Why the UAE Is Fueling Sudan's Apocalyptic Civil War

By most measures, it is the worst war happening anywhere in the world. Since fighting erupted between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, Sudan has not simply plunged into the abyss. It hit the bottom and then kept tunneling down through the bedrock.

The statistics are grimly familiar to anyone tracking the conflict: an estimated 150,000 dead, twelve million displaced, cities sacked and burned, famine stalking the land, and ethnic cleansing underway in Darfur. Taken together, they amount to a portrait of hell on Earth.

Yet while the conflict in Sudan is a civil war, it is not the Sudanese themselves who are sustaining it. The warring combatants are being kept awash in gold and weapons by outside forces. Egypt, Qatar, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, the Houthis: there is no shortage of outside powers willing to pour gasoline onto this African inferno. But one nation is contributing to the war more than any other, the United Arab Emirates.

Since the summer of 2023, Abu Dhabi has clandestinely delivered ammunition and high-tech weapons to the RSF, supplied intelligence, and treated wounded fighters, even as the paramilitaries carry out a genocide. It has done all of this in pursuit of goals it may now be further from achieving than ever before.

Devils on Horseback

To the outside world, it initially appeared like nothing so much as a great humanitarian act, an attempt to alleviate the suffering of Sudan’s civilians. When the UAE established a base at the small Chadian city of Amdjarass near the Sudanese border, Emirati officials were quick to stress that they were building a field hospital, one that would treat hundreds of those escaping the devastating conflict next door.

Behind this concerned facade lay a darker motive. Since the base at Amdjarass began receiving regular cargo flights in mid-2023, evidence has mounted that treating wounded refugees is the last thing on Abu Dhabi’s mind. In January 2024, a UN investigation declared it had “credible” evidence that the hospital was a front for massive weapons transfers.

That summer, the State Department-funded Sudan Conflict Observatory released tracking data for 32 flights that it concluded with “near certainty” were transporting weapons to the conflict zone. Western intelligence agencies, the official Sudanese government, and investigations by outlets such as the New York Times have all reached the same conclusion. Far from a field hospital, the Amdjarass base is being used to transfer huge amounts of firepower to one faction in Sudan’s chaotic civil war. It may also serve as a hub for intelligence gathering and treating wounded fighters, all in the hope of propelling the Rapid Support Forces to victory.

To call this a significant intervention would be to underplay the UAE’s role in the conflict. While other nations are meddling in Sudan’s civil war, none appears to have so consistently and steadfastly supported one side, nor spent so much in money or political capital to swing the outcome. For its part, Abu Dhabi strenuously denies all of these allegations. Despite the wealth of reports from international bodies and the US government, the UAE’s position remains that its only interest in Sudan is humanitarian.

That is a hard claim to swallow. As the New York Times summed up the feelings of diplomats and officials: “Eager to cement its role as a regional kingmaker, the wealthy Persian Gulf petrostate is expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to fighters rampaging across the country.” And “rampaging” is the correct word. Flush with Emirati weapons and training, the RSF has helped turn the war into a byword for atrocity.

A War That Engulfed a Country

Kicking off in April 2023, the Sudanese conflict at first looked like it might be confined to a quick showdown in the capital, Khartoum, between the regular army, or SAF, and the RSF, which had until recently governed alongside it. Instead, the fighting quickly expanded in scope and geography until the whole country was in flames.

Among the areas worst hit was the western region of Darfur, where an earlier iteration of the RSF, then known as the Janjaweed, carried out a genocide nearly two decades ago. As fighting broke out this time, the group mobilized to finish the job, overrunning and sacking city after city in a spectacular display of violence. In El Geneina alone, an estimated 15,000 people from the Masalit ethnicity were systematically slaughtered.

Although El Geneina was a particularly extreme example, the pattern was repeated wherever the RSF seized power. Over the course of 22 months, the group has been accused of everything from looting to ethnic cleansing, to the enslavement and mass abuse of women under its rule.

