Mercenaries and high-profile defectors abound in Sudan war
Human rights organizations accuse the UAE of supporting the RSF militia, which has seen a number of high-profile defections to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Meanwhile
Human rights organizations accuse the UAE of supporting the RSF militia, which has seen a number of high-profile defections to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Meanwhile, the civilian population continues to suffer. When Sudan's military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan welcomed Al-Nour Ahmed Adam — also known as Al-Nour Al-Qubba and a former senior commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia — into the ranks of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) earlier this year, it was one of the most high-profile defections in the Sudanese civil war to date. While the SAF controls the capital Khartoum, Port Sudan and large parts of the east and center of the country, its rival RSF holds vast areas in the west of the country, particularly in Darfur, including the city of El Fasher. Al-Nour Al-Qubba is not the only defector: He was followed a few weeks later by high-ranking RSF commander, Ali Rizq Allah, also known as Al-Savannah. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reviewed videos purportedly showing these two defectors during the siege of El Fasher, where the international NGO has documented war crimes committed by the RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commonly known as Hemedti, during the city's capture in October 2025. General amnesty for RSF fighters? Since the war began in 2023, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has been trying to recruit defectors from the RSF into the SAF. Almost from the beginning, he declared a general amnesty for members of the militia if they laid down their arms, saying they could be integrated into the military. Human Rights Watch says it was unable to verify whether this also applied to the most recent defectors. For Mohamed Osman, a Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, there must not be impunity. "Those responsible for serious international crimes and human rights violations do not get a free pass if they switch sides," he said, adding that "Sudanese people who have experienced horrific abuses under any commander's watch deserve justice." According to conflict monitors at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the recent defections could be a sign of increasing tension within the RSF ranks and of "cracks in the RSF's core alliances." They assume that "local loyalties are superseding central command, sparking violent intra-coalition competition over remaining war spoils." Who are Sudan's RSF?
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'The war would be over if not for the UAE' The defections come at a time when both the SAF and the RSF have external support. Though the front is in Sudan, the alliances that are keeping the war going extend far beyond the country's borders. The RSF's supporters are believed to include the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopia, Libya, Chad and Kenya. The SAF, which has also been accused of war crimes, is supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Eritrea. Iran is also suspected of having provided military aid to the SAF. Last year, US intelligence sources told the US daily The Wall Street Journal that the UAE was believed to have supplied the RSF with "advanced Chinese-made drones along with small arms, heavy machine guns, vehicles, artillery, mortars and ammunition." The report cited Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to several special envoys for Sudan, as saying that the "only thing that is keeping them [the RSF] in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they're receiving from the UAE." "The war would be over if not for the UAE," he insisted. In 2025, the human rights organization Amnesty International also found evidence suggesting that the UAE had "almost certainly" re-exported Chinese-made weapons to the RSF. The UAE rejects the accusations. Salem Aljaberi, the UAE's assistant minister for security and military affairs, said that Amnesty International's allegations were "baseless" and lacked "substantiated evidence." International donors gather for Sudan conference To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Mercenaries from Colombia alongside RSF In late May, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled "From Bogota to El Fasher: The UAE's Role in the Deployment of Colombian Fighters and Other Backing to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan." The 83-page document details how hundreds of Colombian mercenaries have been recruited to fight alongside the RSF in Sudan since 2024. It claims that a Colombia-based recruitment agency worked with the "Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), which appears to have hired the contractors who were deployed to Sudan." "Thankfully for us, Colombian contractors are not very hygienic with their social media presence so we were able to get a lot of information from their own Tik Tok accounts and other social media that they posted publicly and geolocate them in these sensitive UAE military sites before they were then deployed to Sudan," Human Rights Watch's Joey Shea told the US news organization Democracy Now.
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