Tag Archives: sextual mutilation sudan

Why and How Dubai Conquered Sudan

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U.S. intelligence agencies say the United Arab Emirates sent increasing supplies of weapons including sophisticated Chinese drones to a major Sudanese militia in 2025 bolstering a group that has been accused of genocide and pouring fuel on a conflict that has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises…It is the latest example of how the wealthy Gulf state is quietly projecting power to influence the course of conflicts and assert its interests in a region dominated by much larger power brokers, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey and Iran.

A key U.S. partner, the U.A.E. has shipped arms into Sudan to shore up the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of Sudan after a string of setbacks that culminated with the militia losing control of the capital, Khartoum, in March 2025. Rearmed, the militia survived that potential turning point in the war and launched a renewed offensive against the government that triggered some of the worst destruction of the two-year war. The RSF’s campaign included an expanded assault on North Darfur state, where the militia tightened an 18-month siege of the regional capital of El Fasher, cutting off tens of thousands of people from adequate food and medicine…“The war would be over if not for the U.A.E.,” said Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive U.S. presidential special envoys for Sudan. “The only thing that is keeping them in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the U.A.E.,” he said of the RSF…The U.A.E. is betting on the RSF to help protect Emirati interests in Sudan. The country is strategically located on the Red Sea, where the Sudanese government canceled a $6 billion Emirati port deal in 2024, and has vast resources of gold, much of which has historically been exported to Dubai. The U.A.E. has invested billions of dollars in the country.

Excerpt from Jared Malsin at al., How U.A.E. Arms Bolstered a Sudanese Militia Accused of Genocide, WSJ, Oct. 28, 2025

Why Arab Men Rape Black Women in Darfur

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Sudan’s civil war is taking a jarring turn in Darfur, where an Arab-led militia is now using state-of-the-art drones and execution squads to dominate the region’s Black population. Rights researchers already are warning that the killings have the potential to surpass the genocide that played out in Rwanda just over 30 years ago. The group behind the violence, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has previously been accused by the U.S. of pursuing a genocide of Darfur’s Black population. Two decades ago, its predecessor was involved in the killing of more than 200,000 people in Darfur.

This time, the killings are the work of a closely-drilled and well-armed rebel force that already has established a parallel government to run Darfur, an expanse of western Sudan roughly the size of Spain. RSF fighters are armed with bomb-carrying Wing Loong II and FeiHong-95 drones, made in China, and supplied by the United Arab Emirates to help expand its own interests in the region.

The RSF have been conducting door-to-door searches, picking out non-Arab men and boys before executing them… Witnesses and residents say militia members swept through the city, raping Black women, detaining aid workers and forcing the last remaining residents to leave… Black women with long hair are systematically separated and raped, according to interviews with multiple aid workers and victims.

According to Eric Reeves, a fellow with the Nairobi-based Rift Valley Institute: “The fierce ethnic animus of the RSF toward non-Arab civilians is equal to that of the Hutus toward the Tutsis in Rwanda. The obscene violence is clearly comparable.”

Excerpt from Nicholas Bariyo, Sudan Militia, Armed With Drones, Hunts Down Black Population of Darfur, WSJ, Oct. 31, 2025

Darfur Forever: when a country is not a country

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Iran unsuccessfully pressed Sudan to let it build a permanent naval base on the African country’s Red Sea coast, something that would have allowed Tehran to monitor maritime traffic to and from the Suez Canal and Israel, according to a senior Sudanese intelligence official. Iran has supplied Sudan’s military with explosive drones to use in its fight with a rebel warlord and offered to provide a helicopter-carrying warship if Sudan had granted permission for the base…

Sudan had close ties with Iran and its Palestinian ally Hamas under longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir. After Bashir’s ouster in a 2019 coup, the leader of the country’s military junta, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, initiated a rapprochement with the U.S. in an effort to end international sanctions. He also moved to normalize relations with Israel. Iran’s request to build a base highlights how regional powers are seeking to take advantage of Sudan’s 10-month-old civil war to gain a foothold in the country, a strategic crossroads between the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa with a 400-mile Red Sea coastline.  Sudan’s military has been fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Burhan’s former second-in-command, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, since mid-April 2023. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises The Biden administration has accused both the Sudanese military and the RSF of committing war crimes. The U.S. alleges the RSF also has committed crimes against humanity, including murder, rape and ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region in western Sudan.  U.N. officials have criticized Sudan for aerial bombing of civilian neighborhoods and depriving Sudanese civilians of desperately needed humanitarian aid. U.N. agencies have also accused the RSF of atrocities, including ethnically motivated attacks in Darfur…

The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2023 that Egypt has supplied drones to the Sudanese military and trained Sudanese troops in how to use them. The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has been sending weapons to the RSF, the Journal reported in August 2023…Dubai is the biggest importer of Sudanese gold and in 2022 a U.A.E.-based consortium signed a $6 billion deal to build a new port facility on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

Excerpts from Nicholas Bariyo, Iran Tried to Persuade Sudan to Allow Naval Base on Its Red Sea Coast, WSJ, Mar. 3, 2024

When the State is the Gang

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In South Sudan “There is a confirmed pattern of how combatants attack villages, plunder homes, take women as sexual slaves and then set homes alight often with people in them,” commented Commission Chairperson Yasmin Sooka.  “Rapes, gang rapes, sexual mutilation, abductions and sexual slavery, as well as killings, have become commonplace in South Sudan. There is no doubt that these crimes are persistent because impunity is so entrenched that every kind of norm is broken,” she added.

UNICEF reports that 25 per cent of those targeted by sexual violence are children, including the rapes of girls as young as 7. Elderly and pregnant women have also been raped. The Commission also received reports of male victims of sexual violence. Sexual and gender-based violence against men and boys is even more underreported than that against women and girls as there is a greater level of stigma. There are even reports of raping and killing of the young and the elderly.

The Commission has also looked at the allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). From January 2018 to 2019, seven such cases involving 18 alleged UNMISS perpetrators were registered in the UN Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Database. 

The oil producing areas of the country have become increasingly militarized by Government forces, including by the National Security Services, which have expanded their involvement in the oil sector. The state-owned Nilepet oil company’s operations have been characterized by a total lack of transparency and independent oversight, allegedly diverting oil revenues into the coffers of elites in the government. Furthermore, oil revenues, and income from other natural resources such as illegal teak logging, have continued to fund the war, enabling its continuation and the resulting human rights violations. 

Outraged by renewed fighting and continuing human rights violations in South Sudan, UN Human Rights Experts urge all parties to stop conflict, end impunity and respect provisions of the revitalized peace agreement, UN Human Rights Council, Press Release, Feb. 20, 2019