Since war erupted in April 2023, fighting between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has caused a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
Some 150,000 people have died and 14 million Sudanese out of a population of 51 million are displaced internally or in neighboring countries. Over 24 million suffer acute food insecurity, and famine is rampant in Darfur, the district in northwestern Sudan most afflicted by war and hunger.
The causes of conflict are many, but foreign intervention ranks high on the list. The Sudanese people are victims of top-down oppression inflicted by big imperialists, lesser ones, and the country’s own elite.
Factional fault lines
The present catastrophe in Darfur recalls massacres of some 400,000 people there in 2003-05 by the Janjaweed paramilitaries, instruments of Gen.Omar al-Bashir, the autocratic ruler of Sudan from 1989 until 2019.
Killings then stemmed from antagonism between Arab ethnic groups predominating in northern Sudan that make up the Janjaweed militias and the region’s non-Arab, non-Arabic-speaking populations.
The Bashir government in 2013 created the Rapid Support Forces from the Janjaweed formations and installed Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” as leader.
Protests by democratic forces beginning in December 2018 led to joint civilian-military rule, for a few months, but a coup in April 2019 removed Bashir from power. Subsequently, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the armed forces and now the country’s president, and deputy military commander Hemedti became co-leaders of a transitional military council.
Turmoil continued, as did agitation for democratic change. In October 2021, the two generals, having instigated another coup, established themselves as the country’s sole rulers. Al-Burhan and Hemedti subsequently disagreed on how to incorporate the RSF into Sudan’s army and on who would command the RSF. Reacting, Hemedti in April 2023 provoked yet another coup. The RSF was soon occupying Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city.
The Sudanese army recaptured a devastated Khartoum in March 2025. The RSF, having laid siege to El Fasher for 18 months and defeated the Sudanese army, took over that city of 700,000 inhabitants in October 2025. Killings skyrocketed.
As of Nov. 6, the RSF have agreed to a “humanitarian ceasefire” for three months proposed by the U.S., Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia. The Sudanese army rejected the truce, demanding that the RSF withdraw from civilian areas and surrender their weapons.
Origins
African nations emerging from colonialism endured varying degrees of continuing oppression and differing kinds of instability. Even so, humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan and the killings seem to be unprecedented.
The country’s vulnerability shows in a destitute, divided population, military rule, and societal collapse. It stems from a long history of autocratic rulers and recurring coups before independence and afterwards, division between an Arab-oriented North and non-Arab South (leading to an independent South Sudan in 2011), and susceptibility to manipulation by outside actors.
The United Arab Emirates has interests in Sudan. Mohammad Khansa, writing for al-akhbar.com, mentions that, “Sudanese gold fuels the RSF, and the UAE.” Newly discovered gold deposits account for 60% of the country’s exports. The UAE imported $2.29 billion worth of Sudanese gold in 2022. Ninety percent of the gold Sudan produces goes to the UAE.
Sudan, the “leading agricultural producer in both Africa and the Middle East” is the “breadbasket of the Arab world.” The UAE imports 90% of its food. UAE investors have fostered land grabs in Sudan and industrialized the country’s agricultural production.
Other UAE interests are: management of key Sudanese ports on the Red Sea, UAE control of many Sudanese banks and the UAE’s use of the RSF as its proxy in competing with Saudi Arabian influence in Africa.
UAE: The sub-imperialist
Explaining the UAE’s relationship with Sudan and the RSF, Husam Mahjoub, writing in Spectre Journal, states that:
“The UAE’s role in Sudan is…part of a coherent, well-financed, and regionally expansive project: a sub-imperialist agenda that combines economic extraction, authoritarian alliance-building, and counterrevolutionary politics.”
The UAE “viewed the Arab Spring [of 2011] as an existential threat to both the authoritarian regimes in the region and its own model of governance.… [The] UAE became an active counterrevolutionary force.”
