fighting.
RSF drone strikes on the army’s wartime capital Port Sudan and other areas have plunged most of the country into extended blackouts.
They have also hit water supplies, piling on the hardships and raising the risk of the spread of cholera and other diseases.
Ground fighting continued in southern Omdurman, part of larger Khartoum, where the army was attacking pockets of RSF fighters, army sources said.
Clashes have also displaced thousands of people on the war’s most active frontline in Western Kordofan state.
There, the army is trying to secure key oil-producing areas and push on into RSF territory in the Darfur region, where the army is trying to break a siege on the city of al-Fashir, its last remaining foothold there.
The war, triggered by a dispute over a transition to civilian rule, has pushed half the population into acute hunger, according to the United Nations.
Momentum in the conflict has repeatedly swung back and forth but neither side has looked close to winning outright.
(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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