Could Sudan's RSF Survive Without the Emirates?

The rapid support forces of Sudan and the United Arab Emirates might be a match made in heaven. As the RSF fights on the front lines, battering the Sudanese armed forces and carrying out atrocities against civilians, the UAE ensures that the slaughter can continue. Brilliant.

The RSF has the manpower, and if they win, they can lay claim to the territory. The UAE has the money, the connections, the hardware, and the diplomatic clout to ensure that the RSF doesn't just win, but that they escape judgment on the global stage. They exist hand-in-hand in a near-perfect geopolitical symbiosis.

The proxy force acts on behalf of the sponsor, and the sponsor feeds its proxy. But what would happen if, in some hypothetical scenario, the UAE's support suddenly disappeared? What would happen to the RSF if their source of money, their hardware, and their geopolitical cover were to abandon them by surprise?

Could the RSF continue the fight, retain their holdings in the Darfur region, force a partition of Sudan, and perhaps even achieve total victory? Or would they begin to crumble, losing ground and momentum until their fighting force collapsed outright?

And if the RSF couldn't win without the UAE, if perhaps it couldn't even survive without the UAE, then what does that mean for Abu Dhabi as the sole nation preventing the collapse of a group credibly accused of perpetrating an ongoing genocide?

We gather together today on Front Stockholm, and we're going to take the liberty of assuming that you, members of our hardcore audience, are already familiar with the civil war in Sudan and the fundamentals of the UAE's relationship with the RSF.

Of course, we've published a number of recent episodes on the topic, including a deep dive on the civil war itself, an explanation of why the UAE is funding the RSF, and a close, albeit very grim, look at the massacres in the city of Al-Fasha.

So, instead of spending all that much time on the background today, we'll refer you to those episodes, and of course a big thank you from us if you've already given them that sweet, sweet watch time thank you.

But we're going to take at least a moment and make sure you've got a bit of the context we presented in one of those episodes, specifically why the United Arab Emirates care about the RSF so much.

Like any good relationship between a proxy fighting force and their shadowy sponsor, the UAE and the RSF's relationship is largely transactional, with the Emirates extracting so much value from the relationship that it justifies sticking with the RSF, despite their many, many abuses and wartime atrocities. Part of the value comes by way of mineral wealth.

Sudan produces very large amounts of gold, which is then shipped off to the Emirates as a form of payment, and it's also home to major natural gas resources. Part of the UAE's interest is also in creating its own breadbasket. The Emirates are a place with very little arable land, so their food has to be grown and shipped in from elsewhere.

But their hope is that by partnering with the RSF, they can assert stable control over agricultural lands, and then get all of those foodstuffs sent for Abu Dhabi. peace benefit. Part of the Emirates' reasoning is geopolitical.

The RSF naturally reinforces the Libyan faction that the Emirates have thrown their support behind, and it allows the Emirates to build influence across the African continent as part of Abu Dhabi's growing network of non-state allies across the Middle Eastern Africa.

Finally, the RSF are a weapon that the Emirates can use to combat the influence of regional rivals like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which back the Sudanese armed forces and prevent the spread of political Islam, to which the Emirates remain staunchly opposed.

For all those reasons, Abu Dhabi obviously believes that it stands to gain by supporting the RSF, and with a cursory understanding of its motivations, we can ask a second question. What does the UAE do in order to provide that support?

We'll start on the front lines, where the Emirates are nothing short of critical as the RSF's key weapon supplier.

After decades of prior conflicts, it is not particularly difficult to get your hands on a weapon in Sudan, but if it was ever going to pose a threat to the SAF in a protracted conflict, the RSF were going to need a lot more than rifles and hand grenades.

They wouldn't be able to obtain those resources from most world governments, not least because they were a non-state actor with a very dark history, trying to overthrow an internationally recognized government.

So, from the early months of the conflict, the Emirates set to work building transshipment and logistical networks that would enable the flow of weapons, ammunition, and other military hardware into the conflict zone.

Those networks flowed through Libya, Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere, sometimes leveraging the assistance of Russia's Wagner Group or the UAE-friendly Tobruk government in Libya.

Eventually, the Emirates built a more consistent pipeline using the airport in the Somali city of Basaso, under the control of the breakaway government of Somaliland.

Those flights now take place very regularly, and while they can typically be spotted by global flight trackers, it doesn't really matter.

The Emirates have succeeded in building transfer networks that don't touch any country where there's both an interest in taking action to stop what Abu Dhabi is doing, and an equal amount of capability to physically intercede in the affairs of autonomous regions.

Beyond the flow of weapons, the UAE have sent all manner of non-lethal supplies and support to the RSF.

That includes personal protection like body armor and helmets, medicines and medical equipment that would be hard to find anywhere in Sudan, converted foreign currencies to enable transactions and travel abroad, and more.

It uses the cover of the International Red Crescent Organization to ferry many of those shipments, including weapons, and ironically enough, it does deliver life-saving supplies as part of those flights. It's just that the supplies go to benefit the RSF instead of being distributed as humanitarian aid, as the UAE claims.

In order to cover up its support of the RSF, the Emirates do send some humanitarian aid into the conflict as well, and often that helps the RSF too, as the money and resources are spent in areas friendly to the RSF or on RSF fighters and their families.

Never mind, of course, that Sudan, as a whole, is haunted. the RSF is repeated two different things. by widespread malnutrition and food shortages, and that some parts of the country are experiencing a state of outright famine.

The Emirates does send food when necessary, but rest assured, that food will not be distributed to civilians unless they're in full support of the RSF's actions and are part of the ethnic and tribal groups that the RSF cares about protecting.

Finally, the Emirates send support in the form of human bodies, mercenaries including hundreds of experienced fighters from Colombia called the Desert Wolves. Those mercenaries are recruited by companies formerly run by high-level Emirati officials, used to support the RSF on the front, and often engaged in the training and direction of child soldiers.

But the UAE's support for the RSF doesn't only include resources that can be sent into the conflict zone.

The UAE also helps the RSF bring resources out and allows them to use the Emirates as cover for all sorts of activities that are best kept away from the front lines.

Businessmen with deep links to the RSF are all over the Emirates today, at the heads of gold trading companies, jewelers, and other enterprises that allow them to launder minerals harvested in the conflict and pass them off as Emirati.

The RSF keeps many of its bank accounts in the UAE, ensuring that they're more difficult to sanction or inspect, and their associates are involved with a range of other legitimate businesses that generate funds and allow for those funds to then be funneled back to the conflict.

The Emirates appear to be host to RSF troll farms and social media operators, as was exposed in November of 2025, when the app X started allowing features to see where accounts are based, and keen observers realized that a number of pro-RSF accounts were operating out of the UAE.

The Emirates are a home for the RSF's diplomatic spokespeople and lobbyists, and they allow RSF representatives to live basically unbothered, conducting their business, hosting meetings, and traveling with the benefit of safe, secure Emirati airports, where they know they can come and go without being accosted.

Already, it's probably clear that the RSF benefits massively from its relationship with the Emirates, but even though the direct support that the UAE provides is quite comprehensive, it's not the full story.

The relevance of the Emirates choosing to accept the RSF's harvests of critical minerals provide a home for their non-combat personnel, and allow them to base businesses and diplomatic operations on Emirati soil, it isn't just that it helps to get valuable assets and important personnel out of the combat zone.

The Emirates are a sovereign nation with decent to good diplomatic relations with most countries on Earth, and they've got oil money, influence, and a fair amount of clout on the global stage. By granting the RSF the benefits that come with those assets, the Emirates can engage in what we can describe, perhaps imperfectly, as a form of diplomatic laundering.

Other countries around the globe who want some sort of relationship with the RSF, but have reasonable qualms about being seen in association with genocidal maniacs, don't have to deal with the RSF directly.

Instead, they can deal with the Emirates, a perfectly respectable, widely accepted fixture in Middle Eastern and global politics, and trust the Emirates to do the rest. As we examine the way that this side of things works, we'll start on a battlefield again where we can't help but notice the sheer abundance of international weapons in the RSF's arsenal.

It's not unusual for foreign military hardware to stream into modern war zones. Just look at Ukraine, where NATO standard fighting equipment is everywhere on the Ukrainian side, while Russia benefits from the flow of weapons and drones from China, Iran, and elsewhere.

