
The Rapid Support Forces in Sudan used weapons, communications equipment, armored vehicles and intelligence supplied by the United Arab Emirates in their fight against the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, in the civil war that began a year ago. It’s unclear, however, if the United Nations Security Council will call out the UAE openly.
The classified documents, seen by PassBlue and provided by a senior diplomat who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, revealed that the paramilitary fighters, known as RSF and led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan (Hemedti), used weapons that the UAE apparently bought from Serbia and the United States. The SAF confiscated some of the weapons, including drones and mortars, when they retook the city of Omdurman in March, according to the source.
PassBlue hasn’t been able to verify the provenance of the weapons independently. Supplying weapons to the RSF would breach the UN arms embargo on Sudan.
The government is accusing the UAE of committing a “crime of aggression,” saying that its weapons flows to the RSF in Sudan are fueling the conflict. The war for dominance in Sudan is being waged between General Hamdan and the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, since April 2023.
The war has been intensified by outside interference, despite a United Nations arms embargo against belligerents in the three-state Darfur region 20 years ago that has since been revised. The two generals now fighting each other were formerly leaders of the Arab militia, Janjaweed, when the UN sanctions were placed. Declared a genocide by the US Congress in 2004, the militia massacred over two million Sudanese as the two men and their forces fought together to successfully depose Sudan’s ruler then, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019.
The friends-turned-foes now rely on foreign countries for weapons to wage their own battle, which has shut down all critical infrastructure and put populations on the cusp of famine in some areas. The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has said that Russia and Iran are sending weapons to the SAF, also violating UN sanctions.
The UN said on Friday that the brutality of the conflict is making it impossible for its aid workers to access the capital of North Darfur, El Fasher, the center of the most vicious fighting. Yet Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it is operating there as the lone charity. Secretary-General António Guterres urged both generals to reopen peace negotiations.
The talks, brokered by Saudi Arabia and the US, fell apart last year due to inertia. The US said General Burhan has refused to resume discussions despite the humanitarian toll engulfing the country. Sudanese authorities insist they cannot stand down as the RSF seizes more territory, including encircling the crown jewel, El Fasher.
“I think there is a higher bar that is set for the Army than for the RSF,” Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told PassBlue. “Unfairly, there’s an expectation that the armed forces is the party that needs to uphold all of these standards, whether it’s humanitarian law, civilian protection, humanitarian access, all of these things because we hold the government of Sudan responsible for the conduct of what happens inside the country and at the borders of the country.”
Since the war began, more than 15,000 people have been killed and millions displaced. Humanitarian experts believe the numbers are grossly understated due to the inaccessibility of hot zones to ensure accurate data collection. MSF told PassBlue that pregnant women and children are dying from easily preventable illnesses in El Fasher, as all hospitals have been closed after RSF attacks heightened in the last month.
UN diplomats and other experts say El Fasher will fall in days if fighting does not stop. SAF has been trapped inside the city at their base close to the airport, since the RSF siege began.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, said the SAF cannot help civilians and are barely defending their base. The RSF takeover of the Darfur region will have serious consequences for the Masalit and non-Arab people who have been largely affected by the conflict, Samantha Power, head of USAID, told the media on June 14.
The day before, the Security Council adopted a resolution demanding that the RSF stop its siege on El Fasher immediately and withdraw all fighters endangering the lives of civilians. It also requests all parties to enable lifesaving aid flows. The resolution, drafted by Britain, also called on all member states to refrain from interference in the war but did not call out the UAE or other countries allegedly arming the RSF or the SAF.
Hudson said the resolution has come too late, as crimes have been committed since the beginning of the war. “The resolution is important,” Hudson added, “but sadly it comes much too late to save many of the Sudanese civilians who have already died and will die because of the existing conditions.”
The weapons allegedly provided by the UAE to the RSF have been used to cause massive destruction, displacement and killing of predominantly darker-skinned Masalit people and other non-Arab groups in Sudan, its government says. The RSF is also accused of raping hundreds of women in the war.
PassBlue was told by relevant parties that Sudan has submitted evidence to the Security Council in the last two months to show how the UAE sent weapons to the RSF and airlifted some of the militia’s wounded soldiers for treatment abroad. Efforts to highlight these issues in the Council publicly, however, appear to be thwarted by allies shielding the UAE, said Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, Sudan’s permanent representative to the UN.
Sources close to the matter told PassBlue that the UAE has been using its influence in the Council to avoid being held accountable and targeted for possibly violating the UN arms embargo. The country was an elected member of the Council from January 2022 through December 2023. As the representative of the Arab bloc in the Council, it was deeply instrumental throughout the fall to try to push members to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, despite resistance by the US.
