Three years after Sudan’s brutal civil conflict first erupted, a newly released United Nations investigation has uncovered a cross-border network that funnels foreign fighters, weaponry, and critical supplies to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s official government military, with an armed faction in Libya acting as a key facilitator.
The findings, published Sunday by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya, cover the monitoring period from October 2024 to February 2026, and detail how Libya’s Subul al-Salam Battalion has coordinated the movement of recruits—including a contingent of former Colombian military personnel turned mercenaries—along with weapons and fuel across the Libya-Sudan border to bolster RSF operations. The battalion is an integrated component of the self-declared Libyan National Army (LNA), led by influential commander Gen. Khalifa Hifter, who holds de facto control over eastern and southern territories of war-battered Libya.
UN experts confirm the battalion’s operations are concentrated in the southern Libyan border town of Kufra, a strategic hub that shares boundaries with Sudan, Chad, and Egypt. Kufra’s key infrastructure, including a local airport that falls under the battalion’s full control, has allowed the group to smoothly transfer fighters and military cargo from Libya into RSF-held territory in Sudan. The investigation further mapped out the tangible benefits the RSF has gained from this Libyan support network: the paramilitary now operates a permanent rear base approximately 75 kilometers, or 46.6 miles, southwest of Kufra, and leverages the town’s existing airbase as a transit hub for incoming Colombian fighters and a modification site for military vehicles imported into Sudan via Libyan smuggling routes.
According to the report’s documentation, the battalion’s direct operational support extended to RSF battlefield advances in June 2025. Facilitation included deploying local ground units, providing armed escorts for foreign fighters traversing Libyan territory, and securing steady supplies of fuel and vehicle spare parts. This backing directly enabled the RSF’s seizure of the Uwaynat border region, a strategically critical tri-point where the territories of Sudan, Egypt, and Libya converge. At the same time, the UN notes that the cross-border activity has severely eroded what remains of border security in southern Libya, creating new instability in an already fragile region.
As of publication, neither the Subul al-Salam Battalion nor RSF spokespersons have responded to requests for comment on the report’s findings. The RSF previously announced it had taken full control of the Uwaynat triangle in June, shortly after Sudan’s national military confirmed it had evacuated the area as part of what it described as defensive restructuring to repel ongoing RSF offensives. Sudan’s military has long leveled accusations that Hifter’s LNA is directly complicit in aiding RSF attacks—a claim Hifter has repeatedly denied.
International human rights organizations have previously documented that both Hifter’s Libyan forces and the RSF receive covert military and financial support from the United Arab Emirates, an allegation Abu Dhabi has continuously rejected. In recent months, Sudan’s national military has moved to disrupt the Libya-based RSF supply line, launching targeted airstrikes in November against convoys of vehicles and groups of foreign fighters assembled inside Libyan territory ahead of deployment to Sudan, the UN report confirms.
The cross-border mercenary network is the latest development in a Sudanese conflict that has already spiraled into one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. The war erupted on April 15, 2023, when long-simmering power tensions between Sudan’s military leadership and the RSF boiled over into open combat, first breaking out in the capital Khartoum before spreading across the vast country. The conflict has pushed millions of Sudanese into famine, displaced millions more, and created the largest single humanitarian crisis on the globe. According to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based independent conflict monitoring organization, the war has killed no fewer than 59,000 people to date. The organization stresses that this official toll is almost certainly a significant undercount, given widespread reporting restrictions and access constraints across war zones.
Already, the United States has imposed targeted economic sanctions on Colombian companies and private individuals linked to the scheme of recruiting and deploying former Colombian military officers to fight alongside the RSF in Sudan.