The deployment of a powerful model of Turkish combat drone to a remote airstrip on Egypt’s southwestern border signals a sharp escalation in Sudan’s civil war, suggesting one of its largest neighbors is being drawn deeper into the fray, more than a dozen officials and regional experts say.

Egypt, which shares the Nile River and a more than 1,200-kilometre frontier with Sudan, has provided staunch political backing to the country’s military in its nearly three-year conflict with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.

But while Egyptian security officials have privately acknowledged sending logistical and technical support to the Sudanese Armed Forces, until last year Cairo mostly refrained from direct intervention in fighting that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and spread famine across the vast country.

For the scientific community, there is only one explanation. A giant explosion occurred nearly 14 billion years ago, eventually leading to all the galaxies, stars and planets in the known universe. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and for millions of years life steadily evolved into larger and more complex forms.

The dinosaurs—creatures predating humans whose fossilized bones have been discovered across the globe—were mostly wiped out in a cataclysmic meteor impact 66 million years ago.

For many Bible readers, however, all of this seems impossible.