China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, (EDIT: the UK, indirectly) and Egypt have each also supplied weapons into this conflict [1]. Presumably due to Sudan’s position on the Red Sea. (China and the UAE seem to be alone in supplying the RSF, though.)
The other complication is the surprising contributions of various African countries. Ethiopia had supported the RSF until 2024, and Kenya hosted an RSF conference in Feb 2025. Haftar in Libya supported RSF before the war, but may have changed positions as his Russian backers turned against the RSF in 2024. The RSF also has some ties to rebels in South Sudan as well as in Chad. Chad in particular gave shelter to the RSF at the behest of the UAE, but has also seized arms shipments that were intended for the RSF. Russia as noted was sympathetic to the RSF until mid-2024, when they switched sides.
When the war initially broke out, some articles in The Economist seemed somewhat agnostic between the two sides, noting that both had serious corruption issues and had committed many abuses. But as the war has progressed, the RSF seems to have revealed itself to be the far more vicious faction, and the red E along with the rest of the Western media now sees their advances as a tragedy. Unfortunately, the one constant here is the general failure of foresight among nearly all countries of the global North (whether aligned with the West or Russia) getting involved in Africa. If the brutality of the RSF had been better anticipated in 2023, the current situation might have been prevented.
It's also likely that the US is kept at bay by trading UAE acceptance of Israel in return for diplomatic cover and military passivity. The US destruction of Libya has been quite important for the UAE:s ability to supply the RSF as well, a lot of the weapon transports pass through there.
The last time Janjaweed-style gangs engaged in similar acts of apartheid and genocide in Darfur the US opposed it and openly called it a genocide. This was in 2007.
I'm not sure when UAE ramped up funding and equipping of similar groups in the Sahel and Maghreb, but when Libya collapses in 2011 they decided to do it there and a few years later they rebrand Janjaweed-militias as RSF and expects them to professionalise because they are provided with resources and diplomatic cover.
Unsurprisingly these gangs in Libya, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere don't stop doing racist murder and rape because it is made easier for them to get away with. Also unsurprisingly, the UAE sees the US as the main risk that they'll be stopped and held accountable, because the ICC and ICJ just don't work as a decent person would expect them to.
The US got (justifiably) yelled at for the war in Iraq, and again (less justifiably) in Libya and Afghanistan, and took the leas that military interference is always wrong, despite the obvious counterexamples of Syria and Crimes.
This is complicated by a lot of the yelling coming from US peace activists, who took advantage of their complete vindication in Iraq (and Vietnam before that) to pretend that there's a through-line and preventing a dictator from bombing dissidents or a naked land-grab-war-of-aggression is identical to starting our own naked-land-grab-war-of-aggression.
Got evidence that they supplied weapons? GP’s Wikipedia article does not seem to say that they did (apart from an unclear reference to US military aid, which I don’t think refers to US military aid to Sudan specifically).
China never directly supplied weapons either. Yet its weapons have been found on both sides. The RSF got them through the UAE and the SAF got it through Iran.
If GGP is going to count China as a supplier it's only fair to count the US. Js. Fwiw, both China and the US place sanctions on the RSF and denounce it as a genocide. Neither directly does business with either side.
Russia is involved directly in the conflict however, literally sending in Wagner mercenaries. They used to back the RSF but in early 2024 switched sides and now fully back the SAF. The sad truth is that most major international players don't care about the Sudanese people. They just want to have the support of whichever side comes out on top so they can continue exploiting the gold reserves of the country like they did before the dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by a popular revolution.
I think it’s possibly fair to say the U.S. doesn’t want this war to continue and probably doesn’t even want the UAE to supply weapons to it, but that was likely true of Israel’s bombing of Gaza as well and no one batted an eyelid when holding the U.S. responsible there.
I haven't found any articles implicating the US, which has export sanctions on Sudan. The only thing I could find was something about small arms from the UK.
That is like saying Russia is suppling Ukraine with weapons to kill Russians because Russia has exported weapons to X that then made it to Ukraine. That is just silly claiming Russia is a supplier of arms to Ukraine.
It would be very strange if American weapons weren't used in a conflict this big, which is a very different question from "did the US government sell weapons into this war".
I've looked for articles and don't see anything about US weapons. It would be very strange, indeed, but supposition isn't proof and I can't find anything suggesting the US is involved in anyway. Colour me surprised, tbh.
I wasn't here to 'provide proof'. Just pointing out that any conflict beyond a certain size almost certainly has some weapon from every large arms producer deployed in the field. I can't image how many tons of small arms we left laying around in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest that are now being recirculated around the worlds conflict zones. I remember after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan if you were in the right place and knew the right people you could get cases of NIB AKs for like $25 a rifle (no, I didn't). It's not politics...it's logistics.
Guess you are on the wrong side of things if you know your weapons are getting laundered through other countries to get to a conflict. And of course uk, us and china know this and always knew this.
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet?
The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)
They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
The comment merely said UAE has become strategically influential in finance, transport (cargo shipping (#5 in world), world's busiest international passenger airport), tourism. Nothing about being fond.
5% GDP growth in non-oil. More diversified than Saudi. #2 globally for being "easy to do business in and with". Top-10 in Global Soft Power Index since 2023 [0], rose from #18 in 2020. Dubai has become a global influencer capital.
Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes, and as a regional counterweight.
If we're talking about Switzerland, yes it's a federal republic with semi-direct democracy, but it also happily supplied mercenaries to mainland Europe for several centuries.
In the long term, Venezuela has more proven reserves (but much less production capacity). Or nuclear + renewable will overtake fossil fuel. In either scenario, Saudi's share of total global energy production will likely decline by late 21st century.
And in non-oil GDP growth, UAE is currently outpacing Saudi.
As to "everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money", depends on who "everyone" is: 77% of the total workforce in Saudi is migrant workers, many of whom earn < US$5000/yr. They're not citizens.
> whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
I’ve heard that line about Qatar, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta, Cyprus, the Maldives, and countless other small states.
I grew up in Switzerland. Folks like to compare themselves to us, mostly due to complete ignorance of our actual history and culture.
It’s true in part and misses the point in others. Geopolitically, however, the observation is sound. Small states need a powerful protector far away or to balance their position between nearby large states. The latter only works in mountainous hellholes and on peninsulas (provided your larger neighbor(s) can’t blockade you; if they can, you need a foreign guarantor with a blue-water navy, of which historically there have only been one or two at a time).
(You know Switzerland is a weapons exporter, right? To the U.S. But also to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Hungary. One could almost say that folks who conclude intent from a place of ignorance communicate “all you need to know about” themselves.)
I think the connotation of 'being Switzerland' has less to do with the modern state of Switzerland and more to do with the ... Unsavory things Switzerland has historically been a part of.
Most of them are patently incorrect, and most of those don't even care to educate themselves since they keep repeating cheap stuff they heard from other bright people and that's it. How many heard about accepting refugees despite being literally surrounded by axis and facing starvation of their own people (how many nations would do that including yours), or not-so-secret massive collaboration with western allies while on surface acting as neutral ie Campione d'Italia, and so on and on).
They were neutral in WWII like ie Spain was, think a bit what does it actually means. Not participating in conflict in any way. So they accepted both jewish and nazi gold or art, and everybody's else. If you want to understand why some of that was kept around after the war maybe reading about numbered accounts would enlight you. If you actually care to understand history as it happened.
Hitler had plans to conquer Switzerland after dealing with Russia, he was aware that they were 'most free and most armed nation in the world', fiercely independent and taking them would cost him dearly not only due to terrain.
Literally nobody had come out of WWII with properly clean slate, you just need to dig (not even deep) to find abhorable stuff on everybody, to different volume of course. Swiss have no problem acknowledging their mistakes, much more than most other nations.
So why do they repeat the same mistakes by hosting Putins family, laundering his money, and denying Germany to deliver Swiss-made air defense ammunition to Ukraine?
Hamas was the de facto government in the Gaza strip, so it was in everyone's best interest to fund them enough to keep their civil branches running (pre-oct 7).
>Qatar does, the official allows, transfer $30 million each month to the Hamas administration in Gaza. But those payments are performed in consultation with Washington and Israel - and with their approval, he says.
>Each month, he says, construction materials worth tens of millions of dollars are also delivered from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. those supplies are then sold by Hamas. He says the organization uses the proceeds to pay its administrative staff. Israel, in turn, he explains, supplies $10 million worth of diesel fuel to the Gaza Strip each month, with Qatar providing another 10 million to needy families. They receive $100 each, "martyr families excluded," the government representative stresses.
Netanyahu having had people transfer cash was a big scandal in Israel.
Trying to murder the negotiating team in Doha was an effort to stop the US from pushing through 'a deal' as it's commonly been called. They've previously been successful at this and it likely annoyed the US that the israelis failed.
The thing is that "Hamas" is used as a synonym for words like "terrorist" and "palestinian" and "arab", and in some circles in the US and largely in Israel "Qatar" means the same thing. It's the un-chosen people that need to serve or die, basically. Hence the anger at Netanyahu, and an important reason why he clings to power, he doesn't want to step off until he's made history some other way that makes israelis forget his scandals.
The UAE is pretty good at playing both sides so they always come out ahead. They act as a key diplomatic intermediary and host a major US military base which is essential to projecting power in the region.
Just wanna plug the most thorough and useful video I've seen on the history of this conflict. The US, Russia, and many other players are more heavily involved in this conflict than is often discussed in media. It breaks down the specific ways many international players are profiting from the conflict and helps makes sense of the motives driving it
Yes ofc. The RSF is just the rebranded Janjaweed which were legally classified as having committed genocide. But they never faced any international consequences and here they are committing genocide once again. It's also a major conflict though as the SAF is the major oppositional force fighting against the RSF. SAF was the military that took control after a democratic revolution pushed out the dictator Omar al-Bashir
Sudan is the 3rd largest producer of gold in Africa but it remains the poorest country in Africa because the companies that exploit those resources are never Sudanese.
The RSF got their weapons by acting as mercenaries for the UAE to fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Fighting as a mercenary is pretty much the only reliable source of income for many people in the country.
