Visible From Space, Sudan's Bloodied Sands Expose a Massacre of Thousands

> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet?

The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)

They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)

They are stable and predicable. If you lend them some money, you can expect to still have it next year.

Not calling Dubai the devil but you could make deals with the devil if the devil was known to religiously fulfill his contracts.

There are a lot of places where you don’t know whether their currency or political system could be rocked next year.

the CIA hired the mafia to assassinate castro in the 60s. these things are not so black and white. stated goals are often independent of behavior

And Qatar is sponsoring and hosting Hamas. Everyone looks the other way, where billions of dollars are.

Similar reasons why Israel hasn't experienced any sanctions yet despite their ongoing genocide against the Palestinians

The UAE is pretty good at playing both sides so they always come out ahead. They act as a key diplomatic intermediary and host a major US military base which is essential to projecting power in the region.

You forgot US and UK.

The other complication is the surprising contributions of various African countries. Ethiopia had supported the RSF until 2024, and Kenya hosted an RSF conference in Feb 2025. Haftar in Libya supported RSF before the war, but may have changed positions as his Russian backers turned against the RSF in 2024. The RSF also has some ties to rebels in South Sudan as well as in Chad. Chad in particular gave shelter to the RSF at the behest of the UAE, but has also seized arms shipments that were intended for the RSF. Russia as noted was sympathetic to the RSF until mid-2024, when they switched sides.

When the war initially broke out, some articles in The Economist seemed somewhat agnostic between the two sides, noting that both had serious corruption issues and had committed many abuses. But as the war has progressed, the RSF seems to have revealed itself to be the far more vicious faction, and the red E along with the rest of the Western media now sees their advances as a tragedy. Unfortunately, the one constant here is the general failure of foresight among nearly all countries of the global North (whether aligned with the West or Russia) getting involved in Africa. If the brutality of the RSF had been better anticipated in 2023, the current situation might have been prevented.

It's also likely that the US is kept at bay by trading UAE acceptance of Israel in return for diplomatic cover and military passivity. The US destruction of Libya has been quite important for the UAE:s ability to supply the RSF as well, a lot of the weapon transports pass through there.

From that Wikipedia (2023-):

- Significantly more than 150,000 total killed

- Estimated 522,000 children dead due to malnutrition

- 8,856,313 internally displaced

- 3,506,383 refugees

I don't understand what you find dumb. Can you explain what you're disagreeing with? Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter? Surely by this metric we would be more allied with Venezuela than Israel. Or, perhaps, you have not fully articulated yourself.

> bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible

They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.

OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?

It ebbs and flows depending on whether it's an al Khalifa or an al Thani who controls Doha. Before the 1995 coup, it was the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan that was in control, and they had both familial and economic relations in KSA and Abu Dhabi.

Khaleeji (like everyone else) are fine putting family history aside if it does not interfere with monetary incentives, and the crux of the issue has been clashing LNG claims between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. The al Thani clan has been pursuing a maximalist claim and works closely with Turkiye and Iran as their short term security guarantor as a result, but the al Khalifa and al Ghufran clan were fine with the Abu Dhabi claim because they have significant economic holdings in the UAE and KSA.

The UAE backs Vucic and is the primary FDI source for Serbia's real estate and armaments industry. A major reason Vucic's administration slid into authoritarianism was because the opposition began asking hard questions about the Belgrade Waterfront Project.

So Arabs fly planes into the world trade center, commit mass genocide at darfur and are still support this dude and his band of thugs with their colonialist rape of Africa?

The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.

> You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields

True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.

Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.

So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.

> We don’t have that influence.

Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.

Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?

If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].

> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...

I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).

[1]: https://www.kimberleyprocess.com/

Way to miss the point and claim things I never said at the same time.

Earnest religious belief means nothing without material support. You can hate someone all you want for whatever religious reasons you want but it doesn't matter unless somebody gives you guns, bombs, tanks and planes. And why would someone do that? Because of material interests.

Why did the Crusades happens (multiple times)? Because of material interests. How did those who materially benefit get ordinary people to fight? By fomenting religious fervor and hatred. Why did they do that? To further their material interests.

