A drone attack on a busy market in western Sudan has killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, including children, as the United Nations warns that the country’s rapidly escalating air wars have claimed more than 200 civilian lives in little over a week.

The attack on Adikong market, near Sudan’s border with Chad, ignited fuel reserves and sent flames tearing through the area on Thursday.

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Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, said in a statement on Friday that it had treated more than 20 of the wounded at a hospital it supports across the border in Adre, and that seven of the injured were children.

MSF described it as the second deadly drone attack on the same area in less than a month.

Drones have become a key weapon used by both sides in the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the ‌paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that began in April 2023.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said on Thursday he was appalled by the scale of intensifying aerial assaults on civilians in the war, warning that more than 200 people had been killed by drones across the Kordofan region and White Nile state since March 4 alone.

“It is deeply troubling that despite multiple reminders, warnings and appeals, parties to the conflict continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons in populated areas,” Turk said.

In West Kordofan, at least 152 civilians were killed in strikes attributed to the SAF, including about 50 when a market and hospital were struck simultaneously in al-Muglad on March 4.

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Three days later, attacks on markets in Abu Zabad and Wad Banda left at least 40 more dead. On March 10, a truck carrying civilians was hit in al-Sunut, killing at least 50, among them women and children.

A day before the Adikong strike, drones used by the RSF hit a secondary school and health centre in the White Nile state village of Shukeiri, killing at least 17 people, including female students, teachers and a health worker, according to the Sudanese Doctors Network.

Mukesh Kapila, professor of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester, told Al Jazeera the increase in the rate of the drone attacks was significant.

“It is really only in the last couple of years that drones have entered the scene in Sudan,” he said, adding that their use now appeared to be “accelerating” into “a preferred weapon of war, particularly on the RSF side”.

The appeal in mounting an attack with a drone, he said, was brutally simple: “It is cheap, it is easily launched from anywhere, and the main effect is that it is a weapon of mass terror.”

Kapila pointed to the pattern of targets — hospitals, water points, markets and displacement camps — as evidence that the intent was “to spread terror” with strikes increasingly used to project power well beyond active front lines.

The SAF has received Iranian-made drones, with Mohajer-6 combat UAVs documented arriving as recently as 2024, alongside Turkish and Russian military support.

The RSF, which has no air force of its own, has been equipped through a network of supply routes reportedly running through Chad and other transit states, with reports pointing to the United Arab Emirates as a key enabler, allegations Abu Dhabi denies.

The war has now produced more than 1,000 documented drone attacks since April 2023, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. In the first two months of 2026 alone, ACLED recorded 198 strikes by both sides, at least 52 of which caused civilian casualties, killing 478 people.

Sudan accounted for more than half of all drone attacks recorded across the entire African continent in 2024, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and by March last year, the SAF claimed to have shot down more than 100 drones in just 10 days.

The human cost of nearly three years of war has caused what has been called the world’s largest humanitarian emergency.

Some 33.7 million people, the largest such population anywhere on earth, now require humanitarian assistance, according to the UN, and more than 12 million have been driven from their homes.

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