On Nov. 6, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) announced that it had accepted a one-sided humanitarian truce after orchestrating a series of horrific onslaughts in El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, in late October. The agreement was put forth by the U.S.-led Quad—additionally made up of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Less than 24 hours later, the cease-fire was broken, with drone attacks on a military base and a power station in Khartoum, the capital city controlled by the Sudanese army.
The RSF attacks in El Fasher highlighted a new level of depravity in what was already the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. More than 460 people were slaughtered at a maternity hospital. Satellite images revealed bloodied sands visible from space. Tens of thousands of civilians have attempted to flee the unimaginable violence.
The siege of El Fasher began in April 2024, as the RSF erected walls and cut off roads, communication, and access, plunging the city into a famine—and effectively turning hundreds of thousands of people into hostages. Until last month, El Fasher was the last stronghold of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Darfur. With the RSF’s capture of the key city, details of large-scale massacres, acts of sexual violence, kidnappings, and other serious human rights violations quickly emerged.
Now, as the world looks on in horror—collectively tuning in to the conflict every few months—efforts by the international community to secure a permanent end to the war seem largely performative. As RSF militiamen conduct war crimes with impunity, and as the UAE, one of the Quad’s members, continues to fund, arm, and support the RSF, peace talks are largely a public relations scheme in a war that has killed more than 150,000 people and displaced 12 million. While Washington’s engagement with Sudan over the last three decades has been fraught, a real resolution to the conflict lies in the United States’ ability to hold its Gulf ally accountable and force the UAE to withdraw from Sudan.
The latest iteration of war in Sudan began as a domestic power struggle between Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (more commonly known as “Hemeti”) of the RSF. The two opportunistic leaders, both former lieutenants of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, dragged the entire country into their personal differences. The generals were once allies in overthrowing Bashir in a coup in April 2019, and Hemeti would later serve as Burhan’s deputy in the Transitional Sovereignty Council. After their coup against the civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, the two found themselves fighting for power. Disagreements over whether and when the RSF should be absorbed into the military, what a power-sharing agreement would look like, and fears of returning to a Bashir-like government came to a head in April 2023, when shots broke out in Khartoum and spiraled into a war.
Two and a half years later, Sudanese infrastructure is massively depleted. As civilians have relied on neighborhood and community efforts to sustain themselves, famine and medical distress have plagued the country. Now, the severely weakened SAF has retreated to its strongholds in the country’s east, and though it maintains control of Khartoum, it is largely unable to recoup losses in Sudan’s west. Civilian groups remain as active as they can, but with severe resource depletion and threats from both warring parties, the political wishes of civil society leaders have gone unrecognized in the ongoing cycles of negotiation. Meanwhile, the RSF has wreaked havoc in its strongholds, proudly broadcasting its atrocious acts via social media.
As the war approaches the three-year mark next April, its sustainability can only be attributed to the active participation of international actors. The role of the UAE, specifically, as a financier and weapons provider to the RSF has been widely established; in March, Sudan took the UAE to the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of supporting the RSF and being “complicit in the genocide” of West Darfur’s Masalit community. Despite the evidence against the UAE, Abu Dhabi continues to deny its involvement and called Sudan’s case a “cynical publicity stunt.”
Significant Emirati involvement in Sudan can be traced back to Hemeti’s rise to power as the head of the RSF. Borne out of the Janjaweed, the genocidal collection of militias organized by Bashir to carry out the war in Darfur from 2003 on, the RSF offered a rebrand—and a route back into the elite diplomatic fold of Sudan. As Bashir sent RSF soldiers as mercenaries to Yemen on the UAE’s behalf in 2015, Hemeti gained unique access to funding, weapons, and money.
Gold smuggling is another key interest for the Emiratis—one that Hemeti has been happy to sustain as his troops gained control of gold reserves and mines around the country, particularly in Darfur. In 2022, the year before the war began, the UAE was the largest importer of the precious metal in illegal African trade.
Since the war began, the UAE’s support of the RSF has guaranteed the Emiratis strategic access, barred the rise of Islamists, and preserved its existing economic infrastructure. Investigative reports by Reuters and other outlets and organizations have alleged that the UAE used airstrips in neighboring Chad to smuggle weaponry into Sudan (the U.N. Security Council has ordered an arms embargo in Darfur for the last 20 years), has paid and supplied foreign mercenaries to the RSF, and funded the RSF’s sieges of terror in exchange for continued access to gold mines and agricultural fields.
