On November 23, Sheikh Shakhboot bin Nahyan Al Nahyan, a top diplomat for the United Arab Emirates, landed in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, with an offer for President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.
In return for access to airstrips in the impoverished country’s remote east, the wealthy Gulf state would invest in the African nation’s defense, mining and agriculture sectors, according to two CAR officials familiar with the talks and two senior Western officials briefed on the matter.
The offer – which resulted in an economic partnership agreement signed in March – is part of a growing effort by the UAE to expand its influence in a region of vast mineral and agricultural wealth and buttress its support for the Rapid Support Forces militia in Sudan, said the people, who requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to media.
The deal with CAR comes as the Gulf nation has built a logistical network to support the RSF and project power in countries surrounding Sudan that includes field hospitals over the border in Chad and South Sudan, according to regional diplomats, analysts and officials. Access to airstrips in CAR would provide the UAE with another destination through which it could discreetly supply the RSF, they said. The UAE has long denied that it backs the rebel group.
In May, the top United Nations court — the International Court of Justice in the Hague — dismissed a case that Sudan’s army brought against the UAE on the grounds that it didn’t have jurisdiction to investigate the claims. The army didn’t appeal the judgment. Analysts say the UAE supports the RSF – which fought Yemen’s Houthis in a Saudi-UAE-led coalition a decade ago – because the wealthy Gulf state opposes political Islamists like those in Sudan’s army.
“In regards to Sudan, the UAE strongly rejects the allegations that it is supplying weaponry to any party involved in the ongoing conflict. These claims are unfounded and lack any substantiated evidence,” a UAE foreign ministry spokesperson said in a written response to a detailed list of questions. The official didn’t respond specifically to a question about allegations from Western diplomats that it has built a support network for the RSF in countries surrounding Sudan.
The US earlier this year sanctioned the paramilitary group and accused it of committing genocide in its brutal two-year civil war against Sudan’s army – which the US also sanctioned, accusing it of committing atrocities – that has killed tens of thousands and displaced 12 million people. The war broke out in April 2023 after the heads of the two factions failed to reach a power sharing agreement following a coup they jointly orchestrated in 2021 against a popular democratic uprising.
In recent years, the UAE has been at the vanguard of Gulf states building influence in Africa by pledging billions of dollars in investments in renewable energy, logistics, technology, real estate and agriculture, eclipsing the likes of China and European countries in terms of pledged FDI. That strategy is part of a broad campaign globally to transition the UAE’s economy away from oil and harness opportunities in areas such as trade and renewable energy.
“Our engagement is not transactional; it is guided by shared values and a vision for sustainable development and inclusive growth,” the UAE spokesperson said.
The UAE’s end goal in Africa is unclear, but it seems to be less about making money – most of Sudan’s $2 billion in gold exports already go to the country for processing, according to Sudan’s finance ministry – than about building itself up as a major power on a continent whose long-time partners in the West and China are disengaging, according to Connor Vasey, a managing consultant on Africa at London-based J.S. Held.
“The UAE has spent decades learning how others have entrenched and projected influence in the continent,” he said, referring to ex-colonial powers like France and newer players like China. “But now African governments’ traditional partners are either pulling back or just still don’t get it – leaving a big opportunity for the UAE.”
African governments are still desperate for foreign partners to develop their economies, and the UAE can, fairly cheaply for a wealthy petrostate, build influence quickly through investment deals, humanitarian aid and taking sides in domestic conflicts, according to analysts.
Beyond CAR, the UAE has provided $600 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan since the war broke out and funded $3.5 billion in humanitarian projects over the past decade, according to the UAE Foreign Ministry. From 2023 until 2024, the UAE’s foreign assistance to Africa including development and humanitarian aid amounted to $1.01 billion, slightly less than the $1.2 billion provided in 2021 and 2022. Last year, the UAE made its biggest African commitment yet with a $35 billion investment that almost single-handedly ended a currency crisis in Egypt.
Critics allege that the wealthy country is trying to polish its image even as it simultaneously arms militias like the RSF in Sudan.
“The UAE’s growing set of alliances in Chad, CAR, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan and Libya demonstrates how important the Horn is to their regional ambitions,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former CIA analyst for Africa.
Djibouti’s President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh said in a May interview with Jeune Afrique that the UAE’s “politics at large are profoundly destabilizing for the entire region.”
Since April, Sudan’s army has routed RSF positions in the capital Khartoum and reasserted itself in central areas of the country, highlighting the limitations of the UAE’s support, according to analysts. The RSF has since taken back control of large swaths of Sudan's Kordofan region in the south and has seized a triangular-shaped strategic zone on the northwestern border with Egypt and Libya from the army.
