The Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) has called on the UN General Assembly and individual member states to impose an immediate arms embargo on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) because of its alleged central role in supporting genocide in Sudan and grave human rights violations across the region.
Documented supply lines, training camps, re-exported foreign weapons, and business ties underline extensive UAE support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudanese paramilitary group found by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan to have perpetrated acts of genocide against non-Arab communities in Sudan’s Darfur region.
However, the UAE has constantly denied these allegations, maintaining its non-involvement in the crisis rocking the minerals rich country.
DAWN, a US-based organisation, said states like the US, France, UK, China and Italy are providing arms or other military support to the UAE.
“From documented re-exports of Chinese howitzers to Darfur to Colombian mercenaries and Dubai-based financial networks fueling the RSF, the evidence of UAE’s support for abusive actors in Sudan is overwhelming,” said Omar Shakir, DAWN’s Executive Director.
“The UAE is the principal external sponsor of a force that a UN fact-finding mission has found committed acts of genocide.
“No legal framework, international or domestic, can justify continued arms transfers to the UAE.”
DAWN has written to five governments best placed to choke off the flow, calling on them to impose an arms embargo: the United States, which supplies 54 per cent of the UAE’s arms; France, its second-largest supplier at 13 per cent; the United Kingdom and China, whose components and re-exported munitions have reportedly turned up in RSF hands in Sudan.
All four are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and each has both the legal duty and the leverage to halt transfers now, the organization said.
DAWN also wrote to Italy, which in 2021 revoked missile and bomb licenses to the UAE under its own arms export law — the one supplier that has already acted — urging Rome to reinstate and extend those measures.
The UAE has armed and financed the RSF since April 2023. The UAE government denies arming the RSF, but the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan identified UAE-linked supply lines transporting weapons, vehicles, and fuel through Chad and Libya into Sudan.
Amnesty International’s analysis of shipment-level trade data, images and videos from social media, and interviews document foreign weapons in RSF hands, including UAE-made armored personnel carriers (APCs) with French and British-manufactured components, a variety of small arms produced in Türkiye, Russia, and Serbia, and UAE re-exports of Chinese Norinco bombs and howitzers to the RSF.
The only country in the world that imports the AH-4 howitzer from China is the UAE, according to SIPRI arms transfer data cited by Amnesty International.
The US Senator Chris Van Hollen and US Representative Sara Jacobs confirmed in January 2025 that the UAE kept arming the RSF, in direct contradiction to assurances it apparently gave Washington.
Between 2021-2025, the UAE ranked as the 11th largest arms importer globally, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
SIPRI’s data shows that, over the past decade, more than half (54%) of the UAE’s imported arms have come from the US, with the remainder coming from France (13%), South Africa (4.9%), Türkiye (4.9%), South Korea (4.7%), Sweden (2.4%), the Netherlands (2.2%), Russia (2.2%), Canada (2.1%), Israel (2%), China (1.4%), Germany (1.1%), Singapore (0.9%), Australia (0.9%), the United Kingdom (0.8%), Spain (0.7%), Italy (0.6%), Finland (0.2%), Serbia (0.1%), and Brazil (one transfer during this period).
Some of these weapons have allegedly been used in Sudan
Sudan’s civil war began on April 15, 2023, when fighting broke out between the commanders who jointly launched the 2021 coup and their forces: RSF commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
The conflict has killed at least 59,000 people and displaced around 14 million people.
Famine grips multiple regions. Following an 18-month siege, on October 26, 2025, the RSF seized El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights documented over 6,000 killings in the first 72 hours of the RSF offensive, finding that the RSF and allied Arab militia perpetrated mass killings and summary executions, sexual violence, disappearances, torture, and pillaging.
UN mission findings
On February 19, 2026, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan concluded that RSF forces committed three underlying acts of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur non-Arab communities.
Mission Chair Mohamed Chande Othman stated that “the scale, coordination, and public endorsement of the operation by senior RSF leadership” demonstrate intent.
On July 8, 2026, the Mission reiterated its earlier findings.
Amnesty International found in a more than 200-page July 2026 report that RSF committed a range of crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, other forms of sexual violence, enslavement and persecution.
The International Criminal Court has investigated crimes in Darfur since the UN Security Council referred the situation in 2005.
In a July 2026 interview with the BBC, ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said her office holds firm, concrete evidence that RSF forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, and that it has linked specific RSF leaders to atrocities against civilians during the fall of El Fasher — describing the investigation’s progress as “significant.”
The danger is spreading beyond Darfur. In mid-2026, the RSF massed forces around El Obeid, one of Sudan’s largest cities, in a siege that observers warned echoed the assault on El Fasher.
On July 6, 2026, the UN Human Rights Council, in a motion brought by the United Kingdom and 14 other states, condemned the RSF’s escalating violence and ordered an urgent inquiry into abuses there, after the UN human rights chief warned of an unfolding “catastrophe,” including summary executions, abductions, torture, and sexual violence.
Yet the resolution stopped short of naming the states fueling the conflict.
On July 8, 2026, the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan warned that El Obeid “must not become the next crime scene,” documenting the same encirclement and attacks on civilian infrastructure that preceded the fall of El Fasher.
By supplying the RSF with weapons, money, and fighters, the UAE bears state responsibility for the campaign the UN has found includes acts of genocide.
Under Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, a state that aids or assists another in an internationally wrongful act, with knowledge of the circumstances, shares responsibility for it — the standard the International Court of Justice applied to complicity in genocide in Bosnia v. Serbia (2007), and which Article III(e) of the Genocide Convention makes a punishable act.
DAWN said the UAE’s conduct meets that threshold, adding that, “the chain does not end in Abu Dhabi: states that keep arming the UAE, knowing its weapons may be diverted to the RSF, risk incurring the same complicity.
“This is not a one-off failure of due diligence. It is a deliberate, sustained, and well-documented policy by the UAE to arm a force credibly accused of genocide,” said Isabelle Hayslip, Advocacy Associate at DAWN.
“Every continuing arms transfer to the UAE risks complicity in atrocity crimes. The international community has the evidence. What is missing is the will to act.”
Daily Trust
