Wagner, renamed Africa Corps after the death of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin last year, ‘shipped arms from Dubai’ to militants accused of war crimes in Darfur

The United Arab Emirates has been accused of using notorious Russian mercenaries to ship arms to rebels in Sudan’s civil war.

Wagner, the group formerly headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a one-time confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has smuggled weapons into Sudan via the neighbouring Central African Republic, a paramilitary group and experts say.

“We have intercepted many shipments of weapons coming from the UAE through CAR since the start of the war in Sudan,” said Abdu Buda, spokesman for the Coalition of Patriots for Change, one of the CAR’s largest militia groupings. “These shipments were transported by Wagner mercenaries.” 

More than 150,000 people have been killed and some 10 million displaced since conflict erupted last year in Sudan, where both government forces and rebels have been accused of war crimes. United Nations investigators said this week that the rebels, known as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF, had committed “horrific” ethnically motivated assaults against non-Arab Sudanese in the Darfur region. 

Buda, the CAR militia spokesman, said his faction had intercepted two Wagner weapons shipments destined for the RSF, as well as capturing four mercenaries. He said two were dead and two still in captivity.

“During our investigation with the Wagner captives, they told us that they have coordination with the UAE and CAR governments to send the weapons to the RSF,” Buda said.

‘Unlimited support’

Both sides in the Sudan conflict are thought to be receiving outside support: government forces are reportedly backed by Iran, while a leaked letter to the United Nations Security Council from Sudan’s representative to the UN, seen by SourceMaterial, alleges that the UAE is providing systematic assistance to the rebels. 

“The rebel militia has committed violations and atrocities with unlimited support from the UAE,” Al Harith Idriss al Harith Mohamed wrote in a 78-page letter dated 28 March. 

The UAE has strongly denied the allegations, though an inquiry by United Nations experts called them “credible”.

The UAE government and the RSF did not respond to requests for comment from SourceMaterial. Mohamed Abushahab, the UAE’s ambassador to the UN, this week told the Security Council that Sudan’s claims it was supplying the RSF were “a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the failings of the Sudanese Armed Forces”.

Harith Mohamed’s letter lists 43 flights from the UAE and to Amdjarass airport in Chad on the Sudanese border between July 2023 and March 2024, of which 25 are said to have carried weapons to the rebels, with many of the return flights used to evacuate RSF wounded. It includes a photograph of a crate of Kalashnikovs allegedly offloaded from a UAE flight. 

“An Emirati plane was monitored arriving in Amdjarass Airport at 2.17am, carrying 30 boxes and a quantity of ammunition,” reads one entry in the letter’s evidence log. Another reads: “Fuel trucks arrived in Amdjarass from Libya to support rebel militias in Sudan.”

Night flights

Alongside the air route through Chad, the Emirati government appears to have exploited connections with Wagner in CAR to develop an alternative smuggling route through Bangui, the capital, to Birao near the Sudanese border, said Nathalia Dukhan, a Central Africa specialist at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

“Local sources mentioned planes, which they believe were Emirati, arriving in Bangui at night with military equipment,” she said. “Wagner collected the shipments, transported them via helicopters and military aeroplanes to Birao, and then transferred them to the RSF in Sudan.”

Some of the weapons now flowing to the rebels through CAR were originally delivered by the UAE to Eastern Libya to support a faction in the civil war there, before being diverted to Wagner, said Andreas Krieg, a King’s College London academic who studies the conflict.

“Some of these weapons were flown into CAR way before last year and then left there,” he said. “Some were then taken into Sudan in April, at the start of the war.”

Wagner was renamed Africa Corps and absorbed into Russia’s Ministry of Defence following Prigozhin’s death in an air crash shortly after publicly defying Putin in August 2023. Its troops have been in CAR since 2018, fighting rebel groups on behalf of the government. The group has also seized gold mines and been accused of torturing and executing civilians.

The mercenary group’s suspected weapons deliveries to Sudan’s rebels appear to be slowing as Moscow advances talks with the government over building a Russian port on the Red Sea, said a Western official with knowledge of the region. 

The Emirati government, meanwhile, remains committed to arming the rebels, in apparent defiance of international sanctions—though it has kept open a discreet channel to the Sudanese government in case its proxy fails, said Krieg:

“The UAE have thrown their full logistical, financial, diplomatic, political and military weight behind the RSF,” he said.

Headline image: A fighter loyal to the government holds up a weapon in Southeastern Sudan (Getty)