The Sudanese people’s uprising in December 2018, prior to Bashir’s removal, continued “even after the October 2021 coup.” It was “democratic, civilian-led, and explicitly antimilitary.” Demands were “freedom, peace, social justice, civilian governance, and accountability.” According to Mahjoub, this “grassroots resistance posed a threat to both Sudan’s own elites and regional powers like the UAE.”
The RSF has helped the UAE in two ways: its “capacity for violence—that is, a force willing to suppress protests, fight wars, and eliminate rivals” and “economic access, especially to Sudan’s lucrative gold trade, which the RSF increasingly controlled.”
“[N]ow the regional leader in the defense sector,” according to the Simpson Center, the UAE imports weapons and makes its own. UAE support for the RSF shows in weapons transferred to the paramilitaries. Gold from the RSF allows the UAE to buy weapons from many countries, with a portion of them ending up with the RSF.
The weapons enter Sudan by irregular means across several borders, and the gold arrives in the UAE the same way.
The UK’s Campaign Against Arms Trade points out that, although the UAE allows the RSF to commit genocide by providing weapons, “there have been no efforts to pressure the UAE or hold it to account, and massive U.S. and French arms supplies to the Gulf dictatorship continue unabated.”
“Useful” to the U.S.
The Biden administration in January 2025 accused the Rapid Support Forces of genocide. In March, Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., introduced legislation in the U.S. House prohibiting arms sales to countries supplying arms to the RSF or the Sudanese Army. The bill has 27 co-sponsors.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and California Rep. Sara Jacobs reintroduced legislation in March in another effort to prohibit U.S. arms sales to the UAE for as long as that country sends arms to the RSF. There are no co-sponsors.
The Trump administration in May announced $1.4 billion sale of weapons and military equipment to the UAE. This comes on top of the $1.2 billion of U.S. arms that the UAE received in 2024.
Husam Mahjoub explains that the UAE, as a “strategic partner of the West…a buyer of arms, a major collaborator with Israel’s genocidal regime, a conduit for intelligence, and a financial hub… is too useful to punish.”
Useful indeed! Reporter Dan Alexander claims—in an article titled “This Gulf Nation Is Powering Trump’s Moneymaking Machine”—that the UAE “has become a hub for the Trump Organization’s international expansion.”
The president and his family have entered into at least nine agreements with ties to the gulf nation. “Together, the ventures…will provide an estimated $500 million in 2025—and about $50 million annually for years into the future…. The president’s offspring are plotting novel ways to use crypto mania to squeeze more money from their real-estate assets.”
Alexander quotes Eric Trump: “The UAE is the developers’ greatest dream because they never say ‘no’ to anything…. There’s no place that has been more fun to work in than the UAE. I mean, if you want to build it, if you can dream it up, they allow you to do it.”
Sudan’s Communists speak
The Sudanese Communist Party stands opposed to the atrocities and the foreign powers fueling the instability in its country. The party issued a statement on Oct. 29.
Speaking for the victims, it says in part: “Our party stands clearly and decisively against the horrifying massacres being committed against civilians in the cities of El Fasher and Bara….
The Communists pinpointed the domestic and outside actors responsible for the catastrophe in Sudan. The SCP affirmed that “what is happening is not merely a military struggle for power; rather, it represents a complex scene of conflict between the parasitic wings of capitalism within the country over power and resources.”
The party said that “the war is, at the same time, a regional/international/imperialist scheme aimed at weakening the Sudanese state and creating conditions for disintegration and division to deplete the capabilities of the people, the wealth of the country, and violate national sovereignty.”
Leaders of the SCP appealed to people of the world and their democratic organizations, foremost among them the communist and labor parties, as well as human rights organizations, to advocate for “political, economic, and diplomatic sanctions” on Sudanese war criminals.
Along with an immediate ceasefire, it said that a key requirement to restoring stability to the country is the banning of weapons imports to Sudan by powers like the UAE and the U.S.
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