Paramilitary drone strikes targeting Sudan's wartime capital have sought to shatter the regular army's sense of security and open a dangerous new chapter in the war, experts say.
Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) group has been at war with the army, which has lately recaptured some territory and dislodged the paramilitaries from the capital Khartoum.
The latter appeared to have the upper hand before Sunday, when drone strikes began blasting key infrastructure in Port Sudan, seat of the army-backed government on the Red Sea coast.
With daily strikes on the city since then, the RSF has sought to demonstrate its strength, discredit the army, disrupt its supply lines and project an air of legitimacy, experts believe.
According to Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair, "this is intended to undermine the army's ability to provide safety and security in areas they control", allowing the RSF to expand the war "without physically being there".
For two years, the paramilitaries relied mainly on lightning ground offensives, overwhelming army defences in brutal campaigns of conquest.
But after losing nearly all of Khartoum in March, the RSF has increasingly turned to long-range air power.
Using weapons the army says were supplied by the United Arab Emirates, it has hit strategic sites hundreds of kilometres (miles) away from their holdout positions on the capital's outskirts.
Michael Jones, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says the RSF's pivot is a matter of both "strategic adaptation" and "if not desperation, then necessity".