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    Sudan Diplomacy Snarled as UAE Arms Fuel Genocidal Brutality in Darfur

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    Washington, DC — “No one can say they didn’t know.”

    In response to visual evidence of torture and mass killings of civilians trying to flee El Fasher, capital of Sudan’s North Darfur region this week, urgent calls are increasing for an immediate ceasefire and accelerated diplomatic action to stop the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias.

    Nearly a hundred organizations signed an October 1 open letter issued by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, demanding safe passage for civilians under siege, in the face of “global paralysis”.

    Last month the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale University School of Public Health warned that the RSF’s tightening encirclement of El Fasher has been strengthened with “at least 38 km of [earthen] berm encircling El-Fasher, and gaps in the berm are closing. Epidemiologist Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the lab, speaking in obvious anguish, told U.S. National Public Radio this week that his team has been tracking the atrocities in real time. “Every day, my team and I watch El Fasher’s destruction from space. No one can say they didn’t know.”


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    “International response to the war has been a study in diplomatic failure, defined by a proliferation of competing initiatives that actively undermine each other,” Hafed Al-Ghwell, senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington DC, says in an analysis of external efforts to end  Sudan’s Deadly Conflict.

    Gridlock blocks ceasefire

    Talks last week in Washington, where representatives from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the United States – the ‘Quad’ – were unable to agree on a proposed three-month humanitarian pause in fighting, reportedly due to objections from the UAE. Alongside the official meetings, representatives from both the SAF and RAS held indirect discussions in their proxy war.

    As the deliberations ended in stalemate, RSF forces were moving into El Fasher [also spelled Al-Fashir], dealing a serious setback to SAF allied forces and pushing the war closer towards widespread regional fighting.

    Responding to the escalating disaster, U.S. Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos, who hosted the Quad meeting, called on the RSF “to protect civilians and prevent further suffering” in an X post on Monday – joining similar and more strenuously stated condemnations of the calamity that already has spilled across borders.

    The UAE has come under fire for mounting evidence of its large-scale support for the RSF, despite repeated denials by top Emirate officials. The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that the UAE has shipped “increasing supplies of weapons” into Sudan to shore up the RSF after a string of setbacks that culminated with the militia losing control of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, in March…that triggered some of the worst destruction in the two-year war.” Quoting U.S. intelligence sources, the Journal said the supplied weaponry included “advanced Chinese-made drones along with small arms, heavy machine guns, vehicles, artillery, mortars and ammunition.”

    “The war would be over if not for the UAE,” Cameron Hudson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former chief of staff to successive U.S. presidential special envoys for Sudan told the Journal, adding that the RSF is able to keep fighting only because of “the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the UAE.”  The RSF is also reported to have UAE-supplied miliary hardware from the United Kingdom, France and Canada.

    “UAE owns these atrocities, for it has armed the RSF even as it commits mass murder and mass rape” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said in reply to the Tedros post.

    Atrocities mount

    As early as 2023, the Faculty Director of the Yale research lab, Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood and his colleagues urged that “international peacekeeping organizations set up a protective zone around El Fasher” to prevent the atrocities researchers saw as inevitable without such preventive action.

    Among the latest reports comes from the El Fasher Resistance Committees alleging that wounded and sick patients in the city’s Saudi Hospital have been massacred, as have civilians at the university and the Interior Ministry, according to a dispatch by Radio Dabanga.

    “All attacks on health care MUST STOP immediately and unconditionally,” World Health Organization head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a social media post. “WHO is appalled and deeply shocked by reports of the tragic killing of more than 460 patients and companions at Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, following recent attacks and the abduction of health workers.”

    As evidence of atrocities get more attention from major media, condemnations of RSF actions grow. In the United States, influential lawmakers have taken notice. “The horrors in Darfur’s El-Fasher were no accident — they were the RSF’s plan all along,” Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on X. “The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people,” he added, calling for the group to be officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

    Representative Greg Meeks of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, condemned as “unacceptable” UAE arms flows to the RSF and said his proposed legislation to cut off U.S. weapons sales to external actors funding the conflict in Sudan should be adopted. “The U.S. must do all we can to help end this devastating conflict.”