The UAE Shipped Colombian Mercenaries Into Sudan's Killing Fields

Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese are dead. Millions more have been driven from their homes, and their children have learned to recognize the sound of drones overhead. Now a confidential United Nations report, submitted to the Security Council and obtained by The New York Times, shows that some of the weapons and fighters feeding this slaughter were not born in Sudan. They were bought, flown, and routed through a web of proxy territory across three countries.

We need to be clear about what this report describes. It is not a story about a distant market failure or a complicated regional rivalry. It describes a government, the United Arab Emirates, allegedly using a private security company to recruit Colombian fighters and move them into a civil war, through territory controlled by Emirati proxies in Libya and Somalia. Those are the facts the UN has put in front of the Security Council. Ask yourself what a sovereign state does when it wants to keep its hands clean. It hires a company. It routes the men through someone else's soil. It calls the operation a "preferred security provider" arrangement and lets the lawyers handle the rest.

The company was founded by a senior official in the Emirati presidency, according to corporate records. Its own website describes it as a preferred security provider to the Emirati Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Presidential Affairs. Read that twice. A firm that answers to the foreign ministry and the presidential office is not a freelance outfit. It is an instrument of state policy with a corporate logo on it.

The UN's accounting goes further. The UAE is accused of supplying drones, weapons, and mercenaries to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The RSF has been accused of atrocities across Darfur and Khartoum, including massacres of civilians and ethnically targeted killings. Foreign weapons and foreign fighters do not merely prolong wars like this one. They make the massacres logistically possible. Every drone that flies over a displacement camp is a decision made in an office somewhere, and every mercenary who crosses a border is a man paid to be useful to a killer.

Australia moved this week to sanction four Sudanese leaders and one entity over serious human rights violations. The list includes army commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Hemedti himself, along with RSF-aligned West Darfur governor Al-Tijani Al-Tahir Karshoum and RSF field commander Hussein Barsham. Let us be honest about the men at the top of both armies. Burhan's Sudanese Armed Forces have their own record of shelling civilian neighbourhoods and blocking aid. Sudanese generals have been fighting over the spoils of a state they were supposed to serve, and ordinary Sudanese have paid for every bargain they broke. Australia's measures are a step. But sanctioning the generals while leaving the financiers and suppliers untouched is like arresting the getaway driver and letting the bank robbers keep the money.

This is the new scramble for Africa, and we must stop pretending it is a 19th-century story with different costumes. In the old scramble, European powers drew borders with rulers and rifles. In the new one, the Gulf states, China, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, and Western governments all compete for ports, gold, grain, and loyalty. Each arrives with a different sales pitch. The Emirates offers investment, humanitarian gestures, and security cooperation. Russia offers mercenaries who ask no questions about the rule of law. China offers roads and loans that come with strings that can strangle a budget. Western governments lecture us on democracy in one breath and quietly sell arms to whoever is useful in the next. All of them treat our continent as a theatre for their rivalries, and all of them leave the bill to African citizens.

The contrast with our own democratic values could not be sharper. Our constitutions promise citizens protection from arbitrary violence and the right to a say in who governs them. A Sudanese mother who has buried three children in a single month does not care which foreign capital supplied the drone that killed them. She wants to know why nobody has been made to answer for it.

Africa's record gives us a better model. Botswana has spent decades building a diamond economy under transparent rules and independent institutions, and it has used its revenues to fund schools and clinics rather than militias. Mauritius built one of the continent's most respected financial centres on clear regulation and predictable courts. Senegal has shown that peaceful transfers of power, won at the ballot box rather than in the barracks, can happen and endure. Each of these is proof that sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a set of institutions that make foreign manipulation harder and domestic accountability possible.

So what must change? Start with the African Union. Its Peace and Security Council has the mandate to act on Sudan, yet too often it issues communiqués while the killing continues. The AU should demand the full publication of the UN findings, convene a session focused on foreign arms and mercenary flows into Sudan, and make clear that any state supplying belligerents will face a diplomatic cost. Members that have stayed silent should be asked, publicly, whom they are protecting.

The UN Security Council must move beyond reports to enforcement. Sanctions should follow the money and the supply lines, not just the faces on television. That means asset freezes and travel bans on the companies, officials, and intermediaries named in the report, and binding measures on arms transfers to all parties in Sudan. Partners that claim to champion human rights should apply the same standard to their own clients that they apply to their rivals. Hypocrisy is not a foreign policy.

Citizens have a role too. Journalists and civil society groups across the continent should track who sells what to whom, through corporate registries, shipping records, and flight data, and publish what they find. Parliaments should demand disclosure of any private security contracts that involve foreign governments. And African voters should ask every candidate a simple question: when a foreign power arms a war that kills our people, will you say its name in public?

We are not asking for charity. We are demanding the same rule of law we ask of our own governments, applied to every power that enters our continent. Sudan's children did not choose this war. They did not invite the Colombian fighters or the drones. Somebody did. The question for all of us is whether we will keep letting them get away with it, or whether we will finally make the names on that report answer for what they did.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL