Blood Money and Ghost Cities: The UAE's Complicity in Sudan's Genocide (2nd November 2025)

Written by: Adem Çalhanoğlu

Edited by: Thuth Htet San

Let me start by talking about how people assume Dubai is its own country because it is so ubiquitous, so famous that you forget that there is also Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Fujairah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Ras Al Khaimah (they're emirates and yes I name them out of my memory) and together they form the United Arab Emirates. The country I'm going to vent about today.

The UAE has been using its power from oil and gas to build for itself a kingdom of lavishness, of prosperity and gold built on top of workers who can't even afford an air-conditioned bus to commute to the perennial construction sites of either Dubai or Abu Dhabi. We can talk about the kafala system, the disproportionate ratio of Emirati citizens to foreign workers, and their rapid normalisation with Israel. But these domestic and diplomatic concerns must be eclipsed by the recent events in El Fasher, a city in the middle of the Darfur region of Sudan - an unfolding tragedy that can only be considered, in the lightest of terms, a genocide.

The United Arab Emirates hasn't denied its direct role in backing, training and sometimes allegedly commanding the rebel Rapid Support Forces against the Sudanese Military since 2023 when the civil war broke out. Initially it was a mutiny by these informal forces whose main operating area is around the war-torn Darfur area where killings and other heinous things had happened for decades and the civil war is just another episode of this tragic genocide.

On the 26th October 2025, the RSF had broken the 18-month siege of El Fasher, held by the Sudanese Army as the surrounding area was claimed by RSF and when it shattered, massacres happened on an unprecedented scale. Women being raped; men were tortured, captured, and killed. Not to mention during the siege, humanitarian aid was almost inaccessible, famine and diseases were commonplace. I know that when sieges break, violence always follows, this is the bloody arithmetic of war. But in my lifetime, I have never witnessed such an explosion of cruelty, such systematic brutality unleashed upon civilians who had already endured eighteen months of starvation and terror. This is not the fog of war, this is calculated annihilation.

With Gaza's genocide being "withheld" by a pebble that is the current ceasefire, the world turns to another genocide unfolding in Sudan that has been neglected for so long. Now, we must recognise that with these videos and images of wanton massacre in El Fasher committed by the UAE-backed RSF, the United Arab Emirates has now turned itself into a pariah state in the eyes of activists just like Israel. Building on top of existing human rights violations within the country and its appalling worker's rights and ties to Israel. This is literal blood money manifested.

Emirates, Etihad, Arsenal, Man City, Burj Khalifa to the overrated Dubai Chocolate. I know that Emirates and Etihad are sometimes unavoidable, that routes and connections make them necessary for many travellers, but we can limit our use of them. Every time we can choose another airline, we should. Every reduction in their revenue, however small, is a reduction in the resources they can funnel to the RSF. Many see the UAE as the laboratory of late-stage capitalism and greedy human nature through the skyscrapers, the neon lights and everything in between that has been built in the last 40 to 50 years. As a matter of fact, most of Dubai in the 1980s was just a small town along the Dubai creek (the area is being preserved but the soul is non-existent) and throw in Burj Khalifa and the Palm Jumeirah and you've got yourself what can be described as the modern-day utopia of glass, lights and the corpses of its exploited workers. I’m not saying that Dubai is a ghost city in the sense it has no people, there’s life, there’s vibes in Dubai but it is part authentic, part implant and part made up. 

Models, celebrities, escorts, rich people from all over the world go to Dubai and the view of Dubai is of a rich, opulent heaven that their deep pockets can enjoy to the hereafter. For those and poordesperate who toil to send remittances back home,  it means cramped, hellish dorms, workingunder the baking Arab sun or enduring the demanding and often cruel service industry (imagine trying to get an Emirati citizen to work there) and the best thing one can do is to eat at an Indian restaurant. For those in between, it can be a transit at either Dubai or Abu Dhabi airport or just through your relatives' phone if they live there.

Now back to Sudan, the UAE has interests in its agricultural and mineral resources and its strategic position along the Red Sea (the city of Port Sudan). Food is expensive in the UAE with most of it imported and Sudan is bisected by the White and Blue Nile and although it doesn't have much greenery on its banks as in Egypt but it is arable and vast. Perfect for a country like UAE. Gold is another resource, one must look into its Gold Souk in the old city to see how Emiratis value the quantity of their gold. And they also wanted to prove to their big brother Saudi Arabia and its rivals of Turkey, Egypt and Iran that they can be a key player in this "wild hunt" that is West Asia. Before Sudan they funded the South Yemen forces against the Houthis and alongside the rest of the Gulf countries, blockaded Qatar until 2021.

In the end, boycott Emirates, Etihad, Dubai Chocolate. See Dubai and Abu Dhabi for what they truly are: monuments built on exploitation, gleaming facades that cannot hide the blood and suffering beneath. Not because these cities lack inhabitants, but because they lack conscience. The United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords whilst Gaza burned, and now arms the forces massacring civilians in Sudan. The same hands that built glass towers are stained with Sudanese blood. This is not diplomacy or development. This is complicity.