By Isha Qarsoon

A war driven by the Rapid Support Forces and sustained through external patronage is destroying Sudan. The RSF’s ascent from a paramilitary auxiliary to the most powerful armed actor in Sudan was fueled by sustained financial, material, and logistical support that investigators, journalists, and government findings have repeatedly linked to the United Arab Emirates. That support has included the conversion of Sudanese gold into cash through Dubai and the movement of arms through routes associated with Emirati entities. As the scale of atrocities mounted and diplomatic pressure failed to curb these flows, Sudan turned to international law and brought a case against the UAE before the International Court of Justice, alleging complicity in genocide. The Court declined jurisdiction on the basis of a reservation the UAE had entered to the Genocide Convention, avoiding any examination of evidence or responsibility and placing the alleged conduct beyond judicial scrutiny under the Convention.

The implications of the Court’s legal outcome are clear. A state possessing substantial financial resources, legal insulation, and operational deniability can materially sustain large-scale violence while remaining beyond the reach of judicial accountability. Sudan has absorbed this reality through devastation. Somalia must confront this risk before it hardens any further, as the same external actor accused of enabling Sudan’s collapse has already established a significant presence across Somalia’s political, security, and economic landscape.

In Somalia, the UAE has moved beyond episodic engagement and into a sustained role shaping political dialogue, including engagements involving President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and regional leaders such as Said Deni and Ahmed Madobe, while simultaneously exercising influence across Somali regions through security assistance, stipends, and infrastructure initiatives. The terms, timing, and continuity of these engagements are not set by the Somali actors involved. Access to mediation, security support, and political relevance is shaped externally, and participation increasingly depends on alignment with priorities defined beyond Somalia’s borders. Negotiation under such conditions functions less as an expression of sovereign political choice than as an accommodation to leverage rooted in unequal dependence.

This influence is felt across Somalia, though it takes different forms in different places. In Mogadishu, Emirati training missions and equipment deliveries have been suspended and resumed in ways that underscore how dependent Somali security institutions have become on external support. In Puntland, the United Arab Emirates built and financed the Puntland Maritime Police Force, a security body operating outside the Somali National Army and beyond parliamentary oversight, while Bosaso has grown into a logistical hub closely associated with Emirati interests. In Jubaland, Emirati assistance has intersected with already fragile regional politics, embedding itself within local security arrangements. In Somaliland, the pursuit of a base in Berbera, later repackaged as civilian infrastructure, established a strategic foothold along the Gulf of Aden. Few parts of Somalia remain untouched, and what emerges is not neutral assistance but influence shaped by geography, ports, and access to the sea.

Sudan shows where this kind of leverage can lead when it is allowed to deepen unchecked. The RSF consolidated power by seizing control of gold mines in Darfur and Kordofan, moving gold through informal channels into Gulf markets, and converting those revenues into weapons and operational capacity. Investigative journalists documented shipments routed to Dubai, where couriers, shell companies, and air traffic transformed raw resources into liquid finance. Arms and drones then flowed back through regional corridors that passed through Chad, Libya, and, at times, Bosaso itself. By 2025, these connections had become sufficiently entrenched that Sudan’s government formally urged Mogadishu to block Emirati-linked smuggling routes operating through Puntland, warning that Somali territory had become part of the RSF’s logistical chain. The appeal captured a troubling convergence, with one fragile state asking another to disrupt flows it lacked the means to fully monitor or control.

Libya provides an earlier and well-documented example of how external patronage can entrench armed actors outside a unified state framework. For years, UN reporting has described the Libyan arms embargo as ineffective where external sponsors-controlled supply chains to local forces, and the UAE has repeatedly been cited in public reporting and human rights documentation as a principal backer of the eastern forces led by Khalifa Haftar, including through the provision of equipment and air capabilities. Human Rights Watch, for example, has documented a 2019 drone strike it attributed to the UAE that killed civilians near Tripoli, illustrating how foreign-provided air power can alter local balances while diffusing accountability through distance and deniability.

