12 July 2026
A drone strike on the evening of July 10 struck a gathering of senior commanders belonging to Army 70, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s armed contingent operating within the Sudanese Armed Forces’ war effort, in the town of al-Kurmuk. According to sources, the strike killed several of the unit’s most senior officers and wounded more than a dozen soldiers, prompting an immediate reshuffle of the contingent’s command structure. Eritrean soldiers were among the reported casualties, reflecting the wider convergence of forces now operating within Sudanese territory.
The strike landed two days after the Sudanese Armed Forces recaptured al-Kurmuk from the Rapid Support Forces and its allied faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, and it points to a force that, having helped take the town, immediately became a target within it.
Al-Kurmuk’s value to both sides of Sudan’s civil war lies in its positioning. The town sits on Blue Nile State’s main highway, the corridor running from western Ethiopia through the Nile River Valley toward Khartoum, and it guards the approaches to the Roseires Dam, a piece of infrastructure central to Sudan’s electricity supply. Its position on the border with Ethiopia and near South Sudan also make it highly strategic.
The Rapid Support Forces and the SPLM-N faction led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu captured al-Kurmuk on March 24, using it as a staging hub for an offensive meant to stetch Sudanese Armed Forces away from the country’s centre and mount a challenge through the Nile corridor toward the capital. The Sudanese Armed Forces spent the following months consolidating positions around the town before retaking it on July 8, after roughly six hours of fighting, according to the locality’s governor. Army 70 formed part of the force committed to that operation, its presence in Sudan’s war tracing back to a different conflict entirely.
Army 70’s roots lie in the Tigray conflict of 2020 to 2022. As Ethiopia’s federal and Amhara forces moved north to fight the TPLF, the Sudanese Armed Forces moved into al-Fashaga, a fertile stretch of disputed borderland that Ethiopian farmers had cultivated for decades under a standing arrangement with Khartoum. Sudan’s forces expelled those farmers and fortified the territory. The episode reset a border dispute and hardened a working relationship between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the TPLF, two parties bound by a shared antagonism toward the Ethiopian government and by ties between Sudanese generals and TPLF military leadership.
As the Tigray conflict ground on, a Tigrayan contingent found itself cut off on the Sudanese side of the border triangle linking Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. This contingent drew from three sources. Former Ethiopian National Defence Force soldiers and officers stationed in Sudan under the UN peacekeeping mission defected to the TPLF’s cause. Elements of the original Tigray Defence Forces retreated into Sudan after being pushed back by Ethiopian and allied forces. Refugees displaced by the fighting were later recruited into the ranks, and these three streams built Army 70 into a force now estimated in the tens of thousands.
What began as a wartime repositioning hardened into something closer to a standing arrangement once Sudan’s own civil war erupted in April 2023, a year after the Tigray conflict’s formal end. Army 70’s fighters gradually took on the Sudanese Armed Forces’ fight against the Rapid Support Forces, and the relationship now functions in a mercenary-like fashion, financial incentive drawing soldiers into a conflict removed from their original cause, while TPLF leadership extends political and material support to General al-Burhan’s forces as part of a broader calculation against the Ethiopian government.
Eritrean involvement is bound up in this same arrangement, known as Tsimdo. Elements of the Eritrean Defence Forces are understood to have taken part in the al-Kurmuk operation alongside Army 70, and Eritrean soldiers featured among those killed in the July 10 strike. This is part of an extensive pattern of support the Eritrean military has extended to the Sudanese Armed Forces over the course of the civil war, support that has moved Asmara from backing at a distance into direct participation on the ground.
Sudan’s territory, destabilized by its own internal war and fractured between two symmetrical forces, has become the primary ground where this alignment takes shape. Political gatherings and military coordination meetings, including one held in Port Sudan, have repeatedly brought together TPLF generals, including figures from Army 70, insurgent representatives from Amhara’s Fano movement and Oromia’s Oromo Liberation Army, and delegations from both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Eritrean military. The border zone linking Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Eritrea has become the breeding ground for this convergence.
The heavy losses Army 70 suffered in the July 10 strike carry consequences beyond the unit itself. They hint at the Sudanese Armed Forces’ increased reliance on TPLF-aligned manpower at a moment when that reliance already fuels its strategic antagonism toward the Ethiopian government, tying Khartoum’s war effort more tightly to actors Addis Ababa considers hostile.
They also suggest a shift in the Rapid Support Forces’ targeting priorities. Having lost ground in eastern Sudan, the RSF may increasingly turn to precision drone strikes similar to the one that hit al-Kurmuk, a capability it has built steadily over the course of the war. Further strikes would bring TPLF and Eritrean fighters more directly into the Rapid Support Forces’ crosshairs. The strike also deals a blow to the cohesion of the wider Tsimdo alignment converging in Sudan. By dragging Tigrayan and Eritrean elements deeper into the casualties of its own civil war, the Sudanese Armed Forces risks fatiguing the alliance it has drawn on, which already rests on the fragile ground of a shared antagonism toward Ethiopia.
By Mahder Nesibu, Researcher, Horn Review