Why the UAE Is Fueling Sudan's Apocalyptic War: Weapons, Gold, and the Scramble for Influence

By most measures, Sudan’s civil war is the worst conflict raging anywhere on the planet. Since fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, an estimated 150,000 people have been killed, twelve million displaced, and entire cities sacked and burned. Famine stalks the land while ethnic cleansing unfolds in Darfur.

Yet while the conflict is technically a civil war, it is not the Sudanese alone who are sustaining it. A constellation of outside powers — Egypt, Qatar, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, and the Houthis among them — have poured gasoline onto this African inferno. But one nation stands out above all others for the scale, consistency, and audacity of its intervention: the United Arab Emirates.

Since the summer of 2023, Abu Dhabi has clandestinely delivered ammunition, hi-tech weapons, and intelligence support to the RSF, even as the paramilitaries carry out what many describe as genocide. Understanding why the UAE has entangled itself so deeply in this catastrophe — and what, if anything, can compel it to stop — is one of the most consequential geopolitical questions of the moment.

The Amdjarass Base: A Field Hospital or a Weapons Pipeline?

To the outside world, the UAE’s establishment of a base at the small Chadian city of Amdjarass, near the Sudanese border, appeared to be a great humanitarian act. Emirati officials stressed they were building a field hospital to treat hundreds of refugees escaping the devastating conflict next door. But behind this concerned facade lay a far darker motive.

Since the base 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 like the New York Times have all reached the same conclusion.

Far from a humanitarian outpost, the Amdjarass base appears to function as a hub for transferring huge amounts of firepower to the RSF, gathering intelligence, and treating wounded fighters — all in the hopes of propelling the paramilitaries 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.

Abu Dhabi strenuously denies all these allegations. Despite the wealth of reports from international bodies and the US government, the UAE’s official position remains that its only interest in Sudan is humanitarian. Yet 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.”

Devils on Horseback: The RSF’s Trail of Atrocity

The Sudanese conflict kicked off in April 2023 and at first looked like it might be confined to a quick showdown in the capital, Khartoum, between the regular army and the RSF, who had until recently governed alongside them. 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, it is estimated that 15,000 people from the Masalit ethnicity were systematically slaughtered.

Although El Geneina was a particularly horrific example, the pattern was repeated wherever the RSF seized power. Over the last 22 months, the group has been accused of everything from looting to ethnic cleansing, to the enslavement and mass abuse of women under their rule. Expert Alex DeWaal has declared that the RSF “operate like human locusts.”

This is not to say their 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 measured against the callousness of the military, the RSF’s record of systematic genocide and mass atrocity stands in a category of its own — making the UAE’s decision to back them all the more consequential and controversial.

The Arsenal: What the UAE Has Supplied to the RSF

When war first broke out in Khartoum, the general assumption was that the army would win a quick, bloody victory. After all, the military had airpower while the RSF did not. Given that overwhelming advantage, there was no reason to think the paramilitaries stood a chance.

That they did is entirely due to Abu Dhabi. In a confidential memo leaked to the press, the European Union ambassador to Sudan wrote about how “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 MANPADS — Man-Portable Air Defense Systems — were the key item. 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.

But 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. The supplies also include armored personnel carriers built by Emirati companies, such as the Nimr Ajban.

The Nimr Ajban is particularly controversial because it incorporates the French-made Galix System, which Amnesty International described 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 — on top of the longstanding UN Security Council resolution the UAE is already violating by shipping equipment 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 2025, videos were released 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 Silence: How UAE Financial Leverage Shapes the Battlefield

The UAE’s intervention in Sudan extends well beyond physical weapons shipments. Abu Dhabi has deployed its vast financial resources to reshape the diplomatic and military landscape surrounding the conflict, effectively neutralizing potential allies of the Sudanese military.

Egypt is one of the Sudanese army’s traditional backers. Initially, Cairo supported the military. But 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 yet another regional power into the conflict and further internationalizing the war.

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 groups 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 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.

The lengths Abu Dhabi has gone to include potential war crimes, such as disguising weapons shipments using the logo of the Red Crescent — a logo protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The Long Game: Gold, Ports, Personal Debts, and the New Scramble for Africa

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the UAE’s intervention in Sudan is how sharply it seems to cut against the country’s own pre-war interests. Before the conflict 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 those agricultural lands have been torched.

And while the RSF has seized most of Darfur, it is the army that controls the Red Sea coastline.

This last point is particularly important. 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, no one thought the coast was imperiled.

The talk was of a de facto partition like Libya, with the army clinging on in Port Sudan even as the interior was lost. The UAE had already secured its port deal before the war — making its intervention, if the goal was a Red Sea foothold, a spectacular misfire.

Hence why some turn to more personal explanations. Emirati leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) appears to feel a debt to RSF leader Hemedti. 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 2024, Sheikh Mohammed seemed to suggest his support for the RSF today was payback, saying he “owes” Hemedti.

But if it really is about a personal debt, it is one that has come with significant 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 gold from Sudan, with perhaps another 60 tons smuggled in via intermediaries in places like 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 billions of dollars that can be made smuggling bullion provide a concrete financial 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, with the major players 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 like 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 — in 2023, the UAE invested almost twice as much as China in the continent, a staggering $45 billion.

Other interventions have been more destructive. Drones from the UAE and Turkey helped the Ethiopian government win the devastating Tigray War. UAE weapons 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 the case of Ethiopia, 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 appears to be hoping to deny that influence to its rivals. At the lower end, these rivalries include the frenemy-ship 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 today intervening heavily on the side of the Sudanese military. Iran’s arrival in the war does not explain why the UAE backed the paramilitaries from the outset — 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 appears to be on the front foot, with the RSF recently driven out of the strategic city of Wad Madani.

