The United Arab Emirates (UAE) proxy war in Sudan has killed and displaced millions. The UK and the rest of the international community have let the war roll on unabated. Former members of the UAE’s Colombian mercenary corps have now recounted the siege and the fall of the city of El Fasher in 2025.
UAE: complicity
One soldier, named as Luis, described the aftermath of the assault in horrific detail:
The air was thick with flies, drawn by both the dead bodies and the heaps of trash. There were bodies that had already turned purple from being exposed to the sun for so long . . . it was awful having those flies buzzing around you while you ate.
Luis, who was working with the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces, told the Financial Times:
The paramilitaries they were working with, who controlled the city, told him they were incinerating the dead because they worried about cholera. But some of the sights troubled him — piles of corpses that looked like they had been crushed by vehicles. Bodies of women and children.
El Fasher fell in late October 2025. A humanitarian NGO reported afterwards that the bloodstained locations of massacres could be seen by satellite.
Luis told the FT he was one of:
around 2,000 Colombian mercenaries who arrived in Sudan to fight alongside the RSF. He said the people who brought him there worked for a private security company called the Global Security Services Group (GSSG), based in the United Arab Emirates. Run by South African managers, it is alleged to have links to the UAE authorities.
Colombian mercenaries recruited through London
Some of the soldiers-for-hire were:
special forces veterans or had battled insurgents in the South American jungles. Some had been gunslingers for the South American cartels.
A few had already spent years working as contractors in the Middle East. But what they saw in El Fasher was something else entirely.
Some Colombian mercenaries were even recruited through a shadowy recruitment office registered in London according to a Guardian report from November 2025
The one-bedroom flat off north London’s Creighton Road is, according to UK government records, tied to a transnational network of companies involved in the mass recruitment of mercenaries to fight in Sudan alongside paramilitaries accused of myriad war crimes and genocide.
Another soldier, Manuel, said he worked with Ukrainian and South African mercenaries in Darfur in 2024:
I have never in my life seen such poverty and misery. It’s heartbreaking . . . Displaced families . . . face a choice between starving to death or driving a car, carrying a rifle, having food.
He also described the use of child soldiers by RSF:
There are kids no older than 12 carrying rifles they can’t lift and bearing the responsibility of a war in which they don’t even know what they’re supposed to do.
It’s the Emirates that put in the most money and resources in the conflict and who provide weapons to the RSF.
Three years of war
The three-year war has killed thousands and displaced millions. The RSF, backed by the UAE, is fighting the Sudanese government, with gold interests and regional influence at stake.
Numerous foreign actors, including the UK, have caused the war to fester through active participation and/or outright passivity. Israel, too, is a major player in the war.
The war in Sudan is theoretically between the Arab-majority RSF and the Sudanese government. But foreign states pursuing their own interests are backing the combatants.
Egypt backs the government, alongside Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Israel has backed both sides at different times.
The RSF has killed Sudanese civilians in vast numbers. Some estimates say 150,000 people have died and more than 10 million civilians have been displaced by fighting. The people of Sudan remain trapped at the meeting point of rapacious regional and global powers.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
