The Resumption

On February 28, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Thousands of commercial flights were grounded. Schools closed across the Emirates. Operation Epic Fury had begun.

Four days later, Ilyushin cargo planes carrying weapons from the United Arab Emirates to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces resumed operations from Al Ain. Le Monde reported that while commercial aviation remained disrupted for weeks, the round-trip arms cargo operations were suspended for four days. Batout Airlines — one of the opaque carriers documented in the pipeline — was grounded when Abu Dhabi’s airport closed. The Ilyushins switched airfields and resumed.

Not the supply chain itself. That has been documented by Le Monde, the Conflict Insights Group, Refugees International, and the UN Fact-Finding Mission, alongside a Chapter VII arms embargo the Security Council has maintained on Darfur since 2004. The supply chain is established fact. What the four days reveal is classification: the UAE treats the RSF pipeline as infrastructure that survives domestic crisis, not policy that yields to one.

Muammar Ibrahim reported from El Fasher for two years.

He was a freelance journalist and Al Jazeera contributor, one of roughly twenty media professionals inside the city during the eighteen-month RSF siege. He documented the shelling, the displacement, the erosion of medical access. On October 26, 2025, as the RSF completed its assault on El Fasher — the last government-held city in Darfur — Ibrahim was detained. A video circulated on RSF social media: Ibrahim surrounded by fighters, identifying himself. The RSF accused him of bias — for calling them “militia.”

Six months later, he remains held incommunicado. His health is reported deteriorating. The Conflict Insights Group concluded in April that the siege Ibrahim spent two years documenting “would likely not have occurred” without the drone capabilities and mercenary support supplied through the UAE pipeline. The pipeline that paused for four days.

Between April and December 2025, CIG identified 143 IL-76 cargo flights to the military wing of Kufra Airport in southern Libya, the staging point for overland transit into RSF-held Darfur. Since April 1, at least 105 more. The flights violate a binding Security Council embargo. They supply a force that the United States and the United Nations have determined committed genocide. They paused for four days when Iranian missiles struck the country sending them. Then resumed.

On April 15, the Third International Sudan Conference met in Berlin. Fifty-five states. EUR 1.5 billion in pledges. The co-hosts’ statement called for “an end to all external support to the warring parties that continues to prolong the conflict.” No country was named. No enforcement mechanism was proposed. Neither the RSF nor the Sudanese Armed Forces was invited. The conference raised money for the consequences of a supply chain it declined to identify.

The question the four days answer is not whether the UAE supports the RSF. It is where that support sits in the hierarchy of what Abu Dhabi protects when everything else is failing. Commercial aviation: weeks to restore. The RSF pipeline: four days. The order of resumption is the order of priority.

An arms embargo has been in force for twenty-two years. A genocide determination was issued in February. A conference of fifty-five states convened in April and called for an end to external support without naming the country providing it. Muammar Ibrahim documented the siege from inside for two years, and the force that holds him is sustained by a pipeline that no embargo, no finding, and no conference has interrupted for longer than the time it takes to switch airfields.

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