Developments elsewhere in the region place these dynamics in a wider context. In late 2025, Saudi Arabia conducted airstrikes in Yemen following the interception of weapons shipments allegedly linked to the UAE and destined for forces associated with the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council. The incident exposed growing strains between Gulf partners and highlighted the extent to which Abu Dhabi has been willing to support armed actors operating outside central state authority, even at the cost of complicating alliances and prolonging conflict. Viewed alongside Sudan and Libya, Yemen reflects a recurring practice in which influence is pursued through locally embedded forces in environments where state institutions are weak and external intervention carries limited immediate consequence.

Taken together, Libya and Yemen place Sudan in a broader regional context. They point to a recurring practice in which influence is pursued through locally embedded armed forces in environments where state institutions are weak and external intervention carries limited immediate consequence.

International attention to Sudan followed only after the scale of the violence became impossible to ignore. In January 2025, the United States concluded that atrocities in Darfur amounted to genocide and identified the RSF as responsible for systematic attacks on civilians, imposing sanctions on RSF leaders and on companies linked to their financing, including entities involved in the gold trade. These measures reflected a belated acknowledgment of how the war had been sustained, but they stopped short of confronting the role of alleged external sponsors. Accountability remained directed at the militia itself, while the financial and logistical channels that enabled its operations continued largely undisturbed.

Sudan’s attempt to pursue accountability through the ICJ ended almost as quickly as it began. The Court’s dismissal on jurisdictional grounds was accompanied by dissents that cautioned against insulating states from scrutiny through treaty reservations when allegations of genocide were involved. Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf of Somalia warned that declining jurisdiction without examining the reservation deprived Sudan of a meaningful opportunity to be heard. He has since retired from the Court, leaving his warning as part of the record rather than a continuing presence within it. The practical consequence is that genocide claims against the UAE under the Convention are now effectively foreclosed, leaving only slower, more political, and less predictable avenues for response.

Judicial non-intervention alongside a limited political response reflects a realist logic in which power carries fewer costs than restraint. Sudan demonstrates how external actors can finance militias, extract resources, and rely on legal formality and political cover to deflect accountability while sustaining influence at relatively low risk. Somalia, burdened by fragmented authority, dependence on external stipends, weak cargo oversight, and limited institutional capacity, offers an even more permissive environment for such dynamics to take hold.

The normalization of external patronage in Somalia has not occurred on its own; it has been accepted, enabled, and defended by Somali political authorities at both federal and regional levels. At the federal level, successive governments in Mogadishu permitted a UAE program that trained Somali troops and directly paid the salaries of thousands of soldiers, arrangements that were treated as a practical substitute for domestic payroll capacity until the relationship ruptured in 2018, when the government moved to take over the program and the UAE ended its training mission after the cash-seizure dispute at Mogadishu airport.

At the regional level, Puntland’s leadership created and sustained the Puntland Maritime Police Force with UAE support, including UAE-funded training conducted through Dubai-linked private contractors, despite longstanding international controversy over oversight, chain of command, and embargo compliance; Puntland authorities treated the force as an operational necessity even when federal officials signaled objections. In Somaliland, political leaders and the legislature formally authorized the UAE’s intended Berbera military base in 2017 and framed later adjustments as civilian repurposing while maintaining deep security and economic ties, including UAE-linked training commitments to local forces. Across these settings, Somali officials have repeatedly treated externally financed security capacity and strategically conditioned investment as governance solutions, even though the cumulative effect has been to weaken unified command, reduce transparency, and entrench dependence.

Somalis should therefore place little faith in external rescue. The ICJ has illustrated the constraints of judicial intervention where powerful states are implicated, and multilateral political processes tend to proceed cautiously when political costs are high. Any meaningful protection must begin domestically, through credible control of arms flows, transparency in security and infrastructure agreements, enforceable disclosure requirements, and sustained resistance to external vetoes over Somali political choices.

Isha Qarsoon
Email:  Ishaqarsoon1@gmail.com
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