However, sources say the UAE’s apparent role in the Sudan war and the Council’s response to the fighting there were kept off the agenda, at least publicly. The UAE used direct diplomatic contact, complaints and threats to fellow Council members and beyond to ensure the topic was not aired openly in the chamber or even privately.
Thomas-Greenfield began raising the Sudan war at the UN last summer, but that focus fell off when the Israeli-Hamas war hit on Oct. 7. By December, Sudan was an afterthought. Yet the US renewed spotlighting it in early 2024, just as the UAE ended its term in the Council.
Idriss al-Harith did not specify which countries have tried to shield the UAE from the accusations of its role in Sudan. “The war will stop today if the UAE stops giving RSF guns,” he said.
In April, when Malta was the monthly rotating president of the Council, Sudan said it requested an open emergency session to discuss the alleged acts of aggression by the UAE. Instead, the Council held private consultations on the humanitarian situation in Sudan. The format meant the Sudanese envoy could not participate.
Malta told PassBlue by email that the meeting was held privately because the Sudanese ambassador sent his request to Malta, as president of the Council, in Arabic, not English. Some countries in the Council said they could not agree to an open meeting based on a letter that was not translated into English. (The Council has no written rule on language requirements in letters that are sent to it.)
Media reports said that the UAE was angered that Britain, the Council member responsible for the Sudan agenda item, did not defend the UAE during a Council session. Consequently, Abu Dhabi canceled scheduled ministerial meetings with the UK in late April.
Similarly, the Sudanese ambassador accused the UAE of pressuring Mozambique, as Council president in May, to modify the format of a meeting that Sudan requested again. The Council held another closed-door meeting on Sudan, which the envoy could not attend.
“We have all underestimated both the destructive and irresponsible power of the UAE,” Hudson said. “UAE has used its economic and political influence to subvert any efforts by the Security Council to hold them responsible. UAE used the fact that it controls five major ports in Mozambique to make sure that Mozambique did not host a meeting investigating the allegations against the UAE.”
The Council’s panel of experts on Sudan identified three routes through which the RSF has received its weapons from the UAE: One is the Amdjarass Airport in eastern Chad. The Sudanese government monitored 28 flights from Abu Dhabi International Airport in the UAE to the Amdjarass airport from May 16 to June 13, 2023. Media reports, including those from The New York Times, indicated that the UAE was transporting weapons to the RSF using this airport in Chad.
The UAE repeatedly denies the accusations, saying it was providing humanitarian aid on the flights to Sudanese refugees camped in Chad. In an email to PassBlue on June 14, the UAE mission in New York City accused Sudan of distracting the Security Council from the effects of the war.
“As we have made clear in our letters to the Security Council, on 21 and 25 April, the UAE unequivocally rejects the baseless allegations made by the Sudanese representative against the UAE,” the mission said in the email to PassBlue.
Sudanese authorities, however, said that the Emiratis had stopped humanitarian aid to Sudan before the war started in April 2023 and were smuggling weapons disguised as humanitarian relief through neighboring Chad.
The relationship between Abu Dhabi and the RSF predates the current war in Sudan. RSF soldiers were recruited and trained to fight as UAE proxies in Yemen. The companies through which General Hamdan exports gold are controlled from the UAE. One of the companies, Al Junaid, was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control two months into the war.
The UN panel of experts on Sudan reported that the company exported $30 million worth of gold in just four weeks in 2018. Although the US Treasury office blocked some UAE companies for potentially violating sanctions on Sudan, Hudson said this action would not deter the Emirati government.
A large increase in civilian cemeteries across five locations in the current fighting zones have been recorded, including in El Fasher. Over 40 villages have been burned in and around the regional capital, 13 more than in the first four months of the war, according to Raymond of Yale. Internet access and other essential services have been shut down in El Fasher.
A Sudanese woman with relatives there said she got recent news that up to seven family members had been killed. She said that boys are being forced to take up arms, with males over 16 not allowed to leave the city and compelled to either fight or face death by the RSF. She recounted that children trying to escape shelling were shredded by bombs.
“They were running to take refuge in our house, and then the bomb just somehow killed them and then cut them to small pieces in our front door,” the woman said during a press briefing on June 13, organized by Crisis Action, a nongovernmental organization.
Joe Penney and Jessica Le Masurier contributed reporting to this article.
This article was updated to correct who confiscated some weapons linked to the UAE: it was the SAF and not the RSF.Â
Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was named the 2020 Nigeria Investigative Journalist of the Year by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism and was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in communications and language arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Just sent the UAE National Council the following message: “Please, please stop supporting the RSF’s attacks on Sudan. It’s horrible but permissible for 2 opponents of equal ability to fight each other, but never for heavily-armed adults to make war on unarmed, non-combatant CHILDREN. There are other ways to achieve your goals.