By ALULA FREZGHI
Sudan is living through one of the darkest chapters in its modern history, yet the world continues to look away. In April of last year, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) heavily armed, financed, and politically shielded by the United Arab Emirates stormed the famine‑stricken Zamzam camp in North Darfur. What followed was not a battle. It was a massacre.
Over 1,000 displaced civilians were killed in just three days. One‑third were executed on the spot. Entire families were wiped out. The staff of the camp’s largest medical clinic was murdered in cold blood. Women, girls, and even boys were subjected to sexual violence. Homes were burned. Bodies were hidden. Evidence was destroyed.
These are not allegations whispered in the dark. They are documented findings by U.N. investigators, human rights monitors, and survivors who escaped with nothing but their memories and their grief.
And yet, this was only the beginning.
El Fasher: A City Starved, Besieged, and Silenced
When the RSF captured El Fasher after an 18‑month siege, the world barely blinked. But for the people of Darfur, it was another catastrophe layered on top of decades of trauma.
Eyewitnesses describe mass killings, house‑to‑house executions, and bodies dumped or burned to erase the evidence. Satellite imagery from independent researchers shows over 150 clusters of likely human remains scattered across the city.
In Kordofan, the pattern repeated itself. When the RSF advanced into Al‑Fashir and surrounding areas, thousands more civilians were killed in a matter of days. Entire neighborhoods were emptied. Drone strikes almost certainly supplied through UAE channels hit power stations, markets, and even U.N. peacekeepers.
This is not chaos. This is not collateral damage. This is a systematic project of terror, enabled by foreign sponsorship and global indifference.
The UAE’s Shadow War in Sudan
For years, Sudanese activists, analysts, and regional observers have warned that the RSF is not acting alone. The United Arab Emirates has been repeatedly identified by U.N. investigators, Western officials, and independent experts as the RSF’s primary foreign sponsor supplying weapons, ammunition, advanced drones, mercenaries, and financial networks that have enabled some of the worst atrocities of this war.
But the question now confronting the region is unavoidable: Will the UAE finally reconsider its spoilers’ role in Sudan after what happened last week in Mukalla, Yemen? In Mukalla, Saudi forces intercepted Emirati‑linked shipments destined for separatist militias, a dramatic escalation that exposed the dangers of Abu Dhabi’s habit of fueling proxy groups across the region. If the UAE can learn anything from that confrontation, it should be this: the era of destabilizing neighbors through armed clients is coming to an end.
Sudan cannot afford to be the next battleground for this reckless strategy. The UAE must stop arming and financing the RSF a group responsible for mass killings, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and the starvation of civilians. Continuing to back the RSF is not “mediation.” It is the deliberate prolonging of a war that has already destroyed millions of Sudanese lives.
A Manufactured Famine
Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is not a natural disaster. It is the result of: RSF sieges that blocked aid routes, targeted killings of medical workers, destruction of food supplies, and western aid cuts at the worst possible moment.
Today, 21.2 million Sudanese face acute hunger. Famine has already taken hold in Zamzam, El Fasher, and Kadugli. Twenty more regions are on the brink. When a population is starved, besieged, and bombed, famine becomes a weapon and silence becomes complicity.
Why the Horn of Africa Must Speak Now
The Horn of Africa knows what happens when the world ignores a genocide until it is too late. We know what foreign meddling looks like. We know how regional wars spill across borders, destabilize neighbors, and reshape generations.
Sudan’s collapse is not an isolated tragedy. It is a regional emergency with consequences for Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, and the entire Red Sea corridor. If the RSF backed by foreign money and foreign drones succeeds in carving out a state through mass killing, it will set a precedent that endangers every nation in the region.
A Red Sea Warning: Sudan, Yemen, and the Region Are Bound Together
What is happening in Sudan cannot be separated from what is happening in Yemen, nor from the rising tensions along the Red Sea. The same networks of arms, drones, and proxy militias that fuel the RSF in Darfur are destabilizing Yemen’s southern coast. The same foreign ambitions that ignite Mukalla are shaping the battles for El Fasher and Kordofan. And the same Red Sea corridor that carries global trade is now threatened by a chain of conflicts stretching from Port Sudan to Aden.
If Sudan falls deeper into fragmentation, if Yemen continues to fracture under competing patrons, and if the Red Sea becomes a chessboard for proxy warfare, the entire region will face a storm that no state can contain alone.
This is the moment to speak clearly: The Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea are bound together and destabilizing one will destabilize all. Sudan is bleeding in silence. Yemen is warning us. The Red Sea is tightening. The world must act before the fire spreads across the entire region.
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