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.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
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.
A dark history
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 UAE-backed horror in el-Fasher exposes the West’s empty words
Read More »
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.
A counter-revolutionary crusade
The RSF’s brutality was first exported to Yemen, where tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters were deployed under Emirati command to wage the UAE’s war for dominance.
Since the Arab Spring, the UAE has waged a counter-revolutionary crusade across the Arab world. It has funded coups, armed militias, and fuelled proxy wars to halt democratic change
There, the same Janjaweed units that once razed Darfur became instruments of Emirati ambition, hired muscle in a regional war that shattered another Arab nation.
Since the Arab Spring, the Emirates – under Mohammed bin Zayed – has waged a counter-revolutionary crusade across the Arab world.
It has funded coups, armed militias, and fuelled proxy wars to halt democratic change and preserve the region’s authoritarian order.
Its foreign policy has become one of pre-emptive sabotage, ensuring that no revolution succeeds, no democracy survives, and no freedom takes root that might threaten the monarchies of the Gulf.
In Egypt, it bankrolled the coup that brought President Abdel-Fatah el Sisi to power and restored military rule.
In Tunisia, it embraced Kais Saied’s 2021 power grab, strangling the Arab world’s last surviving democracy.
And in Libya, it went further – repeatedly violating international law to install a new autocrat. A UN report documented the UAE’s repeated breaches of the arms embargo on Libya: attack helicopters, drones, and missile systems secretly supplied to Khalifa Haftar’s Libya National Army (LNA), escalating the war and enabling the seizure of strategic territory.
The pattern is now impossible to deny.
The Wall Street Journal has detailed how Emirati arms pipelines have bolstered a Sudanese militia accused of genocide, a mirror image of the Libya playbook.
UAE preaches that prosperity without freedom is the path forward for Arabs. But the reality their model produces is fragmentation, mayhem, and bloodshed
Meanwhile, a parallel story has unfolded in Gaza, one that couples “humanitarian” optics with carceral engineering.
Evidence suggests the UAE is entangled in Israel’s scheme to raze eastern Rafah and erect a “humanitarian city” to corral 600,000 Palestinians, a “concentration camp” by any honest measure.
Mondoweiss traces this to Israel’s operation codenamed Gallant Knight 3 to the emergence of Abu Shabab’s “Popular Forces” as a local proxy to police the enclosure.
To service this prison without bars, the UAE has built six desalination plants in Egypt’s al-Arish, boasting a combined capacity said to serve over 600,000 people – the very figure echoed by Israeli officials and sympathetic media. UAE state-aligned coverage touts this as charity.
In context, it looks like infrastructure for mass containment. Nor did Abu Dhabi merely stand by as Israel waged a genocidal onslaught. It helped keep Israel’s arteries open.
With the Red Sea contested, Israel moved to overland shipping from India via the UAE to bypass Yemen’s Houthi attacks.
Reports and follow-ups detailed trucking routes running from Gulf ports to Haifa. At Ben-Gurion airport, as most airlines suspended service, Emirati carriers kept flying, effectively serving as a lifeline for Israeli travel during the war.
An ideological partnership
This partnership is not merely logistical; it is ideological and commercial.
Israeli and Emirati online networks have worked in tandem to shape narratives around Sudan and Gaza, targeting Sudan’s army even as RSF massacres mounted in El Fasher.
How Abu Dhabi built an axis of secessionists across the region
Read More »
On the defence-industrial side, firms are expanding inside the UAE, tightening a two-way flow of money, tech, and intelligence. Israeli defence firm Controp is opening a UAE subsidiary making it the latest emblem of this deepening security embrace.
All the while, Emirati rulers boast of their “development model” as a “shining example for the region”: authoritarian, anti-political, drenched in consumerism and spectacle.
It is a façade of progress built on repression. A mirage of modernity concealing a machinery of tyranny.
They preach that prosperity without freedom is the path forward for Arabs. But the reality their model produces is fragmentation, mayhem, and bloodshed.
The Emirates does not act alone. It has become Israel’s most significant regional partner, an accomplice in a shared project of disintegration. Together they invest in chaos: igniting civil strife, arming factions, and turning disorder into opportunity.
Through money, mercenaries, and propaganda, they pit sect against sect, tribe against tribe, reducing nations to feuding fiefdoms over which Israel reigns supreme.
Domination through division
The spoils are both strategic and material. Sudan’s gold flows through RSF-UAE channels; Libyan oil and Yemeni ports are quietly absorbed under the guise of “investment”. Israeli and Emirati companies profit from looted resources and smuggling networks that thrive in the chaos they helped create.
The UAE remains a small state playing at empire, waging wars beyond its means and courting consequences it cannot contain
For Israel’s far-right government, the goal is domination through division. For the UAE, it is borrowed power: the illusion of empire through servitude to one.
Both see the region not as sovereign nations but as pliable territories, a mosaic of weakened entities ripe for manipulation. From a small Gulf principality, Abu Dhabi has recast itself as a regional meddler, entangled in every conflict from Yemen to Libya to Sudan.
The irony is that it imagines itself a great power, intoxicated by wealth, emboldened by its alliance with Israel, and convinced that exporting crises will shield it from change.
But geography and history offer no such protection. The UAE remains a small state playing at empire, waging wars beyond its means and courting consequences it cannot contain.
For the fires it has kindled in Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and beyond will not burn outward forever. Sooner or later, every arsonist meets their own blaze. Those who build power on flames always end up being consumed by them.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
