Abu Amama: the cancelled $6 billion port deal at the centre of Sudan's war

An Emirati Red Sea port concession was signed before the war. The SAF cancelled it in November 2024 after concluding the UAE was arming the other side. The question is whether the war exists in part to re-issue it.

An Emirati Red Sea port concession was signed before the war began. The SAF cancelled it in November 2024 after concluding that the UAE was arming the other side. The question now is whether the war exists in part to re-issue it.

The Sudanese Armed Forces' Finance Minister, Gibril Ibrahim, stood at a podium in Port Sudan on November 3, 2024, and said: "After what happened with the UAE, we will not give them a single centimetre of Sudanese land." The statement formally cancelled a $6-billion port and economic-zone agreement signed two years earlier between Sudan's then-transitional civilian-military government and a consortium of Emirati state-linked investors. The cancellation is one of the clearest expressions of why the Sudanese civil war has continued as long as it has, and why no negotiated settlement has appeared workable.[1][2]

The cancelled agreement was the Abu Amama port project. Abu Amama is a stretch of Red Sea coastline approximately 200 kilometres north of Port Sudan, currently inhabited by perhaps a few hundred people and used principally as a goat-grazing reach by Beja pastoralists. The framework, signed on August 13, 2022 by AD Ports Group of Abu Dhabi and Invictus Investment of Dubai in partnership with the Sudanese central government and announced that December, proposed building at Abu Amama a deep-water container port, an associated free economic zone, an airport, a 450-kilometre highway connecting the port to the Nile at Abu Hamad, and a 400,000-feddan (415,000-acre) agricultural development zone. The total investment was projected at $6 billion. Sudan was entitled to a 35-percent profit share. The Emirati consortium was entitled to the operating concession.[3][4][5]

What made Abu Amama strategically interesting, and valuable enough that one interpretation of the war places it at the centre of the conflict's commercial logic, was its position on the Red Sea littoral. By 2022, after a decade of Gulf-power competition for Horn of Africa basing rights, the Red Sea was the most contested maritime corridor outside the South China Sea. The UAE had built or operated terminals at Berbera in Somaliland, Bosaso in Puntland, Assab in Eritrea, and Aden in Yemen. Saudi Arabia ran a parallel programme of Red Sea ports; Qatar, Turkey, and China each held Horn of Africa basing or port investments. With Abu Amama added, the UAE's position would have become commanding: Berbera and Bosaso to the south, Assab to the south-east, Abu Amama on the central western shore, and Aden anchoring the Bab el-Mandeb.[6][7]

For the Sudanese counter-party in 2022, the agreement was less attractive than the headline number suggested. Sudan already had a working deep-water port at Port Sudan, operated through the state-owned Sea Ports Corporation; the 35-percent profit share at Abu Amama would have produced lower returns to the Sudanese fisc than the existing Port Sudan operation, with the additional cost of a sovereignty concession over 415,000 acres of agricultural land in a region (Sennar, Gedaref, the Beja country) where land-tenure disputes were already politically explosive. The deal was, in practical Sudanese terms, an Emirati strategic acquisition wrapped in the language of economic development.[8][2]

The internal Sudanese politics of the agreement reflected this. The deal was pushed by the transition government's economic technocrats and by the Burhan-led Sovereignty Council, which valued the Emirati relationship for diplomatic and military-aid reasons. It was opposed by Beja tribal leaders, by sections of the Sudanese Communist Party and the civilian resistance committees, and, critically, by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), whose RSF had its own competing UAE relationships and who did not want a rival civilian-led economic relationship with Abu Dhabi crystallising.[2][8]

What the war did to the deal

The April 2023 outbreak between the SAF and the RSF made the Abu Amama framework, in its 2022 form, immediately untenable. The civilian transition government that had been the formal Sudanese counter-party was effectively destroyed in the first weeks of the war, with Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and the Forces of Freedom and Change pushed out of the country. The Sovereignty Council fractured. The Sudanese Sea Ports Corporation came under exclusive SAF control. And the Emirati consortium found itself in the awkward position of being publicly committed to a port concession with one Sudanese party while, according to mounting documentary evidence, supplying weapons to the other.[1][7]

