In the besieged Sudanese city of el-Obeid, children are afraid to walk to school because of drones. The walk to class now runs through a war in which the cheapest weapons are flown over civilian streets, and the people who die most often are those who cannot hide.
The United Nations has been counting the cost. At least 330 children were killed or injured in Sudan in the first six months of 2026, and drone attacks accounted for 60 percent of those casualties, according to UNICEF. In North Kordofan, where el-Obeid is the capital, drone strikes and other attacks have killed at least 18 children and wounded 17 more since May. The victims ranged in age from two months to 17 years.
The strikes are not accidents. The UN human rights office documented 15 drone attacks on el-Obeid and its surroundings in three weeks in June, killing at least 45 civilians. The weapons have hit markets, schools, fuel stations, water infrastructure and civilian vehicles. Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that the attacks were relentless, that residents faced impossible choices, and that some people were selling their belongings to finance their escape from the city. For many, the cost of transport and the constant attacks on the roads make leaving impossible.
Both sides fly the drones: the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary force besieging the city, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, the national army. Last week, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, told his commanders they no longer needed to wait for orders from the high command and could launch counteroffensives at their own discretion. Aid groups fear that means more attacks on civilians, not fewer.
El-Obeid is home to more than half a million people, including at least 100,000 displaced from cities already destroyed, such as el-Fasher in North Darfur. The RSF now controls every road out of the city except the one to the east. Aid has not reached the population for two months. UNICEF warns that 500,000 civilians are at risk in and around the city and that any further deterioration would expose more children to death, injury and displacement. Sheldon Yett, the agency’s representative in Sudan, said that for many children there was no safe place left.
The wider war is one of the worst of this century. Since fighting erupted in April 2023 between the army and the RSF, at least 59,000 people have been killed, 13 million have been displaced and much of the country has tipped into famine. Thirty million people need humanitarian help. Displacement in Kordofan has risen by nearly two-thirds in three months, and the International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 100 incidents of forced displacement in under nine months, an average of one every two to three days. The Human Rights Council has ordered an investigation into the catastrophe unfolding in el-Obeid.
What makes el-Obeid different is what is being destroyed. A city under siege loses its market, its hospital, its water. But a school that children are too frightened to attend is a different kind of loss: it is the future, surrendered street by street. The drones are cheap and the children are not. Yet the war goes on, and the classrooms stay empty.