Economy & Business
In the Shadow of a Scandal-Hit Mine: Al-Amoudi Rebuilds His Gold Empire on the Sudanese Border
The darkest supply line of Sudan's bloody civil war has once again been exposed by flight-tracking data. At a time when Ethiopia has become the main hub for resupplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, 44 suspicious cargo flights from the United Arab Emirates to Ethiopia were identified in August alone.
According to flight-tracking data, the sorties were carried out by 13 different Ilyushin Il-76TD heavy cargo aircraft. The picture is striking: 22 flights departed from Al Reef Airbase, 20 from Al Ain Airport and 2 from Sweihan Airbase. Forty-four sorties in one month means that, almost every day, at least one heavy cargo aircraft took off along the same route.
The flight data aligns with findings that international media outlets and research institutions have been documenting for months. Satellite analysis by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) has identified activity consistent with military assistance to the RSF at an Ethiopian army base in Asosa, near the Sudanese border; the lab's latest report found that roughly 100 new military vehicles ("technicals") arrived at the base between 23 and 28 August, and that the build-up may be linked to a potential RSF assault on the city of Ed Damazin in Blue Nile state. A sixfold increase in vehicles within five days lays bare the scale of the preparations.
A Reuters investigation in February, meanwhile, used satellite imagery to document a secret camp in the Benishangul-Gumuz region — assessed to be financed by the UAE and capable of training thousands of RSF fighters — and reported that Asosa's airport had been upgraded for drone operations. Middle East Eye has likewise tracked repeated flights by UAE-linked cargo planes from Abu Dhabi to military airfields in Ethiopia, and published satellite imagery connecting the Asosa base to UAE supply lines. In yet another dimension uncovered by Le Monde, Il-76s belonging to a shell company registered on paper in Burkina Faso were documented making dozens of flights on the UAE-Ethiopia route, switching off their transponders over the Red Sea.
United Nations experts have found credible the allegations that the UAE has been arming the RSF since the start of the war. Although Abu Dhabi denies all the accusations, flight records, satellite imagery and reports from the ground all point in the same direction: the centre of gravity of the supply line has shifted from Chad to Ethiopia, and the government in Addis Ababa is becoming an ever-deeper party to the war next door.
The 44 flights in August show that these are not abstract accusations but concrete traffic leaving its trace across the sky. Every take-off may mean another load carried into the war machine of a militia accused of genocide in Sudan and it is being recorded, sortie by sortie, before the eyes of the international community.
