Scrutinise both sides in Sudan's war

[John Ashworth]

In Sudan's war, the UN weighs one side's alleged backers and overlooks
the other's altogether

July 30, 2026
EU Reporter

When a draft of the United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan reached
Reuters on 29 July, its preliminary findings were partially revealed.
Reuters reported that the report traced Boeing 727 aircraft and a
Chadian air corridor moving fighters, drones and weapons to the Rapid
Support Forces, and judged credible the recruitment of some 1,500 to
2,000 Colombian mercenaries through a private company based in the
Gulf Cooperation Council. Upon further review of the draft UN report,
meant to be submitted to Security Council in early August, it is clear
the work is not just incomplete but mismanaged.

What the report leaves out is as telling as what it contains. There is
very little published finding on Iranian, Turkish supplies that have
sustained the Sudanese Armed Forces, and no reference to the chemical
weapons that Washington and others say the army has already used. For
the civilians on the receiving end of those weapons, the omission
carries a quiet injustice. The same conflict, examined by the same
body, yields intense scrutiny on one side and near silence for the
other.

The report also arrived quickly, and late. Some of the Panel's five
expert seats were filled only in the closing months of the mandate,
according to the Secretary-General's appointment letters. Its
armed-groups expert, Charles Cater, was named in February 2026 shortly
after a senior investigative role at The Sentry, a private
organisation that publishes dossiers and campaigns for sanctions and
asset recovery, raising questions of potential bias. Its arms expert,
Guido Potters, was appointed only on 6 May, moving across from the
Panel's aviation portfolio with roughly ten weeks to assemble a
multi-country weapons case before the deadline. Neither fact impugns
the men's good faith. It does mean that findings capable of triggering
sanctions in a murky conflict were produced, on a compressed timetable
and on expertise and independence that the report does not set out for
the reader.

All of this matters because the allegations left outside it are grave,
and in one case already the subject of a formal government
determination. In April 2025 the United States concluded that Sudan's
government used chemical weapons in 2024, and imposed sanctions that
it widened again in July 2026 after finding Khartoum still
non-compliant.. No comparably authoritative international body has
tested these findings, because the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons has opened no fact-finding mission, even as American
diplomats pressed the case at its Executive Council in July.

The foreign hand behind the army is documented with similar clarity
outside the UN process. Reuters and satellite analysts have placed
Iranian drones at bases north of the capital. The Washington Post
detailed a Turkish contract worth roughly $120 million for Bayraktar
drones and warheads delivered to Port Sudan. Egypt, for its part, has
been photographed flying an Akinci drone from an airstrip near the
Sudanese border. None of this appears among the Panel's conclusions.
While some of this is mentioned its done so in passing.

The result is an accountability landscape tilted at its very
foundations. The one mechanism able to trigger Council sanctions
concentrates on the RSF, and singles out a single country, while the
Sudanese army's suppliers are mentioned only in passing and its
alleged chemical attacks are left to a patchwork of unilateral
sanctions, open-source investigators and rights groups, none of which
commands the same enforcement power.

The UAE, which denies arming the RSF, complicates the Panel’s claims
further it is the second-largest humanitarian donor to Sudan after the
United States, having given some 784 million dollars since the war
began, according to figures its foreign ministry attributes to UN
data. That standing does not answer the specific allegations against
Emirati-located networks alleged in these reports, yet it underlines
how partial any single-party accounting must be in a war this diffuse.

Sudan's catastrophe is now the largest in the world by almost every
measure the UN keeps. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs counts 33.7 million people in need of aid, famine confirmed in
El Fasher and Kadugli, and more than eight million people displaced
inside the country. Both sides stand accused of atrocities, including
the army of indiscriminate bombardment and chemical use.

None of this is to say that the RSF and its alleged backers deserve
less scrutiny. It argues that the other half of the war deserves as
much. A sanctions regime that examines one party in forensic detail
and treats the other as a footnote does not merely produce an
incomplete record. It signals to the victims of the unexamined half
that their suffering counts for less, and it hands every government a
grievance to wield against the next inquiry. If the Security Council
wants its findings to carry the authority of law rather than the
appearance of a verdict written in advance, the Panel must weigh every
foreign hand in Sudan by the same standard, name every supplier its
evidence can reach but frame them accurately be they private entities
or official government ones. , and pursue the chemical file with the
energy it brought to the flight logs over Nyala. Anything less
examines one party while the war consumes them all, and risks
compounding the very injustice done to the civilians the United
Nations exists to protect.

https://www.eureporter.co/world/sudan/2026/07/30/in-sudans-war-the-un-weighs-one-sides-alleged-backers-and-overlooks-the-others-altogether/

END
______________________
John Ashworth

ashwor...@gmail.com

+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)

PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya