The U.A.E.’s Covert Role in Sudan’s Civil War

A guest article by Mohamed Mohamed

While claiming neutrality, the United Arab Emirates quietly armed a militia accused of atrocities and profited from the conflict.

Since April 2023, Sudan’s internal power struggle has spiraled into one of the world’s deadliest wars. Officially, it’s a battle between the national army and a paramilitary force. In practice, it’s a war engineered by foreign money, weapons, and ambition.

At the center of it: the United Arab Emirates.

While publicly posing as a neutral mediator and humanitarian donor, the UAE has quietly armed the RSF, a militia accused of ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the systematic starvation of civilians. It hasn’t just backed a side. It has armed it, bankrolled it, and shielded it from consequence.

Once hailed as a modernizing force in the Gulf, the UAE now stands credibly accused of sponsoring war crimes in Sudan. This isn’t peacekeeping. It’s remote-control warfare.

What began as a domestic crisis has become a proxy war for gold, regional leverage, and Red Sea ports. And no foreign actor has shaped its course more covertly or more decisively than the UAE.

The Shadow Airlift

In late 2023, a United Nations panel traced at least 24 cargo flights from Emirati military airfields to Amdjarass, a remote town just across the border from RSF-held Darfur. The planes, linked to companies previously involved in arms trafficking, slipped off radar over Saudi and Sudanese airspace, only to reappear near the front lines.

Their cargo was undeclared. But the aftermath wasn’t.

On the ground, mortar shells recovered in Darfur bore serial numbers tied to Bulgarian weapons legally exported to the UAE. Abu Dhabi wasn’t just watching this war. It was fueling it.

The UAE denies all involvement. Officials claim the flights delivered humanitarian aid, accusing Sudan’s military of fabricating evidence and, more recently, of smuggling weapons themselves.

Sudanese officials call it a smokescreen. Brigadier General Nabil Abdallah told the Sudan Tribune: “Whenever the UAE’s failed attempts to invade Sudan are thwarted, it tries to invent a new lie, such as arms smuggling.”

Gold, Dependency, and the Cost of Calling It Out

The RSF’s firepower runs on gold.

Since the early 2010s, the UAE has been Sudan’s top buyer. In 2023 alone, it imported 97% of Sudan’s official exports, over $1 billion worth. But that’s just the legal trade. Smuggling routes stretch across Chad, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Egypt, channeling conflict gold into Dubai’s shady markets. There, it’s cleaned, resold, and shipped, no questions asked.

The RSF takes a cut at every step. Its commanders and shell companies, some with links to Emirati fronts, run the trade like a logistics firm. Gold goes out. Weapons come in. A closed loop of extraction and violence.

But the RSF is only half the story. The other half is the state trying to fight it, and the bind it’s trapped in.

Even as Sudanese generals accused the UAE of fueling the war, they remained wired into its financial systems. In 2023 and 2024, the UAE absorbed nearly all of Sudan’s official exports, mostly gold. Emirati-linked banks, including Dubai Islamic Bank and Bankak, kept the economy on life support: fuel shipments, cash transfers, currency swaps. It was a collapsing state held together by Emirati credit.

That dependency silenced Sudan’s leaders. For months, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan avoided direct confrontation. The price of calling out the UAE was steep: fuel shortages, frozen banks, and the unraveling of what little still worked. When he finally acted, it was slow and deliberate. First came the quiet expulsion of 15 Emirati diplomats in December 2023. Then, in March 2025, Sudan filed genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.

Still, the gold kept moving.

In 2022, Sudan produced 41.8 tonnes of gold. But between April and August 2023, just 2.0 tonnes were declared from army-held areas, 1.8 tonnes of which went straight to Dubai. That pattern held through 2024 according to Sudanese officials. By February, output surged to 64 tonnes. Nearly all of it still flowed to the UAE, generating over $1.5 billion. Even as Sudan denounced Emirati support for the RSF, it remained financially tethered to Abu Dhabi.

The contradiction wasn’t just bitter. It was structural.

That structure broke on May 6, the day after the ICJ dismissed Sudan’s case.

A wave of drone strikes hit Port Sudan: fuel depots, the airport, and the army’s main base. Sudan blamed the RSF. But in a televised address, al-Burhan named the sponsor: the United Arab Emirates. He called it an “aggressor state,” severed ties, and closed the embassy. Behind him, black smoke rose over the Red Sea.

A Pattern of Proxy Extraction

Sudan isn’t an outlier. It’s a blueprint.

In Libya, the UAE once armed Khalifa Haftar in defiance of UN embargoes. Today, it’s also courting the Tripoli government, a dual-track strategy to hedge power on both sides. In Yemen, it seized key ports under the cover of coalition warfare. In Ethiopia, it supplied drones during the Tigray conflict, a war that killed over 600,000 people. In Somalia, it built covert military outposts in breakaway regions. In South Sudan and Chad, it allegedly funneled weapons to the RSF through bases disguised as humanitarian hubs.

This isn’t opportunism. It’s a model: build influence usually through proxies, then extract value from the chaos. First come the networks, weapons, money, training, political cover. Then come the contracts, the minerals, the ports.

