The link between Gaza and El Fasher, or UAE-Israel cooperation

The massacres, deportations, rapes, seizures and plunder that have in fact been going on in Sudan for two and a half years suddenly came onto the agenda of the whole world a few days ago, when El-Fasher fell into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces militias commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), who is backed by the UAE. The RSF under Hemedti had in fact earlier rebelled against government forces and, with the Janjaweed forces at its command, had seized the capital Khartoum, Gezira and Omdurman, where it committed countless massacres and crimes against humanity. Hemedti, who held the capital Khartoum under control for two years, did not establish an administration there either. Essentially he had neither the culture, nor the equipment, nor the intention to establish one. His style and goal were only to plunder every asset that could be plundered in these settlements, to burn and destroy, and with his men he did nothing but drain dry every place he entered.

For that reason, those who, because the problem in Sudan gives the appearance from a distance of a civil war, were seeking a compromise between two equal parties fighting each other were badly mistaken.

We have tried many times before to touch on what has been happening in Sudan and on the error in this approach. There were not two equal parties fighting each other. There was a state administration, whose legitimacy was established through its institutions and civil society organizations, around which the people had somehow united during a long transition period and which the people had granted a legitimate period for the transitional administration; and against this administration there was a man who had launched a rebellion using marauders based on tribal ties, brought mostly from outside Sudan, from Chad, Libya and African countries. Moreover, this man is one of the principal actors in all of the crimes against humanity attributed to Omar al-Bashir in the Darfur crisis, which was for a long time on the agenda of the International Criminal Court.

In this rebellion led by Hemedti, the only concern of the Janjaweed he gathered around himself is booty and plunder. This plundering force serves only to destroy the country; it has not the slightest plan, project or vision to rebuild. In the territories they invaded over the past year they plundered everything in their path that was worth anything, killed civilians at random, raped women and dragged the country into complete chaos. In return, the number of fighters with whom they first set out melted quickly, falling to nearly twenty percent. With a recent new move by the Armed Forces, Omdurman, the most populous city they had previously invaded, the Gezira region between the two Niles and the capital Khartoum were liberated from these invaders in recent months.

In fact, after being driven out of the capital Khartoum and withdrawing to Darfur, it would have been very hard for the RSF to recover from the great rout they had suffered. Many of the marauders they had gathered with the promise of plunder and booty had died in the fighting, and the great majority of the rest had taken what was owed to them and headed home. But a hand, a mind (guess whose?) set a new target before the RSF: El-Fasher.

In the city that fell after a siege lasting 500 days from May 2024 and 300 attacks, Hemedti's forces used hunger as a weapon by blocking food and medical aid. In the end, it emerged that hunger, massacre and mass killings had been committed against the people of El-Fasher.

The power that set El-Fasher before the RSF as a target, supported it until it captured the city, and determined the mind and strategy behind it is no longer a secret to anyone: the UAE. El-Fasher is a city of strategic importance, but it is a gateway on the Libya-Chad border that can control all the logistics that might move from there into Sudan. It has a military base and an airport. With the capture of this city, the RSF, which until now has suffered from being unable to obtain a status equal to that of the government in Sudan, will in effect be holding a region under control. For the UAE, this much of a foothold is enough. When it officially recognizes that place, the formula of partition in Libya will have worked here too, and the room for maneuver it wants will have been created.

This style of policy by the UAE is without doubt a very serious problem within the Islamic world. There is no beneficial intervention or contribution of its anywhere. Finding its trace wherever there is unrest, wherever there is a problem, has become the ordinary perception about the UAE. Why does it do this? The famous Egyptian politician Ayman Nour, who in recent months wrote an open letter to it because of the role it played in Sudan, addressed it as follows:

"What does the brotherly UAE want in its policy in Sudan? What is its direct, or even indirect, interest in supporting the Janjaweed militias, who have left no legal, international, religious, political or moral crime uncommitted?!! What is its ultimate goal in supporting this insane war?

Is this goal, which I doubt will be achieved, worth the blood lost, the lives, the honor trampled underfoot?!

However great the potential gains in gold and influence may be, can these gains compensate for the UAE's loss of the love of most, indeed a great part, of the Sudanese people?"

Was there an addressee there that this appeal could reach? If anyone expected an effect that would stop the UAE from condemning Sudan to permanent instability by coveting its gold resources, and from setting Hemedti, a war criminal and complete bandit, upon the innocent people of Sudan, it was in vain. The UAE's support for the war criminal and criminal against humanity Hemedti continued to increase, and made it a partner to all these crimes being committed today. Because on the matter of Sudan, on the nature of the RSF and the crimes it has committed there, a common awareness and perception has now formed all over the world. No one wants to be seen together with these criminals. Meanwhile, it appears that behind people's not having had enough information so far about what has been happening in Sudan lay a very strong control of social media networks. It has emerged on this occasion that this control and these cover-up activities were carried out with the UAE's financing and political support.

When the massacres in Sudan are thought of alongside Gaza, a painful sentence is often uttered: what is being done here is Muslims doing to Muslims. That it is no different from what Israel does to Muslims is, of course, very painful.

But there is something that is overlooked: the fact that the UAE is parallel to Israel in all of its policies in the region, and that all of these expansionist and destabilizing policies of its coincide with Israel's strategic calculations. Let us not forget that after the fall of Omar al-Bashir, Israel acquired a sphere of influence in Sudan that it had never had before.

The first thing the transitional government formed with the UAE's contribution was made to do was to join the normalization process with Israel in return for the lifting of sanctions. Now, with this latest move, is another important region as far as the Nile being brought under control? This depends in part, of course, on how Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia respond to this process.