On examination of photos and videos of weapons used in the conflict that were posted on social media, the rights group identified that companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia, and the UAE were associated with the weapons provided to RSF.[96] Human Rights Watch reviewed images of show crates with markings indicating they were manufactured in 2020 and initially acquired by the UAE Armed Forces in through a contract with Adasi, a subsidiary of UAE-based weapons manufacturer Edge Group. A January 2024 report by the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan deemed the UAE's alleged support to the RSF as "credible"
According to Business Insider, "The two generals helped Russian President Vladimir Putin exploit Sudan's gold resources to help buttress Russian finances against Western sanctions and fund his war in Ukraine."[108]
Yes, to clarify the primary international players:
Russia: initially supported the RSF, then at one point was trading with both sides, and in 2024/2025 fully switched sides to back the SAF
Iran: stayed out of it until 2024 when it finally backed the SAF which caused a major turning point in the conflict
UAE/the US: the main player responsible for RSF's rise. It hired out RSF mercenaries to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At one point there were more than 40,000 RSF mercenaries (mostly between the ages of 14-17) in Yemen. It continues to be the primary funder of the RSF
Israel: the RSF buys surveillance tech and weapons from Israel
Saudi Arabia: the largest smuggler of (illegally acquired) gold from RSF. A major source of funding for the RSF
China: doesn't directly deal with either side but Chinese-made weapons were found in the hands of the RSF mostly through the UAE reselling them. The SAF also has some Chinese made weapons through Russia and Turkey
tl;dr: it's a very complex disaster but international players simply don't have an interest in ending it. The SAF is the main opposition to the genocidal RSF, but they are also uninterested in maintaining the democracy that the people fought for and the sides backing the SAF (mostly Iran, and now Russia) are likely hoping to continue their exploitation of gold if they defeat the RSF
... unfortunately what matters is that gold is a curse. Colonialism hundreds of years ago froze extractive oppressive hierarchies, and even though many places gained independence the new elite mostly took the already in-place system and started to run it to benefit themselves.
"Visible from space" used to mean "by astronauts". If high-resolution sensors are allowed, then the term applies to things like a tree and a car, and doesn't signify much.
Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.
"Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects “consistent with the size of human bodies” and “reddish ground discolouration” thought to be either blood or disturbed soil."
The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.
The silence from the west on what's going on in Sudan is deafening. It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan?
Throwing out "whataboutism" every time someone dares ask a question like this is a fallacy in itself, intending to distract from the question of why genocide in places like Sudan are so thoroughly and utterly ignored and even buried.
> It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan?
The simple truth is a lot of, if not most, such vocalised outrage in any country is nine parts vanity. Remember #StopKony? About as effective for the people being harmed as students at Columbia barricading themselves into a building.
I’m not sure I condemn moral vanity. It is a genuine intellectual exercise. But it’s one that doesn’t particularly benefit from repeat unless one seeks to become a student of atrocity, and one that has strong viral effects.
What about the minority who actually try to help those harmed, e.g. by fundraising for victims or volunteering? They’re far and few in between. Moreover, their efforts benefit from economies of scale.
As a result, in any community, the people actually being helpful will tend to pick their battles. And the people flipping out for fun will cluster around whatever is trendy to flip out about in public.
Because we dont fund or assist what's going on in Sudan? We have sanctions in place against the RSF rather than applauding their leaders in congress every year.
Well we are currently sending funding. Except that funding is going to further the conflict. Sudan's gold reserves are critical materials. The previous dictator, Omar al-Bashir, was propped up by foreign powers exactly because they allowed those countries to extract the gold reserves. The RSF is the same thing. they are the evolution of the Janjaweed militias that the ICC found to be committing genocide. The international community did nothing to stop them or hold them accountable so they are once again committing genocide. International players want this to continue. Russia was at some point funding both sides and sending in Wagner mercenaries. UAE has been funding the RSF since the very start and continues to be the largest importer of (illegal) gold. Israel benefits because the RSF is a major importer of its surveillance tech as well as weapons. Both Israel and the US fund the UAE despite knowing that the UAE is fueling the RSF because they both ultimately benefit. American and even Chinese weapons have been found on both sides (mostly through the UAE reselling weapons to the RSF). Even if the SAF wins, it'll just be another military junta whose top priority is to exploit the gold reserves to the benefit of whichever nation is funding it and NOT giving any of that wealth back to the people.
Sadly, yet another bloody chapter of the Abu Dhabi (al Nahyan) - Doha (al Thani) feud that has been going on since the 2011 coup attempt [0], which itself is part of a longer multi-generational blood feud going on between the royal families [4]. The Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Balkans are all burning because of this saga [1].
The UAE backs the RSF [2] (formerly known as the Janjaweed of the Darfur Genocide), and Qatar supports the Sudanese Army [3]
The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.
> bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible
They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.
Destabilizing the region, working with Hamas, facilitating terror financing, working with Iran, and a bunch of other stuff should concern us. There’s plenty of flat sand to park aircraft on without doing business with those filthy slavers.
> Qatar already deals with Iran and Russia by proxy
So does the UAE. They’ve played their game well.
It doesn’t mean we need to be their staunch defenders. But it’s in our government’s interest to not piss them off for no gain. And we’re not in a place in America where foreign policy swings power.
Much of Europe and Asia is dependent on Gulf sourced ONG and Gulf sourced FDI.
And the current crisis is happening because the last time we were hands off with Middle Eastern affairs shortly before the Arab Spring, a number of conflicts spiraled into proxy wars between KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, and Iran.
We just have to keep protecting them and give them weapons, otherwise somebody else will do it.
Quite a high moral ground to be on, I tell ya. I know I know, realpolitik and all, but then lets stop pretending there is some higher ground and treat say china-us conflict as something that literally doesn't concern Europe at all (seems like US has still military upper hand but who knows for how long, seems like China will steamroll ya economically/technologically pretty soon). Especially given this year developments when we saw that US military equipment cannot be trusted, US IT infra cannot be trusted and so on.
Europe would be more concern if there was more trust in the current US government. Besides, European politicians have been so naive they have let China use their financial power to exert pressure, they are slowly waking up to it, but not fast enough.
OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?
In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia.
There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.
A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
Like I said, I'm not apologizing for any of the many bad things Qatar has done, but I don't understand how this, where Qatar is supporting the legitimate-ish and not-especially-genocidal side, is being used as evidence by the "Qatar sucks" camp.
Becuase this is one proxy war that is part of a larger proxy war across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.
I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.
The UAE backs Vucic and is the primary FDI source for Serbia's real estate and armaments industry. A major reason Vucic's administration slid into authoritarianism was because the opposition began asking hard questions about the Belgrade Waterfront Project.
It ebbs and flows depending on whether it's an al Khalifa or an al Thani who controls Doha. Before the 1995 coup, it was the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan that was in control, and they had both familial and economic relations in KSA and Abu Dhabi.
Khaleeji (like everyone else) are fine putting family history aside if it does not interfere with monetary incentives, and the crux of the issue has been clashing LNG claims between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. The al Thani clan has been pursuing a maximalist claim and works closely with Turkiye and Iran as their short term security guarantor as a result, but the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan were fine with the Abu Dhabi claim because they have significant economic holdings in the UAE and KSA.
Now I know 100% you're talking out of your ass. The Al Khalifas rule Bahrain. The Al Thanis rule Qatar. That bloodless coup you were talking about? That was the father of the current Qatari emir deposing his father when he was abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Qatari_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat).
The current emir succeeded him peacefully after the father stepped down.
All Arab families are intermarried in various ways, but the Al Nahyans have always been historical rivals to the Al Thanis, and have always tried to invade Qatar. The Qataris were invited to join with the UAE, along with Bahrain, but refused because they figured Abu Dhabi would take the leading role eventually (which it has). In all of the UAE, only Dubai remains more autonomous than usual because they were able to develop on their own with the guidance of the current sheikh of Dubai.
This is horrible but I feel like the "visible" from space headline is becoming increasingly less impressive as satellite imagery becomes more impressive.
You could say, I drink so much coffee it's visible from space and it's literally just a coffee mug sitting on a park bench.
This is truly horrible and I don't want to detract from the original aim of the article, but can we just establish that 'visible' from space doesn't really mean much anymore given the resolution of satellites? My garage is also visible from space, doesn't make it worthy of a headline.
So strange that I haven’t seen global coverage of this crisis on a daily basis, or demonstrations for “Free Sudan” on campuses. If anyone has a theory about why this humanitarian disaster doesn’t receive the same attention as Gaza, which didn't have such events, please feel free to share.
Western governments prefer to earn a day's income than sacrifice a whole African tribe since the last centuries up until now. So, no wonders Sudan felt in a hell hole where intertwined interests take place. Only the public outcry through mass media can stop a genocide which in this case does not sell. After a few years the balance of power will settle and may be a movie will be produced, like Hotel Rwanda.
ideology plays little role in these conflicts, they are partially religio-ethnic but mostly about pure power, where religion and ethnicity are levers pulled to leverage power.
the people seeking power would sell out their own mothers if that's what it took.
the ideologies here are the ideologies of the HN commenters who try to fit the facts into their predetermined narratives.
and "visible from space" means absolutely nothing meaningful. can we read license plates from space or not yet? I don't know, but in this context, who cares
(way back in the 1980s a china-zealot was telling me that the Great Wall of China was "the only manmade thing visible from space." I had the presence of mind to say back, "isn't it more significant to be able to get to space to see what's visible?")
It's worth noting there are islamists on both side. Anyone who characterizes this as purely religious or ethnic has a bridge to sell. This conflict would have died years ago if it weren't for foreign actors putting their hands up Sudan's ass
The number of violent conflicts initiated by various islamist groups is insane [1]. There is something wrong here that goes beyond funding. It's possible to acknowledge that without being islamophobic.
The heatmap may as well represent a map of recently decolonized areas with unresolved political issues, and just so happens that many of these places have significant Muslim populations.
If you read the Koran and Hadiths, there are numerous statements about the true Muslims duty being to spread Islam - at the point of the sword being a well supported one, scripture wise.
Isn't that true of Christianity as well? If it is the true Muslim's duty to spread Islam by the sword, then why did it take centuries for populations to convert to Islam in places like Egypt which were conquered by leaders who knew Mohammed personally? Why did places which were never conquered by Muslim caliphates like Indonesia have significant Muslim populations today?
No, definitely not with the same authority. If you take the Bible as the equivalent of the Quran, and the church fathers as the equivalent of the hadiths, neither has any endorsement of conversion through threats of violence. Jesus was never a political or military leader, nor were the first few generations of Christian leaders.
I cannot give as clear an answer with regard to islam, because I do not know enough in depth, but there are a variety of interpretations. There was persecution of religious minorities in the Muslim empires, but mass slaughter of those who refused to convert would have inspired rebellion. The conversion did happen in places like Egypt and Syria and Persia and there was coercion.
As for Indonesia, the GP did not claim Islam spread only by the sword.
Notably, I never said ‘by the sword’ was the only way. There is definitely a history of a number of religions doing it though!
First, I am under no illusions that what a religions book (or common formal teachings) says necessarily matches what its stated followers actually do.
Judaism essentially forbids ‘recruiting’, and it is quite difficult to convert. Mainly because Judaism is essentially ‘this group of people have a special deal with god/are god’s special people’.
Which makes the crusades particularly crazy/insane of course. Jesus was clearly non-violent and didn’t want people going out killing each other over anything he was saying.
At the time, the Church (now Catholic Church) heavily controlled ‘the word’, by insisting everything be done in Latin - which they were then the gatekeepers for. They also meddled (or flat out controlled!) national politics, and this gave them immense power to control the narrative of ‘what god demands’ in ways that now clearly contradict what we can read ourselves.