The disclosure of the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan's first interim report in January 2024 — documenting the UAE-to-Amdjarass air bridge supplying the RSF — made the contradiction unmanageable. Through 2024 the SAF's relations with the UAE deteriorated steadily; the Sudanese embassy in Abu Dhabi reduced its operations; the Sudanese ambassador to the UN consistently named the UAE in Security Council briefings as a sanctions-busting state.[1][9]

The November 3, 2024 cancellation was therefore not a surprise. It was the formalisation of a relationship that had functionally ended. What it did do was foreclose, for the foreseeable future, the prospect of an SAF-blessed Emirati commercial reentry to Sudan. The Burhan government's position is that it cannot trust the UAE as an economic counter-party while the UAE is materially supporting the RSF, and the cancellation made the position concrete.[1]

The buried interpretive question

The most provocative reading of the Sudanese war is that Emirati support for the RSF is partly motivated by the prospect of securing Sudanese land, ports, and resources through a counter-party more willing to deliver them than a sovereign government. Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation has described the UAE's approach as a form of "land banking." The Sudanese food-systems expert Abubakr Omer, quoted in the same reporting, argues that what Abu Dhabi can extract from the RSF is "guarantees of gold and of future agricultural production" from an actor with "no regard for public relations or human rights."[13] On that logic, if a future Sudan emerges in which the RSF or an RSF-affiliated government controls some portion of the Red Sea littoral, an Abu Amama-equivalent concession becomes commercially deliverable; if the SAF prevails outright, the concession is dead for at least a generation.[2][8]

This interpretation does not require imputing to the Emirati state an instrumental decision to engineer a war. It requires only the observation that, under the post-war scenarios in which the UAE's commercial interests in Sudan are realisable, the RSF must hold meaningful territory — and that the Emirati continued support for the RSF, including in the face of mounting U.N. documentation, makes more sense in this framing than in any other. The humanitarian justification — that the UAE supports the RSF because the SAF is the worse party, or because the UAE objects to Sudanese Islamist factions inside the SAF political coalition — does not survive contact with the U.N. evidentiary record of UAE conduct toward Darfuri civilians.[1][9]

The Abu Amama cancellation forecloses one particular form of the strategic-port outcome. It does not foreclose all of them. The RSF and its allies signed a founding charter in Nairobi on February 18, 2025, leading to a parallel "Government of Peace and Unity" announced on March 4, 2025, and have expressed an intention to administer Darfur and Kordofan under their own authority. Were that parallel government to secure territorial recognition — by Chad, by the UAE, by an eventual settlement that partitioned Sudan in fact if not in name — a separate concession to Emirati investors for development of RSF-controlled territory becomes available. The RSF does not yet control Red Sea coastline, but the longer the war continues and the longer the SAF's ability to project force into Darfur remains limited, the more likely a *de facto* partition becomes — and the more likely the underlying Emirati commercial interest finds a route to expression that does not require a Khartoum-issued concession.[10][8]

What Port Sudan looks like now

In the meantime, the SAF retains exclusive control of the existing Port Sudan facility and has, since the cancellation, sought alternative international port partners. Qatar has offered preliminary investment terms. Turkey has signalled interest. Russia, under a different version of the 2017 Bashir-era agreement for a Russian naval base at Port Sudan, has been quietly continuing low-level conversations that the SAF has not closed.[11][6] No comprehensive new agreement has been signed. The infrastructure remains under-invested, the throughput remains constrained by wartime conditions, and the SAF's hard-currency-earning potential from port operations remains a fraction of what the pre-war framework, including Abu Amama, would have produced.

The buried fact at the centre of the Sudanese war is that the conflict destroyed roughly $6 billion of foreign investment already committed to the country in 2022, and may yet produce a different $6-billion concession to the same investors through a different Sudanese sovereign. The economic logic of the war is not separable from the question of who, after it, signs the next port-construction contract. The cancellation closed one route to that outcome; the RSF's Nairobi declaration opened another.

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