For over two years, the Red Sea city of Port Sudan served as the de facto capital for the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and as a critical humanitarian gateway.
Over the last week and for six consecutive days, a series of precise drone attacks, attributed to the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF), shattered that illusion of safety, targeting oil depots, power stations, the city’s airport and a geopolitically strategic naval base.
The immediate consequences are dire: skyrocketing water prices, crippling fuel shortages, and a fresh wave of terror for a populace already traumatised by conflict.
The Port Sudan strikes signal more than tactical escalation – they expose the deepening entrenchment of the war, the sophisticated capabilities of its combatants, and the increasingly brazen role of external actors in fuelling a conflict that has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
“The drone attacks on Port Sudan are an extension of the war’s shift away from ground battles toward destabilising aerial strikes,” notes Ahmed Kodouda, a humanitarian policy expert and former senior policy advisor in Sudan’s post-revolution transitional government.
This strategy, he argues, demonstrates the RSF is “not only interested in gaining ground, but also in denying the SAF the ability to govern.”
The RSF’s “speed and precision shouldn’t be a surprise,” Kodouda adds. “It reflects an emboldened force with foreign backing and no political constraints,” he told The New Arab.
Suspicions of external support for the RSF have heavily centred on the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A United Nations (UN) panel documented a “consistent pattern” of cargo flights from the UAE into Chad.
The UN experts noted these flights exhibited oddities, such as disappearing from radar, raising “questions of possible covert operations.” Investigators also linked some flights to operators with a history of embargo-violating arms transfers to other conflict zones.
Although the UN panel’s investigators could not definitively prove the planes carried weapons, they still stressed the need to close “investigative gaps.” Notably, the panel’s final published report omitted any direct accusation linking the UAE to arming the RSF via these flights.
The UAE has repeatedly denied that it plays any role in arming the RSF, instead highlighting that it “remains steadfast in its commitment to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe.”
However, Suliman Baldo, Executive Director of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, explained that the UAE’s support for the RSF is “known and documented,” adding that after being pushed from central Sudan, the RSF adopted “a strategy of conserving ground forces and relying on drones” to target strategic infrastructure nationwide.
The accusations have escalated tensions dramatically. As a result of the attacks and after months of condemnatory rhetoric, Sudan’s army-led government finally severed diplomatic ties with the UAE, branding it an “aggressor state.” In response, the UAE declared it “does not recognise the decision of the Port Sudan Authority,” calling the move a “diversionary tactic aimed at undermining peace efforts.”
This diplomatic battle followed an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that it lacked jurisdiction to hear Sudan’s claim accusing the UAE of complicity in genocide by arming the RSF. Sudan insists it will keep pursuing legal and other avenues against the Gulf state, while the UAE claims the ruling is revelatory of the “baseless” nature of the case.
Yet, evidence of arms transfers continues to surface. Amnesty International identified Chinese GB50A guided bombs and 155mm AH-4 howitzers, “almost certainly re-exported by the UAE,” in RSF hands.
Reporting by France24 has traced Bulgarian mortars found in Sudan back to a €50 million UAE contract with International Golden Group (IGG), an Emirati firm with a documented history of diverting arms to conflict zones. The UAE, however, maintains its denials.
The insatiable appetite for war is largely financed by another of Sudan’s curses: gold. Billions in illicit gold flow out of Sudan, bankrolling both the SAF and the RSF.
RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (‘Hemedti’) built a formidable empire on Darfuri gold, an enterprise reportedly now worth hundreds of millions annually.
This expansion was achieved through a network of alliances: Russian Wagner mercenaries offered operational support, the UAE became and remains the primary recipient of gold from RSF-controlled territories, and critically, the SAF itself initially nurtured and empowered the RSF, effectively incubating the very force that would challenge its dominance.
The SAF, too, relies on gold from areas it controls, even partnering with an Emirati-owned company, Emiral Resources (linked to UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed), which operates the country’s largest industrial mine, the Kush mine.
A report co-authored by Suliman Baldo and Ahmed Soliman, citing Central Bank of Sudan data, reveals a critical pipeline: in 2024, “almost 97 per cent of official gold exports (from SAF-held areas) were to the UAE.”
Curiously, this economic lifeline continued even amid diplomatic turbulence and despite the SAF accusing the UAE, since the war erupted in 2023, of arming the RSF.
When recently questioned on Al Jazeera about gold exports from SAF-controlled areas, particularly to destinations like the UAE, Sudan’s Finance Minister, Gibril Ibrahim, offered an ambiguous response. “We export to the market… It’s free trade… more than 80% of gold produced in Sudan is by the private sector,” he stated, acknowledging that gold could make its way to the UAE.
Ibrahim added that the government is working to divest from the UAE, but that “shifting to other markets takes time, we are now shifting in a gradual manner to new markets.”
As Suliman Baldo explained to The New Arab, even with diplomatic ties strained throughout the conflict, the UAE remained the “main window for all global financial transfers’ for the de facto government in Port Sudan due to US sanctions.”
This makes the SAF-controlled government’s recent decision to sever ties particularly awkward. The decentralised nature of gold mining, the SAF’s practical inability to completely freeze its economic dealings with the UAE, and its desperate need for funds to bankroll a war effort, hitherto reliant on Emirati economic nodes, all create a complex bind for the national army.
This entanglement was recently highlighted when Sudan’s Minister of Mines, Mohamed Bashir Abu Nomou, responded to calls to halt gold exports to the UAE by stating he was “not the authorised body to issue such a decision,” underscoring the symbiotic, yet contradictory nature of the Sudanese-Emirati relationship.
Furthermore, the path to peace in Sudan appears increasingly obstructed, undermined by both internal dynamics and divergent external interests. Recent diplomatic efforts, such as a British-led attempt in April to establish a contact group for ceasefire talks, have faltered, collapsing when key regional players – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – could not agree on a joint communique.
The inability of these crucial regional players to find common ground demonstrates a core problem: those best positioned to influence Sudan’s warring factions are too entangled in their own competing agendas to act cohesively for peace.
Suha Musa, a Sudan researcher, emphasises that true peace requires more than just a cessation of hostilities. “A ceasefire is a ceasefire,” she told The New Arab. “But what happens after that? That I think we [Sudanese civil society] really need to sit down and assess and not let ourselves get kind of pulled back into the same patterns [of infighting and disunity] that have long flooded Sudan.”
Musa further stresses that the ultimate goal should be a transition to genuine civilian rule, warning against solutions that merely entrench existing power structures.
However, the fundamental drivers of the conflict remain potent. Ahmed Kodouda believes the “war’s driving incentives, namely spoils, survival, and external backing, still heavily favour continued conflict.” This grim assessment suggests that until these core incentives are addressed or countervailed, a lasting resolution will remain elusive.
Against this difficult backdrop, US President Donald Trump’s visit to the UAE and other Gulf powerhouses, now underway, arrives as these nations actively seek to capitalise on what some Gulf officials term a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to deepen ties with Washington.
Amidst this diplomatic flurry, the ongoing war in Sudan will inevitably test the new administration’s priorities and its willingness to engage with the conflict’s diplomatic quagmire.