SUDAN’s air force has carried out bombings in which at least 1,700 civilians have died in attacks on residential neighbourhoods, markets, schools and camps for displaced people, according to an investigation into air raids in the country’s civil war.
The Sudan Witness Project says it has compiled the largest known dataset of military airstrikes in the conflict, which began in April 2023.
Its analysis indicates that the air force has used unguided bombs in populated areas.
The data focuses on attacks by warplanes, which only the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is capable of operating. Its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) does not have aircraft. It launches drone strikes, but drones were excluded from the research.
The RSF has been internationally condemned for allegedly carrying out ethnic massacres in Sudan’s western Darfur region, triggering charges of genocide by the United States.
“The RSF are being held responsible for a lot of damage and violations, and I think rightly so,” says Mark Snoeck, who ran the project. “But I think the SAF should also be held accountable for their actions.”
The military has also faced international criticism, accused of indiscriminate bombings.
The SAF did not respond to a BBC request for comment. But it has previously denied allegations of targeting civilians, saying its airstrikes are “directed solely at RSF gatherings, locations and bases recognized as legitimate military targets”.
Sudan Witness is an initiative by the Center for Information Resilience (CIR), a non-profit group which works to expose human rights violations. It received funding from the British foreign ministry for this project.
According to an advance copy of the report obtained by the BBC, Sudan Witness analysed 384 airstrikes conducted between April 2023 and July 2025.
More than 1,700 civilians were reported killed and 1,120 injured in the incidents it documented. The group says these are conservative figures as it takes the lowest reported number.
There were 135 cases involving residential areas, with verified destruction to homes and civilian infrastructure.
In 35 instances the bombs struck markets and commercial facilities, often when they were crowded with people. And 19 strikes affected vulnerable groups in places like health facilities, sites housing displaced people and educational institutions.
Sudan Witness acknowledges that its research is incomplete because the results reflect access to data rather than the total number of strikes. It’s hard to get information from conflict zones due to poor telecommunications and the difficulty of identifying credible sources, it says, and strikes on military targets are likely to be underreported.
But it says through a rigorous methodology, it has been able to build a wider picture of the military’s air campaigns, visualising the information in an interactive map that shows the scale and impact on civilian populations.
“For us to say that the Sudanese Armed Forces conducted an airstrike on a certain location at a certain time would more or less require that the SAF be caught in the act in footage that can be verified,” says Mr Snoeck. “And this would be a very high threshold, because footage like that is very exceptional in Sudan. So what we therefore have done is analysed hundreds of airstrikes claims to paint the bigger picture.”
The main patterns that emerge are repeated hits on residential neighbourhoods and markets, says Mr Snoeck, as well as a large number of alleged strikes on essential humanitarian and medical facilities.
“I think these patterns strongly suggest that the SAF isn’t doing enough to avoid civilian casualties,” he said.
Justin Lynch, managing director at Conflict Insights Group which tracks foreign weapons supplies to Sudan, told the BBC that Sudanese civilians were bearing the brunt of the battles between the army and the RSF.
“Sudan’s conflict is really a war against civilians,” he told the BBC. “Air power and other heavy weapons disproportionately target civilian, more than military, sites.”
Sudan Witness calculates the credibility level of a reported airstrike based on publicly available digital information known as open source.
It assesses the reliability of the source, ability to analyse the location through videos posted to social media, and available satellite imagery.
Some of the incidents examined by Sudan Witness could be based only on reports. Where it was able to find corroborating evidence, it confirmed the attacks with a low-to-medium degree of certainty.
But the group highlights cases where munitions, impact craters or shrapnel damage are identified.
In one such instance Sudan Witness confirmed multiple videos and images showing a crater with an undetonated air-dropped bomb in the Zamzam camp for displaced people in North Darfur.