A drone strike on Sunday evening, 18 October, near the market in Al-Dibab, West Kordofan, killed 80 people, according to a medical source and a witness quoted on Monday by AFP and carried by France 24. Most were waiting for trucks to take them back to their villages after market day. It is among the deadliest single attacks since the war began in April 2023 between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The figure is from sources on the ground, not a UN tally.

Ahmed Abakar Wadi told AFP, over satellite internet because of a communications blackout, that he helped bury 50 of the dead, one of them his brother Mohamed. Another 47 wounded were taken to nearby Al-Mujlad; 30 died there, the medical source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Fifty plus 30 is 80. A second drone strike, on Al-Mujlad, injured four people who are being treated.

Wadi described two blasts, ten minutes apart, on a transport hub where people gather after market day. The RSF-declared administration, Tasis, accused the army. All of West Kordofan is under RSF control. Tasis’s accusation is not an independent finding: who launched the drone remains disputed.

On Monday a separate strike near Khartoum airport killed four people, three of them children, a medical source said, according to France 24’s French edition. Three children, aged two to six, and a man arrived at the morgue after a strike on a house in the Nasser Extension neighbourhood, just east of the airport. The children are not named.

An army source told AFP that air defences shot down drones launched on Monday morning by the militia, aimed at the airport and its surroundings. That is the army’s account. It does not, by itself, establish who hit the house in Nasser Extension.

The war has no firm death toll. Aid workers estimate more than 200,000 killed and the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis, AFP writes. More than 12 million Sudanese have left their homes, according to the UN as cited by France 24. Those estimates do not replace Monday’s 80 and 4.

This was not a strike “on market stalls” in the sense of stalls: the sources describe a truck hub next to the market, on Sunday evening. It is not a verdict on who pressed the button. It is a count from a medic and a witness, plus four in Khartoum, in two places and two days.

Image: Khartoum airport and Africa Street, 24 March 2011, Hind Mekki El Mardi, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The airport, not the house in Nasser Extension and not the Al-Dibab market.

Sources consulted: Drone attack near southern Sudan market kills scores — France 24; Drone attack near market kills 80 in Sudan — The Guardian.