Inside The Secret Network Fuelling Sudan's War

From Lighthouse Reports
Co-published with EVIDENT and Sudan War Monitor
On 29 June 2026 - full copy:

INSIDE THE SECRET NETWORK FUELLING SUDAN'S WAR

Lighthouse Reports travelled to Eastern Libya to expose the UAE supported RSF network of military training camps that enabled them to continue their war in Sudan.

The shadowy role of the United Arab Emirates in fueling the war in Sudan – once a well kept secret – is now acknowledged as a key driver of Sudan’s disastrous, yearslong civil war.

Still, little is known about how the UAE co-opts regional governments to achieve its aims in Sudan.

Lighthouse Reports, Evident and Sudan War Monitor travelled to eastern Libya to reveal how the UAE network works on the ground. Through a combination of open source and on-the-ground reporting, the investigation sheds new light on one of the UAE’s most entrenched operations in their vast network of support to the RSF.

As the international community has failed to intervene in Emirati meddling, the UAE has meanwhile built a sprawling network of complex logistics, military bases, financing, and weapons trafficking routes to prop up the Rapid Support Forces and fuel their war efforts in Sudan.

METHODS

The investigations drew on a long term analysis of activity across TikTok, Facebook and Telegram. We reviewed thousands of posts and built an archive of more than 500 relevant clips showing convoy movements between Libya and Sudan, activity at key desert checkpoints and camps, and developments in the border triangle. We verified and connected this material through geolocation, analysis of uniforms, vehicles and other identifying symbols, and social-network analysis of accounts linked to the RSF, the Libyan National Army, and associated networks.

We complimented these efforts with analysis of high resolution commercial satellite imagery of specific sites. Using a custom processing workflow with publicly available Sentinel-2 data., we tracked changes in vehicle routes across remote stretches of the Sahara, helping us understand how smuggling and asset transfers developed in response to changing conditions on the ground. These findings informed reporting trips and interviews.

We worked with ⁨Conflict Insights Group, a public benefit research firm, that conducted analysis of telephones located at Camp 17. CIG used publicly available adtech data, which is information from cookies that users agree to sell to third party vendors when they visit a website or use a mobile application. The information includes movement data, language settings, and other details that users consent to selling to a third party vendor, which CIG purchased. CIG found evidence of at least two South American mercenaries at the site in the summer of 2025. One device located at Camp 17 was set to Colombian Spanish and visited the site from 11-12 June 2025. Another device was set to Argentinian Spanish, and used a military grade phone on 13 aug 2025.

This investigation received kind support from Maltego and IRBIS OSINT-platform.

STORYLINES

Our reporting, including interviews with LNA officers, RSF defectors, and Sudanese military sources, unveiled four previously unidentified RSF camps in Libya, contrary to claims by the RSF that they do not conduct troop training outside of Sudan and contrary to LNA insiders’ claims that the RSF operations in Libya were largely wound down by late 2025.

In Kufra, we embedded with the Libyan National Army in the border triangle area where we had been tracking RSF training and transit sites via social media analysis and heat maps of tracks from suspected RSF resupply convoys throughout the desert for months.

Keen to show us that they were combatting trafficking and had shut down any alleged flow of weapons into Sudan, Lieutenant Enheish Fattah of the LNA’s Subul Al Salaam brigade flatly denied that the LNA facilitated RSF activities in Libya.

“No, that’s all rumors. People are trying to create conflict between the Libyan and Sudanese armies,” Lieutenant Fattah said when questioned on 2025 clashes between the Sudanese Army and the LNA in the border region, in response to increasing frustration of the Sudanese Army and its backers in Egypt about LNA support for the RSF.

Interviews with eight RSF defectors still living in Libya, revealed the full scale of their operations there, which extend from small-scale training activity and transit points in Benghazi to more robust sites in the desert in the border triangle region. These sites include staging sites to prep weapons and modify vehicles for war, training sites where RSF soldiers say they trained alongside the LNA and UAE-contracted Colombian mercenaries, and convoys of trucks carrying fuel and alleged weapons from Libya back into Sudan.

Defectors told us that they were expected to return to Sudan to train their fellow RSF soldiers based on the training they received in Libya.

