The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has rejected an Amnesty International report alleging that it supplied Chinese-made weapons to Sudanese paramilitary forces involved in the ongoing conflict with the country’s regular army. In a statement posted on the UAE Foreign Ministry’s X account, Salem Aljaberi, the UAE’s assistant minister for security and military affairs, strongly denied the accusations, calling them “baseless” and unsupported by evidence.
“The UAE strongly rejects the suggestion that it is supplying weaponry to any party involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” Aljaberi said. He added that the claims made in Amnesty’s report were “misleading” and lacked substantiated evidence.
On Thursday, May 8, Amnesty International released a report based on its analysis of footage depicting attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s capital Khartoum and Darfur. The report claimed that it had identified “Chinese GB50A guided bombs and 155mm AH-4 howitzers” used by the RSF, suggesting that the UAE was the sole country that imported these howitzers from China in 2019. Amnesty relied on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for its findings.
Aljaberi responded by stating that the howitzer in question was manufactured outside the UAE and had been available on the international market for nearly a decade. He dismissed the claim that only one country had procured or transferred the system, describing the Amnesty report as “misleading.”
The Amnesty report came amid ongoing RSF drone attacks on army-controlled cities in Sudan. The UAE has repeatedly denied allegations of arming the RSF, despite claims from UN experts, US politicians, and other international organizations. On Tuesday, Sudan’s army-aligned government severed diplomatic ties with the UAE, accusing it of supplying the RSF with advanced weaponry used in attacks on Port Sudan. The UAE denied the allegation, maintaining that the internationally recognized Sudanese administration does not represent the legitimate government of Sudan.