The Horn of Africa Is Bleeding and the UAE–Ethiopia Axis Is Fueling the Fire

By Alula Frezghi

Sudan’s war is still routinely framed as a domestic power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). That framing is no longer analytically defensible. A growing corpus of investigative journalism, flight-tracking data, satellite imagery, and corroborated intelligence leaks points to a more dangerous reality: Sudan has become the central theater of a regionalized proxy conflict, with the United Arab Emirates as a principal external driver and Ethiopia as a permissive, if not enabling rear base.

This is not speculation. It is an observable pattern that the international community has thus far chosen to treat as peripheral rather than constitutive of the war itself.

A Covert Airbridge Comes Into Focus

Recent investigations have documented aircraft linked to Emirati logistical networks flying between Israel and Ethiopia, forming what appears to be a shadow airbridge aligned with long-standing allegations of UAE material support to the RSF. While Abu Dhabi continues to issue categorical denials, multiple independent indicators converge:
• flight paths consistent with covert cargo operations rather than civilian or commercial traffic;
• satellite imagery revealing anomalous activity at secondary and remote Ethiopian airfields;
• testimonies from Sudanese intelligence and SAF-aligned sources describing RSF fighters transiting Ethiopian territory into Sudan’s Blue Nile state.¹²³⁴

Individually, these data points might invite skepticism. Taken together, they establish a strong circumstantial case for a state-enabled supply route sustaining the RSF’s operational capacity.

Ethiopia’s Role: Plausible Deniability as Strategy

Ethiopia’s role is more opaque but no less consequential. Addis Ababa publicly maintains a posture of neutrality, yet multiple reports suggest the RSF has operated from Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, a strategic corridor bordering Sudan’s Blue Nile state. SAF-aligned sources report RSF units moving through this territory before launching cross-border attacks.

If substantiated, this would mean Ethiopia is not merely failing to police its borders but providing operational depth and territorial sanctuary to a foreign paramilitary force accused by the United Nations and human-rights organizations of ethnic cleansing, mass killings, and systematic sexual violence.

This posture is particularly destabilizing given Ethiopia’s own internal fractures: unresolved insurgencies, economic freefall, contested borders, and a strained federal order. Entanglement in Sudan’s war risks regionalizing Ethiopia’s internal crises while normalizing the instrumentalization of non-state armed actors as tools of foreign policy.

South Sudan: Fragility Meets Regional Spillover

The RSF’s recent offensive in Blue Nile has also revived concerns about cross-border movements from South Sudan. SAF sources claim RSF units transited South Sudanese territory before attacking the al-Silik garrison. Independent verification remains incomplete, but the broader pattern is unmistakable: the RSF is operating with a level of cross-border mobility that exceeds the capabilities of a purely domestic militia.

Such mobility implies at least tacit state-level facilitation or, at minimum, the exploitation of fragile states unable to enforce territorial sovereignty. Either scenario deepens regional insecurity and erodes already tenuous norms against cross-border militarization.

A War Designed to Stretch Sudan’s Defenses

The RSF assault on Blue Nile was not an isolated tactical decision. SAF analysts interpret it as a diversionary operation designed to draw government forces away from Kordofan, where the RSF has faced mounting pressure. The SAF’s capture of Habila in South Kordofan, following weeks of heavy fighting, threatened RSF positions around Dilling and disrupted key supply lines.

This is where external sponsorship becomes decisive. The RSF’s ability to wage simultaneous, geographically dispersed offensives is not a function of endogenous strength alone. It is the product of foreign logistics, external financing, and access to cross-border sanctuaries. Every drone shipment, every airlift, every permissive border crossing recalibrates the battlefield.

The Human Cost of Foreign Engineering

While regional and Gulf capitals maneuver, Sudanese civilians absorb the consequences. Drone warfare employed by multiple actors has killed women and children in South Kordofan. Entire towns have been depopulated. More than 14 million Sudanese have been displaced since April 2023, constituting one of the largest humanitarian catastrophes in the world today.⁵⁶

Yet international responses remain narrowly humanitarian and conspicuously evasive on political accountability.

The UAE continues to market itself as a neutral humanitarian actor while evidence mounts of its material entanglement. Ethiopia asserts neutrality while its territory appears increasingly embedded in the war’s logistics. South Sudan, itself fragile and internally divided, risks being drawn into a conflict it neither controls nor benefits from.

This is not diplomacy. It is destabilization conducted behind the language of statecraft.

A Region at the Brink

The Horn of Africa is already structurally fragile. Ethiopia’s internal conflicts, Eritrea’s isolation, Somalia’s insurgency, South Sudan’s instability, and Sudan’s civil war form an interconnected arc of insecurity. The UAE’s increasingly militarized foreign policy from Libya to Yemen to the Sahel has now extended decisively into Sudan.⁷

If this trajectory continues, the region will not merely experience episodic instability. It risks cascading into a multi-state conflict zone stretching from the Red Sea littoral to the Gulf of Aden, with profound implications for global shipping, migration flows, and regional sovereignty.

Accountability Is No Longer Optional

Sudan’s war can no longer be treated as an internal affair that external actors merely “influence.” The accumulated evidence indicates that foreign states are actively shaping the conflict’s duration, intensity, and geographic spread.

The UAE and Ethiopia must be confronted with documented realities: logistical networks sustaining the RSF, territorial facilitation and permissive transit, political cover extended through diplomatic silence, and the enabling of a paramilitary force implicated in mass atrocities.

Silence is no longer neutrality; it is complicity. And complicity is what has allowed this war to metastasize beyond Sudan’s borders.

Sudan is bleeding. The Horn of Africa is bleeding. And the fingerprints of Abu Dhabi and Addis Ababa are increasingly visible on the wounds.

Footnote
1. Middle East Eye, “Exclusive: UAE flights linked to Sudan war tracked from Israel to Ethiopia,” investigative reporting on flight patterns and logistical networks (2024).
2. Sudan War Monitor, field updates on RSF movements and SAF counter-operations in Blue Nile and Kordofan (2024).
3. Satellite imagery analyses referenced by independent monitoring groups documenting anomalous activity at Ethiopian airfields, particularly in Benishangul-Gumuz (2023–2024).
4. Testimonies from SAF-aligned intelligence sources describing RSF cross-border movements from Ethiopia and South Sudan (2024).
5. United Nations and humanitarian agencies’ displacement estimates indicating over 14 million Sudanese displaced since April 2023.
6. Reports on escalation of drone warfare, including RSF claims regarding Bayraktar drone engagements in South Kordofan (2024).
7. Comparative regional analyses documenting the UAE’s pattern of proxy engagement in Libya, Yemen, and the Sahel (2015–2024