Trained on Emirati Bases, Colombian Mercenaries Stood by as RSF Killed in El-Fasher

When the Rapid Support Forces overran El-Fasher in October 2025, ending an eighteen-month siege that had already starved the North Darfur capital, the killing was carried out by Arab-Sudanese fighters. But a 29-year-old survivor Human Rights Watch calls Amal remembers who stood beside them: pale-skinned men, shorter than the Sudanese, in fatigues and helmets, carrying "sniper rifles… small weapons with silencers." They did not fire on her group, she said. They watched.

Human Rights Watch believes those men were Colombians, and in an 83-page investigation published on 25 May it lays out how they got there: from retired soldiers in Colombia, through at least two military facilities inside the United Arab Emirates, to the front lines of a war that has produced the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe.

The recruitment pipeline: Bogotá to Abu Dhabi, then Benghazi and El-Fasher. Graphic: Qatar Standard, based on Human Rights Watch.

At the centre is Global Security Services Group (GSSG), an Abu Dhabi security firm licensed to work for the Emirati government, founded in 2016 by Ahmed Mohammed al-Humairi, secretary general of the UAE's presidential court, before its shares passed to its CEO, Mohamed Hamdan al-Zaabi.

Retired Colombian personnel were first approached by A4SI, a Bogotá-based agency working closely with GSSG.

Source: Human Rights Watch

But the route ran through the Emirati state. Contractors' own geolocated videos place them at the Ghiyathi military base and a facility in Al Wathba, both in Abu Dhabi. One described landing on a private flight and being waved through without a passport stamp.

At least 300 Colombians had deployed as early as August 2024.

Source: Human Rights Watch

The contractors were not only fighting; one told HRW he spent April 2025 training RSF recruits — many of them "young children" — at camps near Nyala.

Source: Human Rights Watch

The UAE rejects all of it: "We categorically reject any claims of providing any form of support to either warring party." The more uncomfortable finding sits in the report's final pages: the US, UK, EU members, the UN and the AU are aware of the evidence, yet retreat into the language of anonymous "external backers" rather than naming the UAE. With more than 150,000 dead and nearly 13 million displaced, HRW wants the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts to investigate GSSG and targeted sanctions to follow.