On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a damning new investigation that adds significant weight to mounting international allegations that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has offered direct military and financial backing to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group already widely charged with perpetrating war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide in Sudan’s ongoing catastrophic civil conflict.
The 18-month-long conflict, which erupted in April 2023, grew out of a bitter power struggle between Sudan’s formal national military and the RSF, an organization with deep roots in the brutal Janjaweed Arab militias that carried out mass atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region in the early 2000s. The fighting quickly spread from the capital Khartoum across the vast northeastern African nation, leaving a trail of devastation and death. Conflict tracking group ACLED estimates at least 59,000 people have been killed to date, a figure researchers acknowledge is almost certainly a major undercount due to restricted access to war zones.
HRW’s latest report details that hundreds of Colombian private military contractors were trained by Emirati personnel at two UAE facilities: one in the Al Dhafra region, roughly 155 miles west of Abu Dhabi, and a second site within Abu Dhabi itself. After completing their training, the mercenaries were deployed to Sudan to fight alongside RSF units, the investigation found.
One unnamed Colombian mercenary interviewed by HRW told researchers he personally helped train RSF recruits at camps near Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, as early as April 2023. He added that many of the trainees he instructed were underage young children. HRW’s findings were corroborated by interviews with a second Colombian mercenary, multiple former Colombian military officers, and cross-referenced with open source intelligence and previous United Nations reporting.
A September 2024 report from a UN expert panel to the UN Security Council already confirmed that Colombian mercenaries have operated across multiple key conflict zones in Sudan, including Khartoum, its twin city Omdurman, Darfur, and Kordofan. The UN experts documented that the contractors took on direct combat roles, operating RSF drones, artillery, and armored vehicles, and participating in offensive ground attacks. These accounts were even implicitly confirmed by RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who acknowledged in a February 2025 video statement that Colombian mercenaries had assisted his forces with drone operations.
According to HRW, the mercenary deployment was organized by Global Security Services Group, an Abu Dhabi-based private security firm chaired by Emirati national Mohammed Hamdan Al-Zaabi. Neither Emirati authorities nor the firm responded to HRW’s requests for comment. However, in response to questions from The Associated Press, the UAE Foreign Ministry issued a full denial of the allegations.
“The UAE does not permit its territory to be used for the recruitment, training, financing or transit of foreign fighters to any conflict, including Sudan,” the ministry stated. It added that any private individual or entity, whether Emirati or foreign, that provides support to non-state armed groups “would be doing so without state authorization, in violation of Emirati law, and would be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution.”
HRW said it has verified geolocated video footage showing Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside RSF forces during the group’s October 2024 capture of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The UN-commissioned expert panel described the el-Fasher offensive as bearing all the “hallmarks of genocide,” with at least 6,000 people killed in just three days of fighting, per UN estimates.
Mausi Segun, executive director of HRW’s Africa Division, emphasized that the mercenary recruitment builds on a growing body of irrefutable evidence of UAE complicity in RSF atrocities. “The recruitment of Colombian private military contractors adds to a growing body of evidence that the UAE provides military support to the Rapid Support Forces, which have repeatedly carried out heinous atrocities in Sudan,” Segun said.
The rights group is calling on the international community, including the European Union, to pressure the UAE to end all support for the RSF by suspending bilateral military cooperation and arms sales to the Gulf state. “Other countries need to stop accepting the UAE’s blanket denials of support to the RSF which fly in the face of the facts, and should put an end to its impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Segun added.
To date, the United States has imposed sanctions on multiple individuals and companies based in Bogota, Colombia, for their alleged role in recruiting and deploying mercenaries to fight alongside the RSF. However, Washington has yet to take action addressing the well-documented allegations of UAE support for the RSF, which the U.S. State Department has itself accused of carrying out widespread “summary executions, ethnically motivated attacks, sexual and gender-based violence, and torture throughout areas under its control” during the conflict.