Why the West Won’t Push Back — and What Might Change

In the twilight of Joe Biden’s presidency, the White House slapped sanctions not just on RSF leader Hemedti but also on multiple UAE-based companies doing business with the paramilitaries. For those unfamiliar with the conflict, such an act might have seemed like a shot across Abu Dhabi’s bows — a warning that the United States could pressure the Emirates into dropping support for the RSF whenever it wanted. But those who have been following the Sudan war recognized the gesture for what it was: too little, too late.

The Biden White House had known for months that the paramilitaries were likely conducting genocide. It had known for even longer that UAE companies were helping fuel Hemedti’s war machine with Abu Dhabi’s blessing. Yet Biden still went ahead and 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 stopping governments from 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 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 Dafra Air Base and the Jebel Ali deep-water port. It also buys enormous amounts of Western military hardware, spending billions of dollars on equipment from America and France.

All of that might not matter were the war in Sudan a significant priority for the Western alliance. But the sad reality is that it ranks far below China, the Ukraine War, Iran, North Korea, Russia, military spending, and trade wars on anyone’s agenda.

That said, there are voices calling for action. Secretary of State Marco Rubio singled out the UAE as a bad actor in the Sudan conflict at his Senate confirmation hearing, stating: “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.” 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 larger the chance that the country’s deposed Islamist regime — the same regime long sanctioned by the US for sheltering and supporting terrorists such as Osama bin Laden — is able to mount a comeback.

Were the US to pursue blocking the Islamists’ return as a specific goal, it might even be able to get the UAE on board. One of the other justifications MBZ has offered for backing the RSF is that they would act as a “bulwark against” the Islamists in Sudan — something Abu Dhabi perceives as vital for regional stability. So there are clearly places where incentives could align. The problem is that no one seems to be in much of a hurry to link them up.

A War Without End — and the Cost of Inaction

As 2025 unfolds, a multitude of factors appear to be keeping Abu Dhabi entrenched in Sudan’s war, long past the point where an RSF victory seemed plausible. The paramilitaries have been dislodged from strategic cities across the map, yet the Emirates still backs Hemedti. The suspicion among observers is that the UAE backed the wrong horse and is now stuck doubling down on a bad choice, hoping against hope that it does not lose everything on this foolish bet.

And while Abu Dhabi calculates, the war keeps raging. 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. With every passing day of indignity, 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 longer outside powers — and the UAE chief among them — continue to pour weapons, money, and influence into the conflict, the further Sudan sinks into an abyss from which recovery becomes ever more difficult. The sooner someone manages to convince Abu Dhabi to stop its weapons transfers — through pressure or diplomacy — the better for Sudan, for the region, and for the international order that is being quietly eroded with every clandestine cargo flight that lands at Amdjarass.

Related Coverage

• The UAE is Destabilizing the Entire Middle East
• How the UAE’s Regional Meddling Triggered a Historic Realignment Across the Middle East
• The UAE’s Regional Ambitions Collapse as Middle East Powers Push Back

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Amdjarass base and why is it controversial?

The Amdjarass base is a UAE facility in Chad near the Sudanese border that was officially presented as a field hospital for refugees. However, UN investigations, the US State Department-funded Sudan Conflict Observatory, Western intelligence agencies, and the New York Times have all concluded it is actually a front for massive weapons transfers to the RSF. The base appears to function as a hub for transferring firepower, gathering intelligence, and treating wounded RSF fighters.

What types of weapons has the UAE supplied to the RSF?

The UAE has supplied Chinese drones (likely piloted remotely from the UAE), MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems), howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, armored personnel carriers like the Nimr Ajban (which includes the French-made Galix System), and vast quantities of Serbian-manufactured munitions. These weapons have allowed the RSF to neutralize the Sudanese military’s air superiority and sustain the fight far beyond their natural point of culmination.

Why is the UAE supporting the RSF in Sudan’s civil war?

Multiple factors appear to motivate UAE involvement: personal loyalty from Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) to RSF commander Hemedti, who provided troops for the UAE’s Yemen intervention; access to billions of dollars in Sudanese gold flowing through Dubai; competition with regional rivals like Iran and Saudi Arabia for influence in Africa; and a desire to prevent a comeback by Sudan’s deposed Islamist regime. In a conversation with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, MBZ reportedly suggested he “owes” Hemedti.

How has the UAE used financial leverage to shape the Sudan conflict?

The UAE offered Egypt a $35 billion investment, which effectively cooled Cairo’s support for the Sudanese army, pushing Islamabad to turn to Iran instead. The UAE also provided Chad with a $1.5 billion loan — nearly equivalent to its entire annual budget — which has kept President Déby from opposing RSF supply routes through Chadian territory despite strong pressure from Chad’s own military to support ethnic Darfuri militias against the RSF.

Why hasn’t the West pressured the UAE to stop supporting the RSF?

The UAE is considered too strategically important to risk alienating. Abu Dhabi hosts around 5,000 US military personnel at vital facilities including Al Dafra Air Base and Jebel Ali port, serves as a counterweight to Iran, maintains warm relations with Israel, and spends billions on Western military hardware. Sudan ranks far below China, Ukraine, Iran, and trade wars on Western priority lists, and the Biden administration even named the UAE a “major defense partner” in autumn 2024 despite knowing about its role in the conflict.

Sources

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• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/world/africa/uae-sudan-civil-war.html
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