British-Backed UAE Trains Mercenaries to Help Militia ‘Committing Genocide’

The British-backed United Arab Emirates (UAE) is helping to supply foreign mercenaries to a group accused of mass rape, torture and ethnic slaughter in Sudan, a Human Rights Watch investigation has revealed. 

An Abu Dhabi-based firm called the Global Security Services Group (GSSG) is training hundreds of Colombian fighters who have joined Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they rampage through the country. GSSG has links to the UAE’s ruling family. 

As well as being involved in direct attacks, the mercenaries have operated drones and trained RSF recruits, many of whom are “young children”, according to an unnamed Colombian mercenary quoted by the rights group. 

The Colombian military contractors were transited through UAE military facilities before being deployed to Sudan, where the RSF is battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). 

The unnamed mercenary who trained RSF child soldiers said they did so at camps around Nyala, the militia’s main base in South Darfur. 

The RSF began life as a militia known as the Janjaweed, used by the Sudanese government during the war in Darfur. The RSF been linked to ethnic cleansing, widespread sexual violence and mass disappearances.

The RSF was responsible for a massacre in the city of El Fasher in October 2025 following an 18-month starvation siege of an estimated 300,000 people. 

The UN said the atrocities against non-Arab communities there, including the Zaghawa, Fur and Berti, showed all the “hallmarks of genocide”. Some of the Colombian mercenaries were present at the time of the genocide, according to videos verified and geolocated by Human Rights Watch. 

The Guardian revealed in December 2025 that a UK-registered company appeared to be involved in recruiting Colombian mercenaries to fight alongside the RSF.

British-made military hardware – including small-arms target systems and British-made engines for armoured personnel carriers – has been discovered at RSF battle sites, according to two dossiers of material seen by the UN security council the month of the genocide.    

Labour’s then-foreign secretary David Lammy visited Sudanese refugee camps in eastern Chad in January 2025, asking: “Where is the liberal outrage? We cannot have a hierarchy of conflict, with this conflict at the bottom.”

But Lammy’s government continued to ship military systems to the UAE after that visit, despite reports they were being funneled to the RSF. 

The UAE was the third largest recipient of arms export licences from the UK last year, receiving £172m of military equipment, according to analysis by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). 

That included £1.9m of exports in the military vehicles and components category, including the engines used by the RSF in armoured personnel carriers.

A UN investigation into an attack on the Zamzam internally displaced persons (IDPs) camp in North Darfur State in April 2025 found “widespread killings, rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and abductions committed during the three-day offensive”.

“The recruitment of Colombian private military contractors adds to a growing body of evidence that the UAE provides military support to the Rapid Support Forces, which have repeatedly carried out heinous atrocities in Sudan,” said Mausi Segun, executive director of the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch. 

“Governments should publicly demand that the UAE stop supplying weapons, equipment, personnel, and other military support to the Rapid Support Forces.”