A drone strike tore through a busy market in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur in southwestern Sudan, killing more than 100 people and wounding 113 others. The attack happened on Monday evening, according to the human rights group Emergency Lawyers, which monitors violence across the country.

The group issued its statement on Tuesday and blamed the Sudanese army for the strike. It condemned the attack in strong terms and called for an independent investigation. Women and children made up a large share of the dead and wounded, the organisation said.

A crowded market became a scene of mass death

Emergency Lawyers said the strike turned a market full of ordinary civilians into a place of mass killings and terrible injuries. Markets are where families buy food, trade goods and meet neighbours, and in Nyala that daily routine was broken in a single evening.

The group’s statement was blunt about what it saw as the human cost. In its words:

This massacre turned a market of civilians into a site of mass deaths and injuries. This is an attack that threatens the lives of local residents and deepens their suffering amid an ongoing war.

That warning goes beyond one night of violence. The group’s point is that people in Nyala were already living under the pressure of a war that has run for more than two years, and this strike added a new layer of fear to everyday life.

Hospital overwhelmed as the wounded arrived

Médecins Sans Frontières, known widely by its initials MSF, reported the scale of the medical emergency at its hospital in Nyala. The international medical organisation said 36 bodies had been brought to the facility. At the same time, 150 wounded people arrived at its emergency department.

Those figures show how quickly the attack overwhelmed the city’s medical response. A hospital receiving dozens of bodies and well over a hundred injured patients is facing a crisis of triage, blood supply, surgery and space, all at once.

Who controls the city

Nyala is currently under the control of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group known as RSF. The group has been fighting the Sudanese army since April 2023. The army is the force Emergency Lawyers held responsible for the drone strike, and the RSF’s control of the city makes the question of accountability especially sensitive.

The attack has put a spotlight on a conflict in which two heavily armed forces have fought for control of territory while civilians have paid the highest price. The rights group’s call for an independent inquiry reflects the lack of trust that many observers now have in the parties fighting on the ground.

A war increasingly fought from the sky

Drone attacks have been used repeatedly throughout Sudan’s civil war. In recent weeks, the number of drone strikes has risen sharply, with both the Sudanese army and the RSF stepping up their use of the weapons. Hundreds of people have been killed in these attacks.

Both sides are increasingly using drones armed with explosives. In many cases, civilian sites have been hit. These include hospitals, dams, schools, markets and camps for displaced people. A market in Nyala now joins that list of places where ordinary people went about their lives and found themselves under fire.

The United Nations has said that drone attacks have become the most deadly threat to civilians during the fighting. That assessment gives the Nyala strike a wider meaning. It is not only a single deadly event. It is part of a pattern in which the weapons themselves are changing how the war kills people far from the front lines.

A humanitarian crisis of enormous scale

The war has produced what the United Nations describes as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. According to the UN, around 34 million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance. That is roughly two-thirds of the country’s total population.

The conflict began in April 2023 in the capital, Khartoum. Tensions between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces had been building, and they turned into open fighting in the capital. The violence then spread to other parts of the country.

Now the fighting has reached deep into Darfur, where the Nyala strike has raised serious concerns about the safety of civilians. Each new attack adds to a long list of grievances, and each one makes the next humanitarian appeal harder to meet.

The scale of this strike, with more than 100 dead and 113 injured in a market, is a grim reminder that the people paying for this war are not the commanders or the armed groups. They are the shoppers, the vendors, the mothers and the children who were in the market when the drone arrived. Calls for an independent investigation are now the most urgent demand from those tracking the violence, and the world is watching whether it will be answered.