Islamic teachings can be interpreted in many different ways, and there are at least 2 major schools of thought (Sunni/Shia), and two major regional differences. What is taught//practiced in most of the middle, and what is taught/practiced in Indonesia being clear differentiators, for example.
But the Koran and its Hadiths are generally relatively accessible, if one looks, and it’s not hard to find analysis of different elements of it online. Unlike the Bible, there are explicit calls for the devout to study it directly. Also, unlike the Christian Bible, it also tends to be less - chaotic and internally conflicting. Comparing Matthew and Leviticus would give anyone whiplash, for example.
As to if it means believers must go to war with specific ‘irritating’ local tribes, or means all unbelievers, depends on who you ask. But most agree it means unbelievers in general. Many of the ‘problem’ groups in recent history with the west have explicitly used it to justify their attacks (among many others).
There are specific carve outs/exceptions for Jews and Christians (though also corresponding ‘give them no quarter unless they convert/behave as Muslims’ sections!), and in general the expectation is that for them to be protected they need to respect Islamic law and behave accordingly. Which isn’t really possible, for the most part, without significant changes in behavior/belief.
So depending on how ‘close to the book’ someone is being, and if sections are being ignored, depends on how much someone is going to believe/follow. Notably, Indonesia is widely seen is ‘Islam light’, but they do follow quite a bit of it (like how marriages work, expectations for women), that the west would struggle with. Middle eastern countries, communities in Pakistan, India, etc. tend to be the hardest core.
And once you understand the nature of the teaching, it is hard to not see the western way of life as being the personification of Iblis (the great satan - the tester of faith). After all, who wouldn’t want to chill out and drink beer, watch TV, and ignore the (often difficult) teachings of God? join us…, it’s fun! And don’t worry, there is no actual god anyway.
And like the old Christian Church during the crusades, government and madrases (religious schools) tend to be intermixed, which of course causes ‘problems’ similar to
the crusades.
Thankfully not to the full extent, right now anyway.
I appreciate your long and thoughtful answer. I am actually Muslim, and from the Middle-East. I agree with most of what you said, I only disagree with the premise that Islam is an inherently violent religion. While I usually ignore such statements, seeing this atrocious conflict in Sudan being reduced to "Islam bad" especially when it's primarily non-Arab Muslims being genocided just irked me too much.
To your point, you're right that the Quran and the Hadith make some statements that to an unlearned individual's interpretation, appear to promote total war against the unbelievers. As you also point out, this is not unique to Islam, as demonstrated by the Crusades for example. I don't think the relative accessibility of the Quran today is a valid point, as in the current day and age anyone can pick up the Bible and read something like Matthew 10:34 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2010%3A...] and claim that Jesus ordered Christians to fight.
Continuing to use Christianity as an example, today you don't get that many extremist Christian groups because most places with significant Christian populations are well developed, generally have highly educated populations, robust political processes, and strong rule of law. Back to the map OP posted, if you overlay it with a map of Christian populations, you'll find a strong overlap in central Africa. Central Africa was recently decolonized, has unresolved political issues, and is majority Christian, as a result you get extremist organizations like the LRA forming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Resistance_Army_insur...].
My point is, it's easy to manipulate some holy text or another to claim it orders to fight the disbelievers. I would say the average Joe who does not need to worry about how tomorrow he will feed his family and educate his children will never get up in arms to kill someone just because of a cherry-picked verse from a holy book. If that happens and this Joe gets up to murder his neighbor, either Joe is a psychopath at heart, or the core reason is something else. If that wasn't the case, then Islam has a huge problem with disobedience, because its 2 billion followers aren't slaughtering everyone right now.
Anecdote time. I had the pleasure of acquainting someone who seriously thought about joining ISIS during their heyday. He was in high-school with me, I didn't know him very closely, but enough to paint a picture. He lived in a dysfunctional home with a terrible father who was too harsh and too violent. He lived in the street most of his childhood, basically treating his home as where he goes to sleep. He came from a poor background, was rock bottom academically, all while living in a country where most youth do not have high hopes for the future. He also had a history of drug abuse and generally thuggish behavior. On a spiritual level, the dude did not give a single iota about any teaching of Islam.
It was 2015. In the few months leading up to his arrest, he had a change of mind and heart. His closer friends tell me he started joining some FB groups where ISIS was doing recruitment. Having been exposed to a couple of recruitment videos myself, I imagine it would have been super lucrative for someone like him. They were always boasting about the loot the fighters would get from battle, how in a couple of months of fighting you could have your own house and land, a nice truck, a subservient wife, all while being super badass with guns and fancy combat gear AND God would love you and send you to heaven if you die (but you wouldn't, because look at the map, ISIS is unstoppable). It was almost like a parody version of the American dream. No need for a higher education, job interviews, hard work, or knowing the right people. If you can pick up a gun and don't mind killing these worthless scum who don't know any better, we can take care of the rest!
Somehow he was arrested and was imprisoned before he could join ISIS. He was released from prison a couple of years ago, and from what I hear some special prison treatment took its toll and now he wouldn't hurt a fly. When this guy tried to join ISIS, was his sole motivation the belief that God earnestly ordered Muslims to indiscriminately fight the unbelievers? A better question: would he have joined them without the promise of wealth beyond his wildest dreams and a chance to start anew?
Not so. There are plenty of cultures that don't follow this. Off the top of my head I can think of the Sami people for whom we have zero archeological evidence of wars. They are not unique either. It just so happens that the barbaric cultures spread more rapidly than the peaceful ones
Please don't fulminate, or make personal attacks like "Typical Hasbara lying", or use capitals for emphasis, or post flamebait or engage in ideological battle on HN. We've had to remind you to observe the guidelines before. Topics like this normally don't get discussed on HN because they inevitably turn into flame wars. If you can't participate in a thread like this without doing it in a flamewar style, please don't participate at all. It benefits nobody, and we have to ban accounts that continue to engage in this style of activity.
Hmm, and the outright deceitful and insidious nature of the post I was responding to? Where someone twists the facts in their very first sentence to hide the fact that the victims of that slaughter were themselves Muslim - just to justify an Islamophobic tirade for the remainder of their post ...
what do you call that? And how exactly does one counter such obvious lies of omission, without using the word "lying"?
"Sorry dear chap, but I believe you are intentionally hiding key facts here,namely the identity of the victims themselves"?
And btw, where was the flamebait? My 2nd paragraph is as close to a precise summary of what's actually happening as you can get, without hiding the identities of anyone involved.
Some version of the second sentence could be fine if you omitted the all-caps words and belligerent tone. The phrases "Typical Hasbara lying", "Birds of a feather flock together" are flamebait, along with the overall hostile and escalatory tone of that comment, along with this entire comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45788190.
This style of commenting is a pattern extending back at least a year, maybe longer. We've already asked you before to do better.
The comment you replied to was also flagged and killed, and also wasn't what we like to see, but that doesn’t justify or excuse further escalation from you.
If you expect others to conduct themselves to a high standard, you need to show a sincere intent to conduct yourself to a high standard, and it makes it harder for us to take action against an earlier comment when a later comment escalates so egregiously.
None of this is personal or specific to this comment or any issue. The guidelines have been in place since HN began and have changed little. They apply equally to everyone. By participating on HN, you agree to adhere to the guidelines. If you don't like HN's guidelines, you can choose not to participate.
I don't see the original comment tying the tensions to Islam anywhere. And yes, the conflict is heavily tied to ethnicities - RSF is Arab-dominated and has been systematically genociding other ethnicities, and both sides are effectively enabling a resource grab for their backers.
Arab vs non-Arab conflicts are also nothing new. See Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, etc.
GTFO with that "real" genocide line. There are atrocities everywhere in this world. The difference is whether your country is funding it and providing political cover for it. In one case they are not, and in the other they are. In the case they are, there is legitimate and justified outrage.
>I doubt we will hear "Death Death to the RSF" or demands to end the genocide in el-Fasher from the college kids and tik-tok influencers any time soon.
You're probably right. It's unfortunate that acts of genocide like the one ongoing in Gaza need to go viral on social media for many Westerners to even be aware of them, much less care.
Perhaps more effort should be put towards raising awareness of other genocides like the genocide in Gaza.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, but you are exactly right.
The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world. Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.” It appears the world only pays attention when Jews are involved.
An estimated 500,000 children have died from malnutrition alone since the Sudan conflict began in 2023[0]. Do you see people in Paris, Washington, or New York demanding an end to that conflict? We have not even accounted for deaths caused directly by the fighting.
Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties, yet all condemnation is directed at the IDF, which attempts to avoid civilian deaths, including by dropping leaflets before airstrikes[2]. No one seems to care that Hamas—the elected government of Gaza—is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way in a war it initiated. Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
I always find it fascinating that pretty much every time pro-Israel posters like yourself bring up Sudan, they only use it as a cudgel to deflect from the IDF's actions in Gaza, not out of any legitimate or sincere concern for the people of Sudan.
> The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world.
Verifiably false.
> Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.”
Because we've seen time and time again the brutal methods the IDF uses to retaliate against the entire population of Gaza, employing collective punishment against innocents. And the protesters were sadly proven very right yet again.
> Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties [...] Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
Surely even you realize that bombing a building when you know there are human shields held within is a bad thing, right? If you know there are innocent people in the blast radius of your bomb and you still fire the bomb, you are the villain in this story. The IDF has killed more civilians than Hamas has and it's not even remotely close, a difference of tens of thousands at minimum.
The idea that “western intervention” is the only thing that stops these from occurring is so ignorant and rooted in racism I don’t know where to begin.
The Europeans left more than 50 years ago. In your weird world view, only Europeans have any agency. Their actions before the 1960s is why the Arab RSF is murdering black people in 2025, amirite? The Arabs have no agency of their own, they’re just instruments of the will of long dead European people.
There is always a choice! The choice the RSF made today is entirely on them. Don’t try to deflect that.
"However, those European countries haven’t acknowledged or apologized for what they have done."
Not completely and not for everything, but largely it is at least recognized. I mean, I learned about it and how bad it all was in a ordinary european school. What you say implies it is like in turkey, where they don't tell students in school what happened in Armenia. Or like in china, where even the knowledge gets removed. (I think Japan also largely choose not to reevaluate its glorious bloody empire past)
So blaming every war in Africa on the colonial past is maybe not helpful, when there have been wars before european involvement. And especially here, to me it seems a inner muslim/arab war. Different factions backed by different arabic states. UAE and Quatar. What exactly is the european involvment here?
I mean, each of the countries you cited (India, China, Cambodia - formerly part of ‘Indochine’) had very well known colonial mistreatment… not sure if you were aware
You're reaching thousands of years ago and missing the much more significant event of the Norman conquest. And I would say that the Normans actually did influence Brexit to the extent that there's a confusion about continental vs. English identity that's only expanded over time.
