Families Fractured, Resources Stripped: How One Nation Profits From Regional Turmoil

Families torn apart by war. Refugees stripped of their organs. Communities watching foreign powers extract their land, gold, and bodies. These are the human stakes buried beneath the UAE’s expanding military and economic footprint across the Horn of Africa, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Abu Dhabi’s involvement in the region accelerated sharply around 2018, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power. The UAE, alongside Saudi Arabia, brokered the peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea that year, motivated by a desire to secure the Red Sea flank against rivals including Iran, Turkey, and Qatar, and to integrate Ethiopia’s emerging market into UAE-controlled logistics corridors. To cement that influence, Abu Dhabi injected billions of dollars in central bank deposits and infrastructure investments into Addis Ababa, then backed the federal government militarily during internal conflicts. Between late 2020 and 2022, Emirati cargo operations sustained the Ethiopian National Defense Force during the northern conflict, financing combat drones and precision munitions. Direct operational expenditures across six years exceeded two billion dollars.

In Sudan, the consequences for ordinary people have been catastrophic. After armed conflict broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the UAE established a logistical air bridge routing transport aircraft through Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, and Entebbe into Amdjarass in eastern Chad. Officially classified as humanitarian aid, these operations supplied military hardware, battlefield trauma management, and electronic warfare support to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s forces, at an estimated annual cost of four hundred million to five hundred fifty million dollars.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, Emirati defense investments have operated along decentralized regional lines: training and stipends for the Somali National Army via the General Gordon military base, sustained funding and arming of the Puntland Maritime Police Force as an Emirati-aligned paramilitary, and refurbishment of Berbera airport alongside training for Somaliland security units. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Emirati commitments have centered on specialized defense advising and security procurement for mining zones, initiated alongside the Primera Group venture in early 2023 to establish secure logistics corridors in North and South Kivu.

The strategic logic connecting these military commitments is extraction. Between 2020 and 2026, an estimated eight point five billion to twelve billion dollars in illicit and semi-licit gold moved from Sudan through Chadian and Emirati front companies into Dubai’s refineries. The UAE remains the principal destination for artisanal and semi-industrial gold sourced from RSF-controlled operations in Darfur and South Kordofan. In the DRC, the Primera Mining Ltd. venture captured official artisanal gold exports that previously bypassed Kinshasa via Rwanda, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in untaxed artisanal gold directly to the UAE. DP World’s concessions in Berbera and Bosaso have established logistical hubs along the Gulf of Aden, with Berbera connecting the Ethiopian interior via the Berbera Corridor and drawing regional freight volume away from the Port of Djibouti. Through sovereign vehicles such as the Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company and the Al Dahra Group, the UAE secured hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile farmland in Ethiopia’s lowlands and central regions, locking in agricultural supplies for food import-dependent Gulf markets.

Geopolitically, the UAE’s positions in Berbera, Bosaso, and Socotra give it observation and naval interdiction dominance over the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint and the western Indian Ocean. Emirati deployments counterbalance Turkish influence in Mogadishu, deter Qatari leverage, and challenge Saudi Arabia’s ambitions over Red Sea economic architecture. By providing sovereign liquidity and personal protection to regimes in Addis Ababa and armed factions in Darfur, Abu Dhabi has accumulated outsized political veto power within African capitals.

The strategy carries severe vulnerabilities, however. The UAE’s arming of the RSF, a faction implicated in ethnic cleansing in West Darfur, has drawn scrutiny from the UN Panel of Experts, the European Parliament, and the United States Congress, exposing Emirati banking firms and bullion dealers to secondary sanctions and anti-money laundering regulatory downgrades. The federal government in Mogadishu views Abu Dhabi’s sub-state arrangements as an infringement on territorial integrity, pushing Somalia closer to Ankara and Cairo. And the UAE’s resource streams depend entirely on transactional relationships with armed actors: if the RSF suffers structural reversals in Sudan, or if Kinshasa rescinds exclusive mineral contracts, access can evaporate rapidly.

What changes most for the people living inside these conflict zones is something harder to quantify than gold flows or drone contracts. Conflict produces mass displacement, the collapse of state law enforcement, and the destruction of medical oversight institutions. These conditions, historically, have created the logistical infrastructure for transnational organ trafficking networks. After the 1998 to 1999 Kosovo War, a landmark 2011 Council of Europe report revealed that factions of the Kosovo Liberation Army operated secret detention facilities in northern Albania where Serbian and Roma prisoners of war were systematically executed and their organs, predominantly kidneys, harvested in makeshift clinics and smuggled abroad. During the regional destabilization of the Horn of Africa and the Middle East throughout the 2010s, UN monitors documented extensive human trafficking networks in the Sinai Peninsula where Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese, and other refugees were held for ransom by armed smugglers; individuals unable to pay were frequently subjected to forced organ removal.

The UAE actively promotes health tourism, attracting international patients through accredited facilities, advanced medical technology, and shorter waiting times than Western healthcare systems. Dubai welcomed six hundred ninety-one thousand four hundred seventy-eight international medical tourists in 2023 for general procedures, though specific public statistics disaggregating foreign transplants are restricted. The UAE’s deceased organ donation rate stands at thirteen point ninety-five per million population annually as of 2026, a figure that, set against the total volume of transplantations performed, reveals a significant domestic supply gap in a transplantation market valued at one hundred twenty million USD annually. Between 2020 and 2026, the UAE’s deceased donation rate grew from zero point ninety-one per million population to approximately fourteen point zero per million population. The transplantation rate grew at a disproportionately higher volume. Abu Dhabi alone recorded two hundred ninety organ transplants in 2024, surging one hundred eighteen percent to six hundred thirty-one transplants in 2025. By mid-2026, the Hayat program had facilitated over one thousand one hundred ninety-five transplants nationwide.

The most explicit institutional allegations connecting UAE proxies to organ harvesting emerged from Sudan itself. In June 2026, the Sudanese government submitted a formal letter to the United Nations Security Council accusing the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces of operating an organized transnational organ trafficking ring. Sudanese UN Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith alleged that the RSF transformed mass detention facilities, notably Daghris Prison in Nyala, into sites where this exploitation occurred. For the families of those detained inside such facilities, the question of what happened to their relatives remains unanswered, and may remain so for years to come.