Emadeddin Badi
Cross-border supply corridors linking Libya and Sudan have become the backbone of the RSF’s war endurance. Their governance is now sharpening strategic competition between the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
In Sudan, battle frontlines only tell half of the story. The staying power of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is the other half: a war behind the war to keep its forces supplied with fuel and munitions.
That is endurance – the capacity to generate combat power, sustain it over time, and recover from disruption faster than an adversary. In protracted conflicts, victory rarely turns on tactics or firepower alone; it hinges on logistics and replenishment.
Nearly three years into the war, the RSF’s ability to keep fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has depended heavily on cross-border flows, with the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) playing a prominent role.
Much of this logistical architecture has been underwritten by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose networked operating model privileges deniability and delegation to intermediaries. In practice, the RSF’s war effort has been sustained by transnational supply chains stitched together by actors able to secure passage across Sudan’s land borders.
In supporting the RSF, Abu Dhabi has turned these supply corridors into foundations of endurance, elevating the armed “gatekeepers” who govern the corridors – controlling airstrips, crossings, storage sites and escort markets. As part of this effort, key nodes have been built up and rehabilitated to keep the RSF units supplied, mitigate disruption and sustain operations. This has entrenched those gatekeepers as indispensable intermediaries.
The LAAF’s Gambit
Across the Libya-Sudan borderlands, modular supply corridors anchored in LAAF-RSF cooperation now link Libya’s southern security order to Sudan’s war effort. In Libya, Khalifa Haftar’s LAAF is an example of how an armed actor can position itself to profit from Abu Dhabi’s hawkishness.
The LAAF has entrenched itself as a gatekeeper over crossings, airstrips, desert routes and storage sites, and has harboured the RSF in Libyan territory. Initially, LAAF’s “corridor governance” model was largely transactional and financially motivated. It also enabled the LAAF to consolidate control in southern Libya while institutionalizing Haftar’s family-led succession.
But LAAF-RSF cooperation carries a trade-off for Haftar. By facilitating RSF sustainment, the LAAF has effectively advanced Emirati objectives in ways that pulled Sudan’s war economy into Libya’s southern periphery.
Along the Chad-Sudan frontier, Sudan’s warring camps are tapping cross-border recruitment pools – the RSF leveraging Tama and Gorane networks, the SAF leaning on Zaghawa constituencies – hardening communal fault lines in Chad.
As these mobilisation networks deepen, they also widen the corridors through which mercenaries, weapons and retaliatory dynamics can travel.
By helping sustain Sudan’s war – and, in doing Emirati bidding while hosting RSF elements – the LAAF created the conditions for potential spillover from both Sudan and Chad into Libya’s south.
The irony is difficult to miss. True to its tried-and-tested strategy of manufacturing insecurity while marketing protection, the LAAF has long leveraged its self-styled role as a “unifier” and border enforcer even as it has profited from irregular migration, facilitated large-scale fuel smuggling and provided a permissive environment for Russia’s deeper entrenchment. After helping sustain Sudan’s conflict for much of the past three years, it is now seeking to launder that enabling role into diplomatic relevance.
The widening geopolitical stakes of the Sudan’s war have sharpened the payoff of this posture. Beyond monetizing mobility through Libya, the LAAF is now de facto positioned as a key cog in RSF’s resupply– a role that converts corridor control into disproportionate geopolitical weight.
For Abu Dhabi, that leverage is increasingly consequential: it needs Haftar’s cooperation not only to keep the RSF sustainment channels viable, but also to preserve its influence in eastern Libya by keeping Haftar’s family in a vassal-like alignment. This has become more crucial since early 2026, when Saudi Arabia has narrowed Emirati room for manoeuvre along the Red Sea.
Corridor governance therefore gives the Haftars room to position themselves vis-à-vis Abu Dhabi, Cairo and Riyadh.
A geostrategic competition over pipelines
The RSF-LAAF pipeline is now explicitly a geopolitical fulcrum. Control over this corridor into the Darfur increasingly functions as leverage over Sudan’s power trajectory – a way to shape not only battlefield endurance, but also who carries weight in determining the contours of any eventual Sudanese settlement.
For Saudi Arabia, Sudan is a strategic red line. Its proximity to the Red Sea and centrality to Nile Basin stability make it too consequential for open-ended proxy warfare.
Riyadh’s preferred end-state is a political settlement that preserves formal state authority, however imperfect, and it views Abu Dhabi’s approach as one that erodes sovereignty and empowers quasi-autonomous actors at the expense of regional stability.
Abu Dhabi’s approach is markedly different. It treats victory less as a defined political end-state than as the survival and entrenchment of its access points, partners and transactional networks across scenarios.
Emirati policymakers also view Riyadh’s patience and procedural pace as ill-suited to fast-moving conflicts, prompting the UAE to adopt a more assertive posture that seeks to “manage” instability through deniable networks and delegated intermediaries.
In Sudan, this operating logic has prioritised keeping the RSF viable despite rising diplomatic costs, reflecting a comfort with prolonged volatility so long as Emirati leverage and access remain intact.