1,000 years is no time at all, in the age of writing.
> Influenced, yes. Can be blamed for, no, much less their descendants today (who aren’t British).
I agree!
This is different than saying the British are responsible for many current day conflicts (e.g., India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine) which is much less controversial.
I take it that’s supposed to be funny. Most people have absolutely zero agency over what happens beyond their own city’s borders, proclaiming your views loudly in public is one of the very few ways you can influence society.
This is a statement of fact but the context is missing quite a lot. The IDF is a uniformed military force and Hamas is an ununiformed organization intentionally hiding among soft targets. Hamas also has children among it's soldiers.
Hamas intentionally created the situation where the IDF will kill women and children to accomplish their objective.
The IDF incursion is also a response to an attack by Hamas that targeted non-combatantants for murder, rape and abduction.
I don't think any of that is a controversial but correct me if I'm wrong.
It's because the US clearly is the main supporter of Israel who is the Goliath in that conflict.
In Sudan the US is not clearly propping up one side.
People are reasonably more mad in the US about Gaza since their taxes directly fund it and the US seemingly could exert influence on Israel if there was political will.
It is not clear how the US would improve Sudan without wading into some massive peacekeeping / reconstruction mission - which no one has the appetite for.
'Visible from space' loses its bite when you see they're using cameras that can practically read your mail from space.
Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.
America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.
They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.
They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.
They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.
They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.
Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.
Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.
This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.
> When we go to see the Emirates, what number on our to-do list do you think Sudan is? It is not on our to-do list. What we have to do is keep the Emirates onside with Israel and onside against Iran.
> What we have to do is keep the Emirates onside with Israel and onside against Iran
This is so incredibly dumb.
The UAE is a spigot of oil and money. (Secondarily, a massive buyer of American goods, services, weapons and financial assets.) Sudan isn’t on our to-do list because it doesn’t directly affect American voters. Oil prices and capital do.
I don't understand what you find dumb. Can you explain what you're disagreeing with? Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter? Surely by this metric we would be more allied with Venezuela than Israel. Or, perhaps, you have not fully articulated yourself.
It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb.
> Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter?
Precludes? No. Politically balanced. Absolutely. You’re not going to win votes promising higher oil prices and stalled construction projects to plant a moral flag in Africa so the guys backed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey win. Abu Dhabi is more than just geopolitically convenient.
> It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb.
Why? I get nothing from views, and much of our foreign policy is based around Israel, which serves the needs of our state in almost uncountable ways. Is it not just as dumb to ignore this? Acting as if our relationships with foreign countries appear in a vacuum seems.... absurd, to put it charitably.
Even if Israel literally didn’t exist, we’d still be doing the same thing with the UAE. Maybe even more, since Israel is sucking up capital that would otherwise go to Dubai.
As always, conflicts are much easier to understand when viewed through the lens of materialism.
Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire.
The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland.
The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supplied with diverted arms shipments from the West to the UAE.
Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call.
This is almost exactly wrong. Like, if you wanted to invent a plausible-on-its-face position that formed a perfect -1 dot product with the truth, this is what you’d come up with.
Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.
But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.
Way to miss the point and claim things I never said at the same time.
Earnest religious belief means nothing without material support. You can hate someone all you want for whatever religious reasons you want but it doesn't matter unless somebody gives you guns, bombs, tanks and planes. And why would someone do that? Because of material interests.
Why did the Crusades happens (multiple times)? Because of material interests. How did those who materially benefit get ordinary people to fight? By fomenting religious fervor and hatred. Why did they do that? To further their material interests.
You mention Ukraine. Perfect example. Russia took Crimea to get a port on the Black Sea in 2014 and also to control resources in that area. Why did Russia invade in 2021? Because maintaining what is essentially an oblast (like Kaliningrad) became too expensive. Ukraine had cut off the water. So Russia ideally wanted to despose the government and install another Lukachenko puppet government (like they have in Belarus) but, failing that, they wanted to secure a land bridge to Crimea. Just look at a map.
One could say the exact same thing you do about "African agency" about the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine but that's just an excuse. Putin doesn't care about that. He cares about the land they live on. And we've seen this exact playbook many times over. For example, Hitler used to annex Austria and the Sudetenland to ostensibly re-unite German-speaking people but again, that wasn't the point.
Now you might say in any of these places the people are motivated to kill for ethnic and/or religios interests. They may genuinely believe in this (but again, ask yourself why) but there are also a ton of opportunists. An absolute perfect example of this is Maria Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who opposed Maduro in Venezuela and her two biggest goals are to privatize Venezuelan industries (previously nationalized) and to further support Israel. She may as well put out a press release saying she's open to the backing her in a coup. Privatizing national industries for Western companies to profit? Sounds a whole lot like material interests to me.
Go back in history and ask yourself why the borders of Sudan are what they are, just like we could for Rwanda and a host of other civil wars. Why exactly are these different ethnic groups in the same country? Well, that's a colonizer special, perfected by the British Empire, to sow division in the locals so the colonizer can profit. Once again, material interests.
> Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts
Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.)
The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way for poorly-trained, uneducated troops to mostly reliably identify the enemy.)
> heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold
Why not oil, too?
> Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call
This hubris fuels our forever wars, both in trade and militarily.
We don’t have that influence. If we tried restricting both Qatar and the UAE in Africa, we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about enough that our leaders have even less free rein than our geopolitical limits circumscribe.
> You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields
True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.
Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.
So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.
> We don’t have that influence.
Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.
Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?
If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].
> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...
I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).
> if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes
Granted. The UAE is not involved due to animus. But this analysis renders everyone in Sudan as NPCs. The reason the conflict is an opportunity for meddling, the reason it has turned into a genocide, these causes are found more in culture and politics than pure economics.
> You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to
America withholding arms from
Sudan wouldn’t change much.
If we started dictating Emirati foreign policy based on withholding arms, they should drop us as a security guarantor. (And can. And eventually would.)
We’d lose a reliable ally and investor and oil producer in exchange for foreign policy control in a region Americans are sick of being involved in.
> What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in?
Nothing. Like actually nothing. Maybe domestic gold prices would bump up a bit, but less than they have with tariffs and the deficit explosion.
If we tried to get the UAE to stop trading Sudanese gold, on the other hand, that would mean applying diplomatic and possibly economic pressure. That could result in costs to American voters we don’t care to pay.
> the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds
Yet blood diamonds still sell.
Gold is tracked and traded based on provenance—high-end mints will produce more expensive bars. The difference is there is a larger buyer pool for conflict gold than there is for diamonds. (And much more for oil.)
> American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all
This is what I meant. American leaders are constrained in acting on foreign policy lines that result in domestic pain. Alienating the Gulf would result in domestic pain.
So Arabs fly planes into the world trade center, commit mass genocide at darfur and are still support this dude and his band of thugs with their colonialist rape of Africa?
The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.
https://archive.is/H0WYu
> ...the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accused of backing the RSF with supplies and mercenaries...
And also helping to launder Hemedti's gold via Dubai. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-resources/ex...
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, (EDIT: the UK, indirectly) and Egypt have each also supplied weapons into this conflict [1]. Presumably due to Sudan’s position on the Red Sea. (China and the UAE seem to be alone in supplying the RSF, though.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
The other complication is the surprising contributions of various African countries. Ethiopia had supported the RSF until 2024, and Kenya hosted an RSF conference in Feb 2025. Haftar in Libya supported RSF before the war, but may have changed positions as his Russian backers turned against the RSF in 2024. The RSF also has some ties to rebels in South Sudan as well as in Chad. Chad in particular gave shelter to the RSF at the behest of the UAE, but has also seized arms shipments that were intended for the RSF. Russia as noted was sympathetic to the RSF until mid-2024, when they switched sides.
When the war initially broke out, some articles in The Economist seemed somewhat agnostic between the two sides, noting that both had serious corruption issues and had committed many abuses. But as the war has progressed, the RSF seems to have revealed itself to be the far more vicious faction, and the red E along with the rest of the Western media now sees their advances as a tragedy. Unfortunately, the one constant here is the general failure of foresight among nearly all countries of the global North (whether aligned with the West or Russia) getting involved in Africa. If the brutality of the RSF had been better anticipated in 2023, the current situation might have been prevented.
I don’t think there was, or is, a lot of stomach to more serious intervention in Sudan. Libya and Haiti went sideways.
From that Wikipedia (2023-):
- Significantly more than 150,000 total killed
- Estimated 522,000 children dead due to malnutrition
- 8,856,313 internally displaced
- 3,506,383 refugees
It's also likely that the US is kept at bay by trading UAE acceptance of Israel in return for diplomatic cover and military passivity. The US destruction of Libya has been quite important for the UAE:s ability to supply the RSF as well, a lot of the weapon transports pass through there.
> likely that the US is kept at bay by trading UAE acceptance of Israel in return for diplomatic cover and military passivity
Sudanese tensions predate the current mess in Gaza, as well as the Abraham Accords.
At this point I’m surprised we aren’t seeing people conclude that we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq because of Israel.
The last time Janjaweed-style gangs engaged in similar acts of apartheid and genocide in Darfur the US opposed it and openly called it a genocide. This was in 2007.
I'm not sure when UAE ramped up funding and equipping of similar groups in the Sahel and Maghreb, but when Libya collapses in 2011 they decided to do it there and a few years later they rebrand Janjaweed-militias as RSF and expects them to professionalise because they are provided with resources and diplomatic cover.
Unsurprisingly these gangs in Libya, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere don't stop doing racist murder and rape because it is made easier for them to get away with. Also unsurprisingly, the UAE sees the US as the main risk that they'll be stopped and held accountable, because the ICC and ICJ just don't work as a decent person would expect them to.
The US got (justifiably) yelled at for the war in Iraq, and again (less justifiably) in Libya and Afghanistan, and took the leas that military interference is always wrong, despite the obvious counterexamples of Syria and Crimes.
This is complicated by a lot of the yelling coming from US peace activists, who took advantage of their complete vindication in Iraq (and Vietnam before that) to pretend that there's a through-line and preventing a dictator from bombing dissidents or a naked land-grab-war-of-aggression is identical to starting our own naked-land-grab-war-of-aggression.
You forgot US and UK.
Got evidence that they supplied weapons? GP’s Wikipedia article does not seem to say that they did (apart from an unclear reference to US military aid, which I don’t think refers to US military aid to Sudan specifically).
China never directly supplied weapons either. Yet its weapons have been found on both sides. The RSF got them through the UAE and the SAF got it through Iran.
If GGP is going to count China as a supplier it's only fair to count the US. Js. Fwiw, both China and the US place sanctions on the RSF and denounce it as a genocide. Neither directly does business with either side.
Russia is involved directly in the conflict however, literally sending in Wagner mercenaries. They used to back the RSF but in early 2024 switched sides and now fully back the SAF. The sad truth is that most major international players don't care about the Sudanese people. They just want to have the support of whichever side comes out on top so they can continue exploiting the gold reserves of the country like they did before the dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by a popular revolution.
