Sudan civil war atrocities cast spotlight on UAE

The bloody aftermath of the takeover of the city of El Fasher by Sudanese paramilitaries has put a spotlight back on the alleged role of the United Arab Emirates in Sudan’s metastasising civil war.

Arms trafficking monitors, rights groups and Sudan’s army-backed government have repeatedly accused the UAE of funnelling weapons and resources to the Rapid Support Forces.

The militia — whose leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, has since 2023 been locked in a power struggle with his former allies in the Sudanese Armed Forces — was accused by the UN of “mass killings, rape, attacks against humanitarian workers and looting” after overrunning El Fasher last week.

Abu Dhabi strenuously rejects claims that it has armed and enabled the RSF, which Washington has previously accused of committing genocide.

But a UN panel of experts last year presented what they described as “credible” evidence Abu Dhabi had supplied arms to the RSF via Chad, while Bulgaria separately told UN investigators mortar rounds captured from the militia entering Sudan in 2024 had previously been exported to the UAE. No re-export permission had been sought. The UN did not make either set of findings public.

In May, an Amnesty International investigation found that advanced Chinese weaponry including guided missiles and howitzers had “almost certainly” been re-exported to the RSF by the UAE.

And the US in January sanctioned a network of UAE-based companies for providing military equipment and financial support to the militia.

A former UN weapons monitor who has tracked UAE involvement in the war described the Gulf state’s denials as “geostrategic gaslighting”.

The massacres in El Fasher began just as talks aimed at securing a truce fell apart in Washington between the so-called Quad, made up of the US, the UAE, Egypt — which backs the SAF — and Saudi Arabia.

The collapse of the negotiations was in part, according to people briefed on the discussions, because of the UAE’s position on El Fasher: Abu Dhabi wanted both sides to withdraw from the area, although the army was under siege and provided the only protection between civilians and a militia with a long record of committing atrocities against non-Arab tribes in Darfur.

A UAE official said the Quad had “underlined that there is no military solution to the conflict in Sudan”.

“We categorically reject any claims of providing any form of support to either warring party since the onset of the civil war, and condemn atrocities” by both sides, the official said, adding that the UAE had consistently supported “efforts to achieve an immediate ceasefire”.

Weapons experts and human rights monitors, including Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab and Dutch peace organisation PAX, have tracked the RSF’s recent transformation to a heavily armed force with drones, guided missiles and air defence systems.

The expansion of the RSF’s arsenal has coincided with regular cargo flights originating in the UAE, often transiting via a UAE-controlled base in Bosaso, Somalia, according to flight-tracking experts.

The flights continue on to airfields in Libya, Chad and elsewhere in the region via an evolving air bridge from the UAE to RSF-controlled territory, which has been documented previously by the UN panel of experts that reports to the Security Council on Sudan arms embargo violations.

Sudan’s army-led government in September provided evidence to the UN that allegedly showed the UAE had facilitated the recruitment of Colombian mercenaries to support the RSF, also via Bosaso — accusations that Abu Dhabi denied.

“Arms logistics and mercenary recruitment for the RSF are provided via private companies, which appear at arm’s length,” said Mike Lewis, an aviation and arms control expert who has worked on previous UN panels monitoring the arms embargo on Sudan.

“But if aircraft carrying weapons or fighters are passing through the UAE without the government knowing about it and being able to stop it, then at best they’re not in control of their borders and airports. At worst, they’re allowing it to take place.”

Both the Biden and Trump administrations, for whom the UAE is an important ally, avoided publicly engaging the issue of Abu Dhabi’s alleged involvement with the RSF.

But a former Biden administration official said the US intelligence community had indications that the UAE was sending weapons to the militia, despite assurances to the contrary: “You could not have a straight conversation with them because they wouldn’t acknowledge it,” the official said.

The latest atrocities have raised hackles in Washington. Jim Risch, the Republican Senate foreign relations committee chair, called last week on the Trump administration to designate the RSF as a terrorist group.

Democrat senator Chris Van Hollen and congresswoman Sara Jacobs also reintroduced an act to Congress that would halt US weapons exports to the UAE until it provided evidence it has ceased support for the militia.

“By providing weapons to the RSF, the UAE is aiding and abetting genocide. Their continued weapons shipments also directly contradict the assurances they provided to the United States,” Van Hollen said.

Cameron Hudson, a Sudan expert who served previously on the US National Security Council, said overlooking the UAE’s role in the conflict “requires us to look foolish”. “That is what is ultimately going to get the Emiratis in trouble,” he said.

The UAE’s relationship with Hemeti hails back to a decade ago, when it recruited RSF fighters and SAF soldiers to join a Saudi-led coalition that intervened in Yemen’s civil war to fight the Iranian-backed Houthis, according to analysts and rights organisations.

That collaboration, said a Sudanese civil society leader who has chronicled the civil war, cemented ties between Abu Dhabi and Hemeti.

“The Emirates have unconditionally extended support to the RSF not only in weaponry but in providing diplomatic leverage in east and central Africa,” the civil society leader said, asking not to be named. “They have helped the RSF build an impressive outreach.”

One of the prime drivers of the UAE’s involvement, analysts say, has been to prevent the re-emergence of Islamist factions embedded in the Sudanese army and allied militia, some of them associated with the former regime of Omar al-Bashir.

Bashir’s regime, which was overthrown in 2019 following months of street protests, sheltered other Islamist militants from the region, including at one point Osama bin Laden.

“This war is nothing but for [Islamists] to come back again to rule Sudan,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati academic.

The UAE “maybe, is just one of many countries in the world who recognise this fact and is doing something about it”, he said, stressing that Abu Dhabi was providing support to Sudanese civilians and not weapons to the RSF. 

Abu Dhabi has acknowledged previously providing weapons to the army and RSF after backing the military council — which included both Hemeti and de facto president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan — that ousted the transitional government that succeeded Bashir. But it said no arms transfers took place after the civil war broke out.

Sudan had also long been central to the UAE’s bid to gain a greater strategic footprint over Red Sea trade and the Horn of Africa.

Before the war broke out in 2023, the UAE was bidding to build a new port in Sudan and develop a vast hinterland of Nile valley agricultural land.

While those plans are stalled, other commercial interests have continued. Much of Sudan’s burgeoning gold production is trafficked through Dubai, according to a report by Swissaid, including from mines controlled by Al Junaid, a holding company controlled by Hemeti’s family.

Both the RSF and the SAF have drawn in external backers during the civil war, with the army gaining backing from Egypt, Turkey and in the past Iran.

The UAE, however, placed its bets on Hemeti to protect its commercial interests, said Jean Loup Samman, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University in Singapore.

“At a certain point they considered Hemeti was their guy. He qualified as Abu Dhabi’s understanding of a strong man — someone usually from a military background, perceived to be against Islamist forces. That’s a common theme in all the regional crises where they got involved.”

An official close to the negotiations in Washington said the SAF had obstructed talks within the Quad, arguing the fall of El Fasher “could have been avoided had the SAF chosen to engage constructively in peace efforts instead of walking away from every initiative aimed at ending the war”.

A person briefed by the Sudan army-led government on the peace efforts said that in discussions before the fall of El Fasher, the UAE demanded Sudan recant accusations it has made against Abu Dhabi after which “they could talk rapprochement and investment”.

Sudan said recanting was out of the question and that the talks would be about “reparations not investment”. The discussions were shortlived, according to the person briefed.

Additional reporting by Andrew England