Sudan accuses Ethiopia of hosting RSF drone launches as both neighbours shut each other's consulates

What did Khartoum actually file at the UN?

On Sunday 1 November, Sudan's Foreign Ministry said it had lodged formal complaints against Ethiopia with the UN Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, accusing Addis Ababa of letting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces use Ethiopian territory to launch drone attacks on Sudanese cities and power stations. The complaint came with a dossier from the army-led Transitional Sovereignty Council, and within three days both capitals had shut each other's border consulates and expelled diplomats.

The charge is the sharpest yet in a feud building all year, and it lands while both countries are already fighting wars of their own, so the question over the Horn is no longer whether the two conflicts are connected, but how far the connection runs.

What do the numbers in Sudan's dossier say?

The dossier, as reported by Al Jazeera and the Addis Standard, counts 70 attacks involving 187 one-way drones launched from Ethiopian territory between 15 February and 27 October 2026, 28 attacks and 97 drones in October alone, with 484 civilians killed or wounded, 176 soldiers killed and about 200 wounded. It names three launch sites, Asosa Airport, the Kurmuk-Gizen border area and Bahir Dar airbase, and Sudan says it attached supporting tables of the attacks, the drone types used and the damage caused.

The timing fits a visible campaign against Sudan's power grid: on Sunday strikes hit substations at al-Dabba and Abu Hamad in Northern State and cut power, and on Monday further strikes hit New Halfa and Aroma in Kassala state and Merowe, near the Merowe dam, taking reported strikes on the power network to 18 in a week. The campaign has reshaped the war inside Sudan, from the exodus out of El Fasher to strikes that drove families from their homes in Blue Nile, and the UN spokesman said on Saturday he was appalled, days after a market strike in RSF-held Darfur killed more than 100 people.

The diplomatic fallout moved fast: on Wednesday 4 November Ethiopia ordered six Sudanese diplomats at the Assosa consulate to leave within 48 hours, and Sudan answered the same day by closing Ethiopia's consulate in Gedaref and expelling its staff, in an exchange confirmed by officials to Reuters and AFP. Amjad Farid, adviser to Sudan's Transitional Sovereign Council, said Khartoum remained committed to defending its territory while working to avoid open war with Ethiopia.

What remains unproven in the drone dossier?

The core of the dispute is evidence: Sudan's figures come from its own Foreign Ministry and military intelligence, and no independent body has yet verified that the drones were launched from Ethiopian soil rather than from RSF-held territory inside Sudan, so the dossier's tables and named sites remain allegations, not established findings. Ethiopia denies backing the RSF; its ambassador rejected Sudan's accusations at the Security Council on 16 October, and the prime minister's office did not immediately answer Reuters' request for comment this week.

The mirror charge is equally unproven: Ethiopia accuses Sudan, along with Egypt and Eritrea, of supporting Tigrayan rebels who launched an offensive in September, and all three deny it. A Reuters visual investigation in February used satellite imagery, an Ethiopian security document and testimony from several sources to identify a camp in Benishangul-Gumuz used to train thousands of RSF fighters, yet that finding did not by itself verify the later drone-launch claims, and the renewed Tigray offensive has made the border harder to read every week.

Nor is it clear what either side wants next: Khartoum has not said what action it expects from the Security Council beyond condemnation, and Addis Ababa has given no reason for the Assosa expulsions, so the record holds two expulsions, two complaints and two denials, and very little about where either capital stops.

Why does a consulate row threaten two wars at once?

Three years into Sudan's civil war, this row turns a spillover into a state-to-state confrontation: a formal complaint to the Security Council puts Ethiopia's name on a UN file as an alleged party to the war, while the consulate closures strip away the last channel between two capitals sharing a long, porous border.

The human stakes are already visible: the war that began in April 2023 has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 14 million, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, and the drone campaign against power stations now reaches cities far from the front lines, cutting power to hospitals, water pumps and homes in Kassala and Northern State.

The regional stakes run wider still: the RSF's war is also a war of displacement, with families fleeing El Fasher and the Chad border, and Ethiopia's Tigray front is active again, so a miscalculation on either side could fuse two wars into one, with Eritrea, Egypt and the Gulf states watching from the edges of the map; and with Ethiopia's rupture with Eritrea already redrawing the region's alliances.

How did two civil wars become one border crisis?

The feud did not start with the drones: Sudan and Ethiopia have traded accusations of harbouring each other's rebels for years, and the Tigray war gave both capitals reason to keep the other's enemies close, so the dossier reads less like a sudden discovery than like a long proxy logic finally filed at the United Nations.

What changed in 2026 is the weapon: one-way drones turned a border once patrolled by soldiers into a launch corridor that can be denied, and a power station hundreds of kilometres from the frontier can now be hit by a machine cheaper than the missile that would stop it; which is why the grid strikes matter beyond their military value: cheap, deniable, and aimed at civilians' daily life rather than at armies.

The expulsions reveal the second change: consulates are the plumbing of a bilateral relationship, and shutting them deliberately removes the people who would normally talk a crisis down, so both sides reaching for that tool within hours says more about the temperature in both capitals than any statement.

What happens if the two wars merge?

The first consequence to watch is the border: the Assosa–Gedaref corridor is where traders, refugees and fighters have crossed for generations, and a closed consulate plus a 48-hour expulsion order pushes smugglers and armed groups into the gap diplomats leave behind, while the complaint gives Khartoum a paper trail for seeking sanctions.

The second is the Tigray front: if Addis Ababa believes Khartoum is arming its rebels, it has every incentive to treat the RSF as a useful counterweight, and if Khartoum believes Addis Ababa is launching drones at its cities, it has every incentive to deepen its support for the Tigray rebels, so each side's suspicion becomes the other's justification, and the loop tightens by itself.

The third is the region's diplomacy: the African Union now holds a complaint that forces it to choose between investigating a member state and shelving the file, while the Gulf states and Egypt watch a row touching their own alignments, and a Council debate that produces nothing would teach both capitals that the institutions cannot restrain them.

What would pull the two capitals back from the edge?

The 48-hour deadline on the Assosa diplomats is the first marker: once the expulsions are carried out, the crisis either cools or finds a new trigger, and the next days will show whether either capital names a mediator or closes the border crossings that still carry trade and refugees.

The Security Council's handling of the complaint is the second marker: a debate, a statement or a request for the Secretary-General to report would put the dossier's claims under scrutiny neither side can control, while silence would leave the African Union as the only forum still holding the file.

The third marker is the power grid: every further strike deepens the humanitarian case against whoever ordered it, and the UN's count of civilian deaths from drone strikes is now part of the public record, so the war's next chapter will be written as much by engineers restoring substations as by diplomats trading expulsions.