Where is the UAE getting weapons from?
The UAE isn’t an arms manufacturing juggernaut.
I think it’s possibly fair to say the U.S. doesn’t want this war to continue and probably doesn’t even want the UAE to supply weapons to it, but that was likely true of Israel’s bombing of Gaza as well and no one batted an eyelid when holding the U.S. responsible there.
China?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/05/sudan-advance...
I haven't found any articles implicating the US, which has export sanctions on Sudan. The only thing I could find was something about small arms from the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/28/u...
This report https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/sudan-constan... lists
> Weapons from China, Russia, Serbia, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates and Yemen identified
Although that seems to be mixing it up a bit, since Turkey and Russia are supporting the SAF.
Also some France-made weapons: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sudan-civil-war-amnesty-interna...
> China?
More like UK: UK military equipment used by militia accused of genocide found in Sudan, UN told
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/28/u...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/28/u...
says it was not supplied by US/UK but rather UAE.
UK|US weapons via an intermediary has been an ongoing handwashing pretence for many decades.
eg: Very British bribery: the whistleblower who exposed the UK’s dodgy arms deals with Saudi Arabia
~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/07/long-read-brit...
discusses some of that history back to the 1970s. It has gone on far longer than that.
Both the US and UK governments are aware of where their weapons are destined for, both pretend to have no knowledge or control.
That is like saying Russia is suppling Ukraine with weapons to kill Russians because Russia has exported weapons to X that then made it to Ukraine. That is just silly claiming Russia is a supplier of arms to Ukraine.
I didn’t know British weapons made it to the RSF. Wow. Have American weapons been used in the war?
It would be very strange if American weapons weren't used in a conflict this big, which is a very different question from "did the US government sell weapons into this war".
I've looked for articles and don't see anything about US weapons. It would be very strange, indeed, but supposition isn't proof and I can't find anything suggesting the US is involved in anyway. Colour me surprised, tbh.
I wasn't here to 'provide proof'. Just pointing out that any conflict beyond a certain size almost certainly has some weapon from every large arms producer deployed in the field. I can't image how many tons of small arms we left laying around in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest that are now being recirculated around the worlds conflict zones. I remember after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan if you were in the right place and knew the right people you could get cases of NIB AKs for like $25 a rifle (no, I didn't). It's not politics...it's logistics.
Guess you are on the wrong side of things if you know your weapons are getting laundered through other countries to get to a conflict. And of course uk, us and china know this and always knew this.
How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet? They’ve been laundering everything for ages, esp Russian oil. How are they so immune to this?
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet?
The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)
They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
Also invested in soccer clubs.
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> The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland
And whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
The comment merely said UAE has become strategically influential in finance, transport (cargo shipping (#5 in world), world's busiest international passenger airport), tourism. Nothing about being fond.
5% GDP growth in non-oil. More diversified than Saudi. #2 globally for being "easy to do business in and with". Top-10 in Global Soft Power Index since 2023 [0], rose from #18 in 2020. Dubai has become a global influencer capital.
Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes, and as a regional counterweight.
If we're talking about Switzerland, yes it's a federal republic with semi-direct democracy, but it also happily supplied mercenaries to mainland Europe for several centuries.
>Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes
How exactly are they waning? Last I heard everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money.
In the long term, Venezuela has more proven reserves (but much less production capacity). Or nuclear + renewable will overtake fossil fuel. In either scenario, Saudi's share of total global energy production will likely decline by late 21st century.
And in non-oil GDP growth, UAE is currently outpacing Saudi.
As to "everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money", depends on who "everyone" is: 77% of the total workforce in Saudi is migrant workers, many of whom earn < US$5000/yr. They're not citizens.
I never said anything about the OP, just merely adding to his point on what has UAE become
> whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
I’ve heard that line about Qatar, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta, Cyprus, the Maldives, and countless other small states.
I grew up in Switzerland. Folks like to compare themselves to us, mostly due to complete ignorance of our actual history and culture.
It’s true in part and misses the point in others. Geopolitically, however, the observation is sound. Small states need a powerful protector far away or to balance their position between nearby large states. The latter only works in mountainous hellholes and on peninsulas (provided your larger neighbor(s) can’t blockade you; if they can, you need a foreign guarantor with a blue-water navy, of which historically there have only been one or two at a time).
(You know Switzerland is a weapons exporter, right? To the U.S. But also to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Hungary. One could almost say that folks who conclude intent from a place of ignorance communicate “all you need to know about” themselves.)
I think the connotation of 'being Switzerland' has less to do with the modern state of Switzerland and more to do with the ... Unsavory things Switzerland has historically been a part of.
It's way more basic than that if you ask the average person. "Swiss neutrality/ banking"
Most of them are patently incorrect, and most of those don't even care to educate themselves since they keep repeating cheap stuff they heard from other bright people and that's it. How many heard about accepting refugees despite being literally surrounded by axis and facing starvation of their own people (how many nations would do that including yours), or not-so-secret massive collaboration with western allies while on surface acting as neutral ie Campione d'Italia, and so on and on).
They were neutral in WWII like ie Spain was, think a bit what does it actually means. Not participating in conflict in any way. So they accepted both jewish and nazi gold or art, and everybody's else. If you want to understand why some of that was kept around after the war maybe reading about numbered accounts would enlight you. If you actually care to understand history as it happened.
Hitler had plans to conquer Switzerland after dealing with Russia, he was aware that they were 'most free and most armed nation in the world', fiercely independent and taking them would cost him dearly not only due to terrain.
Literally nobody had come out of WWII with properly clean slate, you just need to dig (not even deep) to find abhorable stuff on everybody, to different volume of course. Swiss have no problem acknowledging their mistakes, much more than most other nations.
So why do they repeat the same mistakes by hosting Putins family, laundering his money, and denying Germany to deliver Swiss-made air defense ammunition to Ukraine?
Perhaps, but that comment did not speak fondly about UAE.
One might say your own comment tells everyone all they need to know about you.
> Perhaps, but that comment did not speak fondly about UAE.
Where did I say I'm referring to OP? I'm merely adding to his point on what UAE is today
And Qatar is sponsoring and hosting Hamas. Everyone looks the other way, where billions of dollars are.
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Wait, the U.S. is looking away from Qatar’s sponsorship of Hamas at the behest of Israel?
How does that square with the face that Israel literally attacked Qatar to get to Hamas leaders in there?
Hamas was the de facto government in the Gaza strip, so it was in everyone's best interest to fund them enough to keep their civil branches running (pre-oct 7).
>Qatar does, the official allows, transfer $30 million each month to the Hamas administration in Gaza. But those payments are performed in consultation with Washington and Israel - and with their approval, he says.
>Each month, he says, construction materials worth tens of millions of dollars are also delivered from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. those supplies are then sold by Hamas. He says the organization uses the proceeds to pay its administrative staff. Israel, in turn, he explains, supplies $10 million worth of diesel fuel to the Gaza Strip each month, with Qatar providing another 10 million to needy families. They receive $100 each, "martyr families excluded," the government representative stresses.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-partner-and-...
Netanyahu having had people transfer cash was a big scandal in Israel.
Trying to murder the negotiating team in Doha was an effort to stop the US from pushing through 'a deal' as it's commonly been called. They've previously been successful at this and it likely annoyed the US that the israelis failed.
The thing is that "Hamas" is used as a synonym for words like "terrorist" and "palestinian" and "arab", and in some circles in the US and largely in Israel "Qatar" means the same thing. It's the un-chosen people that need to serve or die, basically. Hence the anger at Netanyahu, and an important reason why he clings to power, he doesn't want to step off until he's made history some other way that makes israelis forget his scandals.
They are stable and predicable. If you lend them some money, you can expect to still have it next year.
Not calling Dubai the devil but you could make deals with the devil if the devil was known to religiously fulfill his contracts.
There are a lot of places where you don’t know whether their currency or political system could be rocked next year.
The UAE is pretty good at playing both sides so they always come out ahead. They act as a key diplomatic intermediary and host a major US military base which is essential to projecting power in the region.
the CIA hired the mafia to assassinate castro in the 60s. these things are not so black and white. stated goals are often independent of behavior
Similar reasons why Israel hasn't experienced any sanctions yet despite their ongoing genocide against the Palestinians
Just wanna plug the most thorough and useful video I've seen on the history of this conflict. The US, Russia, and many other players are more heavily involved in this conflict than is often discussed in media. It breaks down the specific ways many international players are profiting from the conflict and helps makes sense of the motives driving it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqIMES53rsY
It's not a conflict, it's a genocide
Yes ofc. The RSF is just the rebranded Janjaweed which were legally classified as having committed genocide. But they never faced any international consequences and here they are committing genocide once again. It's also a major conflict though as the SAF is the major oppositional force fighting against the RSF. SAF was the military that took control after a democratic revolution pushed out the dictator Omar al-Bashir
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This is entirely false. The UN clearly defines [1] genocide as (emphasis mine):
> ...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group...
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
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Sudan is the 3rd largest producer of gold in Africa but it remains the poorest country in Africa because the companies that exploit those resources are never Sudanese.
The RSF got their weapons by acting as mercenaries for the UAE to fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Fighting as a mercenary is pretty much the only reliable source of income for many people in the country.
From wikipedia :
On examination of photos and videos of weapons used in the conflict that were posted on social media, the rights group identified that companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia, and the UAE were associated with the weapons provided to RSF.[96] Human Rights Watch reviewed images of show crates with markings indicating they were manufactured in 2020 and initially acquired by the UAE Armed Forces in through a contract with Adasi, a subsidiary of UAE-based weapons manufacturer Edge Group. A January 2024 report by the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan deemed the UAE's alleged support to the RSF as "credible"
According to Business Insider, "The two generals helped Russian President Vladimir Putin exploit Sudan's gold resources to help buttress Russian finances against Western sanctions and fund his war in Ukraine."[108]
Yes, to clarify the primary international players:
Russia: initially supported the RSF, then at one point was trading with both sides, and in 2024/2025 fully switched sides to back the SAF
Iran: stayed out of it until 2024 when it finally backed the SAF which caused a major turning point in the conflict
UAE/the US: the main player responsible for RSF's rise. It hired out RSF mercenaries to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At one point there were more than 40,000 RSF mercenaries (mostly between the ages of 14-17) in Yemen. It continues to be the primary funder of the RSF
Israel: the RSF buys surveillance tech and weapons from Israel
Saudi Arabia: the largest smuggler of (illegally acquired) gold from RSF. A major source of funding for the RSF
China: doesn't directly deal with either side but Chinese-made weapons were found in the hands of the RSF mostly through the UAE reselling them. The SAF also has some Chinese made weapons through Russia and Turkey
tl;dr: it's a very complex disaster but international players simply don't have an interest in ending it. The SAF is the main opposition to the genocidal RSF, but they are also uninterested in maintaining the democracy that the people fought for and the sides backing the SAF (mostly Iran, and now Russia) are likely hoping to continue their exploitation of gold if they defeat the RSF
Modern Belgian congo
... unfortunately what matters is that gold is a curse. Colonialism hundreds of years ago froze extractive oppressive hierarchies, and even though many places gained independence the new elite mostly took the already in-place system and started to run it to benefit themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Origins_of_Comparativ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
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I'm constantly impressed that we are a civilisation that can look down from space and see this kind of barbarism.
