PREVIEW
The Sudanese army has denied claims it carried out the attack, instead blaming its paramilitary rival the Rapid Support Forces
The bombing of the United Arab Emirates’s ambassador’s residence in Khartoum on Monday has prompted a war of words after Dubai pinned the blame for the ‘heinous attack’ on the Sudanese army.
That was promptly denied by the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) which insisted that the ‘shameful and cowardly acts’ had been carried out by its rivals in the country’s civil war.
It is hard to take the SAF’s repudiation of the attack at face value coming just days after General Abdel Fattah al Burhan’s veiled references to the UAE in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly as one of the main ‘regional and political players’ backing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his rival General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (AC Vol 65 No 16, As the civil war threatens the region, the UAE boosts Hemeti’s militia).
However, few take the UAE’s protestations of neutrality in the conflict seriously.
Enjoying the UN pulpit as Sudan’s de facto head of state, Burhan added that states were ‘providing funding and mercenaries for their own political and economic benefit’. His officials have presented dossiers of evidence to the UN of the UAE providing weapons and support to the RSF.
Describing the attack as a ‘flagrant violation of the fundamental principle of the inviolability of diplomatic premises’, the UAE’s foreign ministry said that it would file complaints to the League of Arab States, the African Union and the United Nations.
In June, Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, accused Abu Dhabi of giving financial and military support to the RSF, and claimed that help was the ‘main reason behind this protracted war’.
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