Now in its third year, Sudan’s war shows the hallmarks of a conflict left to burn far too long: emptied towns in Darfur, millions displaced inside the country, millions more forced across borders, and repeated warnings from UN officials that what is unfolding west of the Nile is not “just another African crisis” but a mass crime. In January 2025, the United States made that explicit, determining that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militias committed genocide in Darfur during the current phase of fighting—a rare moment when international language caught up with what Sudanese figures had insisted since 2023.
Genocide does not happen. Genocide is being committed.
Amgad Fareid, executive director at Fikra for Studies and Development and former chief of staff in the Sudanese Prime Minister’s Office, put it bluntly: “Genocide does not happen. Genocide is being committed. Earthquakes happen, but genocide is committed,” he told The Media Line. “If we agree on that, we can say that genocide is being committed by the RSF in Sudan, in different areas of Darfur. And the RSF is the metamorphosis of the Janjaweed militia … a fascist militia that’s implementing a fascist project that cannot be compatible with stability or peace or normal life in Sudan or in the region,” he added.
Why Abu Dhabi is in the frame
What remains less understood is how this phase of the war began, why it has lasted, and why so much Sudanese activist attention has shifted not only to Khartoum and Darfur but also to Abu Dhabi.
A precise starting point
Unlike many civil wars that escalate in steps, this phase began on April 15, 2023. “This war started by the RSF attempt of a coup to take power on the 15th of April 2023,” Fareid said. “And this coup attempt was aiming to avoid merging with SAF [the Sudanese Armed Forces] and ending the independent military presence and existence of the RSF, which will affect, of course, its economic and political influence. So, Hemedti [RSF leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo] … tried this coup. When this coup failed, he took the country with him in this path of blood and terror,” he added.
The RSF was required under the transition plan to integrate into the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Integration would have meant losing its separate chain of command and—crucially—its commercial networks, including those tied to gold. The RSF moved first; the army resisted; the confrontation engulfed the country.
Origins of the RSF
To see why there was an RSF in the first place, it helps to rewind 20 years. Guido Lanfranchi, a research fellow at the Clingendael Institute who follows Sudan and the Horn of Africa, stressed that the RSF was built by the Sudanese state itself: “In the early 2000s, the RSF’s predecessors—a local militia widely known as the “Janjaweed”—were supported by the government in Khartoum and by the SAF to fight off an armed rebellion in Darfur” he told The Media Line. “In this way, the SAF would outsource the ground fighting, while the armed forces would carry out aerial bombings. So, 20 years ago, the same SAF that today denounces the RSF atrocities was giving them support while they were committing another genocide against the very same people,” he added.
Given that history, many European diplomats began the 2023 war from an “equidistant” posture—neither with SAF nor with the RSF—“because, frankly, what kind of credibility does the Sudanese army have after having created the RSF and supported it for two decades?” he noted. That is why Western statements in 2023–24 often argued that “neither SAF nor RSF” should shape Sudan’s future.
Neutrality under strain
Yet both experts say the scale of RSF operations in Darfur has shifted that equation. “This position is equidistant and is coming more and more under pressure,” Lanfranchi said of the Western attempt to stay neutral, “because of the sheer size of the violations that the RSF is committing.”
Alleged UAE support, and denials
Much of today’s public debate centers on how and why the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ended up named—in UN expert reports, US congressional briefings, and by Sudanese politicians—as the principal external backer of the RSF. Abu Dhabi rejects the accusations, telling the UN and Western partners that its engagement is humanitarian and diplomatic and that it supports a ceasefire. Both interviewees noted that the UAE’s Sudan portfolio predates this war.
“Until March 2019, just a few weeks before the Sudanese people managed to topple the Bashir regime, the UAE was providing significant financial support to the Bashir regime,” Fareid recalled. “So, Bashir was actually their friend and their ally, not the opposite. This claim of taking a stand against political Islam is just a mask to mask the support of this genocidal militia,” he added.
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Lanfranchi pointed to a connective tissue often missed: Sudanese participation in the Saudi–Emirati campaign in Yemen. “It goes back mostly to the war in Yemen,” he said. “Both RSF and SAF sent soldiers to fight in Yemen. It was a mercenary deal—not that they were sending it for kindness, they were getting handsomely paid for it. That’s where the origin of the relation kind of lies. … And at the time, it was not that the Emiratis were supporting only the RSF; they were supporting both the RSF and SAF,” he added.