This is not to say that its opponents are angels. The Sudanese Armed Forces are known for indiscriminately bombing civilian neighborhoods, carrying out extrajudicial executions, and have even been accused of deploying chemical weapons. Both factions have used starvation as a weapon, leading to what appears to be a famine that may soon eclipse even Ethiopia’s 1983-85 famine in terms of body count. Still, even when measured against the callousness of the military, the RSF stand apart, a rampaging, genocidal force that the expert Alex de Waal has said “operate like human locusts.”

That record makes the central question all the sharper. Why is the UAE supporting them? What could Abu Dhabi hope to gain from entangling itself with these self-proclaimed “devils on horseback”? Before turning to motive, it is worth laying out exactly how the Emirates have tried to ensure an RSF victory.

How Abu Dhabi Kept the RSF in the Fight

When war first broke out in Khartoum, the general assumption was that the army would win a quick, bloody victory. The military had airpower, while the RSF did not. Given that overwhelming advantage, there seemed little reason to think the paramilitaries stood a chance. That they did, in reality, is entirely due to Abu Dhabi.

In a confidential memo leaked to the press, the European Union ambassador to Sudan wrote that “the delivery of drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers and MANPADS to the R.S.F. by the U.A.E. has helped it neutralize the [military’s] air superiority.” The key item there is the MANPADS, or Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. Supplied with these weapons, and trained in their use by the Wagner Group, the RSF was able to blunt the military’s one major advantage.

Emirati largesse did not start and end with air defenses. Over the 22 months of conflict, the UAE has supplied the paramilitaries with more than enough kit to sustain their war. Chief among these donations are Chinese drones, used for battlefield surveillance and likely piloted remotely from the UAE itself. They also include armored personnel carriers built by Emirati companies, such as the Nimr Ajban.

This last item is particularly controversial because it incorporates the French-made Galix system, which Amnesty International described in a recent report as “a defense system for land forces that releases decoys, smoke and projectiles to counter close-range threats.” Built into the Emirati APCs under a joint manufacturing agreement between Lacroix Defense and the Edge Group, the system’s deployment in Sudan breaks an EU-wide embargo on sending any military kit into the country. That comes on top of the longstanding UN Security Council resolution that the UAE is already breaking by shipping kit into Darfur.

Then there are the crates and crates of munitions. When the army retook vital sectors of the city of Omdurman, it claimed to have captured piles of Serbian-manufactured munitions that had been sold to the UAE. After the strategic town of Wad Madani fell to the military earlier in the war, videos circulated showing warehouses full of Emirati missiles. Taken together, all this materiel has allowed the RSF to sustain the fight far beyond their natural point of culmination.

Buying Out the Army’s Allies

It is not just physical weapons that the paramilitaries rely on, but also Emirati influence with other nations. Multiple countries are intervening in Sudan’s conflict, from Russia to Turkey to Qatar to Yemen’s Houthis, all of them responsible for prolonging the war and causing vast suffering. What has been most telling, though, is the behavior of nations now taking a back seat.

One such nation is Egypt, one of the Sudanese army’s traditional backers. Initially, Cairo supported the military. Then Abu Dhabi offered to invest $35 billion in Egypt, and that support all but faded away. As a result, the army turned to Iran for help, pulling another regional power into the conflict.

Then there is Chad, where the Amdjarass air base is located. By rights, Chad should be supporting ethnic Darfuri militias against the Rapid Support Forces. Much of the country’s military leadership comes from the Zaghawa group, one of the communities the RSF is massacring in Darfur. Throughout the 2000s, the Chadian military supplied arms to Zaghawa forces fighting in Darfur against an earlier form of the RSF.

According to the International Crisis Group, there is significant pressure from Chad’s armed forces for President Déby to do something similar today.

Instead, Déby is allowing Emirati cargo planes to supply the paramilitaries via Amdjarass. The likely reason is a $1.5 billion loan from Abu Dhabi, almost equivalent to the Chadian government’s entire annual budget. In other words, the UAE is not just sending weapons. It is spending considerable sums of money to keep some of the Sudanese military’s potential allies out of the fight.

