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A drone originating from Sudan struck the Chadian border town of Tine on Wednesday night, killing 17 people and wounding several others in the latest and deadliest cross-border spillover from a civil war now entering its third year — an attack that prompted Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby to issue an immediate order authorizing military retaliation against any future strike originating from Sudanese territory.
The Chadian government confirmed the revised death toll in a statement issued Thursday, raising an earlier tally of 16 reported by a military source in the hours immediately following the strike.
“Despite various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border, the town of Tine has again been the target of a drone attack,” the government spokesman said. “This latest assault of extreme gravity has caused the death of 17 of our compatriots and left several others injured.” Deby convened an emergency session of the defense and security council overnight and, according to a presidency statement posted on social media, ordered the armed forces to “retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming from Sudan.”
The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that controls most of the Darfur region on the Sudanese side of the frontier and whose fighters have been blamed for the majority of cross-border incidents, denied responsibility in a statement posted on Telegram, attributing the strike to the Sudanese Armed Forces — the RSF’s adversary in the ongoing civil war. That denial tracks a consistent pattern: the RSF has denied virtually every attack attributed to it by Chadian, Sudanese, and international sources throughout the conflict. Neither the RSF’s denial nor the Chadian government’s attribution has been independently verified.
Tine sits directly across a seasonal watercourse from Al-Tina, its Sudanese twin town, in the North Darfur region. The RSF claimed control of Al-Tina in February 2026, ousting the Joint Defense Forces, a pro-army militia that had previously held the position — a development that placed RSF fighters immediately adjacent to the Chadian border at exactly the point where Wednesday’s strike originated. The watercourse separating the two towns is dry for most of the year, making the boundary a line on a map rather than a genuine physical barrier, and the town of Tine has become a focal point for violence that formally belongs to a foreign war.
Chad imposed an indefinite closure of its border with Sudan on February 23 after RSF fighters crossed into Chadian territory while fleeing from Sudanese army units near Al-Tina, killing seven Chadian soldiers at the Birak garrison in what N’Djamena described as a direct military incursion. The closure was intended, Chadian officials said, to prevent further conflict from bleeding across the frontier. Wednesday’s drone strike demonstrated that no border closure can stop an unmanned aerial vehicle. According to an AFP tally compiled before Thursday’s attack, 15 Chadian soldiers and eight civilians had already been killed in incidents linked to the Sudanese conflict since late December 2025.
The broader drone war unfolding inside Sudan provides essential context for what struck Tine. Sudan has recorded more than 1,000 documented drone attacks since April 2023, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. In the first two months of 2026 alone, ACLED logged 198 drone strikes by both sides, at least 52 of which caused civilian casualties, killing 478 people — making Sudan responsible for more than half of all drone attacks recorded across the entire African continent. In the week leading up to Wednesday’s cross-border attack, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned that more than 200 people had been killed by drone strikes across the Kordofan region and White Nile State since March 4 alone — a rate of killing he described as an intensifying aerial assault on civilian populations.
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Among the dead in that same week-long period were at least 17 people killed when a drone attributed to the RSF struck a secondary school and a health center in the White Nile State village of Shukeiri on March 12 — victims that included female students, teachers, and a health worker, according to the Sudanese Doctors Network. The school strike and the Tine cross-border attack occurred within 24 hours of each other, reflecting a tempo of aerial violence across the broader conflict zone that has escalated sharply in the opening months of 2026.
The RSF’s drone capabilities have been a subject of sustained international controversy. The paramilitary group has no formal air force of its own. Its drone arsenal has been assembled through a documented network of supply routes running through Chad and other transit states, with multiple credible reports identifying the United Arab Emirates as a key source of materiel and support — allegations Abu Dhabi has consistently denied. The use of drones has altered the character of the war fundamentally. Mukesh Kapila, professor of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester, told Al Jazeera that the appeal of drone warfare for the RSF was “brutally simple: it is cheap, it is easily launched from anywhere, and the main effect is that it is a weapon of mass terror.”
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Sudan’s civil war, which began in April 2023 when tensions between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces exploded into open fighting in Khartoum, has killed tens of thousands of people and created what the United Nations has described as the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis. At its peak, the conflict displaced approximately 14 million people, with nearly one million fleeing across the border into Chad — a country with its own severe food insecurity and limited institutional capacity to absorb a refugee population of that scale.
More than 21 million Sudanese — nearly 45 percent of the population — face acute food insecurity, according to UN estimates, with multiple regions formally assessed as experiencing famine conditions.
The conflict has received sharply diminished international attention since the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began on February 28.
The Sudan war is now approaching its third year while the world’s diplomatic bandwidth and media attention has been almost entirely consumed by the Middle East crisis and its global energy reverberations. The United Nations Security Council imposed targeted sanctions on four RSF commanders in February 2026, including Hemedti’s brother Abdul Rahim Dagalo and three other senior figures, for atrocities committed in and around El-Fasher — a measure that rights organizations welcomed but described as long overdue and insufficient given the scale of documented crimes.
No ceasefire framework is currently active in Sudan. The Sudanese Armed Forces have been conducting an intensified aerial and ground campaign across the Kordofan and Darfur regions since the start of 2026, and the RSF has responded with drone strikes targeting military installations, markets, schools, and civilian infrastructure in areas outside its control. Chad has not specified what form its authorized military retaliation will take, and the government’s capacity to distinguish between Sudanese state and RSF aircraft — if that distinction is even relevant to an incoming drone — has not been publicly established.