With the UAE as a member of the key external mediating team, the Quad can hardly be seen as a serious entity devoted to ending the war—regardless of how many times they claim they are. Instead, the UAE’s involvement in peace talks is a marketing scheme designed to keep international backlash to its involvement in the war at bay. As long as U.S. negotiators sit next to Emiratis in boardrooms and co-sign their statements without holding them accountable for their role, Washington stands to be implicated in prolonging the war as well.
Since Sudan’s independence in 1956, its relationship with the United States has been marked by repeated withdrawals of ambassadors and breaks in diplomatic relations, but it wasn’t until the 1989 coup that brought Bashir to power that the relationship entered a period of precipitous decline. In 1993, for instance, the Clinton administration designated Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism. Sudan found itself in the company of Iran and Syria for more than 25 years, and the accompanying ramifications of the designation plagued Sudanese citizens who already had no say in Bashir’s authoritarian rule.
As U.S. sanctions and aid restrictions hit Sudan, the country was cut off from international financial systems that may have helped it recover in the era following the Second Sudanese Civil War. The prevention of trade, assistance, and investment meant that international institutions erased Sudan from their consideration. Humanitarian agencies ceased to function effectively as unemployment soared, and the West turned a blind eye to Bashir’s rise, allowing him to consolidate power, resources, and control.
In the three decades since, the United States has enforced additional sanctions on Sudan several different times. Punishments levied under the Bush administration in response to the genocide in Darfur were renewed under the Obama administration until the last week of his presidency, and in the final days of the Biden administration, sanctions were imposed on both the heads of the SAF and RSF, along with several RSF-owned companies, for wartime abuses. Instead of punishing the regime or opposing state-sponsored human rights abuses, the cycle of sanctions largely contributed to civilian suffering and eventual reliance on state patronage, which was scarce, corrupt, and unequal in distribution.
When Sudan was finally taken off the state sponsors of terrorism list in 2020 by the Trump administration, the decision was largely motivated by U.S. political interests. The United States had backed Sudanese leadership against the wall, forcing the signing of a normalization agreement with Israel in 2020. When confronting this reality of disinterest and coercion, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that Washington will be a serious negotiating partner to Sudanese civilians, in their truest hour of need, unless it first confronts the role of its allies in prolonging the conflict.
Since April 2023, Washington’s role in Sudan has been impacted a broader retrenchment from foreign assistance, as seen in the Trump administration’s unraveling of U.S. Agency for International Development, one of the sole lifelines for tens of thousands of people across the country.
Still, despite Washington’s troubled history with Sudan and the reasonable apprehension that many Sudanese and international observers have with its involvement, the United States may be the only player able to successfully pressure the UAE into withdrawing its support to the RSF. The UAE enjoys a close relationship with the United States, with access to U.S. military training, information, and equipment. As the UAE is increasingly outed in the media for its part in aiding the RSF’s genocide and atrocities, its weakening international image could be the impetus for Washington to take a decisive step in ending the war. To do so successfully, the removal of the UAE as a mediating partner is the first step.
Sweeping sanctions coupled with the restriction of military cooperation with the UAE, export controls, U.S.-led investigations, and pressure from the most powerful rooms in Washington offer some ways for the United States to leverage its power with its Gulf ally and could even hand Trump one of the war-ending victories he seems to relish so much. The reality cannot be overstated: Washington has real leverage with the UAE, and if it avoids exercising that leverage decisively, the United States resigns itself to complicity.
If the sheer level of humanitarian collapse is not enough to encourage U.S. actors to engage seriously with ending this war, they could also consider how their own interests are at stake. If the United States allows the status quo to continue, room for bad external actors to take root in a vulnerable country only grows.
The aims of last week’s truce are desirable, but the only way to achieve its goals is a firm, concentrated effort to address the current realities on the ground. There is a genocide in Sudan. It is being carried out by the RSF with the UAE’s help. To make truces like last week’s attempt truly sustainable and successful, both entities must be held accountable for their crimes—and removed from the negotiating table.