A UN team reconstituted in the closing months of its mandate, working without access to Darfur, relying on sources it will not identify and giving Abu Dhabi days to answer, is asking the Security Council to implicate the UAE in atrocities without producing a single credible link between private actors and the Emirati state.
On July 29, Reuters disclosed a confidential draft report prepared by the United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan and sent to the Security Council ahead of its expected publication in September. The draft reportedly claims that three Boeing 727 aircraft transported Colombian mercenaries, drones and weapons through Chad into territory controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia UN investigators have accused of mass killings, rape and genocide in Darfur. Its public case rests on two eyewitnesses in Nyala, South Darfur, and information supplied by two unidentified UN member states, yet the draft offers no passenger manifests, cargo records, passport files or explanation of whether those sources were genuinely independent.
Reuters traced planes linked to companies associated with Steven Shaulis, a former US Army Special Forces soldier and longtime contractor for the US government and the United Nations, from N’Djamena in Chad to hubs used by the RSF in Nyala, Kufra in southeast Libya and Bosaso in northern Somalia. Corporate filings, aviation registries, satellite imagery and mobile-location data connected the aircraft to private companies operating across several countries, but Reuters could not determine who financed the flights or what the aircraft normally carried. The crew and a ground engineer aboard a Boeing 737 destroyed at Nyala airport in May 2025 were employed by Occidental Support Services, a UAE-registered company that Reuters reported is owned by Shaulis himself. That did not establish that Occidental controlled the aircraft’s mission or acted for the Emirati government.
The draft appears to bridge those gaps by attaching the aviation file to a separate case involving Colombian mercenaries. Human Rights Watch , in a report published on May 25, says the Colombia-based recruiter A4SI worked with the Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), and that some contractors passed through facilities it identified as UAE military sites at Ghiyathi and Al Wathba before reaching Sudan. Its own language repeatedly concedes uncertainty: the men “appear” to have been hired by GSSG, the operation “appears” to have been state-backed and the available links “indicate” possible official involvement. Those formulations may justify further inquiry, but they do not establish that the Emirati state ordered, financed or controlled the deployment, particularly when the NGO advancing the allegation has long been accused by critics of protecting Muslim Brotherhood interests.
A UAE official familiar with Abu Dhabi’s exchanges with the Panel told me that the government received two questions only after the inquiry had been underway for months. Abu Dhabi was initially given three days to respond and later received a two-day extension. The UAE asked for passenger lists, passport numbers, flight itineraries, aircraft-identification records, tracking data and information concerning the alleged cargo, but the official said the Panel supplied none of it, although Abu Dhabi submitted a formal reply.
I have not reviewed the complete correspondence or corporate records the official said would be shared, so the Emirati response remains an attributed rebuttal rather than a final exoneration. The accusation must nevertheless meet the same standard, because a government denial is not proof, but neither is a secret witness, a company registration or a random flight path. The source said, after an internal investigation, GSSG found no record of the names supplied by Sudanese authorities and that A4SI has no UAE branch or licence. The US Treasury sanctioned A4SI and seven other entities and individuals in December 2025 over a Colombian recruitment and financing network supporting the RSF.
The Panel was not reconstituted for much of 2025, leaving it unable to operate or produce its scheduled interim report, which had been due by August 12 that year. Amber Christina Larsen and Andrey Kolmakov were appointed on October 3, 2025, Charles Cater joined on February 11, 2026, Musonda Simwayi on February 25, and Guido Potters became the arms expert only on May 6. Potters had roughly ten weeks before the final-report deadline to assume responsibility for a file covering aircraft, drones, ammunition, foreign fighters, private companies and disputed state direction. No arms expertise is publicly associated with him.
Either much of the arms case had already been built before Potters arrived, forcing him to inherit witnesses and technical judgments developed by others, or he was expected to verify a sprawling weapons inquiry in barely two months. The UN has published no inherited-work audit, no list of outside consultants and no account of which findings Potters independently reproduced. His aviation experience is relevant, but earlier Sudan Panel reports identified him as an aviation expert while another member handled arms, and aviation tracking is not ammunition tracing, drone-component identification or munitions analysis.
The remaining appointments deepen the concern. Kolmakov’s earlier UN work identified him with finance and natural resources, yet he is now the regional-issues expert without publicly demonstrated depth in Sudan, Darfur or Arabic. Simwayi has anti-money-laundering credentials, but the public record does not show sustained work on Sudanese gold, hawala, Gulf free zones or conflict-finance attribution. Larsen has serious credentials in human rights and international humanitarian law, but her profile does not show a Sudan specialisation or technical experience in battlefield reconstruction, munitions effects or command attribution.
