Authors pointed out that since the begging of conflict in Sudan back in April the number of charted flights from UAE to Chad have increased drastically. Most of those planes were cargo ones and all of them were addressed for the rebels in Sudan.
🔻Before the war broke out in Sudan, Abu Dhabi have been sponsoring both al-Burhan’s army and Hemedti’s RSF. As Rybar rightfully pointed out, it was done to fulfil UAE’s interest in maintaining the Sudanese gold export chain.
Since April the UAE focused its attention mostly on Hemedti. Analysts suggest that he is viewed as a more favorable person who is more willing to cooperate in gold export.
▪️However, we should not forget that Sudan’s conflict is mostly an ethnic one, where one group is fighting the other for power. The UAE also have stronger connection with the Janjaweed militia from the Rizeigat tribe in the South-Western Sudan than with Arab tribes from North-East.
And there also comes Chad, where big chunk of population have strong inter-ethnic ties with Rizeigat. Also Chad has strong ties with the UAE. And in June they even signed several military cooperation agreements that (it would be wrong to ignore this fact) had been under discussion for a long time, even before the civil conflict in Sudan. And yet was signed just at the right time.
🔻All of these things, described in Part 1, are supplemented by data on flights between Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE, and N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. Since April (when war in Sudan broke out), the amount of cargo flights between these two destinations significantly increased. The current number of flights (even in the beginning of October) is much higher than in previous years.
And this data is highly unlikely connected to the “spirit of friendship between the UAE and Chad”.
But where is Paris, which has a huge control over Chad, in this equation? Well, France, as well as other Western countries, do not mind the destabilization of Sudan. They just wait, how things will turn out.
🔻These facts confirm the NYT conclusion regarding the role of UAE and Chad in sponsoring the RSF.
Of course, for now we can only speculate with the flight data, cultural and historical connections between sides and сonvenient coincidences. But these data are enough to draw interim conclusions about the situation in the region.