War-weary civilians have looked up at a blackened sky in Port Sudan this week as the two-year war they had fled finally reached their once-safe haven on Sudan's Red Sea coast.

"Panic is setting in, people are terrified," Port Sudan native Sami Hussein Abdel Wahab told AFP as smoke billowed behind him.

Giant plumes of thick smoke have hung in Port Sudan's skies since Sunday, when the first drone strikes, blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), struck the city.

Tuesday's dawn attack on the wartime de facto capital struck the airport, fuel depots and a power substation, grounding all international flights in and out of Sudan and causing a city-wide blackout.

"It's us, the citizens, that they're targeting," Mohamed Ahmed Karar, 57, told AFP, referring to the RSF, at war with the regular army since April 2023.

Another resident, Salem Omar Ibrahim, said: "They hit everything that benefits........

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