Through Yemen, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi came to know, pay, and use Sudanese forces. Since 2023, though, the two Gulf capitals have diverged. Saudi Arabia, directly opposite Sudan on the Red Sea, has tilted toward SAF, Lanfranchi said, partly because Saudi stability is more directly exposed if Sudan burns.
How the RSF keeps fighting
Where both experts converged most was on how the RSF has sustained its campaign. “Since the beginning of this war,” Fareid said, “they [the UAE] put a lot of pressure on the Chadian government and they provided financial support to allow access of weapons from Libya and Chad … from the Haftar government, which is Eastern Libya, to the RSF,” he added. “This continuous supply has provided the RSF with a lifeline to continue doing what it’s doing in its campaign of atrocities. And after the RSF took control of major cities in Darfur, like Nyala, which is now the stronghold of the RSF in South Darfur, the UAE continued to use Nyala International Airport to create an air bridge supplying the RSF with weapons and supplies. We find weekly several airplanes … tracked with open-source airline trackers that go from UAE to Nyala airport. Even the Sudanese armed forces, several times, bombed some of these planes,” he further explained.
At the core of Sudanese accusations is this claim: an embargoed territory supplied through neighboring states and, Fareid says, via a weekly airlift from a Gulf partner close to Western capitals. Several UN panels since January 2024 reported “credible evidence” of Emirati financing and supply to the RSF; in January 2025, US lawmakers said administration reporting pointed the same way.
Strategy and geography
Fareid added strategy to logistics. “The UAE is not even a Red Sea littoral state, but it has acted as if it wants to control the western coast of the Red Sea—Somaliland, Eritrea, Sudan, even Egypt—in competition with the long Saudi coast on the other side,” he said, calling this “an imperialist project” under a peacemaker façade.
Gold and finance
Gold is another link. “The total gold imports from Sudan into the UAE in 2024 … were estimated at 29 tons. This is a 70% increase from 17 tons recorded in 2023, during which the war started in April. This 70% increase tells you that the UAE directly benefited from this war,” Fareid said. “The official Sudanese authorities in 2024 reported exporting 27.9 tons of gold. So basically, this tells you that gold smuggling from the conflict zones in Sudan is directly benefiting the UAE. This is not unique to Sudan. Everywhere there is conflict, you find the UAE profiting from it in one way or another. Dubai has become a money-laundering hub, including for Russian money trying to bypass sanctions,” he added.
Lanfranchi accepted the figures but called Abu Dhabi’s choice puzzling. “Yes, it’s true that a lot of Darfur gold goes to the UAE. But so does gold from eastern Sudan. They had a massive 6-billion infrastructure and agriculture project in northeastern Sudan—core SAF areas—signed after the coup … and this investment has been canceled … in protest against the UAE support for the RSF. So, if their interest is economic, why haven’t they kept a balanced position?” he asked.
“What is hard to explain is why, after the war started, Abu Dhabi seems to have doubled down on the RSF instead of keeping a balanced position that would have better protected its economic interests in eastern Sudan, which is SAF territory. Economics, gold, agricultural land—they all matter, but none of them fully explain why the UAE would position itself as a key supporter of the RSF, rather than adopting a more balanced approach and keeping ties with both sides,” he added.
“Part of the explanation may simply be bad policy—for instance, a few people on top of the decision-making structure buying into the RSF’s narrative that it is ‘anti-Islamist’—or it may be about personal relations. Frankly, Abu Dhabi’s real reasoning is still not quite clear to me,” he further noted.
Russia, and why the UAE allegations matter
Fareid also mentioned Russia, often linked to Darfur. He said Russian security companies that previously operated under the Wagner umbrella worked with RSF-linked gold and security networks since the Bashir era, while Moscow spoke to Port Sudan authorities about a naval facility. Even so, he described the Emirati pipeline as “beyond discussion right now,” because it is backed by a state that is also a key Western partner—making Western silence, in his view, harder to justify.
