The Emirati cargo planes that don't exist on FlightRadar

An airstrip in eastern Chad is the logistical spine of the RSF's war. The U.N. counted at least 86 cargo flights from the UAE. No Western jurisdiction has moved to interdict it.

An airstrip in eastern Chad has become the logistical spine of one of the world's largest active conflicts. Most of the aircraft using it file no transponder. The U.N. counted them anyway.

Amdjarass, in the Ennedi-Est region of eastern Chad, is the hometown of Mahamat Idriss Déby, the president of Chad. Until 2023 the town had a desert airstrip used principally by the Chadian military and occasional French support flights. By the end of 2024, Amdjarass had become one of the busier military-cargo airfields in the region. Reuters, drawing on a panel of United Nations experts, reported at least 86 flights from the United Arab Emirates landing there since April 2023, suspected of carrying arms for the Rapid Support Forces.[1][2]

Many of the planes did not appear on commercial flight trackers, leaving Emirati airfields with transponders switched off and re-emerging at Amdjarass without flight-plan numbers civilian aggregators could capture. Satellite imagery showed cargo pallets, some marked with UAE flags, being unloaded near RSF supply routes; weapons experts who reviewed the images assessed the contents as probable ammunition or weapons based on the design and colour of the crates.[1][2] The U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan, across its 2024 reporting, treated the air bridge between the UAE and Chad as a central logistics channel feeding the RSF, while noting that neither the UAE nor Chad granted it full access to verify.[2][3]

The Emirati government has denied arming the RSF. Its position is that the Amdjarass flights are humanitarian: it cites 159 relief consignments and more than 10,000 metric tonnes of food and medical aid delivered via the airstrip since the war began, and it has stated that it will not transfer any weapons to the RSF "going forward."[1]

That denial sits uneasily with the documentary record. The U.N. panel confirmed 24 Ilyushin Il-76TD landings at Amdjarass in 2024 through satellite imagery, ramp photographs, and corroborating records.[1][2] The freighters are, in several cases, operated by the same Central Asian and offshore-registered shell carriers the panel had documented running earlier UAE air bridges into Libya in support of Khalifa Haftar's forces.[5] The operators are well practised at this geography.

What the panel actually saw

The U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan operates under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1591 and is meant to be granted access by member states to verify compliance with the Darfur arms embargo. In practice, neither the UAE nor Chad fully complied with its requests in 2023-24. What the panel did obtain is set out in its 2024 reporting:

- Twenty-four Il-76TD landings at Amdjarass were confirmed through satellite imagery captured at the time of arrival, ramp photographs, and corroborating records.[1][2]

- A larger number of additional flights were inferred from the panel's surveillance of departures from Emirati airfields and intermediate stop-overs, bringing the total of suspected arms flights since April 2023 to at least 86, the figure first reported by Reuters.[1][2]

- Imagery reviewed by the panel and by news organisations showed crates, some bearing UAE flags, being unloaded near RSF supply routes; weapons specialists assessed the contents as probably ammunition or weapons.[1][2]

The materiel arriving at Amdjarass was then trucked across the Chad-Sudan border and onward to RSF supply areas in West Darfur, a route consistent with the surge in RSF firepower documented over 2023-24.[2]

Why Chad permits it

The Chadian government's role is the diplomatic key. Amdjarass is not an Emirati base; it is a Chadian government airstrip, operated by Chad's air force, with arrivals notionally subject to Chadian customs control. The flights land with the permission of Chad's president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, the eldest son of Idriss Déby Itno, who ruled Chad for three decades and was killed in 2021.

Two things explain Déby's accommodation of the UAE flights. The first is money: the UAE extended Chad loans reported to total around $2 billion across 2023 and 2024, alongside broader investment promises, at a moment when N'Djamena was short of external support.[4] The second is the absence of alternatives. France completed the withdrawal of its military from Chad by early 2025, ending a defence relationship that dated to the 1960s, part of a wider retreat from the Sahel.[6] The United States keeps only a limited presence and has been unwilling to confront the UAE on the file, and the European Union has little leverage in N'Djamena. The accommodation reads as transactional rather than ideological, particularly given the long-standing friction between the Déby clan's Zaghawa base and the RSF's Arab tribal confederation.[4]

What the air bridge buys

The RSF's military capability in 2023-24 was substantially upgraded from where it stood before the war. At the start of the conflict the force fielded mainly Toyota technicals with heavy machine guns and a modest stock of mortars inherited from its days as a Bashir-regime counter-insurgency tool. By 2024 it had acquired armed drones, including Chinese-origin systems that have driven a sharp escalation in aerial attacks across Darfur and Kordofan, along with mortars, anti-tank weapons, and military communications equipment in quantities indicating sustained resupply rather than one-off capture.[1][7]

The newer matériel has no plausible domestic origin. The Sudan arms embargo dates to 2004 and applies to all parties to the Darfur conflict; the supply chain documented by the U.N. panel runs directly against it.[2]

Why the air bridge is the right unit of analysis

There is a case for treating Amdjarass as the war's logistical centre of gravity rather than reading each RSF capability discovery as a separate trafficking story. The RSF order of battle as it stood in 2024-25 sits downstream of those roughly 86 cargo flights. A heavy freighter like the Il-76 carries on the order of 40 tonnes per trip, so even a conservative reading of the confirmed and suspected flights implies thousands of tonnes of imported matériel over little more than a year, enough to keep a force of tens of thousands of fighters armed at a sustained tempo.[1][2]

The chokepoint is therefore a single airstrip in a small town in eastern Chad. Closing it would not end the Sudan war: the RSF has accumulated stockpiles, and gold revenue would let it seek alternative supply through Eritrea or Egypt. But closing it would push the RSF's operational tempo down and its logistics cost up, and it would show that the United States and the European Union were willing to confront a Gulf partner over a documented arms-embargo violation.

That has not happened. The U.N. panel's reports have produced briefings, joint statements, and expressions of concern, but no enforcement consequence for the carriers, the Chadian government, or the originating consignor.[2][4] The flights have continued, with the aircraft mix shifting somewhat as the tracking became more public but with no clear reduction in throughput.[1]

The point is that the Sudan war's principal supply line is documented, named, and geographically specific: an airstrip, a known set of operators, an overland corridor any of several Western enforcement jurisdictions could choose to interdict and none has. The war's continuation is, in that narrow sense, partly a policy choice rather than only a fact about Sudan.

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