A UN Panel Puts Colombian Contractors at the Centre of Sudan’s War

SUDAN · GEOPOLITICS

A United Nations (UN) Panel of Experts has reported to the Security Council that foreign fighters are sustaining Sudan’s war, and that Colombian contractors were central to the drone and artillery operations of the Rapid Support Forces. The panel describes a pipeline that begins with recruitment in Colombia, passes through training in the United Arab Emirates, and ends in the paramilitary’s most technical units.

What the panel says about Colombian fighters in Sudan

The report judges credible the estimate that between 1,500 and 2,000 former Colombian military personnel fought on the RSF’s side. It describes them not as guards or logistics staff but as operators of combat drones, artillery and other advanced weapons, based in Nyala, the RSF’s main hub in Darfur, from March 2025.

That distinction matters more than the headcount. A few hundred people who can fly armed drones change what an irregular force is able to do. The panel links the contractors, known as the Desert Wolves, to the planning of the siege and capture of El Fasher in October 2025, an assault the UN has said bore the hallmarks of genocide.

Witnesses placed them across Khartoum, Omdurman, Darfur and Kordofan. The geography suggests they were moved to wherever the fighting was heaviest rather than garrisoned in one place.

The route from Bogota to Abu Dhabi

According to the panel, the recruits were hired through Global Security Services Group, a private security company based in Abu Dhabi. It says the firm was chaired by Mohammed Hamdan Al-Zaabi, an Emirati national.

Training took place at a military base in the Al Dhafra region, roughly 250km west of Abu Dhabi, and at a second site in the capital. Only afterwards were the recruits sent on to Sudan.

The UAE foreign ministry rejects the account. It states that the country does not allow its territory to be used to recruit, train, finance or move foreign fighters into any conflict, and says it examined the company’s activities and found no links to mercenaries in Sudan.

Readers should hold both of those things at once. A UN panel has set out a documented chain, and the government named in it denies the chain exists.

Why Colombia keeps appearing in other people’s wars

Colombia has spent decades building a large, combat-experienced professional military, and it retires soldiers young. That produces a steady supply of men with skills that command far more abroad than at home.

Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions in its report “From Bogota to El Fasher”, published on 25 May 2026, tracing the same Bogota-to-Darfur route through Emirati training facilities. Two independent bodies arriving separately at the same finding is what gives the claim its weight.

For Latin American readers this is not a distant African story. It is a labour-export story with a Colombian address, and the recruits are somebody’s neighbours.

What the report does not settle

The panel documents recruitment, training and deployment. It does not, in what has been made public, establish a chain of command running from any state to specific battlefield decisions.

Nor does it put a figure on how many of the contractors are still in Sudan. Contracts of this kind rotate, and the panel is describing a period rather than a present-day headcount.

The distinction between what is documented and what is inferred is the whole argument here. Anyone reading further should keep the two columns separate.

The wider pattern this belongs to

Sudan’s war has drawn in outside money, weapons and now manpower from several directions at once. Each new supplier makes a negotiated end harder, because it lowers the cost of continuing.

The same competition for position along the Red Sea and across the Sahel runs through much of the continent’s current politics. It is the thread our Africa coverage keeps returning to.

What a panel of experts is and is not

A UN Panel of Experts is a small standing body that reports to a sanctions committee of the Security Council. Its job is to establish facts, not to prosecute.

That gives its findings unusual weight and unusual limits. Panels have subpoena power over nobody and rely on witness testimony, documents and satellite imagery.

Their reports nonetheless become the evidentiary base for sanctions designations. Naming a company and its chairman in a panel report is the step that usually precedes listing.

For Colombia the report creates a domestic legal question rather than a diplomatic one. Recruiting mercenaries is regulated under Colombian law, and prosecutors there have opened enquiries into similar recruitment before. Colombia’s government has previously apologised to Sudan for the presence of Colombian mercenaries in the country.

Bogota has previously acknowledged the phenomenon and said it is difficult to police, since retired soldiers travel on ordinary passports to take ordinary-looking security jobs.

The contracts are typically signed abroad, which is precisely what makes them hard to reach.

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