Major cities across Sudan, including the capital, Khartoum, and coastal city Port Sudan, have been plunged into darkness after drone strikes hit a key power plant in the country’s east.

Flames and smoke rose from the facility in Atbara, River Nile state on Thursday, which is controlled by the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and under attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the ongoing civil war that has ripped the nation apart.

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Footage circulating on social media showing the power station ablaze has been verified by Al Jazeera.

Two civil defence members were killed, power plant officials said, while trying to extinguish the fire that erupted after the first strike, adding that rescue workers were injured when a second drone hit as they battled the flames.

Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Vall in Port Sudan reported that residents initially thought a routine power cut had occurred, only to learn it was linked to incidents in Atbara, roughly 320km (about 230 miles) north of Khartoum.

He added that such strikes have become a frequent occurrence in Sudan’s war.

“We have seen this many times during the during this current year and the last year. The RSF drones are going thousands of kilometres across Sudan because they think it is a way to weaken the government and to prove to the population they can’t be protected by this military government,” Vall said.

The attack marks the latest escalation in a devastating drone campaign that has killed at least 104 civilians across Sudan’s Kordofan region since early December. The deadliest strike hit a kindergarten and hospital in Kalogi, South Kordofan, where 89 people died, including 43 children and eight women.

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Six Bangladeshi peacekeepers were killed when drones struck their base in Kadugli on December 13, prompting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to warn that targeting peacekeepers “may constitute war crimes under international law”.

A day later, the Dilling Military Hospital came under fire, killing at least six people and wounding 12, many of them medical staff.

The use of drones has been extensive by both the SAF and RSF in recent months.

According to the US-based think tank Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 484 drone strikes occurred across 13 African countries in 2024, with Sudan accounting for 264 of them, more than half the continental total. By March 2025, the intensity had surged further, with the SAF claiming it shot down more than 100 drones in just 10 days.

Sexual violence ‘escalating alarmingly’

Sudan plunged into chaos in April 2023 when a power struggle between the SAF and RSF exploded into open fighting. The war has killed more than 100,000 people, according to some estimates, but the true toll remains unclear.

The conflict has created what the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with more than 14 million people displaced and at least 30 million needing vital assistance. More than 40,000 people have fled North Kordofan alone, while civilians remain trapped in besieged cities.

For the third consecutive year, Sudan topped the International Rescue Committee’s Emergency Watchlist released on Tuesday, as global humanitarian funding has shrunk by 50 percent. A Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of 22 aid agencies named Sudan the world’s most neglected crisis of 2025.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed on Wednesday that more than 1,600 people have been killed in 65 attacks on medical facilities across Sudan this year. “Every attack deprives more people from health services and medicines,” he said.

Seif Magango, spokesperson for the UN Human Rights office, also told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that sexual violence was also “escalating alarmingly”, with women bearing the conflict’s greatest cost. Women face “gang rape while simultaneously trying to flee from killing and bombs,” he said, describing conditions as particularly horrific in el-Fasher.

The heaviest fighting has now shifted from Darfur to the country’s central regions where the country is bisected between territory controlled by the RSF and SAF.

A report released on Tuesday by Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab found that RSF forces engaged in a “systematic multi-week campaign to destroy evidence” of mass killings in el-Fasher through burial, burning and removal of human remains after the city fell in October.