The United Arab Emirates Is Devastating Sudan for Profit

At one time or another, Sudanese governments have hosted, armed, or tolerated rebels and opposition groups from all of the country’s neighbors, from Egypt and Libya to Uganda and Ethiopia. Sudan’s neighbors have repaid the favor, and a range of outside actors are now involved in the Sudanese civil war.

Key supporters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) include Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea support the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the de facto government. Among all the external actors, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the most consequential, even though it has the least reason to be involved.

Every other external actor has a stake in Sudan that derives from geography, security exposure, or the influx of Sudanese refugees. Even Saudi Arabia, while not a land neighbor, shares the Red Sea coastline with Sudan and has a direct interest in stabilizing its western maritime frontier.

The UAE has no security interest, no shared border or river, and no reason to be concerned about refugees reaching Emirati territory. We can only understand its role in Sudan as part of a broader subimperial project that rests on four connected strategic pillars.

Four Pillars

The first pillar is economic hegemony. RSF-controlled mines in Darfur feed gold smuggled to Dubai, often routed through South Sudan, Egypt, Chad, or the Central African Republic. This gold can be monetized into hard currency that sustains the war while giving the UAE leverage over Sudan’s economic and political trajectory.

Beyond gold, Sudan is also a critical node in the UAE’s continent-wide strategy of port and logistics dominance, part of an investment program now worth more than $110 billion across the continent, with dozens of port concessions, dry ports, and logistics hubs. Controlling Sudan’s ports, land, and mineral wealth is one of the reasons the war serves Abu Dhabi’s interests.

The second pillar is political expansion. Sudan is a strategic frontier in the UAE’s broader effort to project political influence across Africa without incurring the costs of formal empire. A subimperial power is not a global imperial force; rather, it acts as an imperial actor within its own regional sphere while aligning its actions with the overarching interests of a global power like the United States. Sudan’s gold, its fertile agricultural land, its Red Sea coastline, and its sheer size make it a central testing ground for that project.

The third pillar is the UAE’s desire to counter Islamist political movements and the influence of Iran. Abu Dhabi has been willing to cooperate with Islamist governments, including Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan, whenever doing so served its interests, just as it has long functioned as a conduit for Iran to evade international sanctions. What its leaders actually oppose is not political Islam or Iran as such, but any political force, whether Islamist, secular, socialist, or democratic, that threatens their preferred regional order.

The final pillar is a concern with regime survival and fear of democratic contagion. The roots of this concern go back to 2011, when the Arab uprisings confronted the UAE with an existential threat to its own model of governance. It responded by becoming an organized counterrevolutionary force across the region, intervening by different means in different countries.

Such interventions included bankrolling the coup that brought Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to power in Egypt and backing the militia of Khalifa Haftar in Libya. In each case, a popular or revolutionary movement threatened a regional order Abu Dhabi wanted to preserve, and Abu Dhabi acted to reverse it.

Sudan’s December 2018 revolution set off the same reflex. This was not because Sudan threatened the UAE materially, but rather because a successful democratic transition next door to the Gulf, achieved by ordinary people rather than by elites, might offer a dangerous model to its own population and to the wider region it is working to shape.

Regional Network

Most of the states that serve as the RSF’s enablers are not acting solely out of an independent interest in what happens to Sudan. They are acting, to varying degrees, on the UAE’s behalf, as part of a network that also extends to actors like Rwanda and the Somali semi-autonomous state, Puntland.

Over more than a decade, the UAE has built deep financial and diplomatic relationships with the leaderships of these states. Those relationships are based on investment, infrastructure financing, security cooperation, and (in some documented cases) direct influence over individual government officials.

The specifics vary from one country to the next. In Libya, the UAE draws on the territory, airspace, and military bases of Khalifa Haftar’s militia to move weapons and fighters into Sudan. In Ethiopia, Reuters has identified a secret UAE-financed camp near the Sudanese border built to train RSF fighters. Reporting has traced further UAE-linked supply routes for the RSF through Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, the Central African Republic, and beyond, as well as facilities established in Chad and South Sudan under humanitarian or medical cover that in practice support weapons transfers and the treatment of wounded RSF fighters.