Modern conflicts are a valuable testing ground, and if a major power, particularly a global arms exporter, can place their otherwise untested kit into the hands of a fighting faction and show that kit to be useful, well, they can make lots of money on the international market by pointing to the battlefield utility of their products and asking prospective

Buyers whether they'd like to achieve something similar.

And as the Emirates support of the RSF has helped to show, there's one nation in particular that has a vested interest in testing its products in the high-intensity but less-modernized style of warfare that's widespread across the African continent. And that nation, as it turns out, is China.

Without any real explanation, the RSF have come into possession of a wide variety of Chinese-made weapons, including relatively sophisticated kits that we can assume, without implying anything, of course, that China might be interested in seeing in action on that sort of battlefield.

Those include numerous copies of advanced drones, including the CH-95, a high-tech model that's capable of conducting long-range airstrikes and carrying out extended reconnaissance missions. The RSF also flies many copies of China's Wing Long 2 and other drones that, at least officially, China would never sell to the RSF directly.

The militants have gained access to Chinese-made AH-4 howitzer models, which the UAE is the only other nation on Earth to have ever purchased.

And they're regularly using Chinese drone jammers and truck-mounted anti-aircraft systems. The RSF have even been found to be using guided bombs made by China, including in some cases where bomb fragments were clearly stamped, indicating their manufacture as recently as 2024.

As for how those weapons are making their way to the RSF, it's clear that they're coming from the UAE, but it's less clear where some of them initially came from.

Some hardware has been diverted from Chad, where it was supposed to arrive and be part of the Chadian military, but most of it is harder to trace. It's not clear that China is necessarily signing off on the transfers, although it isn't clear that they're not either.

What we do know is that China views Africa as one of its critical export markets for its arms industry.

It offers cost-effective, relatively technologically sophisticated hardware that poorer nations can operate on a budget, and that less advanced militaries can figure out how to operate pretty easily.

Even African leaders that might despise the RSF now have the ability to look at the RSF's battlefield successes and see how Chinese kit made that possible, perhaps with the help of Chinese sales representatives to flesh out the finer details.

Besides China, a range of other nations have seen their military hardware flow to the RSF, Now, to have the largest number of manufacturers in the US, I've been asked him to talk about The US has sold in front of the US, the US.

But the US is also on the US. voluntarily or otherwise those include russian shoulder-fired missiles serbian rifles british targeting systems turkish shotguns and others and then there's the emirates role in fueling the global gold market which we've already spoken about briefly but feel that it's really worth talking about again gold production in sudan

Comes mostly from areas under rsf control and in the first half of 2025 the emirates were the buyer for nearly 90 percent of sudan's official gold exports that doesn't account for the high proportion of gold that's believed to be kept off the books and given directly to the emirates without leaving a paper trail that's particularly important because the

Emirates are critical players in the global gold market if you want to take a deep dive on how this all works we actually published an episode on the subject last year on warfronts you can find it by searching warfronts the gold smugglers in ethan's though it works a little something like this sudanese gold and gold harvested from other illicit mines or

Conflict zones across africa flows into the emirates a country that doesn't produce gold itself but instead operates refineries that produce pure gold for trade and manufacturing purposes but the gold that does go through emirati refineries doesn't get stamped with a label that would indicate it was from sudan or south africa or ghana or any place else

Because it was refined in the emirates and because that process can reasonably be expected to involve gold from some places getting mixed up with gold from other places it's all just labeled as emirati and again it's perfectly acceptable for countries and corporations to do business with the emirates often that gold is then purchased and further modified in

Switzerland where then it could be sold off as swiss gold furnished with the practically unimpeachable reputation of the lands of fine watches and cuckoo clocks so the uae can launch gold and ensure the countries that want the rsf's gold never create a paper trail that would suggest that they knew where it came from the uae can order weapons taking weapons

From foreign countries however that may have happened and then getting those weapons to the rsf through its own plausibly deniable smuggling routes it can launch a diplomacy allowing nations that want to speak or convey messages to the rsf to speak with the uae instead and giving those nations all the reason in the world to trust that the emirates won't air

