Wadi Seidna owes its existence to the Second World War, when Allied ferry routes to the Middle East and India crossed the Sudan. English Wikipedia, the only source reached for this period, records that No. 114 Maintenance Unit of the Royal Air Force was formed here in April 1942 and disbanded in February 1943, and that the field was used for tropical trials of aircraft.

The Americans arrived too. The US Army Air Forces’ 46th Ferrying Squadron was activated at Wadi Seidna on 2 December 1942, according to the same article, and flew ferry routes reaching from El Geneina in Darfur to Karachi and from Cairo to Tehran. On 7 May 1944 the RAF set up No. 115 (Transport) Wing here. Wikipedia says the field was no longer in British use by 1946; the date on which it passed to Sudanese hands is not documented in the sources reached.

Independent Sudan made Wadi Seidna one of the twin pillars of its air force. English Wikipedia names Khartoum and Wadi Sayyidna as the service’s two main air bases in 1991, and calls Wadi Sayyidna "a long-established training center and airbase", where No. 2 Fighter-Attack Squadron flew Chinese J-7 fighters for a period. The army’s Military Academy, which trains its officers, is also at Wadi Seidna.

Its position north of Omdurman also put it in the path of the war in Darfur when that war came to the capital. On 10 May 2008 the Justice and Equality Movement attacked Omdurman; a 2018 opinion column in Sudan Tribune by Mahmoud A. Suleiman says JEM forces entered the city from the north "through Wadi Seidna military base". Which squadrons and how many aircraft are based here today has not been published by the government or major media, and is not given here.

When fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Forces erupted on 15 April 2023, Khartoum’s international airport became a battlefield. Wadi Seidna, held by the army, became the exit. Sudan Tribune reported on 24 April 2023 that the United States, Britain, Germany and France relied on the base for their evacuations, while Qatar and Jordan used Port Sudan. The army accused the RSF of obstructing convoys; the RSF’s deputy commander said he had ordered his forces not to hinder the evacuations of foreign nationals.

The British operation was the largest. The UK government says the RAF flew more than 20 flights from the airfield in a week, the last on the evening of 29 April, and that 2,197 people had been brought out of Sudan by 1 May 2023, from more than 20 nations and aged from five days to 92 years. Royal Marines of 40 Commando were among the units deployed, and engineers of 51 Parachute Squadron repaired the runway at night between flights as the surface broke up under the traffic: the first operational runway repair by British forces since the Falklands conflict of 1982, according to the Ministry of Defence. The UK handed the airfield back to Sudanese authorities, it said, in better condition than it found it.

From 2024 the RSF took the war to Wadi Seidna from the air. On 21 March 2024 a kamikaze drone destroyed the air force’s last C-130H Hercules as it taxied, according to English Wikipedia citing The Eurasian Times. On 7 June 2024 the army said its air defences downed two RSF drones over the Wadi Seidna military area, and in October 2025, as Khartoum airport prepared to reopen, Sudan Tribune reported further drones aimed at what it called "a key army base". By mid-March 2026, citing military communiqués, the paper counted more than 15 loitering munitions aimed at Wadi Seidna and nearby army sites in Khartoum North, which it said were destroyed.

The base’s worst day of the war was not an attack the RSF claimed there. On 25 February 2025 an Antonov transport crashed into the Omdurman district of Al-Iskan shortly after take-off from Wadi Seidna. The army blamed a technical malfunction; Major General Bahr Ahmed Bahr, commander of the Bahri military area, was among the dead. Sudan Tribune initially reported at least five civilians killed on the ground; English Wikipedia, citing Al Jazeera, gives a total of at least 46 dead. The RSF had claimed to shoot down an army Ilyushin at Nyala in the 48 hours before; it made no claim for the Omdurman crash in the report cited here.