During Sudan's civil war, which erupted in April 2023, both sides have increasingly relied on drones, and civilians have borne the brunt of the carnage. The conflict between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group is an example of war transformed by commercially available, easily concealable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. Modular, well-adapted to sanctions evasions and devastatingly effective, drones have killed scores of civilians, crippled infrastructure and plunged Sudanese cities into darkness. In this visual investigation, Al Jazeera examines the history of drone warfare in Sudan, the types of drones used by the warring sides, how they are sourced, where the attacks have occurred and the human toll. The RSF traces its origins to what at the time was a government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed.

A number of real-world security scenarios can be cast as a problem of transiting an area guarded by a mobile patroller, where the transiting agent aims to choose its route so as to minimize the probability of encountering the patrolling agent, and vice versa. We model this problem as a two-player zero-sum game on a graph, termed the transit game. In contrast to the existing models of area transit, where one of the players is stationary, we assume both players are mobile. We also explicitly model the limited endurance of the patroller and the notion of a base to which the patroller has to repeatedly return. Noting the prohibitive size of the strategy spaces of both players, we develop single- and double-oracle based algorithms including a novel acceleration scheme, to obtain optimum route selection strategies for both players. We evaluate the developed approach on a range of transit game instances inspired by real-world security problems in the urban and naval security domains.