The UAE enables genocide in Sudan
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
Sudan now represents the worst humanitarian catastrophe on earth. The competition for that dubious distinction is not even close. Since fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), roughly 14 million people – a quarter of the population – have been driven from their homes. Nine million more have been displaced inside the country and another 4.4 million have been pushed across borders into Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt. Nearly 34 million Sudanese people, about two-thirds of the nation, now require humanitarian assistance. Almost 19.5 million face crisis-level hunger, and 825,000 children under five are expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year.
Behind that tragic arithmetic of suffering stands a question the international community has been remarkably reluctant to ask out loud: who is paying for it?
A United Nations fact-finding mission concluded in February 2026 that the RSF’s conduct in El Fasher – the capital of North Darfur province it seized in October 2025 after an eighteen-month siege – bore the hallmarks of genocide. The United States government had already made a formal genocide determination against the RSF in January 2025.
The RSF did not acquire that renown on its own. Amnesty International documented Chinese-made GB50A guided bombs and 155mm AH-4 howitzers in RSF hands, weapons that had been sold by China to the United Arab Emirates and almost were re-exported to Darfur in breach of the UN arms embargo. In addition to that, a United Nations sanctions panel traced Bulgarian mortar shells that had been exported to the United Arab Emirates in 2019 to an RSF supply convoy seized in North Darfur. And in May 2026, Human Rights Watch published a year-long investigation showing that an Abu Dhabi security company with links to the ruling family recruited more than 1,000 Colombian private military contractors, trained them at Emirati bases, and deployed them alongside the RSF – including in El Fasher as the massacres unfolded.
Abu Dhabi (the capital of the United Arab Emirates) denies all of this. As one Human Rights Watch researcher put it, the Emirati role has become the world’s worst kept secret. Their motive is not ideological. It is monetary.
Gold is the most significant source of income for both warring parties, and the Rapid Support Forces controls much of Sudan’s informal gold production in Darfur and Kordofan provinces. UN experts estimated that ten tons of gold worth roughly $860 million came out of RSF-held territory in 2024 alone. Overwhelmingly, that gold goes to Dubai. Once the smuggled gold bullion is melted and refined there, it enters the legitimate global market laundered clean.
The Sentry has mapped the corporate architecture: more than a dozen Dubai-registered firms tied to RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – “Hemedti” – and his family, spanning gold trading, jewelry, and consultancy. This is not a gang or a mafia sideline. It is a war economy with a bank.
Gold is only part of the UAE bounty taken from Sudan. The Emirates sought a $6 billion Red Sea port at Abu Amama, paired with 415,000 acres of farmland – a bid for both maritime position and food security that Khartoum canceled in 2024, citing UAE support for the RSF. In addition, a longstanding hostility toward ISIS-aligned factions within the Sudanese military makes the calculus even more apparent: a compliant client force is giving Emiratis access to minerals, farmland, and the Red Sea coast.
What is most alarming about this is not the stealthy Emirati activities under way but Western complicity with it. France, the European Union, and the United Kingdom have all issued statements deploring external support for the war while pointedly declining to identify the supporter. In Washington, Senator Chris Van Hollen’s (D-MD) effort to condition arms sales to the United Arab Emirates on ending its support for the Rapid Support Forces was rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, with several Democrats joining Republicans opposing it.
The United Arab Emirates is an arms customer, an investment partner, and a diplomatic convenience. Sudan is Black, distant, and politically cheap. That asymmetry is the whole answer.
Naming a state sponsor of genocide is the minimum act of moral seriousness. Until Washington and Brussels are willing to do it – and to attach real cost to gold imports, arms transfers, and financial networks – the massacres will continue to be well funded.
