The Price of Silence in Sudan

Justin Lynch
Nov 7
7 min read

The United Arab Emirates is arming a militia committing genocide in Darfur. In exchange for US silence, Biden got a Middle East partner, and Trump got cryptocurrency cash.

Students in Khartoum hold up the Sudan flag during a protest on November 3, 2025,against atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher .(Ebrahim Hamid / AFP via Getty Images)

On October 24, rumors spread that Sudan’s warring factions might sign a ceasefire in Washington, DC. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had fought for two and a half years. SAF has indiscriminately bombed civilians, and their allied Islamist militias have executed civilians. In the city of El Fasher, North Darfur, people were forced to eat animal feed because of an 18-month blockade by the RSF. A young woman I spoke with from the town was raped by multiple RSF fighters. But despite the violence, for just a moment, there was hope for peace.

But after both sides thought they could gain by keeping up the fighting, the negotiations collapsed. Then two days later, the RSF overran the SAF’s last base in El Fasher, North Darfur. The SAF withdrew, and the killing began.

At the Saudi Maternity Hospital, a RSF fighter filmed himself stepping over bodies. An elderly man in white knelt on the floor. A soldier shot him in the head. The man fell. The soldier moved on. Another shot sounded. According to the World Health Organization, the RSF killed at least 460 people at the hospital.

We don’t yet know the full extent of the massacres, but satellite imagery has picked up blood-stained grounds. El Fasher held roughly 250,000 people, but only around 6,000 have escaped to Tawilah, a nearby town where they can receive aid. The RSF has trapped, held ransom, or executed many residents who have tried to flee. Aid workers say children arrive to Tawilah alone—their families murdered. In another video, an RSF soldier filmed bodies lining a road and said, “This is what genocide looks like.”

Since April 2023, Sudan has experienced systematic atrocities from both sides. RSF is slaughtering people with weapons provided by the United Arab Emirates. The SAF, according to the United States, has used chemical weapons. The SAF has received weapons and support from Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and Qatar.

State Department officials have attempted interventions, but neither the Biden nor Trump White House has provided the top-level political support to stem the flows of weapons from its allies—the UAE, Qatar, and Egypt.

The fall of El Fasher partitions Sudan. RSF holds Darfur in the West, SAF the east. It also reveals a policy failure. Shortly after the war began, the United States documented sophisticated arms shipments from the UAE to the RSF. Officials knew atrocities were likely. Stopping the flow of arms could have lowered the intensity of the conflict by eliminating the advanced drones and foreign fighters that the UAE has provided the RSF for its fight in El Fasher.

The UAE’s relationship with the RSF accelerated around 2017, when Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia hired the RSF leader, Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”), to provide soldiers for their campaign in Yemen. In return, the UAE provided billions of dollars of financial support to the RSF, a former intelligence official told me.

Within weeks of Sudan’s civil war erupting in April 2023, US intelligence detected a rapid increase in UAE weapons facilitation to the RSF via a Chadian airbase, according to a Biden administration official. Evidence accumulated through the summer.

Multiple officials at State, USAID, and other agencies wanted to use Washington’s leverage to stop UAE arms flows. The reasoning was direct: As the RSF’s sole external backer, Abu Dhabi offered the most efficient pressure point to influence the paramilitary group.

The pressure never materialized. Biden and his senior team—particularly Brett McGurk—blocked serious action, according to five US government officials. Internal memos and discussions involving the Gulf required McGurk’s clearance. He was pursuing a broader rapprochement between the UAE and Israel. Without the ability to use leverage over the UAE, US policy on Sudan defaulted to ceasefire mediation between the warring parties led by the State Department.

In June 2023, the RSF attacked Masalit displacement camps in El Geneina, West Darfur. Human Rights Watch documented the killing of thousands of civilians—including infants, women, and the elderly—in less than two months. It was an example of the brutal atrocities the RSF were committing in Sudan. State Department officials tried to negotiate a ceasefire between the warring parties in El Fasher but were unsuccessful.

After October 7, 2023, the calculus shifted. Biden’s team wanted a Gaza ceasefire, which required UAE cooperation. McGurk felt that the UAE was providing critical humanitarian aid in Gaza and their political support was essential if a peace deal was going to happen. Separately, the administration pursued a technology deal: UAE divestment from Chinese systems in exchange for US microchips. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in the state-owned G42 AI firm in 2024. Sudan receded from the administration’s focus.

