Sudan war has created web of arms and mercenaries, report says

The war in Sudan has created a network of arms and mercenaries that spans swathes of north and central Africa, according to a new report published on Tuesday by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.

Entitled Collateral Circuits: The impact of Sudan’s war on arms markets and mercenary networks in Chad and Libya, the report charts the way in which pre-existing smuggling routes were reactivated and expanded after the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out in April 2023.

It focuses on Chad and Libya, through which the UAE's support for the RSF has flowed, and shows that the impact of the war has spilled out into Niger, Mali and beyond. 

Middle East Eye has reported on UAE supply routes that also run through Somalia, Uganda and Central African Republic to reach the RSF in Sudan. Abu Dhabi continues to deny backing the RSF, despite mounting evidence.

Sources in the Sudanese government opposed to the RSF say that the paramilitary group has fielded fighters and technicians from 17 countries. 

Mercenaries, arms trafficking, gold mining and people smuggling are the main components of a war economy that has drawn in all of Sudan’s neighbours and is providing profit and employment for a vast array of people in the region. 

“The residual impact of this war economy will be long lasting because it’s integrated mercenaries and weapons,” Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at Global Initiative and the report’s author, told Middle East Eye.

“But it is also increasingly resulting in the development of infrastructure created at least in part to enable supplies… So, once the Sudan conflict contracts, weapons, mercenaries and the infrastructure will morph to play new roles.” 

In the report, Badi argues that Sudan has, therefore, “not only reshaped its own frontlines but also transformed the wider security economies of its neighbours”.

“The proliferation of arms and the growing reliance on mercenaries are reshaping the security architecture of the Sahel and Sahara region, not as residual effects of war, but as persistent forces that rewire conflict economies and deepen structural fragility,” the report states. 

Arms flow out of Sudan

While arms and mercenaries have been coming into Sudan, they have also been going out. The report includes pictures of DShKM machine guns, small arms and other weapons found for sale in markets in Chad and on Facebook.  

“The collapse of internal military control and the fragmentation of command structures enabled a rapid proliferation of arms outflows from both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) stockpiles in Sudan into regional markets,” the report says.

Badi told MEE that the regional integration charted in the report - and present in the movement of arms and mercenaries - means that it makes “little sense” to look at North Africa, the Sahel and other countries close by “in a compartmentalised fashion”.

“It’s a feature of Emirati, Russian and increasingly Turkish policy to look at these theatres in an integrated fashion, and you can clearly see that in the way there was continuity and complementarity in the supply lines set up for the RSF via Libya and Chad over time,” he said.

Badi said that apart from the integration of the region and the durability of the weapons and mercenary circuits, he found that the RSF's success on the battlefield collated with its supply lines functioning uninterrupted.

“The quality of the supply lines has had a direct impact on military developments in the war, whether the loss of Khartoum or the fall of el-Fasher in Darfur,” he told MEE. “Obviously it’s not the sole factor but it has played an important role.”

When SAF took the capital Khartoum in the spring of 2025, RSF supply lines had been impacted by the loss of key positions in northern Darfur, as well as other problems. 

But in June, the paramilitaries, with the help of groups affiliated to eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar, including Subul al-Salam, took the Sudanese portion of the triangle border region that includes parts of Libya and Egypt and borders Chad. 

This provided the RSF with a straightforward supply line - centred on Maaten al-Sarra, a once disused air base - to fuel its assault on el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which it took control of at the end of October.

UAE supplies through Chad and Libya

The report charts the use of different key bases for the UAE-facilitated supply of the RSF. 

“Initially, eastern Libya - particularly Kufra - appeared poised to become the backbone of RSF resupply. Yet operational disruptions inside Sudan soon shifted the centre of gravity towards Chad, where Amdjarass emerged as a new hub, anchored by Emirati support and tacit Chadian state facilitation,” it states.

Subul al-Salam and the 128th brigade of Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) were key to operations in Libya, the report says, moving military material in convoys south to the Ain Kaziyet crossing, where it was collected at the border by RSF units.

A key early setback for the RSF was the capture of the Shafir Lit base, better known as Chevrolet, on 20 April 2023. Earlier this year, the RSF took the base back, thereby greatly easing its supply routes. 

As well as arms, Kufra was a hub for the “discreet transit of personnel, particularly Chadian mercenaries moving into Darfur - alongside steady flows of fuel, cars and light material that RSF procured in southern Libya”.

The movement of arms from Chad has involved a corridor running from Amdjarass, where the UAE built a “field hospital” in July 2023 “ostensibly to serve Sudanese refugees”, through Bao and Kariari into Zurug, in Darfur.  

Mercenaries, the report argues, have been central to every phase of the Sudan war and to the functioning of its different supply pipelines.

"They do not operate on the margins of trafficking but act as organisers and enablers of the circuits: escorting convoys, managing access and keeping flows moving across borders," the report says.