"Visible from space" used to mean "by astronauts". If high-resolution sensors are allowed, then the term applies to things like a tree and a car, and doesn't signify much.
Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.
"Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects “consistent with the size of human bodies” and “reddish ground discolouration” thought to be either blood or disturbed soil."
The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.
> Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.
I'd happily do it if someone pays for my ticket
Ticket to Sudan, or ticket to space?
Start a gofundme, I'll chip in.
> Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.
That sounds slow and expensive.
Having a foot in both the future and the past. Or at least I wish it were in the past.
Murder is timeless (apparently).
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
Can we verify those images are not edited or generated?
Why would you fake satellite images? The perpetrators uploaded videos by themselves
Because war propaganda exist. Verify, don't trust.
Yes, the ISS as a sadistic Christof
It's a libertarian paradise.
UAE backed RSF's doing.
There is another article on that topic: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/31/sudans-latest-...>
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Whataboutism fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
The silence from the west on what's going on in Sudan is deafening. It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan?
Throwing out "whataboutism" every time someone dares ask a question like this is a fallacy in itself, intending to distract from the question of why genocide in places like Sudan are so thoroughly and utterly ignored and even buried.
> It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan?
The simple truth is a lot of, if not most, such vocalised outrage in any country is nine parts vanity. Remember #StopKony? About as effective for the people being harmed as students at Columbia barricading themselves into a building.
I’m not sure I condemn moral vanity. It is a genuine intellectual exercise. But it’s one that doesn’t particularly benefit from repeat unless one seeks to become a student of atrocity, and one that has strong viral effects.
What about the minority who actually try to help those harmed, e.g. by fundraising for victims or volunteering? They’re far and few in between. Moreover, their efforts benefit from economies of scale.
As a result, in any community, the people actually being helpful will tend to pick their battles. And the people flipping out for fun will cluster around whatever is trendy to flip out about in public.
People tend to care a lot more about wars their country is funding.
Because we dont fund or assist what's going on in Sudan? We have sanctions in place against the RSF rather than applauding their leaders in congress every year.
I agree with your first paragraph but I am following the principle of having the conversation around this specific HN topic on this post.
Just enough funding to view suffering. No funding to end it.
What do you want to do? Send in troops from somewhere else to die too?
Well we are currently sending funding. Except that funding is going to further the conflict. Sudan's gold reserves are critical materials. The previous dictator, Omar al-Bashir, was propped up by foreign powers exactly because they allowed those countries to extract the gold reserves. The RSF is the same thing. they are the evolution of the Janjaweed militias that the ICC found to be committing genocide. The international community did nothing to stop them or hold them accountable so they are once again committing genocide. International players want this to continue. Russia was at some point funding both sides and sending in Wagner mercenaries. UAE has been funding the RSF since the very start and continues to be the largest importer of (illegal) gold. Israel benefits because the RSF is a major importer of its surveillance tech as well as weapons. Both Israel and the US fund the UAE despite knowing that the UAE is fueling the RSF because they both ultimately benefit. American and even Chinese weapons have been found on both sides (mostly through the UAE reselling weapons to the RSF). Even if the SAF wins, it'll just be another military junta whose top priority is to exploit the gold reserves to the benefit of whichever nation is funding it and NOT giving any of that wealth back to the people.
Sadly, yet another bloody chapter of the Abu Dhabi (al Nahyan) - Doha (al Thani) feud that has been going on since the 2011 coup attempt [0], which itself is part of a longer multi-generational blood feud going on between the royal families [4]. The Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Balkans are all burning because of this saga [1].
The UAE backs the RSF [2] (formerly known as the Janjaweed of the Darfur Genocide), and Qatar supports the Sudanese Army [3]
[0] - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/united-arab-emirates-pala...
[1] - https://lobelog.com/doha-and-abu-dhabis-incompatible-visions...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/world/how-u-a-e-arms-bolstered-a-sudanes...
[3] - https://www.africaintelligence.com/eastern-africa-and-the-ho...
[4] - https://gulfif.org/changing-alignments-in-the-lower-gulf/
The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.
> bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible
They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.
Destabilizing the region, working with Hamas, facilitating terror financing, working with Iran, and a bunch of other stuff should concern us. There’s plenty of flat sand to park aircraft on without doing business with those filthy slavers.
> plenty of flat sand to park aircraft on
Then someone else parks there. Barring a Saudi takeover of Qatar, we’re stuck there to keep the Russians and Chinese out.
Qatar already deals with Iran and Russia by proxy. Qatar’s largest trading partner now is China and Qatar supports the one China policy.
> Qatar already deals with Iran and Russia by proxy
So does the UAE. They’ve played their game well.
It doesn’t mean we need to be their staunch defenders. But it’s in our government’s interest to not piss them off for no gain. And we’re not in a place in America where foreign policy swings power.
We should wash our hands of both places and their petty feud. They offer us nothing but problems and moral stain by association.
Much of Europe and Asia is dependent on Gulf sourced ONG and Gulf sourced FDI.
And the current crisis is happening because the last time we were hands off with Middle Eastern affairs shortly before the Arab Spring, a number of conflicts spiraled into proxy wars between KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, and Iran.
We just have to keep protecting them and give them weapons, otherwise somebody else will do it.
Quite a high moral ground to be on, I tell ya. I know I know, realpolitik and all, but then lets stop pretending there is some higher ground and treat say china-us conflict as something that literally doesn't concern Europe at all (seems like US has still military upper hand but who knows for how long, seems like China will steamroll ya economically/technologically pretty soon). Especially given this year developments when we saw that US military equipment cannot be trusted, US IT infra cannot be trusted and so on.
Europe would be more concern if there was more trust in the current US government. Besides, European politicians have been so naive they have let China use their financial power to exert pressure, they are slowly waking up to it, but not fast enough.
OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?
In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia.
There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.
A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
Like I said, I'm not apologizing for any of the many bad things Qatar has done, but I don't understand how this, where Qatar is supporting the legitimate-ish and not-especially-genocidal side, is being used as evidence by the "Qatar sucks" camp.
Becuase this is one proxy war that is part of a larger proxy war across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.
I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.
> The Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Balkans are all burning because of this saga
Balkans, you say?
The UAE backs Vucic and is the primary FDI source for Serbia's real estate and armaments industry. A major reason Vucic's administration slid into authoritarianism was because the opposition began asking hard questions about the Belgrade Waterfront Project.
Right on mate, but that's hardly "Balkans is burning", if you know at least a bit of recent European history...
You think the Abu Dhabi Qatari rivalry began in 2011? 1700s more like it.
It ebbs and flows depending on whether it's an al Khalifa or an al Thani who controls Doha. Before the 1995 coup, it was the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan that was in control, and they had both familial and economic relations in KSA and Abu Dhabi.
Khaleeji (like everyone else) are fine putting family history aside if it does not interfere with monetary incentives, and the crux of the issue has been clashing LNG claims between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. The al Thani clan has been pursuing a maximalist claim and works closely with Turkiye and Iran as their short term security guarantor as a result, but the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan were fine with the Abu Dhabi claim because they have significant economic holdings in the UAE and KSA.
Now I know 100% you're talking out of your ass. The Al Khalifas rule Bahrain. The Al Thanis rule Qatar. That bloodless coup you were talking about? That was the father of the current Qatari emir deposing his father when he was abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Qatari_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat).
The current emir succeeded him peacefully after the father stepped down.
All Arab families are intermarried in various ways, but the Al Nahyans have always been historical rivals to the Al Thanis, and have always tried to invade Qatar. The Qataris were invited to join with the UAE, along with Bahrain, but refused because they figured Abu Dhabi would take the leading role eventually (which it has). In all of the UAE, only Dubai remains more autonomous than usual because they were able to develop on their own with the guidance of the current sheikh of Dubai.
This is horrible but I feel like the "visible" from space headline is becoming increasingly less impressive as satellite imagery becomes more impressive.
You could say, I drink so much coffee it's visible from space and it's literally just a coffee mug sitting on a park bench.
This is truly horrible and I don't want to detract from the original aim of the article, but can we just establish that 'visible' from space doesn't really mean much anymore given the resolution of satellites? My garage is also visible from space, doesn't make it worthy of a headline.
So strange that I haven’t seen global coverage of this crisis on a daily basis, or demonstrations for “Free Sudan” on campuses. If anyone has a theory about why this humanitarian disaster doesn’t receive the same attention as Gaza, which didn't have such events, please feel free to share.
Western governments prefer to earn a day's income than sacrifice a whole African tribe since the last centuries up until now. So, no wonders Sudan felt in a hell hole where intertwined interests take place. Only the public outcry through mass media can stop a genocide which in this case does not sell. After a few years the balance of power will settle and may be a movie will be produced, like Hotel Rwanda.
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ideology plays little role in these conflicts, they are partially religio-ethnic but mostly about pure power, where religion and ethnicity are levers pulled to leverage power.
the people seeking power would sell out their own mothers if that's what it took.
the ideologies here are the ideologies of the HN commenters who try to fit the facts into their predetermined narratives.
and "visible from space" means absolutely nothing meaningful. can we read license plates from space or not yet? I don't know, but in this context, who cares
(way back in the 1980s a china-zealot was telling me that the Great Wall of China was "the only manmade thing visible from space." I had the presence of mind to say back, "isn't it more significant to be able to get to space to see what's visible?")
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> There’s also the Islamic Arab monarchies (RSF) vs the Muslim Brotherhood (SAF).
Qatar is an Arab monarchy and they are backing the SAF.
RSF are described as anti-islamist on Wikipedia. Is that wrong?
It's worth noting there are islamists on both side. Anyone who characterizes this as purely religious or ethnic has a bridge to sell. This conflict would have died years ago if it weren't for foreign actors putting their hands up Sudan's ass
The number of violent conflicts initiated by various islamist groups is insane [1]. There is something wrong here that goes beyond funding. It's possible to acknowledge that without being islamophobic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
The heatmap may as well represent a map of recently decolonized areas with unresolved political issues, and just so happens that many of these places have significant Muslim populations.
If you read the Koran and Hadiths, there are numerous statements about the true Muslims duty being to spread Islam - at the point of the sword being a well supported one, scripture wise.
Abu Bakr [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr] and even Mohammed himself [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_expeditions_of_Muhamma...].
It has never been a particularly ‘turn the other cheek’ religion.
