A drone strike on a Christian community on Christmas Day killed 12 people and injured at least 18 others, CSI’s partners in the Nuba Mountains report.
On December 25, 2025, the worshipers had gathered to walk together to a Christmas celebration at their church when a bomb hit the group. “The church [building] was not hit, but a congregation marching in procession toward the church was targeted,” a local Christian attorney told Morning Star News.
The strike came from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), one of the two major factions fighting in Sudan’s civil war. The strike hit a village called Tulushi, in Julud county of South Kordofan State.
A report by the Sudan War Monitor shared photo and video evidence from the scene of the attack, showing women, children, and the elderly among the victims as well as men.
The Darfur Victims Support Organization issued a statement noting that the organization “considers this attack a grave crime that may amount to a war crime, as it deliberately targeted civilians during a peaceful religious occasion without any legitimate military justification, within the broader context of repeated aerial assaults on populated civilian areas.”
“It is more sad news,” remarked CSI’s local partner when reporting the attack.
Earlier in December, CSI had reported that dozens of civilians were killed in another drone attack carried out by the SAF on a school in Kumo in the Nuba Mountains. Most of those killed in the attack were children.
Increasing attacks on civilians in the Nuba Mountains
As Sudan’s civil war continues, the Sudanese Armed Forces are increasingly targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in the Nuba Mountains, which is home to the largest Christian community in Sudan. Yet such attacks have largely gone underreported due to the remoteness of the villages and the lack of mobile phone signals for communication.
The Nuba Mountains is an autonomous region in Sudan, which is home to a mixed Muslim-Christian population. For many decades, it has been ruled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, a secular force that has protected Christians and their religious freedom. Since the 1980s, the Sudanese government has launched repeated genocidal wars against the people of the Nuba Mountains.
Since the beginning of Sudan’s new civil war in April 2023, hundreds of thousands of people have fled to the Nuba Mountains for safety. Many of these people now find themselves once again caught up in the rising violence.
The attack on Christmas is part of a broader campaign by Sudanese Armed Forces drones and warplanes that have targeted homes, markets, and hospitals as well as military sites, notes the Sudan War Monitor. The British organization Centre for Information Resilience has documented reports of at least 384 SAF strikes resulting in a minimum of 1,719 reported civilian deaths between April 2023, when the war started, and December 2025.
CSI continues to provide humanitarian aid in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile regions of Sudan, especially to families displaced by the civil war.
