🌍 How the UAE Fuels Genocide in Sudan

Receipts, law, and the lifelines that keep the RSF alive — and how we cut them.

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What the United Arab Emirates is doing in Sudan is not a mystery hidden in footnotes. It is a story told by flight manifests that never appear, by licenses that officials say do not exist but later show up in sanctions filings, by passports found in wreckage and weapons that move along desert roads while publicists draft statements about hospitals and aid. The RSF — a force born from the Janjaweed that ravaged Darfur — has besieged cities, emptied neighborhoods, and hunted families. In El‑Fasher, the killing escalated again after the city fell: door‑to‑door executions, a massacre in the Saudi Maternity Hospital, tens of thousands fleeing with whatever they could carry. If you only skim the headlines, you might think this is just another far‑off “civil war.” But when you slow down and look at the receipts, a different picture comes into focus: the RSF’s capacity to sustain these crimes depends on external lifelines — and the UAE is the most consequential of them.

In March 6th, 2025 filings at the International Court of Justice, Sudan accused the UAE of being “complicit in the genocide” in West Darfur by militarily, financially, and politically backing the RSF. The UAE’s reply was pure derision — a “cynical publicity stunt,” they said — even as UN arms‑embargo monitors called allegations of UAE smuggling via Chad credible. A few weeks later, as jurisdiction fights played out and diplomats parsed procedures, the violence in Darfur did not pause. It never does. And that’s the bitter truth about international law: the court calendar moves in months; the killing moves today.

Still, the law matters — and I’m going to explain it plainly. Under the Genocide Convention, states have a duty to prevent and punish genocide. A state can be responsible for complicity when it aids or assists genocidal acts knowing the intent behind them. You don’t need a soldier’s fingerprint on a trigger to be complicit; you need knowledge and material support that foreseeably fuels the crime. That is why arms diversions and money flows matter so much here. Under the Arms Trade Treaty, exporters must assess whether a transfer would facilitate grave violations of international humanitarian law, and must take steps to prevent diversion. And under Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, all states have a duty to ensure respect for the laws of war — not merely to obey them themselves.

If you want to understand how this looks on the ground, follow the trail. In Omdurman, after the army retook the city, documents and UAE passports reportedly surfaced in the wreckage; investigators described the combined evidence — drones capable of dropping thermobaric munitions, recently made weapons, logistics — as a smoking gun of Emirati involvement. In Port Sudan, officials accused the UAE of supplying weapons used in RSF drone attacks on the wartime capital. At the same time, a different face of the Emirates went to work: press releases about field hospitals, headlines calling the UAE a humanitarian beacon, festivals celebrating Sudanese culture in Abu Dhabi, and an all‑out PR effort to control the narrative while the weapons pipelines kept humming.

It is not just hardware. It is finance. Gold from RSF‑controlled mines is traded in the UAE. Hemedti’s commercial web stretches through Dubai. Fighters once sent to serve Emirati priorities in Yemen and Libya have come home to tear Sudan apart. Analysts across the spectrum have said a version of the same sentence: without the UAE’s financial and logistical support, the RSF could not have sustained this war this long. That is not absolution for anyone else — the Sudanese Armed Forces have their own record of abuses — but it is clarity about who is fueling the engine that has driven ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

And where do Western capitals sit in this picture? The words are often right — condemnations, grave concern, even formal genocide determinations naming the RSF — but the deeds undercut the sentences. The United States, the United Kingdom, and France have continued to transfer massive quantities of weapons to the UAE, even as intelligence and open‑source investigations have stacked up evidence of re‑exports to the RSF. One U.S. administration advanced a $1.2 billion sale; the next notified $1.4 billion more. Legislators like Senator Chris Van Hollen, Representative Sara Jacobs, and Representative Gregory Meeks have pushed to block arms sales to the UAE until it stops arming the RSF — a necessary first step — but those bills only exist because the default posture has been business as usual.

I want you to hear me as your brother now, not just as a journalist: this is what complicity looks like. It looks like engines that can be labeled “civilian” on the export form but end up powering armored vehicles in a genocide. It looks like a UN arms embargo covering Darfur in theory while weapons move in practice, and like Security Council renewals that make the news cycle for a day while El‑Fasher bleeds for months.

People sometimes ask me if this is really different from other eras of impunity. Here’s one difference that matters: universal jurisdiction has more footholds than it used to. Borders remember what headlines forget. I think about the way apartheid eventually ran into a wall of boycotts, sanctions, and travel risks. I think about elders who taught me that the arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own — we bend it, with law, with culture, and with courage. None of that brings back the Masalit people already killed, or the babies whose names we will never learn from Zamzam and Abu Shouk, but it tells us there are levers to pull now.

If you’re still with me, you are part of this community. Join as a monthly, annual, or founding member so I can keep this reporting free for the world, put the receipts on screen when we launch our video show on December 1st, and keep naming names — clearly, firmly, and with the law in plain English.

Let’s get very specific and keep the language plain. The RSF’s ability to keep killing civilians depends on external lifelines. The most decisive of those lifelines runs through the United Arab Emirates. The receipts aren’t abstract.

Here are the facts you can carry into any conversation:

• Court filings: On March 6th, 2025, Sudan went to the International Court of Justice accusing the UAE of being “complicit in genocide” by arming, funding, and politically backing the RSF in West Darfur. The UAE denied it and pushed for dismissal, but UN embargo monitors already called smuggling via Chad credible.