One defector who agreed to speak on camera to Evident, revealed the location of a previously unknown training camp located approximately 20 kilometers outside of Benghazi.

He described arriving in Libya and being sent to Benghazi through Kufra. Others, he said, were sent to a military camp in Jufra for training. Of his own time at the camp known to him and others in RSF as Camp 17, he told us “there are many here in Camp 17. They are in charge of cars, supplies, and ammo and oversee delivery of them.”

He said the RSF would bring “around 40 or 50, maybe up to 70 or 80” soldiers at a time to train in Camp 17. They would receive their training from LNA soldiers and Colombian contractors.

“RSF is mainly supported by the Emirates,” he told us, adding “but no one can speak up or ask.”

Libyan authorities failed to meaningfully engage with us on the reality of what is happening inside Libya or on their collaboration with the UAE to support the RSF. We traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to interview a spokesman for the RSF government, Tassis, who denied the claims revealed in our reporting.

While the scale of Sudan’s war is almost impossible to account for due to the lack of humanitarian access and the level of violence across the country, recent estimates put the death toll at nearly 400,000 people. 

Regional analysts insist that the level of support from the Emirates for the RSF has allowed violence, particularly in the Darfur region, to spiral out of control. We interviewed survivors from Khartoum and Darfur in Kufra and in Benghazi to understand the true impact of Emirati meddling on Sudanese civilians. 

They arrived in Libya after arduous journeys from Sudan – some traveling through Chad – often harassed by RSF soldiers and human smugglers throughout their journey.

“When we reached Libya, we had nothing left,” Fatima, a mother of four living in Kufra told us. “I have nothing left but my children and my honor.”

CO-PUBLICATIONS

Evident & Lighthouse Reports: 

Inside the Secret Network Fueling Sudan's War

Sudan War Monitor: 

Inside the RSF's Libya Supply Network

Credits: Julia Steers, Klaas van Dijken, Jack Sapoch, Bashar Deeb, Margot Gibbs, Tessa Pang, Wael Eskandar, AM, and many unnamed Sudanese journalists, Amel Guettatfi, Srdjan Stojiljkovic, Stacey Naggiar, Jennifer Smart, Kevin Clancy, Zach Toombs

View original: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/inside-the-secret-network-fueling-sudans-war/

Hat tip: Dr Eric Reeves, Co-founder Team Zamzam Project, Responding to Famine and Aiding Victims of Sexual Violence in Darfur

linkedin.com/in/eric-reeves-01b6b16 (LinkedIn)

fundraise.operationbrokensilence.org (Personal)

fundraise.operationbrokensilence.org (Other)

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The War the World Forgot: Why Aren’t We Talking About Sudan? Why Some Wars don’t Make Headlines

Article from The Rest Is Politics

By Alastair Campbell
Dated 23 April 2026 - full copy: 

The War the World Forgot: Why Aren’t We Talking About Sudan?

“It’s the worst war in the world right now,” said Alastair in his discussion with Rory in the main episode about the ongoing conflict in Sudan.

The scale of the deaths and displacement is “almost uniquely horrific” and yet, he said, “there is so little attention paid to it.” 

The conflict, which entered its fourth year this month, so rarely appears at the top of the news agenda that it is often called “the forgotten war”. 

For this newsletter, we interviewed Ashan Abeywardena, who works as an emergency response manager for the charity War Child in Sudan. We also spoke to top foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, who has been reporting on conflicts for 38 years - including Sudan - to understand what is happening in the country, and why it receives so little international attention. 

And finally… We had a call with actress Carey Mulligan, who campaigns for War Child and who visited a Sudanese refugee camp in Chad with the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in February. Alastair met her at an event on Monday and set up this interview.

Carey Mulligan in Chad in February 

with the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper

What’s happening in Sudan?

Fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces began in April 2023. Since then at least 150,000 people have died and 15 million have been forced to flee their homes in the northeast African country. 

“We often blithely refer to Sudan as the world’s ‘biggest humanitarian crisis’ without thinking what that actually means,” Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, who reported on the war from a refugee camp in Chad in February, explains. 

“It actually means women gang-raped when they head up a road, girls hiding terrified under branches, young people who once dreamt of going to university, forced to scrape a living gathering firewood,” she says.

