Sudan’s civil war fueled by secret arms shipments from UAE and Iran

OMDURMAN, Sudan - Sudan’s devastating civil war is being fueled in part by weapons secretly supplied to both sides by foreign countries, including munitions and drones from the United Arab Emirates and Iran, according to confidential assessments, a State Department funded report and evidence collected from captured weapons in Sudan.

Sudanese military officials in the city of Omdurman recently allowed Washington Post journalists to inspect a drone that the officials said had been captured from the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces along with munitions for the drone. The officials provided photos of the crates they had captured, including one with labeling that indicated the munitions had been manufactured in Serbia and sent to the UAE Armed Forces Joint Logistics Command.

This apparent evidence of UAE involvement aligns with the findings of the Sudan Conflict Observatory, a group funded by the U.S. State Department that tracked Emirati flights. In an assessment shared exclusively with The Post ahead of publication on Tuesday, the group said it tracked 32 flights between June 2023 and May 2024 and concluded with “near certainty” that they were weapons transfers from the UAE to the RSF.

The RSF has denied receiving military support from the UAE, and UAE diplomats strenuously rejected such allegations when they were raised by United Nations officials earlier this year. “The UAE is not providing any support or supplies to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) or any other warring parties,” the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement to The Post.

Since the end of last year, Sudan’s military has also been using foreign-supplied armed drones, in particular those secretly provided by Iran, according to the Observatory’s report. The group tracked seven flights between Iran and Sudan from December until July. Four of the flights were believed to be military because they returned to an Iranian air force apron at a Tehran airport, the report said. The other three turned off their trackers as they landed in Iran, but this suspicious behavior suggested they carried military cargo, the report said.

While Sudanese military officials have publicly denied receiving drones from Iran, a Sudanese security official confirmed that they had. Iranian officials did not respond to requests for comment.

While arms shipments from the UAE and Iran to Sudan’s warring parties have been previously disclosed, including in a New York Times account of Emirati support for the RSF using an airfield in neighboring Chad, some details about the frequency, pattern and nature of flights from the UAE and Iran have not been previously reported.

Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 after months of escalating tensions between the military and the RSF, which shared power in ruling the country. Since then, about a fifth of the population has been displaced, and famine looms. U.S.-sponsored peace talks have faltered, while several other countries in the region have stoked the conflict by supplying military support, raising the prospect that the war could spread beyond Sudan’s borders and destabilize its neighbors.

“Having a country that is sinking into not just violence and instability but potentially a failed state is something that creates enormous risks … for regional stability,” U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello said. “Every country in the region stands to lose far more by letting the country collapse than they might gain from pursuing narrow interests.”

Sudan’s western Darfur region is now under a United Nations arms embargo, but not the country as a whole.

The UAE and Iran, as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Russia, have followed developments with keen interest because of Sudan’s strategic location on the Red Sea, which sees about 12 percent of world shipping.

“The Horn of Africa has become an arena for competing interests from the Gulf, who are financing and weaponizing local proxies,” said Alexander Rondos, a senior adviser with the Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “Whoever controls Sudan, controls the Red Sea.”

The UAE’s involvement in Sudan is motivated by concerns over the Red Sea shipping lanes, crucial for trade at Emirati ports, and over the potential return of Islamists who long flourished in Sudan under former president Omar al-Bashir, diplomats and regional analysts say. The UAE also has extensive interests in Sudan’s gold and agriculture sectors, and longtime ties to RSF commander Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as Hemedti.

The UAE is an important U.S. ally, valued for its military and diplomatic cooperation in the Middle East. Last month, President Joe Biden designated the UAE as “a major defense partner of the United States.” He did not mention Emirati support for Sudanese fighters.

Two Western diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, described the Emirati denials of arming the RSF as “ridiculous” and “comical.”

In tracking the Emirati flights, the Sudan Conflict Observatory found that they routinely landed at the Amdjerass airport in northeastern Chad, close to its long, porous border with Sudan. The Emiratis say the Amdjerass base is a hospital for wounded civilians, although it is several hours drive from the camps for Sudanese refugees.

The group’s report noted that some of the airplanes were previously linked to weapons trafficking.

“There’s no other plausible explanation for these airlifts except for weapons support to the RSF,” said Justin Lynch, an adviser with the Observatory. “No one is fooled.”

Sudan’s commander in chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said in an interview that he blamed both Chad and the UAE for the ongoing conflict. “We want to end this war, but we need the Emirates to stop supporting the RSF,” Burhan said.

The drone that military officials showed to Post journalists was captured from the RSF in March, they said, after a month-long battle at the Sudan Broadcasting Corporation building in Omdurman, along with the console and bomblets. Military technicians said the drone had been assembled from commercially available components.

The drone carried 120-mm airdrop munitions. The officials said the military had captured nearly 300 crates of them and allowed Post journalists to examine some of the munitions, which had been repackaged. While the munitions did not have any markings saying where they were made, other information on the munitions matched that shown in photos of a captured crate, which also had a label saying the munitions were manufactured by Serbia’s state-owned Jugoimport-SDPR JP and supplied to the UAE Armed Forces Joint Logistics Command.

Jonah Leff, the executive director of U.K.-based Conflict Armament Research, reviewed photos of the crate and said the labeling is consistent with markings applied by Serbian manufacturers.

Jugoimport-SDPR JP did not respond to requests for comment.

Jeremy Binnie, the Middle East defense specialist for Janes, said pictures of so-called suicide drones used in Sudan seemed to match an image of a drone displayed by the UAE in Abu Dhabi. Another type of drone used in Sudan, multicopters that drop bomblets, has been seen in other conflicts where the UAE was involved, including in Yemen and Ethiopia, he said.

Sudan’s military has received substantially less outside support than the RSF, diplomats say. Support from the military’s long-standing ally, Egypt, cooled after the UAE promised to invest $35 billion in Egypt, Sudanese officials said. So Sudan’s military contacted Iran and Russia.

Military leaders normalized relations with Tehran in October, eight years after Sudan broke off relations. Secret flights from Iran to Sudan started arriving in December, using a plane previously identified by the U.S. government as delivering arms to Syrian fighters linked to Iran, the Observatory said. The most recent flight was on July 23.

The flights, operated by the Iranian company Fars Air Qeshm, began at Iran’s Mehrabad airport and continued to Bandar Abbas in southern Iran before heading to Port Sudan, the report said. Mehrabad and Bandar Abbas are both important bases for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mehrabad hosts the 1st Tactical Airbase, home to Iranian Aircraft Industries, the report said, and Bandar Abbas is a base for an Iranian drone fleet.

“Since flights began in December 2023, there has been an increase in Iranian weapons identified on the battlefield,” the report said, noting an Iranian-made Mohajer-6 drone shot down in Khartoum, a Mohajer-6 drone and ground control station, a single-payload drone similar to Iranian variants used in Yemen and also significant amounts of Iranian artillery guns and munitions.

Lieutenant General Yasser al-Atta, Sudan’s Assistant Commander in Chief, denied the military had recently received Iranian drones. But another security official confirmed the receipt of the drones. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said Iran had sought to build a naval base on the Red Sea in return for the drones and other military help but that the Sudanese military had paid for the drones outright.