When US officials confronted UAE leaders about their support for the RSF, they issued repeated blanket denials. It was a bizarre lie from an apparent ally. The UAE’s support for the RSF was obvious, and the UAE’s denials were brazen. These lies continued all the way to the White House, according to Biden administration, State Department, and Defense Department officials who spoke with me. This included a September 23, 2024, meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris and UAE President Mohamed Bin Zayed, a Biden administration official told me.

Biden never showed any real interest in Sudan, and he clearly prioritized a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Senior Biden foreign-policy aides felt their job was to execute their boss’s vision. They also felt that they were not given reasonable policy alternatives in Sudan that could succeed. Both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan said privately that the United States shouldn’t “want to own” what was happening in Sudan, a former Biden and White House official told me. Some believed that pressure on the UAE would have unintended consequences elsewhere and could harm negotiations involving the UAE. US and foreign diplomats described incidents of Emirati officials overreacting to criticisms and being angry at benign Facebook posts or over not calling Abu Dhabi quickly enough.

Without the ability to use their leverage, US officials again tried persuasion. In 2024, the National Security Council and State Department attempted to convince Emirati counterparts that their Sudan policy harmed their own interests. The effort failed. Abu Dhabi proved so sensitive about Sudan that a planned 2024 bilateral meeting had to be reframed as an Africa summit. The meetings received high-level attention, but options like pressuring the UAE to end their support of the RSF remained off the table, so a real breakthrough to end the conflict was not possible. “I was like, ‘It’s a genocide, though. What about the genocide?’” one Biden official recalled. It was a frustration that Biden’s absolute vision for the Middle East meant the Sudan team had to prevent mass killings and end a war without the ability to coerce the conflicting parties. Officials working on Sudan felt there were intermediate options that would have pressured the UAE without sacrificing the broader relationship. Instead, they felt they were asked to fight with both hands tied behind their backs.

For Sudan officials, the final indignity came in the Biden administration’s closing days. McGurk wrote a letter to Senator Chris Van Hollen saying that the UAE told the Biden administration it was not arming the RSF. The letter did not go through the usual clearance process, two White House officials told me, and was an example of McGurk making Sudan policy on his own. He incorrectly called the “Rapid Support Forces” the “Rapid Sudan Forces” in the letter, which added to the embarrassment across the US government.

With the election of Donald Trump, the White House made its relationship with the UAE even more transactional. An investment fund controlled by UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed deposited $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture founded by the Trump family and Middle East adviser Steve Witkoff, The New York Times reported. Two weeks later, the administration granted the UAE access to American microchips critical for its AI ambitions. Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, now serves as senior adviser on Africa and leads Sudan policy. Some State officials give him positive reviews, but he carries multiple portfolios and receives even less senior support than Sudan had under Biden.

The siege of El Fasher illustrates a familiar pattern: Attention arrives after prevention fails. Right now, negotiations between SAF and the RSF are unlikely to work because both sides think they can win. The US remains unwilling to use it leverage against foreign actors, like the UAE. Plans to support a technocratic civilian coalition have been tried before—and with more resources—but have repeatedly failed.

Pressure on the UAE to halt arms flows would not have ended conflict in Sudan. Even if a national peace deal is signed, fighting could continue for decades at the local level. But halting UAE and foreign arms flows would have at least eliminated the advanced weaponry that was being used to kill civilians. I know, because I was a small part of a project that mapped out the facilitation of weapons in Sudan.

In 2024, clever US officials devised a plan to expose UAE and Iranian weapons networks in Sudan. They proposed funding a report using open-source methods to document how the UAE was sending weapons to the RSF and Iran to the SAF. The report operated through a program with enough autonomy that senior Biden officials could not easily block publication.

Our report was published in October 2024 and detailed how an Emirati-backed flight network was “almost certainly” moving supplies to the RSF via an airport in Chad. The New York Times and Reuters published similar findings around the same time. Within a few months, flights to the airstrip declined measurably. The UAE’s flights have now moved to another airstrip in southern Libya. The exposure did not end the war, but it did raise the cost of UAE and Iranian logistics operations that sustained the conflict.

The lesson from the Biden and Trump administrations is that there can be endless peace talks and technical, stopgap solutions. Without attention and action from the president and his senior staff, atrocities like El Fasher will still occur.

In the meantime, the United States and Western nations face a question. One of our allies, the UAE, is arming a genocidal militia. What is the price to keep the United States silent amid mass killing?

Justin Lynch Justin Lynch is a researcher. He has managed State Department programs monitoring illicit finance, led analysis of State Department conflict observation programs, worked for the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission in Sudan, and conducted research for European governments on arms flows. He is the co-author of the book Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy.