In the flickering twilight of El-Fasher, a child clutches a soot-covered doll beside a pile of ashes where her home once stood.
Mothers huddle in the corridors of the last functioning hospital, terrified that the next drone strike will claim the wounded they tend. Fathers dig graves with their hands, burying children in the courtyards of shattered schools.
For 18 months, the city endured a siege that stripped it of food, water, and life. When its gates finally fell, it was not liberation that entered. It was annihilation.
Witnesses speak of men dragged from their homes, women and children executed in the streets, hospitals shelled while terrified civilians sheltered inside.
Human Rights Watch has documented scenes of mass killings, burning, and looting. The UN has described the assault as a "campaign of extermination". And behind the force that carried out this atrocity stands a patron whose fingerprints stain every front of Sudan’s war: the United Arab Emirates.
If the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are the visible executioners, the hand that directs them is Abu Dhabi’s.
It has poured cash, weapons, and political cover into the war machine of RSF leader Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo - known as Hemeti - igniting a conflict that has torn Sudan apart.
Arms continue to reach the RSF commander through the porous borders of Chad and Libya, and by air flights through UAE bases in Somaliland, sustaining a war that has displaced millions and hollowed out the country’s institutions.
Even the UK’s own military equipment has found its way into RSF hands, exposing the West’s silent complicity in the crimes it publicly condemns.
The RSF’s roots lie in the darkest corners of Sudan’s modern history. Formed under former President Omar al-Bashir as a paramilitary arm of the National Intelligence and Security Service, it was later folded into the army’s framework without losing its autonomy.
Its leader, Hemedti, rose from humble camel trader to warlord, from Bashir’s enforcer in Darfur to deputy head of Sudan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council.
In 2019, the RSF helped depose Bashir, joining the transitional government while quietly preserving its independence and foreign sponsors. That fragile coexistence with the army collapsed in April 2023, when negotiations over security reform failed.
What followed was not merely a military confrontation but a struggle for the nation’s survival: a state pitted against the mercenary force it once created.
Since the popular uprising of 2018 that overthrew Bashir, Abu Dhabi has intervened to sabotage the Sudanese revolution and divert it from its course.
It armed and financed Hemedti - the Janjaweed commander once used by Bashir to crush Darfur - and sought to exploit that same brutal expertise to destroy Sudan, fragment it, and divide it further, using its petrodollars as a weapon of disintegration.
A Middle East Eye investigation revealed how this support operates: through a clandestine network of airlifts, arms, and mercenaries. In Somalia’s port city of Bosaso, Emirati cargo planes marked "hazardous" land and depart under cover of night, part of a covert operation funnelling weapons and fighters into Sudan.
Colombian mercenaries recruited by UAE-based private firms have been deployed under RSF command in Darfur’s killing fields. This is not proxy war by accident, but by design.
But Sudan is only the latest theatre in Abu Dhabi’s long campaign of counter-revolution."
✍️ Opinion by Soumaya Ghannoushi
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