What could be so important about this one war that Abu Dhabi is willing to go to such lengths to influence the outcome, an effort that has even included potential war crimes such as disguising weapons shipments with the logo of the Red Crescent, a symbol protected by the Geneva Conventions? With no insight into the inner workings of the Emirati government, no one outside it can say for certain. But the most plausible theories range from cynical opportunism to Abu Dhabi playing a much longer game.

The Red Sea Theory and Its Problems

Perhaps the strangest part of the UAE’s intervention in Sudan is how sharply it seems to cut against the country’s own interests. Before the war erupted, Abu Dhabi had already signed a major deal with Khartoum to build a coveted port on the Red Sea. Millions more had been sunk into agricultural holdings, intended to turn Sudan into the Emirates’ breadbasket.

With the onset of conflict, much of that agricultural land has been torched. And while the RSF has seized most of Darfur, it is the army that controls the Red Sea coastline. This last point matters, because analysts looking to explain the UAE’s backing of the paramilitaries often point to Abu Dhabi’s desire for a Red Sea port. As Alexander Rondos of the Africa Center told the Washington Post, “Whoever controls Sudan, controls the Red Sea.”

Yet even at the military’s lowest moment in the war, when it temporarily lost control of vital agricultural states to the RSF, no one thought the coast was imperiled. Instead, the talk was of a Sudan that would be de facto partitioned like Libya, with the army clinging on in Port Sudan even as the interior was lost. As such, it is hard to see how going all in on backing the RSF could have helped the UAE achieve a Red Sea port.

Especially because, and this bears emphasizing, Abu Dhabi had already secured that prize before the war broke out. If a Red Sea port were the goal, the intervention has been a spectacular misfire.

That is why some turn to more personal reasons to explain Abu Dhabi’s behavior. In this case, the debt that Emirati leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, believes he owes the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, a general known as Hemedti. Back in the late 2010s, when the RSF and the army were both allied under Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, Hemedti delivered boots on the ground to help the UAE’s intervention in the Yemeni war. In a conversation with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in December, Sheikh Mohamed seemed to suggest that his support for the RSF was payback, saying he “owes” Hemedti.

Gold, Influence, and a New Scramble for Africa

Perhaps things really are as simple as a personal debt being repaid. But if so, it is a debt that has come with clear upsides for the Emirates, chief among them access to Sudanese gold. Sudan is a major gold producer, and most of that gold has traditionally been funneled through the UAE, specifically through Dubai. In 2022, the Emirates officially imported 39 tons of it from Sudan, with perhaps another 60 tons smuggled in via intermediaries in places such as Chad, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

Since the war erupted, both the RSF and the military have smuggled large volumes of gold to buy weapons and ammunition. As Foreign Affairs put it: “Gold has been a major driver of the war in Sudan. The RSF is more deeply involved in the gold trade, but both sides have smuggled and sold large volumes of gold to fuel their war machines. The UAE currently benefits from this trade.”

The extent of those benefits is hazy, especially after the outgoing Biden administration sanctioned Emirati companies involved in laundering Sudanese gold. But the billions of dollars to be made smuggling bullion would at least give a concrete upside to the UAE-RSF connection.

On a more abstract level, there is an argument that the world is witnessing a new Scramble for Africa, only the major players are no longer European colonial powers but a plethora of countries in the Gulf and wider Middle East. The past few years have seen regional powers such as the UAE, Turkey, and Iran inserting themselves ever more forcefully into Africa. Some of that has come in the form of benign-seeming projects, like infrastructure investment. According to the New York Times, the UAE in 2023 invested almost twice as much as China in the continent, a staggering $45 billion.

Other interventions have been more destructive. It was drones from the UAE and Turkey that helped the Ethiopian government win the devastating Tigray War. And it was UAE weapons that long helped prop up General Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya. In both cases, the interventions were made in the hope of winning influence, and in Ethiopia’s case it more than paid off.

