Sudan / El-Obeid - The Warring Self Strikes the Mourner, Erasing the Ritual of Grief

Event Baseline: A drone strike hit a funeral procession in el-Obeid, Sudan, killing civilians. Rights groups accuse the RSF paramilitary of the attack amid the civil war.

They gathered to bury the dead, and they became the dead. The target was not a military base, but a procession of grief. This is the logical endpoint of a mind that has divided the world into friend and enemy. The other is so completely dehumanized that even their sorrow is a threat.

The drone, a supreme instrument of detached thought, sees only geographical coordinates. It does not hear the keening. It does not smell the incense. The operator, miles away, kills what his screen tells him is a target, and his own self remains untouched. But the self is the target. Every bomb that falls shatters the fragile illusion that we are separate. The war will end when the last human realizes that the funeral is their own.