by ANDREAS KRIEG
By doubling down on the RSF, Abu Dhabi expanded the brutal civil war. It should now leverage that entanglement to push for deescalation
The fall of el-Fasher has done more than redraw the map of western Sudan. It has crystallised a truth long visible to those watching Abu Dhabi’s statecraft up close: when confronted, the Emirati leadership does not climb down.
Despite two years of criticism and negative media coverage about its overt and covert entanglements in Sudan, Abu Dhabi has doubled down. Its primary surrogate, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now holds the logistical heart of Darfur – and with it, a power base that can be monetised in gold, protected by cross-border routes and leveraged against neighbours.
That outcome is not a fluke of battlefield luck. It reflects a governing ethos in Abu Dhabi that prizes assertiveness, retaliation against perceived slights, and the strategic accumulation of leverage over time.
Pragmatism, in the technocratic sense, is less important than prevailing. Fifteen years of Emirati statecraft in the era of Mohammed bin Zayed have shown that for the United Arab Emirates, the question is not whether it “wins” a capital; it is whether it can deny adversaries a decisive victory, lock in access to corridors and markets, and outlast the news cycle. Yemen and Libya are cases in point.
This is why the popular shorthand that the UAE “seeks stability” so often misleads. In truly Machiavellian fashion, Abu Dhabi seeks advantage.
It does so with a style that is unapologetically transactional and, at the top, intensely personal. President Mohammed bin Zayed, the architect of this approach, operates as a strategist who sees deterrence and reputation as indivisible.
Backing down invites predation; escalation resets the terms. Since the Arab Spring, Mohammed bin Zayed has been consistent: tie local actors to Emirati logistics and finance, reward compliance, punish betrayal, and cultivate multiple allies so you never lose your seat at the table.
Reputational cost
The mechanism is what some call “weaponised interdependence”. Over the past decade, the UAE has built a web of ports, free zones, air hubs, trading houses and financial services that reach from the Red Sea to the Sahel, and deep into the Mediterranean – a multimodal axis of secessionists.
Those physical and financial pipes are matched by a constellation of state-adjacent companies and private vehicles that can move money, people and materials with speed and deniability. When Abu Dhabi backs a partner, it is not only delivering cash or kit; it is opening pathways into an ecosystem centred on Emirati nodes. As long as those pathways remain open, time is on Abu Dhabi’s side.
Sudan shows the model in stark relief. The UAE has invested across multiple layers.
It has engaged civilian figures who could front a technocratic reboot in Khartoum. It has cultivated ties to the regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), because no viable settlement can ignore the officer corps. And most powerfully, it has aligned with the RSF, the paramilitary that turned its Darfur patronage network into a war economy.
That last choice carries the highest reputational cost, for obvious reasons: the RSF’s genocidal conduct has been widely condemned. Yet the same elements that make the RSF toxic also make it useful to Abu Dhabi. It can police key corridors, extract rents from cross-border commerce and gold, and hold ground in the west, even if the centre of the country remains contested. For an external patron, it is a bet on endurance, rather than on a clean victory.
Criticism from Washington and London has not altered this course, nor have European warnings about sanctions or reputational damage in global markets.
The response from Abu Dhabi, when pressure mounts, is familiar: contest the facts, widen diplomatic channels, and reinforce facts on the ground to ensure that leverage does not slip. It is an attitude of defiance rather than accommodation, and it flows from a confidence born of structural depth.
Keeping options open
No regional capital can match the UAE’s current combination of liquidity, logistics and diplomatic access. That confidence explains another hallmark of the Emirati style: keep options live on both sides of a conflict.
In Yemen, Abu Dhabi cultivated southern secessionists, while hedging with anti-Houthi northern forces. In Libya, it backed renegade general Khalifa Haftar’s eastern campaign, while maintaining lines to businesspeople and municipal networks in the west.
In Sudan, it can talk to Abdalla Hamdok, the civilian ex-prime minister, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”) of the RSF, while maintaining channels to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his circle. If one door closes, another remains ajar.
But there is a price to this posture, and it is rising. Deniability – the lubricant of this kind of power – erodes with each drone video, cargo flight manifest and satellite image.
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