GENEVA/PORT SUDAN
United Nations investigators have published the most detailed account yet of how foreign money, foreign weapons and foreign fighters are keeping Sudan's war running, naming the countries whose territory and companies sit along the chain and calling on the Security Council to extend an arms embargo that currently covers only Darfur to the whole of the country.
The report, "Fuelling Sudan's conflict: weapons, fighters and external support networks," was released Thursday by the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan. It shifts the accountability question away from the two armies doing the fighting and toward the private companies, recruiters, logistics intermediaries and governments that supply them — a move with immediate diplomatic consequences, because the states it identifies include a close Western security partner in the Gulf.
"Accountability cannot stop with those who carry out the attacks," said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, an expert member of the mission. "The full chain of responsibility must be investigated, including those who order, finance, supply or otherwise facilitate international crimes."
What the mission found
The core finding concerns mercenaries. The mission documented the deployment of up to 2,000 former Colombian military contractors who directly operated combat drones, artillery and advanced weapons systems alongside Rapid Support Forces units in Darfur and Kordofan.
The mission found reasonable grounds to believe that private entities, logistics facilitators and recruiters operating from countries including Colombia and the United Arab Emirates used transit points in Chad, southeastern Libya and the Somali port city of Bosaso to move personnel, training, weapons and logistical supplies to the RSF inside Sudan.
"We found a transnational chain of networks spanning several countries that provided the RSF with foreign personnel, training, weapons, and logistics," said Mona Rishmawi, an expert member of the mission. That support, she said, "fed into RSF operations in Zamzam camp and later during the takeover of El-Fasher, where the Mission documented grave human rights and international humanitarian law violations and international crimes, including conduct displaying hallmarks of genocide."
The finding is not one-sided. The mission also concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Sudanese Armed Forces used foreign-supplied drones in operations that harmed civilians and civilian objects. Foreign suppliers, it found, have substantially enhanced the drone capabilities of both sides, allowing each to strike far beyond the front lines.
The report attaches specific casualty figures to that capability. RSF drone strikes in Kalogi, South Kordofan, killed 114 people, including around 60 children. SAF strikes in Ad-Da'ein, East Darfur, killed at least 70 people and destroyed a major hospital. Repeated RSF drone strikes on El Obeid, North Kordofan — concentrated between July and August 2026 — progressively degraded electricity, fuel and other infrastructure in a city already under partial siege, worsening constraints on water, health care, transport and civilian movement.
The mission found reasonable grounds to believe these attacks constitute serious violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law, and may amount to war crimes. Directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects is a war crime.
Why the numbers matter
Sudan's war began on April 15, 2023, when the Sudanese Armed Forces under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces under Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo turned on each other in Khartoum. It has since produced the largest displacement crisis in the world.
As of August 2026, more than 11.3 million Sudanese had been forcibly displaced, according to UN High Commissioner for Refugees data — 6,490,949 people displaced inside the country and 4,585,550 who crossed an international border. More than half of those displaced are children. About 19.5 million people face crisis levels of hunger, including risk of famine, and 33.7 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The war's civilian death toll remains contested and no authoritative count exists; the mission's report deals in documented incidents rather than aggregate estimates.
The supply lines the report describes are what allow that arithmetic to keep expanding. Two truckloads of food aid destined for families in South Kordofan were destroyed in an aerial attack over the preceding weekend, the World Food Programme said on Wednesday — an illustration of how the drone capability the mission documents translates into hunger on the ground.
The mission, and what it is allowed to do
The Fact-Finding Mission was established by the UN Human Rights Council in October 2023 under resolution A/HRC/RES/54/2, with a mandate to investigate the facts, circumstances and root causes of alleged violations committed since the war began. Its mandate was extended for one additional year, to October 2026, by resolution A/HRC/RES/60/3. The Council separately asked it to run urgent inquiries into events in and around El Fasher, in November 2025, and El Obeid, in July 2026.
The El Fasher inquiry produced the mission's starkest conclusion to date. In July, it found that the mass killings, abductions and gang rape carried out in the city constituted what it called distinct markers of genocide. Thursday's report traces the equipment and personnel that made that offensive possible.
Its chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, framed the report as an argument about consequences rather than intentions. "The consequences of this external support are being felt most acutely by civilians," he said. "This external support has not brought greater protection for civilians. Instead, civilians are paying the price through attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets and places of refuge."
He added: "The international community has been repeatedly warned about the violations unfolding in Sudan. Those warnings must now translate into action."
The political problem
The mission's recommendations are directed at states, and they are pointed. It called on governments to enforce the existing Darfur arms embargo, halt military transfers where there is a substantial risk of contributing to serious violations, investigate individuals and entities involved in illicit support networks, and strengthen accountability measures. It urged the Security Council to extend the arms embargo throughout Sudan.
Each of those asks runs into the same obstacle. The Security Council is the only body that can widen the embargo, and the Council has spent the war divided over Sudan. Extending an embargo to the whole country would apply to the Sudanese Armed Forces — the internationally recognized government's army — as well as to the RSF, which is precisely why previous attempts have stalled. Port Sudan has consistently framed such proposals as an equivalence it will not accept between a state and a militia.
The naming of the United Arab Emirates as a jurisdiction from which entities in the supply chain operate is the report's sharpest diplomatic edge. Abu Dhabi has denied arming the RSF throughout the war. The mission's language is careful — it concerns private entities, logistics facilitators and recruiters "operating from" listed countries, and it applies a "reasonable grounds to believe" standard rather than a judicial one — but the practical effect is to put a UN-mandated body's name behind allegations that have until now circulated mainly through investigative journalism and leaked panel-of-experts findings.
The report also draws Chad and Libya into the frame as transit territory, which complicates two already fragile situations: Chad hosts the largest population of Sudanese refugees, and southeastern Libya is controlled by forces outside the Tripoli government's authority.
What to watch
Three things. First, whether any state acts on the mission's due-diligence argument — that governments linked to these supply chains are under strict international legal obligations to investigate and halt mercenary and supply networks operating from or through their territory. That is a legal claim with domestic litigation potential in more than one jurisdiction, including Colombia, where the recruitment of former soldiers for foreign wars has already become a political issue.
Second, the Human Rights Council session at which the report is formally presented, and whether the mission's mandate — which expires in October 2026 — is renewed. A body that has now named states as well as belligerents is a harder body to extend by consensus.
Third, El Obeid. The mission has an open urgent inquiry into the city, and its own report describes an intensifying drone campaign there through July and August. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, warned in July that the city faced relentless attacks. The investigators have already published one report on what happened after a siege ended at El Fasher. The stated purpose of the El Obeid inquiry is to make sure they do not have to write the same report twice.