In December 2023, Addis Ababa received Hemedti for what looked suspiciously like a state visit. But rather than just securing influence for itself, the UAE also seems intent on denying that influence to its rivals.

At the lower end, those rivalries include the frenemy relationship between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with both competing to be the Gulf’s preeminent power. At the far more tense end is the rivalry with Iran, which is intervening heavily on the side of the Sudanese military. The arrival of Iran does not explain why the UAE backed the paramilitaries from the start, since Tehran only got involved in December 2023, after eight months of fighting.

But it could explain why Abu Dhabi now feels it cannot row back, even as the army gains ground and the RSF is driven out of the strategic city of Wad Madani. In short, a multitude of factors may be keeping Abu Dhabi in this war long past the point where an RSF victory seemed possible. Through 2025, the paramilitaries have been dislodged from strategic cities across the map, yet the Emirates still back Hemedti.

Why No One Will Pressure the Emirates

All of which raises the final question: is there anything that can be done? Is there any nation or leader capable of convincing the UAE to stop supporting the RSF? It is a question without an easy answer.

In the twilight of Joe Biden’s presidency, the White House sanctioned not just RSF leader Hemedti but also multiple UAE-based companies doing business with the paramilitaries. To those with no knowledge of the conflict, this might have seemed like a shot across Abu Dhabi’s bows, a warning that the United States could pressure the Emirates into dropping the RSF whenever it wanted. But those following the Sudan war just rolled their eyes.

The Biden White House had known the paramilitaries were likely conducting genocide for months, and had known for even longer that UAE companies were helping fuel Hemedti’s war machine with Abu Dhabi’s blessing. Yet Biden still named the Emirates a “major defense partner” in the autumn of 2024, only the second nation after India to receive such an honor.

Here lies the real obstacle to pressuring the UAE to drop Hemedti: the Emirates is simply too important to Western powers to risk alienating. One of the major goals of the West in the Middle East is to contain Iran, and the UAE offers a vital counterweight to Tehran’s influence. Abu Dhabi’s relationship with Israel is warmer than that of most Gulf nations, and Emirati companies are vying to help rebuild the devastated Gaza Strip.

For the US specifically, the country hosts around 5,000 military personnel, including at the vital Al Dhafra Air Base and the Jebel Ali deep-water port. It also buys vast amounts of Western kit, spending billions of dollars on hardware from America and France.

None of that might matter if the war in Sudan were a significant priority for the Western alliance. But it ranks low on almost everyone’s agenda. China, the Ukraine war, Iran, North Korea, Russia, military spending, and trade wars all rank far higher than the devastation unfolding across Africa’s third-largest nation.

Where Incentives Might Yet Align

That is not to say no one cares. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has singled out the UAE as a bad actor in the Sudan conflict, saying at his Senate confirmation hearing: “As part of our engagement, we also need to raise the fact that they are openly supporting an entity that is carrying out a genocide.”

The expert Cameron Hudson has argued in Foreign Affairs that there are good reasons for the Trump White House to care about what happens in Sudan. A major one is that the longer the war drags on, the greater the chance that the country’s deposed Islamist regime mounts a comeback. That is the same regime long sanctioned by the US for sheltering and supporting terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.

Were Washington to pursue blocking the Islamists’ return as a specific goal, it might even be able to get the UAE on board. After all, one of the justifications MBZ has offered for backing the RSF is that they would act as a “bulwark against” the Islamists in Sudan, something Abu Dhabi sees as vital for regional stability.

So there are clearly places where incentives could align. The problem is that no one seems in much of a hurry to link them up. And the longer the war goes on, the closer the country comes to complete collapse, and the more outside powers, like Iran, intervene with their own end goals in mind.

