Sudan’s civil war has no shortage of outside actors. Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan back the RSF; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea back the army. All of them have something at stake — a border, a security exposure, refugees crossing into their territory. The United Arab Emirates has none of that. No shared border, no shared river, no Emirati city absorbing Sudanese refugees. Husam Mahjoub argues in Jacobin that this absence of any normal interest is the point.

Read the UAE’s role through four pillars instead:

  • Gold. RSF-controlled mines in Darfur feed gold smuggled to Dubai via South Sudan, Egypt, Chad, or the Central African Republic — monetized into hard currency that keeps the war running.
  • Logistics. Sudan anchors a continent-wide Emirati port and logistics build-out worth over $110 billion.
  • Counterrevolution. Abu Dhabi’s opposition isn’t to political Islam or Iran as such — it has worked with both when useful. It’s to any force, Islamist or secular or socialist or democratic, that threatens its preferred regional order. After 2011 it bankrolled El-Sisi’s coup in Egypt and backed Haftar in Libya.
  • Democratic contagion. Sudan’s December 2018 revolution didn’t threaten the UAE materially. A successful transition next door, won by ordinary people, is the threat.

This is the essay’s analytical core: the UAE behaves as a subimperial power — imperial within its own sphere, aligned with the interests of a global power above it. And it doesn’t act alone. Haftar’s Libyan territory and airspace move weapons into Sudan; Reuters identified a secret UAE-financed training camp near the Sudanese border in Ethiopia; supply routes run through Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Chad, and South Sudan, with some facilities operating under humanitarian or medical cover.

The part that should sit with you is the Western complicity. The US, Britain, France, and Canada had the intelligence, read the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch investigations, and were briefed repeatedly by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab on the coming siege of El Fasher. Washington was hosting talks with RSF and Sudanese government representatives at the very moment El Fasher fell. France and Canada received reports that French- and Canadian-made weapons supplied to the UAE were turning up in RSF hands in Darfur — a direct breach of the UN arms embargo — and did nothing. When sanctions finally came, they landed on the Colombian mercenaries at the bottom of the chain, not the Emirati companies and officials who financed the recruitment.

Mahjoub is also pointed about the peace-process reflex. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur, and the framework agreement that preceded this war all produced the same shape: power and positions distributed among armed factions, development promised and rarely delivered, perpetrators left in place to fight again when incentives shifted. His conclusion is narrower and more radical — the international community’s real capability is to stop the states fueling the war, and to name the UAE first. That is a decision, not a policy failure, and he wants the people who made it investigated accordingly.