This is why Saudi Arabia has moved to contest Emirati air bridges more directly, including by reportedly restricting Emirati use of Saudi airspace and, by extension, Egyptian and Somali airspace for military transfers.
The net effect of restrictions not only raises the cost of moving cargo and personnel from the UAE but also narrows the Emirates’ supply options.
For its part, Egypt – edging closer to Saudi Arabia’s position despite its financial reliance on Emirati support – has also shown a growing willingness to acknowledge Akinci drone strikes on convoys moving through southeast Libya into Darfur, enabled by Egypt’s unprecedented decision to grant Türkiye access to a base on its territory.
The Saudi-Emirati contest has also extended to would-be procurers and intermediaries enabling RSF resupply. Days after reports surfaced of a multi-billion-dollar defence deal involving Pakistan and the LAAF, Riyadh moved to deepen defence-commercial cooperation with Islamabad, building on its 2025 mutual defence pact.
This was quickly followed by leaks around a separate Pakistani package reportedly valued at ~$1.5 billion to supply the Sudanese Armed Forces with aircraft and military hardware. In parallel, Saudi Arabia has tightened ties with Mogadishu (after Somalia ended all cooperation with the UAE), and is sounding out Chad as another pressure point on Abu Dhabi.
Taken together, these moves suggest a Saudi effort to pry loose and neutralize the UAE’s key RSF supply enablers, forcing it to reroute – and potentially reinvent – its sustainment pathways to the RSF through alternative theaters.
In practical terms, Saudi Arabia is positioning itself to frame Emirati interventionism as a regional security risk and to raise the political cost for third parties that enable RSF endurance, even indirectly.
This widening contest will also create openings for opportunists: Moscow has largely opted for equidistance between the RSF and the SAF and is likely to keep hewing to that approach as Gulf competition intensifies, deepening its footprint when convenient.
If Abu Dhabi continues to double down, Riyadh may seek to escalate from constraining pipelines to shaping the battlespace more directly, including by underwriting a larger Egyptian or Turkish role in Sudan.
Logistics as geopolitical currency
For the LAAF, this contest encourages hedging rather than realignment. Yet, it remains structurally tethered and dependent on Abu Dhabi through an ecosystem of patronage that Riyadh cannot easily replicate.
Even if Saudi Arabia succeeds in disrupting specific pathways, competing with the UAE’s networked model would require sustained investment across aviation, procurement and local intermediaries, as well as leverage over Libya’s economy.
The LAAF is therefore unlikely to reverse course, offering selective signals of cooperation with Riyadh and Cairo to reduce pressure while preserving its core relationship with Abu Dhabi.
For the LAAF, the squeeze narrows into two distinct scenarios, neither comfortable. In the first, it stays structurally aligned with Abu Dhabi: it keeps supplying the RSF while offering only selective cooperation with Cairo and Riyadh to manage pressure. The price is strategic bleed-through, as tensions in Darfur and Ennedi (Chad) increasingly spill over into Libya’s south.
In the second scenario, the LAAF could opt for halting RSF resupplies in an attempt at a partial pivot toward Egypt and Saudi Arabia to de-risk exposure. This move would collide with the realities of LAAF’s Emirati entanglement across financing, logistics and patronage.
It would also inject competing geopolitical agendas directly into Haftar’s family project, sharpening fraternal competition as different sons position themselves toward rival patrons and sell competing “stability” bargains to external backers.
For Europe, the risks extend beyond Sudan’s immediate war economy. The ecosystem built to sustain RSF endurance – rehabilitated airstrips, bases and mercenaries – will likely outlive the conflict’s current phase.
Such infrastructure can be repurposed by other actors, as Russia has done in eastern and central Libya by occupying sites previously rehabilitated by the UAE.
Another spillover risk lies in Chad: the Déby regime’s bargain with the RSF is compounding internal fragilities and ethnic tensions, raising coup or rebel-offensive risk in N’Djamena and potentially accelerating a Sahel-wide tilt toward the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) axis, which is pro-Russia and anti-European.
European engagement should therefore focus less on declaratory diplomacy and more on constraining the system that makes RSF sustainment possible. That means tightening aviation oversight, tracking and disrupting intermediated procurement and logistics finance and systematically sanctioning key enablers.
By increasing attribution and political exposure, Europe can raise the reputational costs of the UAE’s zero-sum approach and shrink the permissive space in which armed intermediaries and corridor managers operate.
Additionally, Riyadh’s settlement-first approach risks overestimating what a political deal can deliver on its own, given the depth of Sudan’s fragmentation and the durability of illicit markets at its borders.
In that context, incentives alone are unlikely to shift LAAF behaviour, since corridor governance has become both profitable and strategically useful. Targeted cost-imposition – sanctions exposure, enforcement against facilitators and tangible penalties for enabling cross-border trafficking – may prove more effective in reshaping the LAAF’s calculus and narrowing the space in which the LAAF-RSF pipeline endures.
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Emadeddin Badi – Senior Fellow, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)
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Italian Institute for International Political Studies
