The UAE is no longer just arming the RSF. It is training its soldiers.

Human Rights Watch released a report this week documenting that hundreds of Colombian mercenaries have been trained at military bases inside the United Arab Emirates, then deployed to fight alongside the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. The training, according to the report, took place at a facility in the Al Dhafra region — roughly 250 kilometres west of Abu Dhabi — and at a second site within Abu Dhabi proper. The recruits, who entered through an Abu Dhabi-based private security firm, were paid to operate drones, artillery, and armoured vehicles in active combat, and to participate in direct attacks.

The Associated Press carried the findings on the wires. The Emirati Foreign Ministry responded that 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 denial is consistent with a now two-year pattern in which the UAE has rejected every published allegation, the most consequential of which has come from the United Nations.

The consequential threshold this week was the type of allegation. For the past two years the public record against the UAE on Sudan has been an arms-transfer record: cargo flights from Emirati airfields to an airstrip at Amdjarass in eastern Chad, documented by the UN Panel of Experts in January 2024 and corroborated by Reuters flight-tracking in December 2024 and by Amnesty International's weapons-tracing in July 2024. A second route, through Bosaso airport in Puntland to RSF-controlled areas of Sudan, was added to the file by reporting in late 2025. The arms allegations, while heavy, were arms allegations. The Human Rights Watch findings are the first major published documentation that the UAE has moved from supplying weapons to training the soldiers who use them.

The training pipeline

The Al Dhafra facility is not a public installation. Its identification, in the HRW report, is the product of months of interviews with returned Colombian fighters and corroborating documentation. The second site, within Abu Dhabi proper, has been similarly identified. The Colombian recruits, mostly veterans of Colombia's own armed conflicts who possess existing tactical experience, transited from Bogota through commercial aviation to the UAE, completed a training cycle of weeks at the Emirati bases, then continued to Sudan via routes the report describes as varied — through Chad, through the Bosaso line in Somalia, or by other arrangements.

The recruitment apparatus, according to the HRW report and the UN Panel of Experts findings on which it draws, was a private security firm registered in Abu Dhabi: Global Security Services Group. The chairman, an Emirati national named in the UN Panel reports as Mohammed Hamdan Al-Zaabi, is the named principal of the firm. Whether the firm operates as a state-aligned entity or as an independent private contractor is a distinction the UAE Foreign Ministry has not engaged with publicly, beyond its blanket denial.

The United States Treasury has, separately, sanctioned a network of recruiters based in Bogotá over the deployment of Colombian fighters to the RSF. The sanctions establish that Washington considers the recruitment pipeline real, regardless of the UAE's denials about the training pipeline that received the recruits.

What the mercenaries do

The HRW report describes the operational roles of the Colombian fighters in the RSF order of battle. They are not auxiliaries. They operate the unmanned aerial combat systems the UN Panel previously documented as supplied through the Chad airlift. They handle the artillery and armoured fighting vehicles. They participate in direct ground attacks. The Colombian skill set — pilot-grade drone operation, indirect fire, mechanised manoeuvre — is what RSF lacked in mid-2024 and now has.

The RSF's own leadership has not been discreet about this. In a February 2026 video statement, the RSF commander Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti — explicitly acknowledged Colombian fighters in the RSF order. The acknowledgment, brief and made in passing, was nevertheless the clearest public confirmation by a principal that the foreign-fighter pipeline existed and was operational. The Emirati denial that has followed every external published account does not engage with the Hemedti statement either.

The operational consequence of this pipeline has been described, in atrocity-documentation terms, by HRW and other monitoring groups working on Darfur. The RSF's offensives against El-Fasher and the El-Geneina campaigns of 2023-2024 produced what the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, in October 2024, called acts that may amount to crimes against humanity. The drone strikes, the armoured assaults, and the direct attacks on civilian populations have not happened without the operators the Colombian pipeline has supplied.

The escalation curve

The arc the public record now describes is no longer ambiguous. In 2023, the allegations against the UAE were political support — diplomatic protection, financial backing, the long-standing relationship with Hemedti's family that pre-dates the war. In January 2024, the UN Panel of Experts named arms transfers, through the Amdjarass corridor in Chad. In late 2024 and through 2025, the arms-transfer documentation matured: Reuters flight-tracking, Amnesty weapons-tracing, Yale Conflict Observatory corroboration. A second arms route, through Bosaso airport in Somalia's Puntland region, entered the file in October 2025 via Middle East Eye investigation, subsequently confirmed by the Somali defence minister. And now, in May 2026, the Human Rights Watch report on training Colombian mercenaries on Emirati military soil.

Each stage extends the legal and reputational exposure further than the last. Political support is a sovereign choice. Arms transfers to a non-state party under United Nations arms embargo — the Sudan sanctions regime, dating to 2004 — are violations of binding Security Council resolutions. Training foreign fighters on national territory for direct combat operations, by a principal that has signed both the United Nations Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries (in spirit, though the UAE is not a state party) and the 2008 Montreux Document on private military companies, is the threshold at which conventional state-responsibility doctrine becomes engaged. The HRW findings do not stand alone; they sit atop the UN Panel record, the US Treasury sanctions, and the RSF commander's own acknowledgment.

The UAE's response has not adjusted across the stages. The denials of 2023, of 2024, and of May 2026 employ the same structural formulation: there is no substantiated evidence, the UAE does not permit, the UAE has provided only humanitarian aid. The formulation has not changed because the record's growth has not been engaged in detail. The denial functions as a placeholder for an absent rebuttal.

The OIC question

For a Qatar Standard reader, the Sudan file presents a question that the Somali file has presented in parallel. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has, in the past eighteen months, mobilised against an Israeli ambition in Somaliland and against a series of Western policy positions on Gaza. It has not mobilised against the Emirati position in Sudan. The reason is the same reason that produces the structural limit on Doha's Somalia policy: the OIC is not designed to confront one of its members.

The Sudanese armed forces, the federal recognised government of the Sudanese state, have no equivalent of the Israel-Somaliland embassy ceremony around which to organise a multilateral Muslim-world response. The harm is being done through arms transfers and now through troop training rather than through formal recognition events. The instrument that Qatar has refined to confront recognition is not the instrument that confronts logistics. The instrument that would confront logistics — economic, financial, infrastructural pressure — is the one the Gulf reconciliation explicitly forecloses.

This is the second proxy-theatre file where Doha is operating with the wrong tool. The first was Somalia. The Sudan file extends the analytic problem to a war that has produced, by United Nations estimate, more than ten million displaced and tens of thousands of confirmed civilian deaths. The threshold this week — from arming to training — is not a fresh start of that war. It is a continuation by means the diplomatic record cannot quietly normalise.

What changes

The Human Rights Watch report does not by itself produce a policy response. Reports do not. What reports produce, in the slow cumulation that the UN Panel of Experts has built since January 2024, is a documentary record that a future Security Council discussion, a future criminal investigation, or a future war-crimes proceeding can draw upon. The record is now long enough that the UAE's denial functions only in the political present. The legal and historical record is operating on a different timescale.

For the families of the Colombian fighters — many of whom, according to the HRW interviews, have not received the payments contracted, and some of whom have died in Darfur — the analytical framing is irrelevant. The line they crossed is the one separating private military work in a sanctioned country from private military work in a country whose civilian population is being subjected to what the United Nations has called possible crimes against humanity. The contracts they signed do not vary by destination. The destinations they were sent to do.

The UAE's Sudan policy will continue as long as the proxy theatre continues to be profitable, deniable, and outside the reach of the multilateral instruments that Doha and others can mobilise against recognition events. Until then, the Al Dhafra base, the Abu Dhabi training site, the Global Security Services Group front, and the Bogotá recruitment line will produce the soldiers the RSF requires for the next phase of the war. The Sudanese federal army cannot reach those nodes. The Sudanese state cannot. The institutional architecture that could reach them has not done so.

---

Sources: Human Rights Watch, report on Colombian mercenaries trained at UAE bases, May 2026. Associated Press wire, 25 May 2026 (carried by ABC News, KOB, KTSM and others). United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan, final report S/2024/65 (January 2024) and S/2025/239 (April 2025). Reuters, Sudan arms transfer investigation, December 2024. Amnesty International, 'New weapons fuelling the Sudan conflict,' July 2024. United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, October 2024 report. Middle East Eye, 'Atrocities in Sudan backed by Colombian mercenaries trained at UAE bases, report,' 2026, and earlier Bosaso investigation, 31 October 2025. United States Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, sanctions actions against Bogotá-based recruiters. RSF commander Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, video statement, February 2026.