Out their dirty laundry and finally the uae is able to launder complicity for other global factions that might privately seek to support the rsf despite their known atrocities or might simply not care very much about the atrocities in question that's true for nations like chad kenya and ethiopia which would love to see a government in sudan that were in

Greater alignment with their respective regional goals and less likely to pose a threat in the future it's true for non-state autonomous governments like that of somaliland quietly allowing the uae to use their land to benefit the rsf however they wish or that of khalifa haftar the libyan warlord who plays his own illicit resource game with the lucrative oil

Fields under his control the uae makes those connections possible and does the dirty work of unifying each of those other entities to the rsf because the emirates can get away with it and the So, with a more comprehensive understanding of the Emirates' true value to the RSF, we can examine the title question of the episode, Could the RSF Survive Without the

Emirates to Support Them?

To answer that question, we're going to lay out a hypothetical scenario that, after the massacres in El Fasher, after the credible allegations of genocide and the satellite photos showing pools of blood visible from space, Abu Dhabi decides that this is all gone too far.

It makes its amends with the international community, hat in hands, and quietly withdraws from the conflict in Sudan, leaving today's RSF in the battlefield position and posture that they enjoy today to fight on their own.

We'll discuss the implications and the likely outcome in three parts. Implications for the battlefield, implications for the RSF's organization and protostate, and implications for the RSF's experience on the global stage. So, on the battlefield, abandonment by the UAE wouldn't result in an immediate collapse of the RSF's lines.

The RSF does the vast majority of its own fighting, uniformed Emirati troops don't participate in the conflict in any large numbers, and even the Emirates' prized Colombian mercenaries only number in the hundreds, whereas most outside analysts suggest that the RSF's forces number anywhere from 80,000 to 150,000.

But, with so many fighters wielding so many weapons, the RSF needs a constant supply of munitions, and without the Emirates' involvement, those reserves would likely dry up fairly soon.

It's not clear just how many munitions the Emirates are supplying, but the high frequency of their cargo flights, and the amounts of Emirati weapons and ammunition that tend to be revealed when the SAF captures forward-positioned weapons depots, would suggest that the RSF requires a fire hose of deliveries, always arriving to replenish what it's burning

Through on the front lines.

The larger and more specialized the munitions, the bigger that problem would be, especially for howitzers, rocket launchers, and the like. The RSF's sophisticated Chinese drones require frequent deliveries of replacement parts, software updates, bug fixes, and other regular support to stay operational.

As a result, the RSF would quickly have to start doing more with less by preserving ammunition, limiting the places where it fights, and trying to use as little of the really valuable stuff as possible.

The SAF, noticing the change, would have the opposite incentive. Push the RSF into more engagements more frequently in order to make them burn their hardware faster.

That's a style of warfare that favors the SAF, a military with deep and long-standing ties with the old Soviet Union, and considerable training in the attritional style of fighting that modern Russia is putting to use in Ukraine.

As the RSF switches into a more defensive posture and embraces a style of fighting that is already not its strong suit, the balance of power on the ground could start to change quickly.

Remember, the RSF and the SAF are fairly evenly matched, even with the Emirates finger on the scale, and according to a range of outside experts, the RSF may have already collapsed long ago if not for the Emirates' efforts in building it up to this point.

Take a relatively even battlefield where both sides can capture territory from the other, but neither can easily win the war outright, and now start sapping away the strength of one side in a progressive deterioration that's going to be very hard to reverse, and well, you could do the maths about what happens next.

Then there's the RSF's fate as an organization and as a burgeoning protostate that's currently poised to try and partition Sudan in two, either formally or informally through its control of the Darfur region.

The RSF's war is not a cheap affair, especially relative to the wealth available in Sudan, and without Emirati infusions of funds, the RSF isn't going to be able to fund its own war effort.

Remember, the RSF does have control of most of Sudan's gold mines, but what it doesn't have are the refineries and other required facilities to bring that gold up to sale quality, and even if they did, who else is willing to buy?

The Emirates have been critical in converting the RSF's gold into cash, and that conversion isn't one that the RSF can handle by themselves.

On the state and infrastructural side, an abandonment by the UAE would likely lead to shortages of medical supplies, sanitation equipment, and even food in some areas, causing issues not just for the RSF's ability to fight, but for its ability to present itself as a rightful leader in the territory that it controls.

