For 29 months, the international community has stood by as the conflict in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has brought daily devastation to what the United Nations has characterized as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. In North Darfur, the situation is extremely dire. For 18 months, the RSF has sealed off more than 400,000 people sheltering in the capital, El Fasher, in a brutal siege while aid trucks seeking entry are regularly hit by drone strikes.
At the recent U.N. General Assembly, though, not a single world leader addressed the deadly siege on El Fasher. One regime in particular is standing in the way of international efforts to end the siege, and it is the one benefiting the most from RSF control: the United Arab Emirates.
According to a report, the UAE was the only member of the Quad—a self-appointed conflict mediation group—at the U.N. to block an agreement to end the siege or even condemn the recent RSF attack on a mosque that killed 75 worshippers. The UAE has denied this claim, as well as allegations of it providing arms and military equipment to the RSF. Yet evidence to the contrary has been widely documented.
There has been a massive influx of weapons to the RSF in recent months, which corresponds with an escalation in attacks on El Fasher. There is no debate about what the RSF will do if it enters El Fasher: massacre vulnerable non-Arab communities already living in famine conditions. The scale of casualties is unthinkable, as the nearly a half million people remaining in the city are already facing death by starvation and surviving on animal feed.
A year into the conflict, we at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) released an independent inquiry with leading experts that concluded the RSF is committing genocide against non-Arab communities in Darfur, particularly the Masalit tribe.
Our inquiry documented how RSF fighters systematically express intent to eradicate non-Arab groups using dehumanizing, racist terms and singling out victims to be killed based on their identity. As one of countless examples, a survivor was told: “If you were Masalit, we decided that we don’t want to leave any alive, not even the children.”
In 2023, the RSF besieged and attacked El Geneina in West Darfur, explicitly targeting the Masalit community and killing up to 15,000 people. In April of this year, on its way toward El Fasher, the RSF stormed Sudan’s largest displacement camp—repeating the same atrocities, massacring more than 1,500 people, and forcibly displacing more than 400,000. Survivors viewed the RSF’s goal as wanting to “exterminate” them.
Now, as the RSF closes in on El Fasher, it’s painting the entire population as a military target, systematically dehumanizing, targeting, and calling for the destruction of non-Arabs, particularly the Zaghawa—one of the main groups in the city—even ordering the militia to “wipe out all the Zaghawa, those falangay [slaves].” The RSF also targets other non-Arab groups in North Darfur. For example, in a widely disseminated video, an RSF field commander executed a civilian after identifying him as belonging to the Berti tribe, which is another major ethnic group in El Fasher.
This past week, we are releasing a follow-up legal inquiry into the war’s disproportionate impact on children, identifying those responsible for and complicit in crimes against humanity involving children.
Since the conflict began, the U.N. Security Council has sat on its hands, issuing merely two resolutions calling for a temporary cease-fire and an end to the siege without any concrete enforcement mechanisms to back them up.
Yet the solution is actually quite simple. Confront the UAE—on which the RSF is dependent for arms, finances, and political cover—to stop its proxy militia from continuing its genocide.
As reporting has shown, the UAE serves as the RSF’s supply line through a campaign of cargo flights shipping heavy weaponry, artillery, and drones through neighboring countries. (The UAE has faced similar accusations in Yemen, Libya, and Ethiopia.) Though the contents of the flights remain obscured, even the U.N. panel of experts on Sudan—an ultra-cautious investigative body—confirmed “heavy rotation of cargo planes” from the UAE to the RSF and later reported that the cargo flights formed a “new regional air bridge.”
The UAE has denied allegations of arms smuggling precisely to create plausible deniability for violating the arms embargo on Darfur. It employs tactics typical of any illegal arms trafficking operation to avoid international scrutiny. It has hidden its airfield base in Chad under the cover of a hospital complex and symbols of a Red Crescent humanitarian mission. According to Wall Street Journal reporting, the UAE fabricated flight documents to conceal arms shipments and outright refused to release suspicious flight manifests requested by the U.N., saying it was unable to meet a tight deadline. In Uganda, officials told the WSJ that they had been ordered to stop inspecting flights from the UAE to Chad. Moreover, a leaked document from the U.N. panel of experts revealed patterns of UAE flights disappearing from the radar mid-flight or having unrecorded takeoffs.
Although the UAE claimed that it is seeking to counter the resurgence of political Islam in Sudan, it is, in reality, exploiting the conflict to secure access to Sudan’s valued resources, including its vast gold reserves, agriculture, livestock, and Red Sea ports. The UAE is a well-known international destination for gold; in the course of a decade, $115 billion worth of undeclared gold from Africa was imported into the UAE. The UAE’s anti-Islamist narrative does not hold water. In fact, the RSF itself was created by the Islamists.
The UAE harbored the leader of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, and established a direct line between him and UAE leaders Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The RSF’s business empire is based in the UAE, as managed by Hemeti’s brothers. A UAE-based company recruits foreign mercenaries to fight alongside the RSF. RSF companies, which are used to acquire weapons, purchase gold, and evade financial sanctions, are based in the UAE. To generate support for the RSF and mask its atrocities, Mohamed bin Zayed’s advisor’s company sent Hemeti on a private jet tour to meet African heads of state. According to some U.S. officials, Emirati leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed even tacitly acknowledged to materially supporting the RSF in a meeting with former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, saying they owed the RSF for sending troops to fight alongside the UAE in Yemen.
Without the UAE, the RSF would be unable to sustain the siege on El Fasher or commit widespread atrocities. If the UAE is genuinely committed to supporting the victims of the war, it should call on the RSF to withdraw. This alone would bring reprieve to El Fasher, where nearly a half million civilians are trapped in starvation, fearing something much worse is imminent.