Charles Cater presents the sharpest appearance-of-conflict problem. He joined as the armed-groups expert only months after serving as director of investigations at The Sentry, an organisation that publishes investigative dossiers and advocates sanctions and financial pressure, and which in November 2025 published its own findings on GSSG’s ownership. Cater’s objectivity easily comes into question because the revolving door between a sanctions-advocacy organisation and a Security Council body capable of triggering sanctions demands disclosure. The UN has not said whether former Sentry sources supplied information to the Panel, whether Cater disclosed overlapping Sudan, UAE or Gulf projects, or whether he recused himself from related matters.
I sent written questions to Guido Potters, Charles Cater, Andrey Kolmakov and Amber Christina Larsen about their methodology, fieldwork, source handling, engagement with the UAE and review of evidence developed before their appointments. None acknowledged or answered my request by publication time.
The Panel’s 2025 report records visits to Port Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and the UAE, but not Darfur, and it relied heavily on telephone interviews, remote interlocutors and confidential sources. Investigators cannot be expected to walk unprotected into an active battlefield, but absence from the field increases dependence on interpreters, armed actors, intelligence services and advocacy networks whose relationships remain hidden. A diplomat, journalist, activist, military officer and local monitor may appear to be five sources while all repeat one originating claim. Unless the Panel traces the provenance of each allegation, “independent corroboration” can become one accusation travelling through several mouths.
The Panel’s own methodology deepens the problem. It invokes the “highest achievable standard” of proof without defining a recognisable threshold. Sensitive evidence may be shared with only two of the five members. Conclusions may be adopted by four members without disclosing whether the fifth dissented or whether that dissent came from the relevant technical specialist. The Panel says affected parties received a right of reply in “most incidents”, which means it does not promise that every serious allegation was put to the person, company or state it could damage.
These rules would be extremely weak for any respectable advocacy report. In a Security Council process capable of freezing assets, destroying companies and implicating a sovereign state in violence, they are indefensible. The 2025 Panel had already said it could not confirm transfers of military materiel from Am Djarass in eastern Chad into Darfur. If the 2026 draft now reaches a harder conclusion, it must identify the new evidence, explain why it is independent of earlier military, intelligence and media claims, and show what proves state authorisation rather than private facilitation, diversion or transit.
The comparison with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) makes the Panel’s selective intensity impossible to ignore. Iran supplied drones that helped the SAF recover territory. Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have all provided some forms of political, financial or military backing of varying degrees, while the Panel’s own reporting documented SAF airdrops of weapons and supplies into Darfur. In April 2025 the US concluded that the Sudanese Government had used chemical weapons the previous year and imposed sanctions, which it widened in July 2026 after finding Khartoum still non-compliant. Sudan is not a war between a sacred institutional national army and one foreign-backed militia, but a regional war supplied by governments, military institutions, smugglers, companies and foreign fighters on several sides.
The Emirati public position has consistently been that it supports neither belligerent but rather favours a civilian-led transition independent of both armed factions and Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups. Former prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, removed in the October 2021 coup led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and civilian coalition leader Khalid Omer Yousif, both associated with the democratic movement overthrown by that coup, have found political space in the UAE while Islamist and military-aligned voices denounce them as foreign agents.
Readers should recognise the procedure. The damage Israel suffered at the UN came through mandates that assumed the conclusion, investigators whose advocacy was not publicly audited, witnesses protected from scrutiny, rebuttals reduced to an annex and accusations repeated until they entered the institutional record as fact. Sudan shows the same machinery being turned against another state that opposes political Islam and chose the Abraham Accords over the old regional order of permanent war.
The Security Council should not publish, adopt or rely upon the findings until an outside review has tested them. It should release the chronology of the Panel’s correspondence with Abu Dhabi, the evidence disclosed, the time allowed for response, the qualifications and language skills of every expert, all conflict declarations, recusals and outside consultants. For every conclusion involving the UAE, the Council should state how many members reviewed the decisive evidence, whether the finding was unanimous and whether the relevant technical expert agreed.
Ultimately, Sudan’s victims deserve an investigation willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including into the ranks of the Sudanese Armed Forces. Over the past year, I met survivors who said they recognised the SAF aircraft that attacked their villages. They showed me photographs of relatives and neighbours who had been unable to escape, mostly women and children, their throats grotesquely swollen, their skin blistered and discoloured, some stripped of their voices altogether. The injuries seemed designed not only to kill, but to silence, as though the weapon understood that every testimony begins in the throat.
The survivors said a UN representative met them in Nairobi, promised assistance, and then vanished. They remained without treatment or meaningful support until a Sudanese volunteer travelled from Paris with the limited help he could gather. Their hopeless eyes have stayed with me. They do not need another UN report that magnifies allegations against one foreign state, the second-largest humanitarian donor to Sudan after the United States, while leaving evidence implicating the SAF and its foreign state backers at the margins. They need investigators prepared to courageously identify every government, company and armed network responsible for financing, arming and transporting the forces destroying the people of Darfur. Before the Security Council gives this Panel’s conclusions to the wider international community, member states should demand its evidence, qualifications, conflicts and complete procedural record.