There is no decisive victory or durable ceasefire in sight as both sides, and their international backers, “battle it out for control of the country and control of its resources such as gold and oil,” Lamb adds.

Abeywardena, from War Child, has just returned to the UK after spending four weeks in Darfur, in the west of Sudan. He had been visiting the charity’s partner organisations which are supporting children living through the war.

“We speak to kids who don’t really know any alternative and are just numb to the sound of conflict and war - and that’s a continuous state of being for them,” he says.

More than 30 million people in Sudan are currently in need of aid, including an estimated 15 million children. Yet desperately needed care provisions have been hard hit by international aid cuts.

Last year, according to a report by Humanitarian Action, only 39.5 percent of funding required for humanitarian responses in Sudan was actually made available. 

“It’s almost ignored by the international community,” Abeywardena says.

War Child does what it can with its local partners to create “places for children to come together, play, and really be children,” Abeywardena says, but it’s not enough.

The British actress Carey Mulligan, who has worked with War Child since 2014 and has visited the charity’s projects in Lebanon, Uganda, and the DRC among other countries, visited a Sudanese displacement camp in Chad in February.

She described witnessing a level of trauma unlike anything she had previously encountered. 

“There was one mother I met almost immediately who had managed to get across the border [into Chad from Sudan], but had lost her husband and her three children and didn't know if they had lived or not,” she said. 

Mulligan met other mothers who had been forced to flee with only some of their children. 

“They had seven children but crossed the border with two,” she said, or “had nine children but crossed with five” - and they often could not bear to explain what had happened to the others.

She described the way survivors spoke with euphemisms. Women would refer to having had a “difficult journey”, she said, which was often “unspoken code for sexual trauma”.

When there are so many severe and immediate threats to survival, just staying alive becomes a success story. 

As Mulligan put it: “Physical survival has become an acceptable outcome for children. If you walk out of a conflict with your limbs intact then that’s meeting some new level of acceptability. A child deserves to have a normal life.”

Both sides in the war, the RSF and the SAF, have been accused of committing war crimes, with widespread reports of rape, sexual assault and child abuse. 

One report released last month by Doctors Without Borders recorded more than 3,396 cases of sexual violence in 2024 and 2025. In South Darfur, 20 percent of victims were under 18, including 41 children under five.

Sexual violence, the report explains, is now “part of everyday life” in most parts of Sudan, both during fighting and in its aftermath, on the roads, in markets and in refugee camps. 

One woman quoted in the report described her attack: “They took us to an open area. The first man raped me twice, the second once, the third four times.”

Mulligan described how one mother she met told her that her seven-year-old daughter couldn’t sleep at night because she was so terrified of a man who had attacked her. 

“[There are] no practical steps there for a parent to take to help their child,” she said. “You're interrupting the building blocks of their brain, you're tying a hand behind their back if you don't offer mental health support to a child who's been through something like that.”

Recovery from the trauma of war is possible, both Abeywardena and Mulligan say, having witnessed it first hand in other conflicts War Child has worked in. 

“We've met countless children over the years who've had really catastrophic trauma and who have, through working with a partner and with mental health support, been able to recover to a degree where they can have agency and choose their life for themselves,” Mulligan says. 

“But it needs peace and sustainable peace for that to happen,” Abeywardena explains.

Why does the conflict receive so little international media attention? 

“In its fourth year, it’s almost an abandoned crisis overshadowed by other world events,” says Lamb. 

There are too many other crises, from Gaza and Ukraine to Iran, she explains, for Sudan to be able to hold international focus for long. 

“In 38 years of reporting I have never known a time like the last four years, or the last three months in particular,” she says. “I never imagined covering a major land war in Europe.”

Research suggests there are also economic and political variables which influence which conflicts get more coverage than others. 

A report from the Reuters Institute released this month titled “Why Some Wars don’t Make Headlines” pointed to factors including the accessibility and safety for reporters, the nature of the conflict, and its perceived impact on readers’ lives. 

A 2025 analysis by Vision of Humanity found more than 1,600 articles for each civilian death in high income countries, compared to 17 in low-income countries. 