You mention Ukraine. Perfect example. Russia took Crimea to get a port on the Black Sea in 2014 and also to control resources in that area. Why did Russia invade in 2021? Because maintaining what is essentially an oblast (like Kaliningrad) became too expensive. Ukraine had cut off the water. So Russia ideally wanted to despose the government and install another Lukachenko puppet government (like they have in Belarus) but, failing that, they wanted to secure a land bridge to Crimea. Just look at a map.

One could say the exact same thing you do about "African agency" about the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine but that's just an excuse. Putin doesn't care about that. He cares about the land they live on. And we've seen this exact playbook many times over. For example, Hitler used to annex Austria and the Sudetenland to ostensibly re-unite German-speaking people but again, that wasn't the point.

Now you might say in any of these places the people are motivated to kill for ethnic and/or religios interests. They may genuinely believe in this (but again, ask yourself why) but there are also a ton of opportunists. An absolute perfect example of this is Maria Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who opposed Maduro in Venezuela and her two biggest goals are to privatize Venezuelan industries (previously nationalized) and to further support Israel. She may as well put out a press release saying she's open to the backing her in a coup. Privatizing national industries for Western companies to profit? Sounds a whole lot like material interests to me.

Go back in history and ask yourself why the borders of Sudan are what they are, just like we could for Rwanda and a host of other civil wars. Why exactly are these different ethnic groups in the same country? Well, that's a colonizer special, perfected by the British Empire, to sow division in the locals so the colonizer can profit. Once again, material interests.

Murder is timeless (apparently).

> Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.

I'd happily do it if someone pays for my ticket

"Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects “consistent with the size of human bodies” and “reddish ground discolouration” thought to be either blood or disturbed soil."

The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.

> Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.

That sounds slow and expensive.

Why would you fake satellite images? The perpetrators uploaded videos by themselves

Yes ofc. The RSF is just the rebranded Janjaweed which were legally classified as having committed genocide. But they never faced any international consequences and here they are committing genocide once again. It's also a major conflict though as the SAF is the major oppositional force fighting against the RSF. SAF was the military that took control after a democratic revolution pushed out the dictator Omar al-Bashir

Yes, to clarify the primary international players:

Russia: initially supported the RSF, then at one point was trading with both sides, and in 2024/2025 fully switched sides to back the SAF

Iran: stayed out of it until 2024 when it finally backed the SAF which caused a major turning point in the conflict

UAE/the US: the main player responsible for RSF's rise. It hired out RSF mercenaries to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At one point there were more than 40,000 RSF mercenaries (mostly between the ages of 14-17) in Yemen. It continues to be the primary funder of the RSF

Israel: the RSF buys surveillance tech and weapons from Israel

Saudi Arabia: the largest smuggler of (illegally acquired) gold from RSF. A major source of funding for the RSF

China: doesn't directly deal with either side but Chinese-made weapons were found in the hands of the RSF mostly through the UAE reselling them. The SAF also has some Chinese made weapons through Russia and Turkey

tl;dr: it's a very complex disaster but international players simply don't have an interest in ending it. The SAF is the main opposition to the genocidal RSF, but they are also uninterested in maintaining the democracy that the people fought for and the sides backing the SAF (mostly Iran, and now Russia) are likely hoping to continue their exploitation of gold if they defeat the RSF

Agree or disagree this post is clearly about which genocide they choose to protest.

There’s nothing funny about the evil at Columbia University, subsidized by billion in taxpayer dollars.

Well we are currently sending funding. Except that funding is going to further the conflict. Sudan's gold reserves are critical materials. The previous dictator, Omar al-Bashir, was propped up by foreign powers exactly because they allowed those countries to extract the gold reserves. The RSF is the same thing. they are the evolution of the Janjaweed militias that the ICC found to be committing genocide. The international community did nothing to stop them or hold them accountable so they are once again committing genocide. International players want this to continue. Russia was at some point funding both sides and sending in Wagner mercenaries. UAE has been funding the RSF since the very start and continues to be the largest importer of (illegal) gold. Israel benefits because the RSF is a major importer of its surveillance tech as well as weapons. Both Israel and the US fund the UAE despite knowing that the UAE is fueling the RSF because they both ultimately benefit. American and even Chinese weapons have been found on both sides (mostly through the UAE reselling weapons to the RSF). Even if the SAF wins, it'll just be another military junta whose top priority is to exploit the gold reserves to the benefit of whichever nation is funding it and NOT giving any of that wealth back to the people.