• Weapons pipelines: Reporting and UN‑submitted records describe UAE‑routed shipments—including Chinese drones and bombs—re‑exported to the RSF. A U.S. intelligence assessment reached the same conclusion this year.

• On‑the‑ground traces: After the army retook parts of Omdurman, investigators found Emirati passports in wreckage and linked RSF drones capable of dropping thermobaric munitions to UAE channels—what one analyst called a “smoking gun.”

• UK parts in RSF hands: Documents seen by the UN show UK‑origin equipment exported to the UAE later in Sudan with the RSF—from Militec training systems to Cummins engines powering Nimr armored vehicles.

• Gold and money: Hemedti’s commercial empire is rooted in Dubai. Gold from RSF‑controlled mines moves through the UAE, recycling blood into liquidity.

• Public relations vs. reality: Even as the UAE touts field hospitals, aid pledges, cultural festivals, and Ramadan truces, it has refused UN flight‑manifest requests, blocked Sudanese commentary on state media pages, and, by multiple accounts, sought to restrain UN investigations into its role.

That’s what complicity looks like in the modern world: not a single signature on a single order, but a continuous pattern of help and denial. Under the Genocide Convention, a state is responsible if it aids or assists genocidal acts knowing the intent behind them. Under the Arms Trade Treaty, exporters must weigh the risk that a transfer will facilitate grave violations, and take real steps to prevent diversion—not just box‑check a form. Under Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, states have a duty to ensure respect for humanitarian law, which includes cutting off the fuel when a partner uses it to burn civilians alive.

This is why Western policy cannot be judged by press releases alone. Words say “never again”; shipments say “right now.” In October 30th, 2025 reporting, U.S. lawmakers demanded a halt to arms for the Emirates until it stops arming the RSF. Senator Chris Van Hollen said, “Enough… We must pass my bill to block arms sales to the UAE until it stops fueling the RSF’s war crimes in Sudan,” and Representative Gregory Meeks pushed legislation to freeze sales to any external actor funding RSF or SAF and to require a report on whether U.S. weapons are showing up in Sudan. Representative Rashida Tlaib called plainly to cut off weapons to the UAE. These are the right instincts—but they must become law and enforcement, not just sentiment.

There’s another layer to this that people often miss: enforcement of the arms embargo that already exists for Darfur. Renewals at the UN Security Council matter, but paper embargoes without teeth are a blueprint for impunity. If the Council’s will is split, states still have tools—national sanctions, Magnitsky‑style listings, export‑control crackdowns, end‑user monitoring, and criminal probes into diversion networks. Universal jurisdiction is not fiction. Ask Augusto Pinochet, arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant. Ask the perpetrators who discovered that the world is smaller than it used to be, and that borders remember what headlines forget.

Some will argue this is a messy civil war with blame on all sides. We don’t need to sanitize anyone to tell the truth: the RSF’s pattern in Darfur—massacres, ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, starvation sieges—is the pattern of genocide. It is also the reproduction of an older crime. The RSF descends from the Janjaweed that torched Darfur in the early 2000s, and it behaves accordingly. The faces are new; the method is not.

I want to place this in a moral lineage you can feel. During the long fight against apartheid, people built a global coalition to cut off the flow—arms, money, legitimacy. Congress overrode a presidential veto in 1986 to pass the Comprehensive Anti‑Apartheid Act, and the pressure changed the math on the ground. Go further back: when Black freedom movements in the United States forced a nation to see what it already knew, law and culture moved because people refused to be quiet. We bend the arc by taking away the fuel and by telling the truth without euphemism.

So what now—today, not in theory? If you sit in Washington, London, Paris—if you sit anywhere with leverage—the steps are not complicated, only contested. They look like this:

• Freeze arms sales to the UAE unless and until it verifiably ends support to the RSF—and make that certification public and specific.

• Sanction UAE state entities, companies, and individuals facilitating transfers to the RSF; hit the logistics chain, not just the front soldiers.

• Mandate end‑user monitoring and post‑shipment verification for any prior transfers; audit where U.S./UK/EU kits have ended up, and publish the results.

• Enforce the Darfur embargo with investigations, seizures, and prosecutions; don’t hide behind Council deadlock to do nothing at home.

• Target the money: choke the gold trade and Dubai‑anchored financial webs that bankroll the RSF; make the laundering costly.

• Back Sudanese civil society—especially women leaders—in any talks; peace built by only armed men is not peace.

• Guarantee humanitarian corridors into Zamzam, Abu Shouk, and across Darfur—monitored, protected, and sustained.

This is the shortest path to reducing the killing now. It will not restore the lives already taken, but it will save the lives still on the edge. And it will do something else that matters: it will tell the truth in deeds about who we are.

I write all of this in the first person because I’m accountable to you. I don’t call this a “war” when it is a one‑sided extermination. I don’t hide behind passive voice when a state supplies a militia that targets babies in a hospital. I call it what it is. And I do it in plain English so a teenager and a professor can both carry the argument and win with it.

If this clarity helped, I’m asking you to match your conviction with action. Join as a monthly, annual, or founding member so I can keep this reporting free for the world, put the receipts on screen on December 1st, and keep pressing for accountability with the law in one hand and the human story in the other.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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