There is little more damning than when the tools for a war crime arrive with the label seemingly still attached. Amid the haul of rockets, shells and mortar rounds seized from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudanese paramilitary outfit widely accused of committing massacres and rape, are crates clearly stamped from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). One box stores a Kornet anti-tank missile and is marked “Abu Dhabi”. Another bears the label “Joint Logistics Command, United Arab Emirates”.
In a war like Sudan’s that is awash with rumour, denial and propaganda, such details carry a force of their own.
The weapons are on show at the country’s Central Intelligence Service headquarters when I visit. Its officers had been assigned to track the flow of armaments into their country.
They came to a clear conclusion, which they now want the world to know: much of the weaponry that helped transform the RSF from a chaotic militia into a feared military force was secretly supplied by the UAE.
Stood amid the captured arsenal, Colonel Mohammed Ahmed tells me that the weapons on show were not isolated examples but parts of a far larger picture. “The evidence built up and now we know. Sudan has been destroyed due to the Emirates,” he says.
Sitting below Egypt in the north east of Africa, Sudan is one of the largest countries in the Arab League. Its eastern border lies just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. The country has been riven by instability since 2019, when its strongman leader Omar al-Bashir was overthrown in a popular uprising. That left a power vacuum which two military forces jockeyed to fill.
The Sudanese Armed Forces entered into a joint rule with the RSF, a paramilitary force originally established by Bashir. However, the RSF opposed plans to be incorporated into the army, and what was meant to be a transition into democratic governance descended into a bitter power struggle. In April 2023 the RSF made its move, launching a series of rapid assaults and capturing swathes of Khartoum, the country’s capital. The conflict quickly escalated, with air strikes and fighting on the streets, widespread food shortages, and the city’s five-million-strong population scrambling to escape.
Destruction is certainly visible throughout Khartoum today. Streets were once filled with traffic; now whole districts lie abandoned. Almost every central building is defaced by bullet holes. Hospitals have been looted so comprehensively that even the wiring has been torn from the walls for its copper.
At a rape trauma centre, staff tell me how RSF militiamen seized women to hold as sex slaves. Its general manager says they had supported more than 300 women who became pregnant as a result. According to a Médecins Sans Frontières report released this week, rape is a “defining feature” of the conflict, and has become “part of everyday life” in some areas of Sudan.
Following the supply lines
The scale of the catastrophe is vast. Some 14 million people have been forced from their homes. Famine was declared in 2024 and 21 million lack food. In January, the UN human rights chief said the country had fallen into “an abyss of unfathomable proportions”. Yet it is a conflict noticed by the outside world only intermittently, even as this country has teetered on the edge of obliteration.
The suddenness of the assault left the government and the country’s official armed forces stunned. The offices of state were forced, along with foreign embassies, to flee east to Port Sudan. Officials were left consumed by a critical question: how had the militia gained access to the weaponry that enabled such a lightning offensive?
The task of finding an answer was given to General Abdulnabi Al-Mahi, head of counter-intelligence in the Sudanese army, and his team. Much of the weaponry, he concluded, was funnelled into Sudan along ancient tribal routes after being supplied by the UAE to the RSF. “If the Emirates had not done this, the war would have finished,” he says.
To prove his claim, he organised for the captured weapons to be put on display and provided photos of more munitions he said originated from the Emirates.
He showed ID cards which military intelligence said were gathered from Colombian mercenaries recruited and sent to Sudan, as well as videos taken off captured or killed fighters from Colombia as well as neighbouring countries such as Chad, Libya and South Sudan that appeared to show foreign fighters shooting Sudanese after they had surrendered.
Thirty miles outside the capital at a former industrial complex, more evidence was presented. Some 40 all-terrain vehicles along with Land Cruisers and ambulances taken from the militia are stored there. In the hub of one mangled Tiger with RSF stickers still stuck to its windscreen, a steel plate showed it had been manufactured by NIMR Automotive. The year was 2016. The client: the UAE. Sudanese officials see a clear chain: foreign supply originated in the Emirates, fuelling the militia, and resulting in atrocities.
There are, of course, other possibilities. Equipment can be diverted, stolen or planted. Abu Dhabi flatly denies any involvement, and has said that it “categorically rejects allegations that it has provided, financed, transported or facilitated any weapons, ammunition, drones, vehicles, guided munitions or other military equipment to the RSF, whether directly or indirectly.”
Indeed, the idea that the UAE — a global symbol of all that is glittering, modern and aspirational — could be involved with facilitating what has unfolded in Sudan almost defies belief, so at odds is it with the Emirates’ image as a place of peace and stability. Even the present crisis, which has seen Dubai and Abu Dhabi targeted by missile and drone strikes following Donald Trump’s confrontation with Iran, has merely reinforced an image of sophisticated vulnerability rather than ruthless hard power.
It is no longer only Sudanese officials making the claims of Emirati involvement. Two US lawmakers went public last year after a White House briefing, saying the Emirates had supplied the RSF. UN investigators are examining how Bulgarian mortar rounds originally exported to the UAE ended up in an RSF convoy.
