Ahmed Ismat Ahmed’s essay on Sudan’s war is built on three numbers. In Soba, a twelve-hour biscuit-factory shift paid 1,500 pounds in 2021. A single room in Haj Yousif rented for 30,000 pounds a month — twenty shifts for rent. The Rapid Support Forces offered 15,000 pounds a day, a uniform, and a phone. Two days of militia pay equalled a month’s rent. This, he writes, explains more than any map he has been shown since: the war was less a story of people choosing violence than of people choosing the wage that was available.

The human center is Iqbal, a tea seller outside the University of Khartoum medical campus, whose stools were seized by municipal crews who then charged her to redeem her own kettle and sugar — a practice called kasha. The women who came in from the farms when farming stopped paying fed and warmed the city while being treated as illegal.

Where the militia’s money comes from:

  • After clashes with Musa Hilal, the RSF took the Jebel Amer gold fields — at peak, roughly 40 kg a day, processed with mercury, flown from Khartoum to Dubai without customs paperwork, annual take estimated above $1 billion.
  • Global Witness traced payments through UAE front companies and National Bank of Abu Dhabi accounts, including more than 900 Toyota Hilux and Land Cruisers.
  • From 2015, the same force sent 14,000 to 40,000 fighters to Yemen on Saudi and Emirati pay, rotating home trained in urban combat and logistics.
  • Wagner arrived around 2017 for the same metal; US Treasury sanctions in 2020 pushed the networks through UAE intermediaries. The buyer did not change.
  • Swissaid, reading the UAE’s own 2024 figures, found Dubai imported 29 metric tons of Sudanese gold that year, up from 17 — plus 18 from Chad and 9 from Libya, neither famous for gold mines.

The policy payoff is sharp. Foreign Policy recently argued for extending the 2005 Darfur arms embargo nationwide; the Security Council extended existing measures only one month. Ahmed’s objection is that an embargo addresses supply, while militia recruitment is a problem of demand. The UAE is not one supplier among others — it is the buyer of last resort and the logistics node for the air bridge into Darfur. A force paid from the mine, through Dubai, does better when the country is in pieces.

His proposals are specific: Kimberley-style certification for Sudanese gold at the point it enters refineries, and sanctions on the UAE-based air-bridge entities and the front companies that convert metal into Toyotas. He is careful not to defend the Sudanese army — but a ruined army still has to pretend it employs people on behalf of a state.

Iqbal was displaced to Omdurman and never found another stall. She asked whether he was eating anyway.