When the United Arab Emirates co-hosted the Jeddah talks in 2023, positioning itself alongside the United States as a mediator in Sudan's war, it was simultaneously being named in United Nations Panel of Experts reports as a conduit for weapons and financial flows to the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF, the paramilitary group whose forces have been documented committing mass atrocities in Darfur including ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, was receiving support from one of the countries sitting at the mediation table. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented. It has produced almost no meaningful consequence for Abu Dhabi.
Understanding why requires looking at three things separately: what the UAE's interest in Sudan actually is, what the RSF connection looks like in practice, and what prevents the countries with leverage over the UAE from using it. Each of these questions has a clear answer. Taken together, they explain one of the most striking failures of international accountability in a conflict that has already killed tens of thousands of people and produced the world's largest displacement crisis.
What the UAE wants from Sudan
The UAE's interest in Sudan is not primarily ideological or strategic in the conventional security sense. It is economic, structured around three overlapping priorities: gold, agriculture, and positioning in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa corridor.
Sudan is Africa's third largest gold producer by official output, but official output significantly understates actual production because a substantial share of Sudanese gold is mined informally in RSF-controlled areas of Darfur and Kordofan and exported through informal channels that bypass the Sudanese central bank. Before the war, Sudanese gold was already moving through UAE refineries in quantities that significantly exceeded what official trade statistics would suggest. The RSF, through its commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, built a gold mining and export network during the years it spent as a nominally state-allied force, developing relationships with Emirati commercial entities that predated the war and continued through it.
UN Panel of Experts reports covering the Sudan conflict have documented arms deliveries to RSF forces routed through third countries with Emirati connections, the movement of gold from RSF-controlled areas to UAE refineries, and financial transactions involving Emirati entities that provided the RSF with resources to sustain its military operations. The UAE has denied these findings and has characterised its role as purely humanitarian and diplomatic. The documentary record assembled by UN investigators, by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and by investigative units at major international media organisations tells a different story.
The agricultural dimension is less discussed but equally important. The UAE, like several other Gulf states, has pursued a strategy of securing agricultural land and production capacity abroad as a hedge against food security vulnerabilities exposed by the 2007 to 2008 food price crisis and reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sudan, with significant cultivable land in its Gezira and Nile corridor regions, has been a target of Gulf agricultural investment for over a decade. Emirati state-linked entities have interests in Sudanese agricultural land that predate the war. An RSF that controls Gezira, which the RSF achieved in late 2023, is a partner in that agricultural positioning rather than a threat to it.
The Red Sea and Horn corridor interest connects the Sudan position to the broader UAE strategic footprint across the region. The UAE has military and commercial presences in Eritrea's Assab port, in Berbera in Somaliland, and has cultivated relationships with armed actors across the Sahel. A Sudan whose western and southern regions are controlled by an RSF with Emirati ties fits within a pattern of Abu Dhabi building influence through non-state armed actors in strategically important geographies rather than through conventional state-to-state relationships alone.
What the RSF connection looks like in practice
Hemeti built his relationship with the UAE over many years and through several distinct channels. The first was mercenary deployment: RSF fighters were deployed to Yemen under arrangements that provided the UAE with ground forces it needed without the political costs of deploying its own military personnel at scale. The financial arrangements for those deployments went through Emirati banking and commercial structures. The relationship that emerged was not simply transactional. It gave Hemeti access to Emirati financial networks, to elite political relationships in Abu Dhabi, and to a channel for gold export that operated outside Sudanese state oversight.
When the war began in April 2023, those channels did not shut down. UN investigators documented arms transfers to RSF forces through routes that passed through third countries with Emirati connections, including through Chad and Libya. The arms included weapons systems that the RSF used in attacks on civilian populations in Khartoum and in Darfur. The gold export channel continued to function, with RSF-controlled artisanal mining operations in Darfur providing a revenue stream that helped finance the RSF's logistics, pay, and procurement even as the Sudanese central bank and official economy collapsed in SAF-controlled areas.
The Emirati side of this relationship has been managed through a combination of commercial entities, some of which have Emirati state ownership or close state ties, and through personal relationships between Hemeti and senior Emirati officials that predate the war. The UAE has invested in denying specific allegations while avoiding a categorical statement that it has no commercial or financial relationships with RSF-linked entities, because such a statement would be demonstrably false given the documented gold trade.