The Darfur region has already been torn apart by the RSF's acts of genocide, and it's home to millions of people who would happily tear the RSF limb from limb if only they had the strength to do so.

As the RSF grows weaker, starts to lose territory quicker and quicker, and grows more desperate, it becomes vulnerable. Meanwhile, a lack of Emirati support would mean that the RSF's business ventures abroad need to be discontinued.

Its diplomats and its lobbyists will need to come home, and once they do, they'll have a very difficult time either leaving again or convincing anybody they'd like to do business with to actually risk making the trip to Sudan itself.

And on the international stage, a cutoff from Emirati influence would mean that the links between the RSF and the rest of the world would be severed outright. Regardless of what individual countries or non-state actors might be willing to do behind the scenes, the single, unanimously agreed, acceptable public posture toward the RSF is clear.

These people are monsters.

They've carried out a despicable genocide that appears to be ongoing, and they're trying to scorn the international order by overthrowing the Sudanese government. They're politically toxic, politically radioactive, and no country wants to be the first to reach out an olive branch, especially if the Emirates have already made the decision to back away.

Powerful regional and global forces will be pushing the international community in the opposite direction, with everyone from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Turkey to Russia to Iran already supporting the SAF, and with the United States and Europe barely comfortable with the idea of not supporting the RSF.

Without the Emirates, the RSF can't launder gold, they can't receive shadowy weapons shipments, and they don't have any other allies. who the international community is willing to talk to in the role of an intermediary.

As the world comes to grips with what happens in our fascia, there is rising pressure on the UAE to work toward exactly this outcome and to step back its influence, abandon the RSF, and let this rotten appendage of humanity be severed for good.

In early November, an Emirati diplomatic envoy offered the country's first real admission of any wrongdoing or mistakes in its conduct across Sudan, stating, quote, We all made mistakes when the two generals who are fighting the civil war today overthrew the civilian government.

That was, looking back, a critical mistake. We should have put our foot down collectively. We did not call it a coup.

End quote. Now, that's far from a full abandonment of the RSF, but it is at least something, and it indicates that the UAE is, at a minimum, feeling pressure from the deluge of damning reports.

Ever since the massacres started in our fascia, more and more nations have been throwing their support behind the SAF as rights groups and journalists shake the global public awake about this conflict for the first time since it began.

Even still, there's reason to believe that any optimism about the UAE doing the right thing or even scaling back its efforts to do the clearly wrong thing is probably misplaced.

Behind the scenes, the Emirates have continued to use their geopolitical influence to try and make all of this go away, prevailing on rich Western nations, to leave Arab world conflicts to the Arab world.

Earlier this year, the United Nations Highest Court threw out a case accusing the UAE of violating the Global Genocide Convention by supporting the RSF, and while the evidence of Emirati complicity is clearer now than ever, that legal precedent is out there, guarding the Emirates from the consequences of their actions.

The world has levied no new sanctions upon the UAE, it hasn't applied any real diplomatic pressure by targeting Emirati interests, and when global leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly in October, in the waning days of the Siege of Al-Fasha, not a single global leader said a word about either the starvation conditions in the city at that time, or the

Impending acts of ethnic cleansing that the entire world could see coming.

When, in mid-November, after the genocide was clear, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for the world to cut off the supply of weapons to the RSF. Rubio still refused to even name the nation responsible.

As difficult as it may be to accept, the idea that world nations could be appalled by the actions of the RSF, and the idea that they would be willing to take action to pressure the Emirates, are not mutually exclusive.

Disgust and horror toward the RSF can exist in parallel with the culture of acceptance, even quiet complicity in allowing the UAE to continue to fuel this proxy conflict.

It's too inconvenient to punish them when the world needs their oil, the markets depend on their gold, and the United States even quietly uses the same military bases in Somaliland that the UAE uses to provide the RSF its weaponry.

Without the UAE, to help it along. Sudan's rapid support forces would first be cut off from the outside world, then suffer a cascade of military setbacks, then wither and die. But until, and unless, the UAE decides to make a change, that's not going to happen.

And so long as it has the Emirate's support, the RSF shows no sign of slowing down.