UAE using Wagner fighters to smuggle weapons into Sudan

Rebel fighters

The United Arab Emirates has used Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary group to ship arms to rebels in Sudan’s civil war, experts and a paramilitary group say.
The Kremlin-funded military contractor used the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR) to smuggle weapons to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fighting against the Sudanese army.
Rebels fighting the CAR government told an investigation by SourceMaterial that they had captured Wagner-escorted consignments of weapons supplied by the UAE and destined for the RSF.
Shipments continued until at least April 2024, the rebels said, with diplomatic sources believing they have now tailed off as Moscow has tilted away from the RSF and towards the Sudanese armed forces (SAF).
As many as 150,000 people have been killed in Sudan and more than 10 million people have fled their homes since the simmering rivalry between the army and RSF last year erupted into war.
Both sides are accused of atrocities. The conflict has set off one of the planet’s worst humanitarian crises and triggered the world’s first formal declaration of famine in seven years.
United Nations investigators this week accused the RSF of “horrific” ethnically-driven assaults against non-Arab Sudanese in the Darfur region.
The UAE, traditionally one of Britain’s closest allies in the Gulf, has long-standing dealings with the RSF and has repeatedly been accused of ferrying weapons to them. It strongly denies all involvement – though UN experts have called previous accusations “credible”.
The Emirati government declined to comment on the latest allegations.
Russia has also emerged as a key participant as the war has become a tangled global battlefield, waged by competing opportunistic powers. Moscow has been playing both sides of the bloodshed, analysts say, in hopes that it will be rewarded with access to gold mines and a strategic Red Sea port.
Wagner mercenaries are heavily involved in the neighbouring CAR, bolstering the government against opposition rebels – and have used the country as a conduit for weapons bound for the RSF.
A rebel leader said Wagner forces – now rebranded Africa Corps after the failed uprising by Yevgeny Prighozin – had been ferrying arms across the border crossing at Um Dafog into South Darfur.
Abdu Buda, a spokesman for the Coalition of Patriots for Change, said the paramilitary group had intercepted two shipments, the most recent in April, and also captured Russian Wagner mercenaries. He said two were dead and two still in captivity.
He said: “These shipments were transported by Wagner mercenaries who are fighting against our forces, controlling the gold and diamond mining area and backing the government in Bangui.”
“We arrested fighters from the Russian mercenaries of Wagner during the battles between us and the CAR government forces… We arrested with them weapons coming from UAE to CAR through Uganda.”
“During the investigation with the Wagner captives they told us that they have coordination with UAE and the CAR government to send the weapons to RSF.”
Wagner’s smuggling route passes through Bangui, the capital, to Birao near the Sudanese border, said Nathalia Dukhan, a Central Africa specialist at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
“Local sources mentioned planes, which they believe were Emirati, arriving in Bangui at night with military equipment,” she said.
“Wagner collected the shipments, transported them via helicopters and military aeroplanes to Birao, and then transferred them to the RSF in Sudan.”
Diplomatic sources said supplies to the RSF appeared to have slowed earlier this year, after Kremlin relations with the Sudanese army warmed.
Wagner and the UAE had already worked together closely elsewhere in Africa, notably in Libya.
Andreas Krieg, a King’s College London academic who studies the conflict, said: “The story of Wagner in the African continent starts in the UAE, they gave them the seed funding to found their base in Libya.
“There is a strategic alignment of interest between Russia and UAE because oppose political Islam and civil society more generally.”
The CAR shipments have been just part of an arsenal of UAE weapons being transferred to the RSF, the Sudanese military alleges.
“The rebel militia has committed violations and atrocities with unlimited support from the UAE,” according to a leaked 78-page dossier of allegations, compiled by Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, Sudan’s permanent representative to the UN.
His letter to the Security Council, dated March 28, lists 43 flights from the UAE and to an airport in Chad on the Sudanese border between July 2023 and March 2024. Many of the flights were allegedly carrying cargoes of weapons.
The letter includes photos, allegedly taken at Amdjarass airport in Chad, one of which shows a crate of Kalashnikovs rifles offloaded from a UAE plane.
Mohamed Abushahab, the UAE’s ambassador to the UN, this week told the Security Council that Sudan’s claims it was supplying the RSF were “a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the failings of the Sudanese Armed Forces”.
Russia, like the UAE, has been heavily involved in Sudan since long before the current war.
In 2017, Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s then president, signed deals in Moscow, agreeing for Russia to set up a naval base in Port Sudan and granting concessions on gold mining to Wagner front companies.
Jonas Horner, former Horn of Africa senior analyst for Crisis Group, said: “By having Wagner/Africa Corps retain ties with the RSF and the Kremlin provide support to SAF, Russia has been able to fudge this parallel support.
“Equally, short on friends internationally, neither of the belligerents in Sudan felt able to alienate Moscow by cutting ties.”
While the RSF has made gains in much of the country, the army appears difficult to dislodge from the north east coast, leaving it still crucial to Moscow’s dreams of a naval base.
Mr Horner said: “I would surmise that for Russia, the equation has become that SAF on the Red Sea are looking fairly comfortable in their defence of that north eastern corner of the country, aided by the delivery of Iranian weaponry.
“That may become the sovereign corner of Sudan as we know it under a SAF-controlled government, regardless of their control of the rest of the country, making close relations with SAF the shortest route for Moscow to procure a Red Sea base.”