Isn't that true of Christianity as well? If it is the true Muslim's duty to spread Islam by the sword, then why did it take centuries for populations to convert to Islam in places like Egypt which were conquered by leaders who knew Mohammed personally? Why did places which were never conquered by Muslim caliphates like Indonesia have significant Muslim populations today?
> Isn't that true of Christianity as well?
No, definitely not with the same authority. If you take the Bible as the equivalent of the Quran, and the church fathers as the equivalent of the hadiths, neither has any endorsement of conversion through threats of violence. Jesus was never a political or military leader, nor were the first few generations of Christian leaders.
I cannot give as clear an answer with regard to islam, because I do not know enough in depth, but there are a variety of interpretations. There was persecution of religious minorities in the Muslim empires, but mass slaughter of those who refused to convert would have inspired rebellion. The conversion did happen in places like Egypt and Syria and Persia and there was coercion.
As for Indonesia, the GP did not claim Islam spread only by the sword.
Some comparative theology time I guess?
Notably, I never said ‘by the sword’ was the only way. There is definitely a history of a number of religions doing it though!
First, I am under no illusions that what a religions book (or common formal teachings) says necessarily matches what its stated followers actually do.
Judaism essentially forbids ‘recruiting’, and it is quite difficult to convert. Mainly because Judaism is essentially ‘this group of people have a special deal with god/are god’s special people’.
Christianity has very mixed message (especially depending on which version of the Bible!) with some explicit calls to convert others - but without any calls to violence associated with them I can see [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2028%3A...]. John the Baptist being a prime ‘doer’. Also, there are explicit calls to ‘turn the other cheek/not retaliate’, such as [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205%3A3...].
Which makes the crusades particularly crazy/insane of course. Jesus was clearly non-violent and didn’t want people going out killing each other over anything he was saying.
At the time, the Church (now Catholic Church) heavily controlled ‘the word’, by insisting everything be done in Latin - which they were then the gatekeepers for. They also meddled (or flat out controlled!) national politics, and this gave them immense power to control the narrative of ‘what god demands’ in ways that now clearly contradict what we can read ourselves.
Islamic teachings can be interpreted in many different ways, and there are at least 2 major schools of thought (Sunni/Shia), and two major regional differences. What is taught//practiced in most of the middle, and what is taught/practiced in Indonesia being clear differentiators, for example.
But the Koran and its Hadiths are generally relatively accessible, if one looks, and it’s not hard to find analysis of different elements of it online. Unlike the Bible, there are explicit calls for the devout to study it directly. Also, unlike the Christian Bible, it also tends to be less - chaotic and internally conflicting. Comparing Matthew and Leviticus would give anyone whiplash, for example.
For instance - Quran 9:5 [https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/71323/what-is-the-...].
As to if it means believers must go to war with specific ‘irritating’ local tribes, or means all unbelievers, depends on who you ask. But most agree it means unbelievers in general. Many of the ‘problem’ groups in recent history with the west have explicitly used it to justify their attacks (among many others).
There are specific carve outs/exceptions for Jews and Christians (though also corresponding ‘give them no quarter unless they convert/behave as Muslims’ sections!), and in general the expectation is that for them to be protected they need to respect Islamic law and behave accordingly. Which isn’t really possible, for the most part, without significant changes in behavior/belief.
So depending on how ‘close to the book’ someone is being, and if sections are being ignored, depends on how much someone is going to believe/follow. Notably, Indonesia is widely seen is ‘Islam light’, but they do follow quite a bit of it (like how marriages work, expectations for women), that the west would struggle with. Middle eastern countries, communities in Pakistan, India, etc. tend to be the hardest core.
And once you understand the nature of the teaching, it is hard to not see the western way of life as being the personification of Iblis (the great satan - the tester of faith). After all, who wouldn’t want to chill out and drink beer, watch TV, and ignore the (often difficult) teachings of God? join us…, it’s fun! And don’t worry, there is no actual god anyway.
And like the old Christian Church during the crusades, government and madrases (religious schools) tend to be intermixed, which of course causes ‘problems’ similar to the crusades.
Thankfully not to the full extent, right now anyway.
I appreciate your long and thoughtful answer. I am actually Muslim, and from the Middle-East. I agree with most of what you said, I only disagree with the premise that Islam is an inherently violent religion. While I usually ignore such statements, seeing this atrocious conflict in Sudan being reduced to "Islam bad" especially when it's primarily non-Arab Muslims being genocided just irked me too much.
To your point, you're right that the Quran and the Hadith make some statements that to an unlearned individual's interpretation, appear to promote total war against the unbelievers. As you also point out, this is not unique to Islam, as demonstrated by the Crusades for example. I don't think the relative accessibility of the Quran today is a valid point, as in the current day and age anyone can pick up the Bible and read something like Matthew 10:34 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2010%3A...] and claim that Jesus ordered Christians to fight.
Continuing to use Christianity as an example, today you don't get that many extremist Christian groups because most places with significant Christian populations are well developed, generally have highly educated populations, robust political processes, and strong rule of law. Back to the map OP posted, if you overlay it with a map of Christian populations, you'll find a strong overlap in central Africa. Central Africa was recently decolonized, has unresolved political issues, and is majority Christian, as a result you get extremist organizations like the LRA forming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Resistance_Army_insur...].
My point is, it's easy to manipulate some holy text or another to claim it orders to fight the disbelievers. I would say the average Joe who does not need to worry about how tomorrow he will feed his family and educate his children will never get up in arms to kill someone just because of a cherry-picked verse from a holy book. If that happens and this Joe gets up to murder his neighbor, either Joe is a psychopath at heart, or the core reason is something else. If that wasn't the case, then Islam has a huge problem with disobedience, because its 2 billion followers aren't slaughtering everyone right now.
Anecdote time. I had the pleasure of acquainting someone who seriously thought about joining ISIS during their heyday. He was in high-school with me, I didn't know him very closely, but enough to paint a picture. He lived in a dysfunctional home with a terrible father who was too harsh and too violent. He lived in the street most of his childhood, basically treating his home as where he goes to sleep. He came from a poor background, was rock bottom academically, all while living in a country where most youth do not have high hopes for the future. He also had a history of drug abuse and generally thuggish behavior. On a spiritual level, the dude did not give a single iota about any teaching of Islam.
It was 2015. In the few months leading up to his arrest, he had a change of mind and heart. His closer friends tell me he started joining some FB groups where ISIS was doing recruitment. Having been exposed to a couple of recruitment videos myself, I imagine it would have been super lucrative for someone like him. They were always boasting about the loot the fighters would get from battle, how in a couple of months of fighting you could have your own house and land, a nice truck, a subservient wife, all while being super badass with guns and fancy combat gear AND God would love you and send you to heaven if you die (but you wouldn't, because look at the map, ISIS is unstoppable). It was almost like a parody version of the American dream. No need for a higher education, job interviews, hard work, or knowing the right people. If you can pick up a gun and don't mind killing these worthless scum who don't know any better, we can take care of the rest!
Somehow he was arrested and was imprisoned before he could join ISIS. He was released from prison a couple of years ago, and from what I hear some special prison treatment took its toll and now he wouldn't hurt a fly. When this guy tried to join ISIS, was his sole motivation the belief that God earnestly ordered Muslims to indiscriminately fight the unbelievers? A better question: would he have joined them without the promise of wealth beyond his wildest dreams and a chance to start anew?
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Looking into the past everyone looks like a barbarian. And yes, the use of the word was meant as sarcasm.
Not so. There are plenty of cultures that don't follow this. Off the top of my head I can think of the Sami people for whom we have zero archeological evidence of wars. They are not unique either. It just so happens that the barbaric cultures spread more rapidly than the peaceful ones
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Wait until you hear about how europeans behave—it makes the islamists look downright civilizing
Or the Israelian or Russian. It almost seems like it's more about power than religion per se.
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Please don't fulminate, or make personal attacks like "Typical Hasbara lying", or use capitals for emphasis, or post flamebait or engage in ideological battle on HN. We've had to remind you to observe the guidelines before. Topics like this normally don't get discussed on HN because they inevitably turn into flame wars. If you can't participate in a thread like this without doing it in a flamewar style, please don't participate at all. It benefits nobody, and we have to ban accounts that continue to engage in this style of activity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hmm, and the outright deceitful and insidious nature of the post I was responding to? Where someone twists the facts in their very first sentence to hide the fact that the victims of that slaughter were themselves Muslim - just to justify an Islamophobic tirade for the remainder of their post ...
what do you call that? And how exactly does one counter such obvious lies of omission, without using the word "lying"?
"Sorry dear chap, but I believe you are intentionally hiding key facts here,namely the identity of the victims themselves"?
And btw, where was the flamebait? My 2nd paragraph is as close to a precise summary of what's actually happening as you can get, without hiding the identities of anyone involved.
Some version of the second sentence could be fine if you omitted the all-caps words and belligerent tone. The phrases "Typical Hasbara lying", "Birds of a feather flock together" are flamebait, along with the overall hostile and escalatory tone of that comment, along with this entire comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45788190.
This style of commenting is a pattern extending back at least a year, maybe longer. We've already asked you before to do better.
The comment you replied to was also flagged and killed, and also wasn't what we like to see, but that doesn’t justify or excuse further escalation from you.
If you expect others to conduct themselves to a high standard, you need to show a sincere intent to conduct yourself to a high standard, and it makes it harder for us to take action against an earlier comment when a later comment escalates so egregiously.
None of this is personal or specific to this comment or any issue. The guidelines have been in place since HN began and have changed little. They apply equally to everyone. By participating on HN, you agree to adhere to the guidelines. If you don't like HN's guidelines, you can choose not to participate.
I don't see the original comment tying the tensions to Islam anywhere. And yes, the conflict is heavily tied to ethnicities - RSF is Arab-dominated and has been systematically genociding other ethnicities, and both sides are effectively enabling a resource grab for their backers.
Arab vs non-Arab conflicts are also nothing new. See Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, etc.
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Ya you know the answer to that. Remember there are between 1 and 3 MILLION Muslim detainees in the Xinjiang internment camps in China.
GTFO with that "real" genocide line. There are atrocities everywhere in this world. The difference is whether your country is funding it and providing political cover for it. In one case they are not, and in the other they are. In the case they are, there is legitimate and justified outrage.
>I doubt we will hear "Death Death to the RSF" or demands to end the genocide in el-Fasher from the college kids and tik-tok influencers any time soon.
You're probably right. It's unfortunate that acts of genocide like the one ongoing in Gaza need to go viral on social media for many Westerners to even be aware of them, much less care.
Perhaps more effort should be put towards raising awareness of other genocides like the genocide in Gaza.
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Is the best you can do a personal attack? Disagree with what i said? explain why. Attacking me personally shows your problems not mine.
"I am going to attempt to delegitimize the killing of children by acting like I care about this other conflict."
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Not sure why you are being downvoted, but you are exactly right.