Boycott calls vs. law
Owing to the alleged Emirati role, Sudanese, African, and some European activists launched a visible “boycott Dubai/Abu Dhabi over Sudan” campaign. It is worth recording Fareid’s words precisely. “I don’t think I’m even calling for this boycott. I’m calling for international law to be actually a law that’s implemented for everyone. Because any legal framework is either universal and applied to everyone or it’s not,” he said. “The UAE is breaching the UN Security Council, and this puts the UAE under possible international sanctions, and this should happen. Without actually having a joint principle, the UAE will continue to do that, and it will continue to risk the global and regional peace and stability,” he added.
He was referring to UN Security Council Resolution 1591, adopted in March 2005, which imposes an arms embargo on Darfur and obliges member states to prevent the supply of arms and related materiel to embargoed entities, with a UN Panel of Experts charged to monitor compliance.
Pressure, or the lack of it
Lanfranchi’s reading was similar: “So far, they have faced very little pressure. There have been a couple of high-profile episodes, like Macklemore’s boycott, but it’s been the exception rather than the rule. At the very moment El Fasher was falling, the president of the European Council was in the UAE, and his statement included no references to Sudan,” he mentioned. “So … beyond the activist bubble … what kind of reputational price are the Emirates paying? I haven’t seen much,” he added. For now, pressure is mostly societal; Arab and European governments haven’t imposed Sudan-specific measures on the UAE.
What kind of reputational price are the Emirates paying? I haven’t seen much.
Regional alignments
Both interviews also pushed back against the early Western framing that the Arab side is split down the middle. “For Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other members of the Arab League, they recognize the existential threat that the RSF, as a military and nonstate militant actor, poses all over the region. And I think that’s why they are supporting the legitimate government in Sudan,” Fareid said. “It is a de facto government. When we try to take this legitimacy from it, we are just left with chaos and lawlessness of the RSF,” he said. Lanfranchi mapped the alignments accordingly: “Within the MENA region, the UAE is relatively isolated in terms of support for the RSF. … Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar are definitely more on the SAF side. … Even Saudi Arabia has shifted … gradually and steadily more toward a SAF-friendly position,” he said. That helps explain why Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been consistent voices for an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access to Darfur: They view the RSF as a foreign-supplied, nonstate armed formation on their western approaches.
Diplomacy without leverage
On the American and European side, Lanfranchi described recognition without confrontation. “There is an acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, yet there is not a willingness to put the required political capital into a solution. The most prominent format as of late, the US-backed Quad, brought to the table Egypt and the UAE, i.e., the two key backers of the warring parties, which were missing before. … But have I seen the US putting significant pressure on the UAE to do things differently? I haven’t,” he said. Early Jeddah talks and subsequent efforts did not produce the promised “durable ceasefire” because, for months, the two states with leverage over SAF and the RSF—Egypt and the UAE—were not both in the room. Even after Washington brought them in, the step Fareid keeps demanding—actual measures against a state breaching the Darfur embargo—did not follow.
Fareid was blunter still: “The US and the UK and other major powers are just setting a blind eye on what the UAE is doing,” he said. “There were reports … about the UK actively … silencing criticism of UAE involvement in arming RSF militia in Sudan. … This was active complicity from the UK government in covering such crimes,” he added.
Humanitarian access
Meanwhile, UN agencies report that both RSF operations around El Fasher and SAF controls elsewhere are repeatedly blocking aid convoys. That means the latest ceasefire calls—from the African Union, the European Union, the United States, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—will only matter if external sponsors press their clients to open corridors; otherwise, humanitarian numbers will worsen even if a truce is declared on paper.
What’s next
As long as the RSF continues to exist as an institution, there will be no peace or stability in Sudan.
As for what comes next, both experts were sober. “A complete RSF takeover of the whole of Sudan looks extremely unlikely,” Lanfranchi said. “And at the same time, it’s unlikely that SAF will win it militarily—at least as long as the RSF continues to receive considerable support. In case a mediated agreement is reached, it remains to be seen what the conditions will be. In the meantime, Sudan looks more and more split into different areas of control,” he added.
Fareid set a harder condition: “As long as the RSF continues to exist as an institution, there will be no peace or stability in Sudan,” he concluded.