When Sudanese military leader Abdel Fatah al-Burhan welcomed al-Nour Ahmed Adam – also known as al-Nour al-Kubba and a former senior commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia – into the ranks of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) earlier this year, it was one of the most high-profile defections so far in the Sudanese civil war.
While the SAF controls the capital Khartoum, Port Sudan and large parts of the east and center of the country, its rival RSF controls vast areas in the west of the country, particularly in Darfur, including the city of El Fasher.
Al-Nour al-Qubba is not the only defector: a few weeks later the high-ranking RSF commander, Ali Rizq Allah, also known as al-Sawana, followed him.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reviewed videos purportedly showing these two defectors during the siege of El Fashar, where the international NGO has documented war crimes committed by the RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commonly known as Hemedti, during the capture of the city in October 2025.
General amnesty for RSF fighters?
Since the start of the war in 2023, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has been trying to recruit defectors from the RSF to the SAF. Almost from the beginning, he announced a general amnesty for militia members upon laying down their arms, saying that they could be integrated into the army. Human Rights Watch says it is unable to verify whether this also applies to recent defectors.
There should be no impunity for Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Those responsible for serious international crimes and human rights violations do not receive a free hand when switching sides,” he said, adding, “The Sudanese people who have experienced horrific abuses under the watch of any commander deserve justice.”
According to conflict monitors from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), the recent defections may be a sign of growing tensions within the RSF ranks and “rifts in the RSF’s core alliances”. He believes that “local loyalties are overriding central command, leading to violent inter-alliance competition over remaining war spoils.”
‘If UAE was not there the war would have ended’
The lapses come at a time when both the SAF and the RSF have received outside support. Although the front is in Sudan, the coalition pursuing the war extends far beyond the country’s borders. RSF’s supporters are believed to include the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopia, Libya, Chad and Kenya. The SAF, which has also been accused of war crimes, is supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Eritrea. Iran is also suspected of providing military support to the SAF.
Last year, US intelligence sources told US Daily wall street journal The UAE is believed to have supplied “advanced Chinese-made drones with small arms, heavy machine guns, vehicles, artillery, mortars and ammunition” to the RSF. The report quoted Cameron Hudson, former chief of staff to several special envoys to Sudan, as saying that “the only thing that is keeping them [the RSF] “They are receiving huge amounts of military support from the UAE in this war.”
“If it were not for the UAE, the war would have ended,” he stressed.
In 2025, the human rights organization Amnesty International also found evidence suggesting that the UAE had “almost certainly” re-exported Chinese-made weapons to the RSF.
UAE has rejected the allegations. Salem Aljaberi, the UAE’s assistant minister for security and military affairs, said Amnesty International’s allegations were “baseless” and lacked “sufficient evidence”.
Colombian mercenaries with RSF
In late May, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “From Bogotá to El Fasher: The UAE’s role in the deployment of Colombian fighters and other support to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.” The 83-page document details how hundreds of Colombian mercenaries have been recruited to fight alongside the RSF in Sudan from 2024. It claims that a Colombia-based recruitment agency “worked with Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), which appears to be hiring contractors deployed to Sudan.”
“Thankfully for us, the Colombian contractors are not very clean about their social media presence, so we were able to get a lot of information from their own TikTok accounts and other social media that they posted publicly and geolocate them to these sensitive UAE military sites before they deployed to Sudan,” Joey Shea of Human Rights Watch told the US news organization Democracy Now.
HRW spoke to two Colombian military contractors deployed to Sudan, three retired Colombian officers, a former GSSG employee, residents of El Fasher, and other sources before compiling its report. It also analyzed company records, official documents, and photos and videos. It said some of the images showed Spanish-speaking private military contractors (PMCs), believed to be Colombians, accompanying RSF fighters in Sudan. Other documented training sessions at military facilities in the UAE.
“Our investigation revealed how Abu Dhabi-based security company Global Security Services Group hired hundreds of Colombian fighters before deploying them to fight with arms and ammunition alongside the Rapid Support Forces, an armed group accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan,” Shea said.
Experts believe that former Colombian soldiers were recruited to fight in Sudan because they had extensive combat experience and were often trained to use American weapons systems. Human Rights Watch said in its report that according to media outlets, “UAE authorities recruited Colombian security and military personnel as early as 2011.” It added that in Sudan, “the UAE is using the same playbook”.
“The New York Times, UN experts, human rights organizations like ours have repeatedly reported on the UAE’s military support to the RSF,” Shea said. “Yet the international community has remained silent. To date not a single EU member state, the EU, the US, the UK, has publicly called for the UAE’s role in supporting and providing military support to the Rapid Action Forces.”
In April, the security analysis organization Conflict Insights Group published a report based on data obtained by tracking the cell phones of Colombian fighters, arguing that the UAE enabled the fall of El Fasher. The investigation revealed a military training facility in Ghayathi, United Arab Emirates, where Colombian mercenaries operated as part of the “Desert Wolves” brigade led by retired Colombian Army Colonel Alvaro Quijano. America and Britain have imposed sanctions on Sudan for promoting its war.
Here also UAE has denied the allegations. “We are calling for an immediate ceasefire at the end of 2025,” Anwar Mohammed Gargash, an adviser to the UAE president, told news agency Reuters. “And most importantly, we do not see the future of Sudan in a military junta. We see the future in civilian change in Sudan.”
‘Signs of Genocide’
Defections from the RSF, repeated accusations against the UAE, and investigations into Colombian fighters reveal how far this war has spread beyond Sudan. But it makes little difference to the civilians who are killed, injured and displaced. Human rights organizations have documented mass killings and other crimes against civilians. A United Nations fact-finding mission has concluded that the siege of El Fasher had “characteristics of genocide”.
The RSF is believed to have killed around 70,000 people in El Fasher alone.
Aid organizations say Sudan is currently the site of the world’s largest and fastest-growing displacement and humanitarian crisis, with the World Food Program saying Sudan is facing one of the world’s largest hunger crises.
About 12 million people have been displaced from their homes and about 20 million are facing severe hunger.
This article was translated from German.