Sarah, a 27-year-old university student, was at a crowded gas station in the town of el-Obeid, on the front lines of Sudan’s civil war, when a drone attacked her without warning.

She says the station lit up before everything went dark. “In front of us there were injuries, blood, burned cars and destroyed cars.”

We have withheld the student’s real name for her safety in a city that is the latest flashpoint in the three-year war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Sarah told the BBC by phone that she was lucky to survive the attack but had suffered injuries.

“I got shrapnel in my leg and hand because I was outside the car when the second missile hit.”

Currently under army control, El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state with a population of around 500,000, has one of the largest military bases in central Sudan.

But the military has been unable to repel the drone attacks: 27 attacked the city in June, the highest monthly total since the conflict began, according to the violence monitoring group Acled.

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said at least 45 people were killed and 41 wounded in 15 drone strikes between June 6 and 28.

He added that the city has been under siege-like conditions for 18 months, with summary executions, kidnappings, torture and sexual violence along routes used by people fleeing the conflict.

“The signals from El-Obeid are clear and unmistakable: another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan,” Turk said last week in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the US-based Yale University Humanitarian Research Laboratory, told the BBC that El-Obeid was strategically important to the warring sides as it lay between the RSF-controlled west of the country and the largely army-held east.

“If you control El-Obeid, you control the road to the capital, Khartoum and [its twin city] Omdurman, so the army has to defend El-Obeid,” he said.