By: Mariam Jooma-Çarikci
Sudan’s tragedy was never simply internal collapse. From Khartoum’s River confluence to Darfur’s gold dust and the Red Sea’s ports, Sudan sits at the intersection of Africa and Arabia, the Sahel and the Horn. Its geography alone guarantees foreign interest; its history ensures interference.
What began in April 2023 as a contest for power between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has become a continental and global confrontation — an African war financed, armed, and narrated from the Gulf and the United Arab Emirates in particular.
With almost 12 million people displaced across the country and some 24 million others facing famine, the human cost of the conflict is catastrophic. Recent social media videos that have come straight out of Darfur show how civilians, young and old are executed at whim by the RSF forces and the rest of the civilian population now encircled and cut off from food, aid or any chance of survival.
Salaamedia hosted a webinar following the fall of the city of El-Fasher to the RSF on Wednesday. The online discussion, ‘Sudan in Focus: a conversation on the latest developments’, aimed at highlighting the latest news out of Sudan while providing historical context and importantly, a call to action.
The guest panel featured Dr Bashir Osman, an independent social activist; Mekki El Moghrabi, a former Sudanese diplomat and policy analyst; and Mariam Jooma Carikci, researcher and journalist focused on the Horn of Africa.
The following analyses were highlighted by the speakers and each of whom spoke of the extension of Zionist militarism in Sudan via UAE proxy. The speakers emphasised the immense humanitarian toll and severe constraints in respect of basic safety and access to food and water sources.
Dr Osman made it clear that a genocide is underway in Sudan, and that civilians are being exposed to all atrocities that a human can be exposed to: killing, raping, humiliation and not for the first time at the hands of the Janjaweed. He explained how almost 12500 people were killed in one week in El-Geneina in the early days of the war and have extended to other areas where they are active. Sudan is facing a Rwanda-style genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The main refrain was for understanding of how the Zionist modus operandi in Palestine is being pursued in Sudan via the Israeli proxy state, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They cautioned against looking at the war solely through a humanitarian prism, rather emphasising how coordinated efforts must be made to fight the Zionist infiltration and devastation of the country.
Just as Al Shifa hospital and many others in Gaza have been targeted and the site of mass atrocities so too have hospitals in El-Fasher in Darfur. According to Mr Mekki Al Moghrabi, a former Sudanese diplomat, ‘…The greater Israel needs a surrounding of problems because they cannot get Egypt unless they have total collapse in Libya and Sudan.
What is happening in Sudan is part of the Israeli plan to destabilise the region. The Abraham Accords are part of this desire to create satellite, compliant Zionist leaning states. The UAE is doing what it is doing in the region on behalf of Israel.
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A war of proxies, not patriots
The SAF controls airfields, the state bureaucracy and Port Sudan. Egypt, Türkiye and, increasingly, Iran back it with training and drones. The RSF, descended directly from the Janjaweed militias that terrorised Darfur two decades ago, dominates the country’s west and the illicit gold trade.
UN experts and independent investigators have traced RSF weaponry and financing to the United Arab Emirates, through shipments routed via Chad and gold laundered through Dubai’s refineries. The UAE denies arming the RSF, but the pattern of evidence is strikingly consistent.
The result is not two armies fighting for Sudan, but two transnational networks fighting in Sudan: one anchored in Nile-valley militarism and the other in Gulf petrodollar logistics. Each sells future mining concessions and port access to its foreign sponsors. What began as a coup within a coup has metastasised into a test case for who will police Africa’s resources in the age of multipolar competition.
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The African Union and the hollowing of “African Solutions”
The African Union suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup and built an ambitious “Roadmap for the Resolution of the Conflict in Sudan.” Its logic was sound: ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, inclusive dialogue, and a return to civilian rule.
But as of 2025, the AU’s mediation sits beside half a dozen rival “tracks” — the Jeddah talks (Saudi-UAE-US-Egypt), IGAD summits, and bilateral Gulf initiatives. Instead of centralising peace, the AU’s roadmap was absorbed into a marketplace of negotiations, each backed by a different patron with its own preferred winner. “African solutions” have been internationalised into paralysis.
The UN’s role followed the same arc. UNITAMS, created in 2020 to manage Sudan’s democratic transition, was terminated at Khartoum’s request in December 2023, just as the country plunged into full-scale war. The vacuum was filled not by international law but by international commerce.
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Why the UAE cares
Abu Dhabi’s motives are less ideological than logistical. Controlling Sudan’s gold and ports means securing wealth and food-supply routes outside Western banking channels.
In 2022 Abu Dhabi Ports Group signed a US$6 billion deal to build a new Red Sea port and economic zone; by late 2024, the SAF suspended the project, accusing the UAE of backing its rival.
For the Emirates, Sudan offers four attractions: a sanctions-proof gold corridor feeding Dubai’s bullion trade, a Red Sea foothold complementing Emirati ports in Berbera and Assab, a buffer against Islamist or revolutionary movements, and a launchpad for projecting “sub-imperial” influence deep into Africa.
Sudan, in other words, is the UAE’s gateway to continental power, and its experiment in governing African conflicts through finance.
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South Sudan: the southern front
To the south, Juba’s survival is tethered to the same pipeline that carries its oil through northern Sudan to Port Sudan. When RSF attacks endangered those facilities, the SAF threatened to close the route, holding South Sudan’s economy hostage.
Refugees, weapons and returnees now cross the porous border daily; RSF and SPLM-N units reportedly coordinate in frontier zones. The spill-over risks turning the war into a north-south conflagration that could unravel the fragile IGAD order.
The silence of the “genocide industry”
Two decades ago, Hollywood called Darfur “the first genocide of the twenty-first century.” George Clooney testified before the UN; Amal Clooney argued cases at The Hague. Western audiences embraced the narrative of Arab militias slaughtering African villagers and demanded intervention.
The same militias — reconstituted as the RSF — are now accused of exterminating the Masalit in West Darfur, with tens of thousands killed and entire communities erased. The U.S. has again used the word genocide, and Sudan has even sued the UAE at the ICJ for complicity in those crimes. Yet this time, Hollywood is silent.
The reason is not moral confusion but political convenience. Condemning genocide today would implicate Western allies, not pariah regimes. It would expose the contradiction of courting the same Gulf state alleged to bankroll mass killings.
Moreover, the story is no longer a simple morality play: both major forces commit atrocities, and the West’s own record, from Gaza to Yemen, has obliterated its humanitarian credibility. The old “Save Darfur” activism now looks like a relic of unipolar innocence.
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Sudan’s historical centrality
For centuries Sudan has been the hinge between Arab and African worlds — hosting Islamist networks in the 1990s, dispatching troops for Gulf wars in the 2010s, and mediating Nile politics in the 2020s.
Its fall reverberates through every adjoining sub-region: Egypt fears for the Nile, Ethiopia for its dam, the Sahel for weapons leakage, and the Red Sea for strategic ports. To lose Sudan is to lose the centre of gravity that connects them.
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The war Africa cannot outsource
If Sudan disintegrates into permanent proxy war, the precedent is lethal: Gulf money will decide African sovereignty, not African institutions. The AU’s “Silencing the Guns” pledge becomes rhetorical, and the UN’s retreat from peacekeeping normalises impunity. T
he international community calls it “conflict fatigue.” In truth, it is selective blindness.
Sudan’s agony is not inevitable. It is engineered—by those who see its land, ports and minerals as assets to securitise rather than a nation to rebuild. The question for Africa is whether it will watch another state be partitioned by profit.
Image via Anadolu Agency.
