All across Sudan, gun battles and air strikes have left civilians to die in the streets as the country descends into bloodshed. Since major fighting erupted in mid-April between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), thousands of people have been killed, and four million more displaced. Hopes of civil society protestors, whose non-violent protests brought down the government of the former President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019, seem like distant memories.
The grim spectre of "ethnic cleansing" is looming once again in Darfur. Certain communities living in the region, in particular the ethnic Masalit, have been targeted by the RSF and affiliated Arab militias. Civilians who have fled to Chad have described to us how RSF and Arab militia forces attacked them in their towns and again as they tried to flee, killing and injuring many. Meanwhile, rather than provide humanitarian aid, some states are actively fuelling the conflict by providing arms and ammunition.
In early June, two months into the renewed conflict, the SAF shot down a drone operated by the RSF. The aircraft was a large vertical-take-off-and-landing quadcopter, carrying a payload of two 120mm mortars. While we do not know which company manufactured the drone, the open-source investigative site Oryx has tracked identical drones in Ethiopia and Yemen. In both of those cases, the drone was provided by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Markings on the mortars indicate that they were manufactured in 2020, in Serbia. Crates of the same mortars, with the same lot numbers, were also recently found in Sudan, with shipping markings indicating that they were originally delivered to the UAE.
As this conflict rapidly spins out of control, and civilians bear the increasing brunt of suffering in both casualties and displacement from their homes, no state should be adding to the misery, and the United Nations Security Council must impose a comprehensive arms embargo on all of Sudan. It is essential, however, to remain realistic about the initial practical effects of an arms embargo on the current fighting.
Sudan is awash with small arms, and the state-run Military Industry Corporation (MIC) produces a vast arsenal of weapons, from rockets to artillery to aircraft bombs. Some of those weapons, such as W85 heavy machine guns, are made through Chinese licences, but some are illicit knock-offs of original Soviet and Iranian design. It is unlikely MIC can manufacture sufficient arms to sustain the needs of the SAF in this conflict, which is why countries such as Russia sell them weapons as well. On the other side, the UAE provides weapons to the RSF, as does General Commander Khalifa Haftar of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces, de facto ruler of large parts of eastern and southern Libya, and the Russian private military force known as Wagner.
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