The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world. Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.” It appears the world only pays attention when Jews are involved.
An estimated 500,000 children have died from malnutrition alone since the Sudan conflict began in 2023[0]. Do you see people in Paris, Washington, or New York demanding an end to that conflict? We have not even accounted for deaths caused directly by the fighting.
Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties, yet all condemnation is directed at the IDF, which attempts to avoid civilian deaths, including by dropping leaflets before airstrikes[2]. No one seems to care that Hamas—the elected government of Gaza—is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way in a war it initiated. Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Sudan_(2024%E2%80%93...
[1]: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/16/middleeast/israel-leaflet...
> The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world.
That's a lie. It was front page news for a week in every major western newspaper. Just use the Wayback Machine to look at the headlines for that day.
I always find it fascinating that pretty much every time pro-Israel posters like yourself bring up Sudan, they only use it as a cudgel to deflect from the IDF's actions in Gaza, not out of any legitimate or sincere concern for the people of Sudan.
> The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world.
Verifiably false.
> Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.”
Because we've seen time and time again the brutal methods the IDF uses to retaliate against the entire population of Gaza, employing collective punishment against innocents. And the protesters were sadly proven very right yet again.
> Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties [...] Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
Surely even you realize that bombing a building when you know there are human shields held within is a bad thing, right? If you know there are innocent people in the blast radius of your bomb and you still fire the bomb, you are the villain in this story. The IDF has killed more civilians than Hamas has and it's not even remotely close, a difference of tens of thousands at minimum.
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The idea that “western intervention” is the only thing that stops these from occurring is so ignorant and rooted in racism I don’t know where to begin.
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Wow, you’re off the deep end mate.
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The Europeans left more than 50 years ago. In your weird world view, only Europeans have any agency. Their actions before the 1960s is why the Arab RSF is murdering black people in 2025, amirite? The Arabs have no agency of their own, they’re just instruments of the will of long dead European people.
There is always a choice! The choice the RSF made today is entirely on them. Don’t try to deflect that.
"However, those European countries haven’t acknowledged or apologized for what they have done."
Not completely and not for everything, but largely it is at least recognized. I mean, I learned about it and how bad it all was in a ordinary european school. What you say implies it is like in turkey, where they don't tell students in school what happened in Armenia. Or like in china, where even the knowledge gets removed. (I think Japan also largely choose not to reevaluate its glorious bloody empire past)
So blaming every war in Africa on the colonial past is maybe not helpful, when there have been wars before european involvement. And especially here, to me it seems a inner muslim/arab war. Different factions backed by different arabic states. UAE and Quatar. What exactly is the european involvment here?
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It’s almost like hundreds of years of damage takes a bit to undo.
You realise that the whole world has suffered through tons of atrocities right?
Should we go through the history of India, China, Cambodia...
I mean, each of the countries you cited (India, China, Cambodia - formerly part of ‘Indochine’) had very well known colonial mistreatment… not sure if you were aware
That is their point. They grew past it.
The UK can’t blame Brexit on the Romans.
> The UK can’t blame Brexit on the Romans.
You're reaching thousands of years ago and missing the much more significant event of the Norman conquest. And I would say that the Normans actually did influence Brexit to the extent that there's a confusion about continental vs. English identity that's only expanded over time.
1,000 years is no time at all, in the age of writing.
> I would say that the Normans actually did influence Brexit
Influenced, yes. Can be blamed for, no, much less their descendants today (who aren’t British).
> Influenced, yes. Can be blamed for, no, much less their descendants today (who aren’t British).
I agree!
This is different than saying the British are responsible for many current day conflicts (e.g., India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine) which is much less controversial.
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I presume there will be protests at Columbia University?
I take it that’s supposed to be funny. Most people have absolutely zero agency over what happens beyond their own city’s borders, proclaiming your views loudly in public is one of the very few ways you can influence society.
Agree or disagree this post is clearly about which genocide they choose to protest.
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The IDF has killed many tens of thousands more women and children than Hamas has, so who the bigger terrorists are is debatable.
This is a statement of fact but the context is missing quite a lot. The IDF is a uniformed military force and Hamas is an ununiformed organization intentionally hiding among soft targets. Hamas also has children among it's soldiers.
Hamas intentionally created the situation where the IDF will kill women and children to accomplish their objective.
The IDF incursion is also a response to an attack by Hamas that targeted non-combatantants for murder, rape and abduction.
I don't think any of that is a controversial but correct me if I'm wrong.
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There’s nothing funny about the evil at Columbia University, subsidized by billion in taxpayer dollars.
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It's because the US clearly is the main supporter of Israel who is the Goliath in that conflict.
In Sudan the US is not clearly propping up one side.
People are reasonably more mad in the US about Gaza since their taxes directly fund it and the US seemingly could exert influence on Israel if there was political will.
It is not clear how the US would improve Sudan without wading into some massive peacekeeping / reconstruction mission - which no one has the appetite for.
It’s the religion not the color that’s the factor. If oppressor belongs to a certain religion it’s all kosher. If the roles reverse it’s genocide.
'Visible from space' loses its bite when you see they're using cameras that can practically read your mail from space.
Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.
America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.
They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.
They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.
They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.
They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.
Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.
Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.
This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.
> When we go to see the Emirates, what number on our to-do list do you think Sudan is? It is not on our to-do list. What we have to do is keep the Emirates onside with Israel and onside against Iran.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-131258413
> What we have to do is keep the Emirates onside with Israel and onside against Iran
This is so incredibly dumb.
The UAE is a spigot of oil and money. (Secondarily, a massive buyer of American goods, services, weapons and financial assets.) Sudan isn’t on our to-do list because it doesn’t directly affect American voters. Oil prices and capital do.
I don't understand what you find dumb. Can you explain what you're disagreeing with? Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter? Surely by this metric we would be more allied with Venezuela than Israel. Or, perhaps, you have not fully articulated yourself.
It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb.
> Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter?
Precludes? No. Politically balanced. Absolutely. You’re not going to win votes promising higher oil prices and stalled construction projects to plant a moral flag in Africa so the guys backed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey win. Abu Dhabi is more than just geopolitically convenient.
> It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb.
Why? I get nothing from views, and much of our foreign policy is based around Israel, which serves the needs of our state in almost uncountable ways. Is it not just as dumb to ignore this? Acting as if our relationships with foreign countries appear in a vacuum seems.... absurd, to put it charitably.
Even if Israel literally didn’t exist, we’d still be doing the same thing with the UAE. Maybe even more, since Israel is sucking up capital that would otherwise go to Dubai.
As always, conflicts are much easier to understand when viewed through the lens of materialism.
Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire.
The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland.
The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supplied with diverted arms shipments from the West to the UAE.
Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call.
This is almost exactly wrong. Like, if you wanted to invent a plausible-on-its-face position that formed a perfect -1 dot product with the truth, this is what you’d come up with.
Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.
But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.
Way to miss the point and claim things I never said at the same time.
Earnest religious belief means nothing without material support. You can hate someone all you want for whatever religious reasons you want but it doesn't matter unless somebody gives you guns, bombs, tanks and planes. And why would someone do that? Because of material interests.
Why did the Crusades happens (multiple times)? Because of material interests. How did those who materially benefit get ordinary people to fight? By fomenting religious fervor and hatred. Why did they do that? To further their material interests.
You mention Ukraine. Perfect example. Russia took Crimea to get a port on the Black Sea in 2014 and also to control resources in that area. Why did Russia invade in 2021? Because maintaining what is essentially an oblast (like Kaliningrad) became too expensive. Ukraine had cut off the water. So Russia ideally wanted to despose the government and install another Lukachenko puppet government (like they have in Belarus) but, failing that, they wanted to secure a land bridge to Crimea. Just look at a map.
One could say the exact same thing you do about "African agency" about the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine but that's just an excuse. Putin doesn't care about that. He cares about the land they live on. And we've seen this exact playbook many times over. For example, Hitler used to annex Austria and the Sudetenland to ostensibly re-unite German-speaking people but again, that wasn't the point.
Now you might say in any of these places the people are motivated to kill for ethnic and/or religios interests. They may genuinely believe in this (but again, ask yourself why) but there are also a ton of opportunists. An absolute perfect example of this is Maria Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who opposed Maduro in Venezuela and her two biggest goals are to privatize Venezuelan industries (previously nationalized) and to further support Israel. She may as well put out a press release saying she's open to the backing her in a coup. Privatizing national industries for Western companies to profit? Sounds a whole lot like material interests to me.
Go back in history and ask yourself why the borders of Sudan are what they are, just like we could for Rwanda and a host of other civil wars. Why exactly are these different ethnic groups in the same country? Well, that's a colonizer special, perfected by the British Empire, to sow division in the locals so the colonizer can profit. Once again, material interests.
>As always, conflicts are much easier to understand when viewed through the lens of materialism.
That no doubt does make understanding things seem easier.
> Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts
Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.)
The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way for poorly-trained, uneducated troops to mostly reliably identify the enemy.)
> heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold
Why not oil, too?
> Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call
This hubris fuels our forever wars, both in trade and militarily.
We don’t have that influence. If we tried restricting both Qatar and the UAE in Africa, we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about enough that our leaders have even less free rein than our geopolitical limits circumscribe.
> You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields
True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.
Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.
So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.
> We don’t have that influence.
Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.
Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?
If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].
> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...
I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).
[1]: https://www.kimberleyprocess.com/
> if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes
Granted. The UAE is not involved due to animus. But this analysis renders everyone in Sudan as NPCs. The reason the conflict is an opportunity for meddling, the reason it has turned into a genocide, these causes are found more in culture and politics than pure economics.
> You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to
America withholding arms from Sudan wouldn’t change much.
If we started dictating Emirati foreign policy based on withholding arms, they should drop us as a security guarantor. (And can. And eventually would.)
We’d lose a reliable ally and investor and oil producer in exchange for foreign policy control in a region Americans are sick of being involved in.
> What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in?
Nothing. Like actually nothing. Maybe domestic gold prices would bump up a bit, but less than they have with tariffs and the deficit explosion.
If we tried to get the UAE to stop trading Sudanese gold, on the other hand, that would mean applying diplomatic and possibly economic pressure. That could result in costs to American voters we don’t care to pay.
> the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds
Yet blood diamonds still sell.
Gold is tracked and traded based on provenance—high-end mints will produce more expensive bars. The difference is there is a larger buyer pool for conflict gold than there is for diamonds. (And much more for oil.)
> American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all
This is what I meant. American leaders are constrained in acting on foreign policy lines that result in domestic pain. Alienating the Gulf would result in domestic pain.
So Arabs fly planes into the world trade center, commit mass genocide at darfur and are still support this dude and his band of thugs with their colonialist rape of Africa?
The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.
You know if we nuked the UAE, everyone would just start funding the folks that make Hamas seem like the church social committee right?
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You should not be posting here if you think that is a serious suggestion. Go play Civ or something