Gold is a key part of that.

In 2022, the UAE imported over 1,000 tonnes of it, worth $59.5 billion. More than half came from African countries. That’s nearly 8% of its GDP.

But most of it can’t be traced. Between 2012 and 2022, the UAE imported 2,500 tonnes of undeclared African gold, valued at $115 billion. In 2024, it suspended 32 refineries over anti–money laundering violations. But enforcement is rare, especially when the gold flows out of war zones.

The Human Cost

The RSF isn’t waging a conventional war. It’s executing a campaign of organized atrocities.

In El Geneina and across West Darfur, RSF fighters and allied militias have systematically targeted non-Arab communities, especially the Masalit. Human Rights Watch and other monitors report tens of thousands killed, entire towns razed, and over 500,000 people forced to flee into Chad.

In Khartoum, satellite images and eyewitness accounts reveal RSF-run detention sites where more than 500 detainees reportedly died from torture and starvation. A nearby mass grave may contain at least 550 bodies.

In February 2025, RSF forces massacred over 200 civilians in raids on White Nile State. Two months later, they stormed the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, one of the country’s largest, killing at least 300 people in a single day.

This isn’t collateral damage. In Darfur, it’s systematic, ethnically targeted violence. Elsewhere, it’s a campaign of terror, brutal, indiscriminate, and unchecked.

Some governments have called it genocide. Most remain silent. The UN has issued warnings.

Human rights groups have documented the crimes in detail. And yet, the RSF continues to operate with near-total impunity.

The Stakes of Silence

On May 5, the International Court of Justice dismissed Sudan’s genocide case against the UAE, not for lack of evidence, but for lack of jurisdiction. The UAE had opted out of Article IX of the Genocide Convention, shielding itself from prosecution. It was a legal technicality. But a damning one.

Because if a state can arm a militia accused of genocide, profit from the violence through global gold markets, and escape scrutiny through diplomatic fine print, what does that say about the system meant to prevent mass atrocity and mass exploitation?

What does it teach other powers, both entrenched and emerging, who are drifting through that same gray zone, that the leap from “stability” to annihilation can come without consequences? The UAE’s image as a modern, stabilizing force was always a carefully managed illusion. Behind the branding lies something older, and uglier.

Its rise was built on the backs of the global poor: Nepali, Bengali, and Filipino laborers at home; Sudanese and Yemeni civilians abroad. First through wage exploitation. Now through proxy warfare and blood-soaked trade.

This isn’t opportunism. It’s a model, a 21st-century form of imperial power: sanitized on the surface, savage in execution, and shielded from consequence.

What This Means for Sudan and the Army

May 6 wasn’t just a diplomatic rupture. It marked a shift in the war itself.

By cutting ties with the UAE and naming it an “aggressor state,” Sudan severed one of its last major economic lifelines. Abu Dhabi was still buying its gold, backing its banks, and propping up parts of the civilian economy. That’s over. Fuel shortages, inflation spikes, and deeper collapse are now inevitable.

Militarily, the stakes are just as high. Port Sudan was the army’s safe zone, its fallback capital and its window to the world. The drone strikes there sent a clear message: nowhere is off limits. The war has reached the coast.

The break with the UAE didn’t give the SAF a new message, it amplified an old one. For over a year, Sudan’s generals have framed this war as a battle for the nation’s sovereignty.

Accusations against the UAE, Chad, and others were part of the narrative. But now, with the Port Sudan attack and the ICJ case dismissed, that framing is harder to ignore, even as much of the world keeps looking away.

The war isn’t really ending. It’s mutating.

The RSF, weakened but still well-armed, is likely to fall back on guerrilla tactics and hit-and-run violence. A shift toward insurgency, if not in name, then in practice. The army, having retaken Khartoum, will try to convert battlefield momentum into political dominance. What comes next is a grind: raids, reprisals, and escalation, unless the UAE intervenes more openly to keep its proxy alive.

Name the Patron

The RSF doesn’t survive on its own. It runs on foreign support. And among its backers, no state has played a more central, more brazen role than the United Arab Emirates, airlifting weapons, laundering gold, and hiding behind diplomatic fine print.

The ICJ may have stepped aside. But the facts haven’t.

We know how this war has been sustained. We know who made it possible. And we know the systems of offshore finance, covert supply chains, and geopolitical indifference, that allowed it to keep going.

None of this makes the SAF blameless. Their record is long, and it’s ugly. This isn’t a war of good guys versus bad guys, if any war ever was. But one side is committing genocide. One side is building mass graves. One side is running brutal detention camps and wiping out entire communities. That’s the difference. And that’s why the international community can’t afford to play neutral.

Name the enabler. Investigate the crimes. Break the model, or watch it spread.

Because what the UAE built in Sudan isn’t just a war. It’s a template, for how to arm a militia, bankroll a genocide, profit and walk away untouched. And other powers are paying attention.

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Mohamed Mohamed guest wrote this article for the Africa Review. You can find more of his work at: piecesandperiod.com

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Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/14/leaked-un-experts-report-raises-fresh-concerns-over-uaes-role-in-sudan-war

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