“Conflicts in regions with less economic influence are more likely to be overlooked, regardless of their severity or humanitarian consequences,” the report notes.

Relatively complex civil wars, like Sudan, also receive less coverage than wars between different countries, the report notes. 

Abeywardena finds it frustrating hearing the Sudan war described as “forgotten” in the wider media. He says: “It’s not forgotten by the millions of Sudanese who are affected.”

You can read Lamb’s piece about her experience reporting on Sudan here and more of her reporting here. 

View original: 

https://alastaircampbell.org/category/podcasts/the-rest-is-politics/

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Sudan: UN Security Council Meeting 26 Mar 2026. Increased drone attacks spilling across Sudan borders

Report from What's In Blue 

Dated Thursday 26 March 2026 - excerpts:

Sudan: Meeting under “Any Other Business”

Today (Thursday 26 March) at 4:30 pm, Security Council members will discuss the situation in Sudan under “any other business” following the discussion on the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in closed consultations. 

The UK (the penholder on the file) and Denmark, supported by the A3 members (the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], Liberia, and Somalia), requested the meeting after a 20 March strike on a hospital in East Darfur state reportedly killed around 70 people. 

Assistant Secretary-General for Africa in the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO) Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher are expected to brief. The UK may propose press elements on the meeting.  [...]

In a 24 March press release, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) warned of a sharp increase this year in the use of drones to conduct airstrikes in the country, highlighting the devastating impact of relatively inexpensive, high-tech weapons in populated areas. It documented over 500 civilian deaths in such strikes between 1 January and 15 March, the majority of which occurred in the Kordofan region.

The press release also highlighted that expanding drone attacks are spilling across Sudan’s borders, raising concerns about further escalation with regional implications. It referred to incidents affecting the border towns of Tina in Sudan and Tiné in Chad following RSF ground offensives. 

On 16 March, around 20 people, including civilians, were reportedly killed and 60 others injured during an RSF ground offensive on Tina. On 18 March, a drone strike in Tiné reportedly launched from Sudan killed at least 24 civilians and injured around 70 others. 

Chad closed its border with Sudan in late February following fighting in Tiné between the RSF and pro-SAF fighters that resulted in the deaths of five Chadian soldiers. 

Following the recent cross-border strike in Tiné, Chadian authorities reportedly reinforced security along the border with Sudan and began the emergency relocation of refugees from border areas.  [...]

Regional and international diplomatic efforts on both the humanitarian and political fronts have continued; however, a significant breakthrough remains elusive. 

Pekka Haavisto of Finland, who assumed his role as the Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy for Sudan in late February, visited Port Sudan and Khartoum earlier this week. During the visit, he met with, among others, the SAF leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the finance minister and leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) faction Jibril Ibrahim. 

In a statement released yesterday (25 March), Haavisto underscored the importance of dialogue and de-escalation as essential steps towards a comprehensive ceasefire, as well as stressed the need to advance civilian protection and to explore confidence-building measures to create conditions for a meaningful political process. Haavisto further indicated that he would continue consultations in the coming weeks with a broad range of stakeholders across the region.

The US has been leading efforts, in coordination with the other Quad members—Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia—to facilitate a humanitarian truce. 

In his remarks at the 19 February Council meeting on the situation in Sudan, US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos called for an immediate humanitarian truce, without preconditions, which he argued must guarantee sustained and unhindered humanitarian access across conflict lines and borders. 

He also noted that the US has been working with the Secretary-General’s office, DPPA, OCHA, and other UN entities to establish a UN mechanism to support implementation, coordination, and oversight of the truce and related humanitarian access commitments. [...]

On 19 February, the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned three RSF commanders for their involvement in atrocities in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. The UK and the European Union (EU) have also previously designated these same individuals. 

On 24 March, the 1591 Sudan Sanctions Committee also designated four RSF commanders, including the group’s deputy commander Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo. 

On 9 March, the US Department of State designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It argued that the group uses violence against civilians to undermine conflict resolution efforts and advance its “violent Islamist ideology”, claiming that the group’s fighters have conducted “mass executions of civilians” and have received support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Read full report here: 

https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2026/03/sudan-meeting-under-any-other-business-5.php

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