The Jeddah talks and the mediation contradiction
The Jeddah process, launched in May 2023 with Saudi and American co-hosting and UAE participation as a supporting partner, produced several ceasefire agreements that were broken within days of being signed. Critics of the process argued from the beginning that it was structurally compromised by the UAE's position: a mediating power that is simultaneously a material supporter of one party cannot credibly pressure that party to accept terms it finds unacceptable.
The RSF's behaviour in the Jeddah talks was consistent with this analysis. The force agreed to humanitarian access provisions it then violated. It signed ceasefire commitments it then ignored. The SAF was not blameless in this pattern, but the RSF's disregard for commitments made in a process in which its primary external backer was a co-mediator is not difficult to explain. Hemeti understood that the UAE's involvement in the process provided a degree of diplomatic protection. Abu Dhabi's presence at the table signalled that there were limits to how hard even its ostensible partners, including the United States, would push for RSF accountability.
The United States was aware of the documentary evidence linking the UAE to RSF support. American officials acknowledged in background briefings that the UAE's role was complicated. That acknowledgement did not translate into public pressure on Abu Dhabi, into sanctions on Emirati entities involved in the gold trade, or into a reconfiguration of the Jeddah process to exclude a party with a material conflict of interest. The reasons for this restraint are not difficult to identify.
Why Western partners stay silent
The UAE's value to the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western partners is substantial and multidimensional in ways that create strong institutional incentives against pressure on any specific issue.
Abu Dhabi hosts American military facilities that are important for regional operations and for projection of force across the Middle East and Horn of Africa. The UAE signed the Abraham Accords in 2020, normalising relations with Israel and providing the Biden and subsequent administrations with a diplomatic achievement they were reluctant to jeopardise. Emirati sovereign wealth funds are deeply integrated into Western financial markets. The UAE has been a partner on counterterrorism, on Yemen, on regional Gulf stability, and on containing Iranian influence in ways that give it leverage over multiple dimensions of American and British foreign policy simultaneously.
The calculation that Western governments have made, implicitly rather than explicitly, is that pressuring the UAE over Sudan is not worth the cost in those other relationships. Sudan is not a Western strategic priority. The RSF's atrocities in Darfur have not generated the kind of sustained political pressure from Western publics that would shift that calculation. The humanitarian organisations working in Sudan have documented the crisis extensively, but documentation without political will produces reports rather than accountability.
The European Union has been marginally more willing to name the UAE's role in public statements, but European member states have their own economic and strategic relationships with Abu Dhabi that constrain how far collective EU action can go. The result is a situation in which the documentation is available, the analysis is not contested among specialists, and the accountability is absent.
What would accountability require
Accountability for the UAE's role in Sudan's war would require a set of actions that are technically straightforward but politically difficult. Targeted sanctions on Emirati entities documented as involved in the gold trade or arms transfers to the RSF would impose costs without requiring a rupture in the broader relationship. A formal UN Security Council referral of the Sudan situation to the International Criminal Court, which would include investigation of external actors who materially supported forces committing atrocities, would create legal jeopardy for Emirati actors involved in RSF financing. Exclusion of the UAE from future mediation processes on the grounds that its conflict of interest undermines the credibility of those processes would remove the diplomatic cover that Abu Dhabi's mediation role has provided.
None of these steps require severing the relationships that Western governments value. They do require treating the documentation that exists as a basis for action rather than a basis for careful diplomatic language. The precedent for doing so exists: individuals and entities linked to human rights violations in other contexts have been sanctioned by Western governments that maintained broader relationships with the states those individuals were from.
The reason these steps have not been taken is not that they are technically unavailable. It is that the political cost of taking them is judged to exceed the political cost of allowing an Emirati-backed force to continue committing atrocities in Darfur while the international community produces statements of concern. That calculation has been made consistently since April 2023. Three years on, it has produced a situation in which accountability for one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the current decade has been effectively outsourced to reports that no one with leverage is required to act on.
The UAE's role in Sudan's war is not a secret. It is a documented fact that has been absorbed into the background of international diplomacy without changing the behaviour it documents. That is what impunity looks like when it operates at the level of a state rather than an individual, and it is worth naming clearly rather than treating as an unfortunate complexity of international relations.