The UAE’s first significant foray into Africa’s conflicts came in 2014, when it backed Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar’s attempt to seize power in Africa’s second biggest oil producer with arms and funding. The UAE spokesperson didn’t comment on any role it may have had in Libya, though the country has previously praised Haftar’s army and called for a peaceful resolution to Libya’s crises.
Since then it has expanded its efforts on the continent to include investment and humanitarian aid. The UAE has built two field hospitals in Chad and another in South Sudan while forging close economic ties with governments in Uganda, Kenya and CAR. Analysts, diplomats and government officials in the region say the funding has also helped attract political support among neighboring countries for its backing of the RSF.In Somalia, the UAE has expanded the airport in the coastal city of Bosaso where it runs a regional logistics hub and trains and supports the autonomously-run Puntland region’s military forces, according to three Western diplomats who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters. Satellite imagery shows a major scaling up of the airport in Bosaso with new loading bays, an extended runway and several hangars being built since the beginning of 2023, around the time when the war in Sudan broke out.
In 2022, DP World, a privately-owned Dubai-based logistics company, signed a construction agreement with Puntland’s government to upgrade the Port of Bosaso.
“Today, we work with over 50 African countries across a wide range of sectors, including sustainable energy, food security, infrastructure, education, digital transformation, and healthcare. Over the past four years, the UAE’s foreign assistance in Africa has remained steady, supporting 51 beneficiary countries,” the UAE spokesperson said.
In a May report, Amnesty International documented the existence of Chinese-made weaponry in Sudan, which it said the UAE had “almost certainly” sent to the RSF. The rights group used global arms data from the Swedish research organization SIPRI to determine that the UAE is the only country to have purchased the equipment during the reporting period — Norinco 155mm AH-4 howitzers.
The UAE denied that it exported the equipment. “The howitzer referenced in the report is a system manufactured outside the UAE and has been available on the international market for nearly a decade. The assertion that only one country has procured or transferred this system is invalid,” the UAE spokesperson said to Bloomberg.
Brian Castner, head of crisis research at Amnesty said that it’s “extremely unlikely” that another country with strategic interests in Sudan secretly purchased the equipment, imported them unnoticed to their home country and then moved them to Khartoum.
Since 2014, the UAE has established military outposts, mostly undisclosed, in six countries – including Yemen, Somalia, Chad and Libya – “to further its military, security, and economic goals in the region,” according to a 2024 report by the Carnegie Center for International Peace.
“For the UAE, this degree of secrecy is needed to minimize negative political exposure — both among local populations, who may oppose the Emirati presence, and for the country’s international reputation, especially where outposts have served to support warring parties in conflict-torn countries,” it said.
The UAE didn’t respond to a question about the allegations in the Carnegie report.
Similar setups in countries surrounding Sudan follow the UAE’s Libyan blueprint, said Hudson – humanitarian operations as a cover for achieving its military and political goals.
"The Chadians have basically given carte blanche to the Emirates to run a sophisticated and clandestine support operation for the RSF," he said. The UAE didn’t comment about its relationship with Chad.
In 2023, the UAE announced it was building a field hospital in the Chadian city of Amdjarass to support Sudanese refugees fleeing over the border from Sudan. UN investigators last year said evidence the UAE was using an airstrip close to the field hospital as a conduit for supplying weapons to the RSF was “credible.” A UN report from this year said that experts were lately “unable to confirm transfers of military material” from Amdjarass to the RSF.
The UAE spokesperson said allegations of it funneling weapons into Sudan “are baseless.” The official didn’t respond specifically to a question about whether its operations in Chad are used to support the RSF but the country has long denied it.
More recently the UAE opened a medical facility in South Sudan where it has treated “all of those in need, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender or political affiliation,” Reem Kait, assistant deputy minister of political affairs for the UAE foreign ministry, told judges in the International Court of Justice in April.
In an unpublished report from November seen by Bloomberg, UN experts said there was a spike in cargo flights coming from the UAE to Amdjarass and N’Djamena between May and September 2024 that coincided with an escalation of hostilities in the Sudanese city of El Fasher, raising the potential of “possible covert operations.”
In March, the Gulf state sent a high-level delegation including Al Nahyan to the Gorom Refugee Camp in South Sudan’s capital Juba to "demonstrate solidarity with displaced communities” that fled the war in Sudan.
The same month it inaugurated its field hospital in South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal state close to the border with Sudan.
While the UAE has said the clinic will “address urgent healthcare requirements,” many of those treated at the hospital to date have been wounded soldiers fighting for the RSF, two health officials in the area said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
"The UAE broadly speaking is diversifying. It was too heavily concentrated in Chad so they went to South Sudan and are looking at CAR,” said Hudson, the analyst. "This looks to be premeditated and highly strategic."
