Hemedti sentenced for Darfur genocide

That is the news. What it leaves unanswered is who supplied the weapons behind the state’s, and who in London decided not to ask too hard.

El Geneina: the crime this verdict answers for

In the two months after the war began, the RSF and allied Arab militias killed an estimated 1,500 people in El Geneina, most of them Masalit. Tens of thousands fled across the border into eastern Chad. Human Rights Watch documented the killings as ethnic cleansing and said they may amount to genocide against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities of West Darfur, a campaign with a direct lineage to the Janjaweed militias of the 2000s, from which the RSF descends.

This is the crime the Port Sudan verdict addresses. It is not the only one.

El Fasher: the killing that followed

The RSF captured El Fasher, the last major city it did not hold in Darfur, on 26 October 2025. The UN Human Rights Office documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days alone: 4,400 inside the city, over 1,600 more on the routes people used to flee. Sudan’s Darfur governor put the toll far higher; the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab estimated at least 60,000 people killed in the attack and its aftermath. RSF fighters carried out summary executions targeting Zaghawa residents and systematic rape of Zaghawa and other non-Arab women and girls.

No one has been convicted for El Fasher. The Port Sudan court’s death sentences answer for El Geneina in 2023. The bigger massacre came two years later, built on the same military capacity, and nobody has yet been made to answer for it.

The UAE’s militia

That capacity did not appear from nowhere. UN Security Council members received allegations in March 2025 that the United Arab Emirates was supplying British-made weapons to the RSF, and UN panel monitors had already found credible evidence of Emirati arms transfers to the militia. Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group, a firm linked to the UAE’s ruling family, trained Colombian mercenaries who passed through UAE military facilities before deploying to Sudan; some were reportedly present at El Fasher.

The RSF is not a self-financing insurgency. It is a force the UAE built, paid and re-supplied through a war its own government has repeatedly denied fighting by proxy.

Britain’s arms, Britain’s alibi

Britain is the arms supplier standing behind the arms supplier. The UK licensed £172m of military equipment to the UAE between April and June 2025 alone, the third-largest quarter on record, including nearly £2m in military vehicles and components, after a £182m quarter at the end of 2024. British-made small-arms target devices manufactured by Militec Ltd in Mid Glamorgan, and Cummins UK engines fitted in armoured personnel carriers built by the Emirati firm Nimr, have been found at former RSF positions in Khartoum and Omdurman, the Guardian reported in October 2025.

Britain also holds the pen. As the UN Security Council’s penholder on Sudan, it is formally responsible for leading the international response. Resolution 2736, passed in June 2024, called for a ceasefire but named no consequences for the foreign states arming either side. The UK made clear at the time it would not support naming the UAE.

At the Munich Security Conference in February this year, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper was asked directly whether the UAE had sent British weapons to the RSF. She called the allegation “unfounded,” saying she had reviewed 2,000 export licences, and added that “there’s probably more than a dozen countries that are in some way involved in arms flows.” The dozen-countries line is not false. It is also not an answer. It names everyone so that it need not name the UAE, Britain’s own arms customer, whose weapons and whose British engines have turned up on Sudanese battlefields.

Nathaniel Raymond, who directs the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, put it more plainly to the International Development Committee on 23 June. The Foreign Office, he said, had prioritised “economic, security, and diplomatic relationships with the UAE above preventing the intentional starvation, forced displacement, and the genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians,” under “significant private pressure behind the scenes from the UAE.” He called it “fundamental political capture.”

Emily Apple of the Campaign Against Arms Trade was more direct still: “UK arms exports are out of control… Our government knows that the UAE is diverting military equipment to the RSF for its war crimes.” Mike Lewis, a former member of the UN’s own Sudan sanctions panel, pointed to the law itself: UK rules bar export licences “where there is a clear risk of diversion, or use in international crimes.” Between 2015 and 2024, 21 of 22 UAE licences that were refused were refused specifically over that risk. The government’s own caseworkers have flagged the danger for a decade.

What the verdict doesn’t settle

The Port Sudan court is not a neutral body. It sits under Sudan’s army, the RSF’s wartime enemy, and it convicted Hemedti in absentia with no defence present, in a war where the army and its own allied forces have been credibly accused of indiscriminate bombing and blocking aid to civilians. A death sentence handed down by one side of a civil war against the leader of the other is a fact to report, not a verdict to endorse, and it does not make the Sudanese Armed Forces the good side of this war.

Nor does “Britain sold to the UAE lawfully” survive contact with what Britain knew. The government’s defence rests on a gap between licensing and diversion, as if end-use were unknowable. Its own refusal record says otherwise: caseworkers assessed the diversion risk from the UAE to Sudan as clear enough to block licences twenty-one times out of twenty-two. Continuing to license the twenty-second is not an oversight. It is a choice, renewed every quarter, that a court in Port Sudan has now put a body count against.

The account still owed

Human Rights Watch’s Mausi Segun has said governments “should publicly demand that the UAE stop supplying weapons, equipment, personnel, and other military support” to the RSF. Britain, uniquely positioned as both the UN’s penholder on Sudan and the UAE’s arms supplier, has not made that demand. It reviewed two thousand licences and pronounced the case against its own ally unfounded.

Hemedti has been sentenced to death by a court that cannot reach him, for a massacre in El Geneina that his forces have already been superseded by a larger one in El Fasher. The Masalit dead of 2023 and the Zaghawa dead of 2025 are still owed an account from the states that made the killing possible. Cooper’s review did not investigate the arming of a genocide. It audited the paperwork for one.