After all of that, one can only hope to have shed at least a little light on why Abu Dhabi may be fueling this most destructive of wars. Honestly, though, the whole thing remains something of a mystery, fueled by a suspicion that the Emirates backed the wrong horse and is now doubling down on a bad choice, hoping against hope not to lose everything on a foolish bet.

And while they do, the war keeps raging. More bombardments destroy hospitals and massacre civilians at markets. The RSF continues its mass abuse and enslavement of women in the territory it controls. Famine spreads, cities burn, and children die of malnutrition on a scale perhaps not seen in decades.

As every day of indignity passes, Sudan inches closer to becoming a failed state, with all the global instability that would inspire. The United Arab Emirates may not have started this war, but it has helped keep it running. The sooner someone manages to convince Abu Dhabi to stop its weapons transfers, through pressure or diplomacy, the better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is fighting in Sudan’s civil war, and how did it start?

The war began in April 2023 between Sudan’s regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, two factions that had until recently governed the country side by side. What looked at first like a quick showdown in Khartoum rapidly expanded until the entire country was engulfed, with the western region of Darfur suffering particularly brutal RSF attacks, including the systematic slaughter of an estimated 15,000 people from the Masalit ethnicity in El Geneina alone.

What weapons and resources has the UAE supplied to the Rapid Support Forces?

According to a leaked EU memo and other reporting, Abu Dhabi has delivered drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, and MANPADS air-defense systems that neutralized the Sudanese army’s air superiority. It has also supplied Chinese surveillance drones likely piloted remotely from the UAE, Nimr Ajban armored personnel carriers fitted with the French-made Galix system, and crates of munitions, including Serbian-made ammunition and Emirati missiles later captured by the army.

What is the Amdjarass base and why is it controversial?

The UAE presented its base at Amdjarass in Chad as a field hospital to treat refugees fleeing the Sudanese conflict. A January 2024 UN investigation found “credible” evidence it was instead a front for massive weapons transfers, and the US-funded Sudan Conflict Observatory concluded with “near certainty” that 32 tracked flights were carrying weapons to the conflict zone. Western intelligence agencies and the Sudanese government reached the same conclusion, while Abu Dhabi continues to deny all allegations.

What theories explain why the UAE is backing the RSF?

Several overlapping theories have been proposed: a personal debt MBZ believes he owes RSF commander Hemedti for supplying troops to the UAE’s Yemen intervention; access to Sudanese gold smuggled through Dubai; a desire for a Red Sea port (though the UAE had already secured one before the war); and a wish to deny influence to rivals, particularly Iran, which entered the conflict on the army’s side in December 2023. The intervention may also reflect Abu Dhabi’s broader strategy to act as a regional kingmaker across Africa.

Why haven’t Western powers pressured the UAE to stop backing the RSF?

The Emirates is seen as too strategically important to alienate. It serves as a counterweight to Iran, maintains a warm relationship with Israel, hosts around 5,000 US military personnel at sites including Al Dhafra Air Base and Jebel Ali, and spends billions on American and French arms. The Biden administration sanctioned UAE-linked companies involved in the Sudan trade yet still named the Emirates a “major defense partner” in autumn 2024, illustrating how geopolitical priorities consistently override pressure over Sudan.

Sources

1. Foreign Affairs: The UAE’s Secret War in Sudan
2. The New York Times: UAE and Sudan’s Civil War
3. The Washington Post: Sudan War, Weapons, UAE and Iran
4. The Guardian: Smoking-gun evidence points to UAE involvement in Sudan’s civil war
5. Amnesty International: French-manufactured weapons system identified in conflict
6. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: Invisible and severe death toll of Sudan conflict revealed
7. World Food Programme: Sudan Emergency
8. Middle East Eye: Stashes of Emirati weapons in Sudan’s Wad Madani
9. Just Security: Genocide determination and UAE arms sales
10. International Crisis Group: Sudan’s calamitous war and finding a path toward peace
11. Chatham House: The Trump administration should build on Biden’s sanctions to disrupt networks feeding the war in Sudan
12. Foreign Policy: Can Trump save Sudan?