Amnesty International released a report saying that Chinese-made guided bombs and howitzers used in Sudan were almost certainly re-exported by the UAE to the militia.
Researchers at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab have carried out analysis of satellite imagery and flight data which they say showed an Il-76 cargo aircraft flying over RSF-held territory on a supply route originating in the Emirates and passing through neighbouring Chad.
Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, urged the UN to “ask questions of the UAE and investigate why this plane was in an active war zone, what its purpose was [and] who was operating it”.
In Sudan, the armed forces have slowly taken back territory and with them has come a form of normality. Last year the RSF was driven from Khartoum. In February, the city’s airport reopened, its runway cleared of unexploded munitions and a temporary passenger hall erected. Some residents have returned to see what remains of their homes, but the city’s population remains barely half what it was.
Salwa Adam Beniya, Sudan’s commissioner of humanitarian aid, warns that recovery will take years. “The militia did not just want to control Sudan. It wanted to destroy Sudan.” Many citizens have lost everything, she says. “No one knows how many are dead.”
The RSF may have been driven from Khartoum, but it remains in the western region of Darfur and is active in Kordofan, central Sudan. The armed forces’ recent advance has not ended this war. If anything, it has concentrated it and made it more openly ethnic and genocidal, meaning the question of how the RSF secures its weaponry remains acute.
The RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, has history in Darfur. He was born there and rose from camel trader to warlord, portraying himself as the champion of the region’s nomadic Arab communities against the Nile Valley elites, who dominated Sudanese politics since the country’s independence in 1956. In doing so, Hemedti weaponised ancient ethnic divides in the service of a new war.
Civilians caught in the crossfire
The RSF emerged directly from the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide from 2003 to 2005, where an estimated 200,000 people from indigenous ethnic groups were killed. Today, non-Arab communities are once again being massacred in a campaign which bears the “hallmarks” of yet another genocide, according to the UN.
Last October there was international outcry when the RSF seized the western city of el-Fasher after an 18-month siege. The militia’s own men recorded and shared videos of the mass killings and sexual violence that followed their victory.
Bokari Ibrahim (pictured top) was an accountant at the Ministry of Justice in el-Fasher. He is now housed in one of Port Sudan’s 43 displacement camps after witnessing firsthand the impact of the RSF and its modern weaponry.
After the RSF began its siege, Ibrahim smuggled out his wife and daughters in a horse-drawn cart, terrified they could be seized and subjected to sexual violence. A mortar struck his office, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Last October, with el-Fasher close to collapse, he fled to a nearby village in search of safety. Instead he witnessed a slaughter. “The first body was outside my house. I knew him. He was Mohammed Yani, a colleague at the ministry. He had three children, the youngest was three.” His torso and legs lay separately in the dust, cut in half by shell fire.
Minni Arko Minnawi, the governor of Darfur, believes 30,000 people died following the fall of el-Fasher. Prisoners of war were killed. Women were raped and then murdered. Those trying to flee the city were hunted down, he says. “It was a massacre.”
Amid such brutality, it is hard to conceive how the UAE could ever have supported such a force, despite the evidence to the contrary. Seeking to find a possible motivation, analysts highlight that the Emirates are not the only state interfering in Sudan. A modern-day Scramble for Africa is occurring, this time involving regional rather than western powers.
Egypt is accused by the RSF of bombing supply convoys. Saudi Arabia has supported the Sudanese army. Recently, Sudan alleged that Ethiopia had started its own drone attacks. It is a struggle for influence in which states fear their rivals securing the upper hand.
Sudanese officials believe the UAE’s involvement is simply due to Abu Dhabi applying to Sudan the viewpoint it has adopted across the region since the Arab Spring: opposition to any perceived Islamism, and a willingness to back anyone it believes can suppress it.
Minnawi, Darfur’s governor, says he was flown to Abu Dhabi and urged to join the RSF cause, with Emirati interlocutors repeatedly telling him that he should oppose the Sudanese army as it was “Islamist”. He refused.
What is not in question is that in Sudan the killing continues. Earlier this month a drone strike blamed on the RSF hit a secondary school and a healthcare centre in the south of Khartoum. Most of the 17 killed were schoolgirls. Days later, the RSF launched fresh attacks on Kordofan. Sudanese officials maintain that Emirati weapons are still being smuggled across the border, crossing from Chad via secret trails.
At the start of this year Sudan’s prime minister, Kamil Idris, declared that 2026 should be the “year of peace”. It is an aspiration with a terrible fragility to it.
For Minnawi, the time when he can resume his governorship in his office in Darfur certainly does not feel close. “What we need in Sudan is a permanent peace,” he says, as he stands up to end the interview. “That is what should be. But what will be? I do not know.”
He does know, however, who he blames. “The message I want to give is that the Emirates are resting in the blood of other people. Their country seems quiet because they are pursuing war away from their territory.
“The world does not know. But they should know. They need to know. People are not seeing what is really going on.”
