On Monday morning, around 11 a.m., a drone strike hit Amiet Market, about six miles north of Abyei town, in the disputed border region between Sudan and South Sudan. The strike hit a fuel depot, set off a fire, and by Tuesday the count had climbed to at least 153 dead — and it was still rising as crews tried to recover bodies from the burned market.
Abyei is one of those places most people outside Africa have never heard of, but its story explains a lot. It is oil-rich, claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan, and its future was left unsettled by the 2005 peace deal and again when South Sudan became independent in 2011. A vote meant to settle it never happened, because the two sides could not agree on who gets to vote. So the region just sits there, disputed, while the war next door spills into it.
Who carried out the strike is disputed, and I want to be straight about that. Abyei’s caretaker information minister, Yohanna Akol Ngor, blamed Sudan’s military, and South Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said the same, summoned Sudan’s ambassador in protest, and urged Khartoum to stop actions that put civilian lives at risk. A senior Sudanese military officer, speaking without giving his name, said the army did strike fuel tankers heading to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and claimed those killed were fighters and fuel smugglers. The Associated Press said it could not verify that claim.
What is not in doubt is what happened on the ground. Doctors Without Borders said more than 20 wounded people were brought to Ameth Bek Hospital, some in critical condition, some with burns. The United Nations condemned the attacks near Amiet Market and Todach on Tuesday, saying dozens of civilians, including women and children, were killed, many people were still missing, and the toll was expected to rise. Its peacekeeping force in Abyei sent medical teams and firefighters to the market.
Amiet Market is not a military base. It is a trading hub where Ngok Dinka and Misseriya communities buy and sell, and local officials say thousands of people were displaced by the bombing. When a market like that burns, it is not just the dead who suffer — the people who sold there, bought their food there, and lived off that trade lose their living too.
This sits inside a bigger war. Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces have been fighting since April 2023, and that war has already torn large parts of the country apart. Abyei matters in it because fuel moves through the region, and both sides treat fuel as a weapon of war. That is the cold logic behind a strike like this — and it is exactly why it is so dangerous for the people caught in the middle.
My honest take: even if fuel was moving through that market to fighters, a crowded market at 11 in the morning is not a clean target. You cannot drop a weapon on a place full of traders and shoppers and then call the dead smugglers after the fact. And the claim that “we do not target civilians” means very little when 153 people are dead and some bodies were burned beyond recognition. If the aim was to cut off fuel, the cost was paid by the people with the least to do with this war.
The other thing that stays with me is how little attention this gets. 153 people killed in a market, and most of the world will scroll past it. That is not an accident — wars in places like Sudan rarely get the cameras. But the people in Amiet Market were doing the same ordinary thing people do in any market anywhere: buying food, selling goods, getting through the day. They deserve to be counted, not just as a number that keeps rising, but as a warning about what this war is doing to ordinary life.
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