Sudan's Drone War Echoes a Familiar Script
Al Jazeera reports Dilling, Sudan’s second-largest city in South Kordofan, is returning to a semblance of normal after a two-year siege, yet residents face constant aerial attacks from government drones. Markets are reopening, but the specter of unseen death from above dictates daily life, a stark reminder that peace is a fragile concept when advanced weaponry is readily available to warring
factions. What the mainstream narrative consistently glosses over are the puppet strings behind these technologies. In 2023, for instance, Iran was reportedly supplying drones to the Sudanese military, a transaction curiously overlooked by Western media that fixates on Tehran's drone exports only when directed at their preferred adversaries. This selective reporting conveniently sidesteps the vast
network of arms trading that fuels conflicts across the Global South, often implicitly sanctioned or actively enabled by the very powers that later decry the 'instability.' The US alone accounts for over 40% of global arms exports, a figure starkly unmentioned in reportage on local conflicts. One might wonder why the sophisticated drones decimating Sudanese neighborhoods receive a fraction of the
attention given to other conflict zones. It is a familiar double standard: the suffering in, say, Yemen, where a US-backed Saudi coalition has waged an air war for nearly a decade, killing hundreds of thousands, is routinely framed differently from aerial assaults elsewhere. The networks of power and profit prioritize certain narratives, classifying some conflicts as regrettable 'local' incidents