Other Players

A few other external actors deserve a place in this picture, even if they carry less weight than the UAE. Qatar has historically supported the former Islamist regime and by extension the SAF, but there is no evidence it plays an active role today.

Iran and Turkey have positioned themselves as suppliers and facilitators for the SAF, since there is no global arms embargo on Sudan’s national army. Ankara is concerned with trade, diplomatic influence, and defense industry outreach as well as agricultural concessions and port access. For its part, Tehran views the Red Sea corridor through the lens of its competition with Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Ties in Sudan that complicate things for those rivals carry strategic value.

Israel has maintained discreet contacts with both Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF and Hemedti of the RSF as part of its goal of normalization with Arab states and its close alignment with the UAE. Russia began participating in Sudan’s gold economy through the Wagner Group militia, leaned toward the RSF early in the war, then reoriented toward the army to keep open a potential naval foothold on the Red Sea.

Western Complicity

None of the major Western countries is a bystander. The United States, Britain, France, and Canada have perfected the language of expressing concern while prioritizing their relationships with the Gulf states (and in this case, mainly with the UAE).

These governments have long known, in detail, what the UAE was doing. Their own intelligence services and officials had access to the information they needed, and organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published detailed investigations. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Le Monde have documented the UAE’s support for the RSF.

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab briefed the US and British governments and the United Nations Security Council repeatedly, warning that a siege of El Fasher by the RSF would trap over a million civilians and that time was running out. Officials in Washington and London knew the RSF was on the verge of capturing El Fasher and that mass atrocities would follow. The United States was hosting talks with representatives of the RSF and the Sudanese government at the very moment El Fasher fell, but it did nothing.

France and Canada received reports that the RSF was using French- and Canadian-made weapons supplied to the UAE in Darfur, in direct violation of the UN arms embargo, and took no action. When sanctions did come, they landed on Colombians recruited to fight as mercenaries, but not on the Emirati companies and officials who financed and facilitated that recruitment in the first place.

Imposing Costs

Sudan’s own history of internationally sponsored peace processes offers a clear warning against the temptation to believe that the international community’s proper role is to engineer or force a settlement, whether through negotiations, power sharing, or externally designed transitional arrangements.

That approach has been tried repeatedly, from the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur to the framework agreement that preceded this war. It has produced the same result each time: agreements that distribute power and positions among armed factions, promise development that rarely reaches the communities that need it, and leave the perpetrators of mass violence in place to fight again once the incentives shift.

The role the international community is actually equipped to play is narrower, and more useful, than the one it keeps attempting to play. It can stop the states that are fueling the war through weapons, finance, and logistics. That would mean naming and imposing real costs on the governments enabling the RSF and first among them, by a significant margin, the UAE.

The individuals, companies, and financial channels that move weapons and gold must be sanctioned, not merely the mercenaries recruited at the bottom of the chain. The assets of the UAE and of Emirati-linked companies are traceable and present in the banking systems and real estate markets of every major Western capital. They could be used as leverage instead of being deemed untouchable.

The underlying pattern of regional interference has not changed since 2023. What has changed is that one actor with no direct stake and unmatched capability has been able to intervene at almost no cost. The actors who might have imposed a cost, whether we are talking about Saudi Arabia as a regional competitor for the UAE or Western governments with real leverage over it, have either woken up too late or chosen not to act at all.

The Western governments in this picture cannot claim they lacked the information. They had the intelligence, the reporting, and the direct warnings, and they chose silence anyway. That is a decision, not a policy failure, made with full knowledge of its consequences. These governments, and the individuals within them who made and upheld that choice, should be held accountable, and investigated, as contributors to the crimes committed in this war.