Paramilitary drone strike causes blackout in Sudan’s El-Obeid

A paramilitary drone strike on a power plant on Tuesday (March 3, 2026) caused a blackout in Sudan’s key Kordofan city of El-Obeid, a local official and an eyewitness told AFP.

“A drone belonging to the Rapid Support Forces bombed the city’s power station early this morning, causing a fire,” an official with the state electricity company said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media.

El-Obeid is the largest city in Sudan’s Kordofan region, currently the fiercest battlefield in the war raging between the RSF and the regular army since April 2023.

“I heard an explosion at 2:00 a.m. (0000 GMT) then saw flames coming from the direction of the station,” city resident Awad Ali told AFP. “It’s now past 9:00 a.m. and power isn’t back,” he said.

North Kordofan state capital El-Obeid lies on a key crossroads that connects RSF-controlled Darfur in the west with the army-controlled east, including the capital Khartoum.

For a year, since the army broke a long-running RSF siege, the paramilitary has been trying to encircle the city, including by launching drone strikes and attacking nearby towns.

Recent weeks have seen the army mount a counteroffensive, managing to break the siege on Kordofan’s two other major cities: Dilling and Kadugli, where hundreds of thousands faced mass starvation.

Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands and left around 11 million people displaced, creating the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.

It has also effectively split the country in two, with the army holding the north, centre and east while the RSF and its allies control the west and parts of the south.