How the UAE Is Fueling Sudan’s Catastrophic War

Sudan’s “civil war” is a proxy war for gold, now waged from above with foreign-armed drones. Journalist and researcher Mosaab Baba says Sudan’s “gold curse” has both the army and the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) increasingly striking civilian targets in a neocolonial war entering its fourth year, which has already killed thousands of civilians and left millions facing famine.

With most of Sudan’s gold now funneled to Abu Dhabi, Baba tells Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra the country has become a “backyard” for the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to extract precious minerals, farmland and access to the Red Sea. A year after the fall of El Fasher, he also explains why the world’s largest humanitarian crisis keeps slipping out of the headlines. Baba also unpacks how the legacy of the December Revolution still offers hope for a sovereign, people-led Sudan, and lays out the stakes driving the Sudanese campaign against Emirati diplomat Lana Nusseibeh’s potential bid to become the next UN secretary-general.

“The only glimmer of hope is that Sudanese people themselves are starting to realize how insane this war is [and] how much they need to remove these neocolonial leaders from the country.”

Sudan’s “civil war” is a proxy war for gold. Most of it is ending up in Abu Dhabi.

Journalist Mosaab Baba says the UAE is spending big to lobby the world’s largest humanitarian crisis right out of the headlines