While Russia, the United States, China, and France appear to be the dominant players on the African continent today, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) role on the continent continues to grow. In particular, the country is heavily involved in two ongoing conflicts, civil wars in Libya and Sudan, acting as a power broker in both. Meanwhile, the UAE’s illicit financial networks have continued to gather strength, as illicit gold flows through Abu Dhabi and funds armed groups, mercenaries, and junta regimes in West Africa. Amidst these political and financial power plays, the UAE appears to be mulling the establishment of its own “Foreign Legion,” taking features of both the Russian Wagner Group and the French Foreign Legion to build the country’s brand of aggressive foreign involvement. The United States and its allies will need to come to grips with Abu Dhabi’s aggressive strategy that tends to encourage jihadism, rather than defeating it.
Abu Dhabi’s approach to foreign policy reflects an essential, thorny problem at the heart of the country’s success and failure–it has a tiny population and vast natural resources. While this natural bounty has made the average UAE citizen unbelievably rich, it also limits the country’s prospects abroad. Today, the country’s population is approximately 11 million people, but only 1 million citizens, while boasting the 16th highest GDP-per capita worldwide. This small, rich population does not appear interested in military service, creating a significant problem for a UAE government interested in projecting power abroad. Instead, Abu Dhabi has turned to a variety of out-of-the-box solutions to address its manpower limitations.
While the UAE has continued to build its petroleum-based wealth, its foreign policy aspirations have struggled to keep up. Today, the country views itself as a regional power, establishing itself both in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf as a power player. This power broker position naturally includes North Africa and the Horn of Africa, however it also pushes the UAE into competition with other regional powers. The UAE seeks to align and sometimes compete with Saudi Arabia, while both are also rivals with Iran in pursuit of regional hegemony. The Arab Spring, in particular, gave the UAE an opportunity to compete in North Africa and closer to home, particularly as civil wars kicked off in Libya and Yemen. Without an army, however, Abu Dhabi attempted a variety of different tactics to influence events abroad.
The UAE took advantage of the Yemeni civil war to test tactics it would later deploy in Africa. However, this would also reflect internal fears and distaste for casualties. This became particularly clear after 45 UAE soldiers were killed in 2015 in Yemen, the deadliest day in the history of the country’s armed forces. Thus, Abu Dhabi was forced to turn toward other approaches to avoid internal blowback. One key tactic has been the recruitment and use of Yemeni child soldiers in the conflict. However, to accomplish more lethal tasks, Abu Dhabi turned to an unexpected source to provide some military muscle, the Americas. Under the leadership of American operator Erik Prince, the UAE hired Reflex Response Security Consultants in 2011 at a rate of $529 million USD. This organization then brought 1800 former Colombian special forces operators to support the UAE’s war effort in Yemen. The government then hired the Delaware-based Spear Operations Group, composed of ex-U.S. special forces and French Foreign legion, who were hired to assassinate Yemeni resistance figures, members of the al-Islah movement affiliated with the Islamic Brotherhood. The UAE also recruited Sudanese forces to act as ground troops in Yemen, who allegedly sustained heavy losses during the fighting there. Yet, with Yemen’s civil war continuing to the present day and the rise of the anti-Sunni Houthis, Abu Dhabi has likely determined that its strategies in Yemen were ineffective in accomplishing the country’s foreign policy goals, particularly the establishment of a regime in Sanaa that aligns with the UAE politically.
Moving West, Abu Dhabi next intervened in the post-Qaddafi fallout in Libya, where a civil war was brewing after the fall of the longtime dictator as a result of Arab Spring protests and Western-backed airstrikes. The UAE moved to align with the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Haftar, who was also backed by Saudi Arabia, France, and others, against the U.S.-backed and international recognized Government of National Accord. The UAE developed a number of different strategies to support Haftar, bringing along some strategies from its campaign in Yemen while also adopting new ones. However, the overall theme–military support without an army–continued. UAE-based individuals allegedly paid Sudanese and Chadian mercenaries to support Haftar. The UAE also purchased a fleet of Russian mobile air defense batteries, Pantsir S-1s, that could shoot down airplanes and drones for Haftar. Members of the Russian Private Military Company Wagner Group would then teach Haftar’s troops to use these weapons. However, these batteries began to be attacked by Turkish drones, demonstrating the escalating, international nature of the conflict. Abu Dhabi routinely broke the 2011 United Nations arms embargo on Libya to deliver weapons and ammunition to Haftar. In another scheme, UAE-based Black Shield Security Services duped hundreds of Sudanese men into military service in Libya and Yemen, often serving as security forces for Haftar-owned oil terminals. The UAE may also have been financially backing Wagner Group, which operated in support of Haftar across Libya during this time period, as well as alleged battlefield coordination between the two parties. Despite all of these activities and significant financial investment, Haftar’s side has yet to claim victory amidst a continually simmering conflict. However, the UAE is likely profiting from the continued conflict through weapons sales and oil revenues.
Beyond using Sudan’s population as a recruitment source for conflicts in Yemen and Libya, the UAE has also emerged as a power playing in the ongoing civil war within the country’s own borders. The UAE supports the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), alongside Libya, against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Abu Dhabi appears to be a primary contributor, investing over $6 billion in the country since 2018. The UAE has also allegedly provided the RSF with heavy weapons, including thermobaric bombs, meanwhile, Dubai continues to act as a trafficking point for gold mining, this time for RSF forces in Sudan. Abu Dhabi has also been accused of transshipping arms via Wagner Group in CAR to the RSF, and Wagner may have assisted the UAE in shipping arms via Chad across the border into RSF territory in Sudan. Last, the UAE and Wagner appear to be working together to supply the RSF with drones, which has resulted in attacks on civilians, including a 2023 bombing of a hospital in Omdurman. By backing the RSF, the UAE is certainly prolonging the war in Sudan, while also ratcheting up the costs for non-combatants.
Building on its connections with the Wagner Group, the UAE also became involved in the organization’s largest success to date–the Central African Republic. Wagner Group has played a key role in ensuring both the ongoing–and increasingly authoritarian–rule of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, while also serving as a primary guarantor of security in the country. Like in Libya, the UAE has cooperated with Russia across sectors to support these operations and establish lucrative business relationships. On one end, the UAE acted as a transportation lynchpin for Wagner Group, particularly Kratol Aviation, a US Treasury-sanctioned organization that provided transportation for Wagner Group and helped the Group import mining equipment. Further, the UAE is believed to be a key hub in illicit gold and diamond smuggling networks connecting CAR and Wagner with worldwide patrons. A CBS investigation tracked a cargo plane, presumed to be loaded with Wagner Group gold, from Bangui to the UAE, where it overlapped with another plane that would later fly to Russia. In the diamond sector as well, Wagner Group worked with established smugglers like the Nassour family to launder diamonds through Dubai, which saw its volume of diamonds traded jump by 75% between 2015 and 2021. Both of these laundering systems reflect systems with significant customs loopholes–and ones that could be very useful to organizations and countries like Wagner Group and Russia that wish to circumvent international sanctions.
The UAE has also proved useful as a willing accomplice for the lucrative West African gold trade, benefiting juntas, illiberal regimes, and Wagner Group. Mali has been a keystone in this relationship, as it only taxes the first 50 kilograms of gold exported per month. Meanwhile, the UAE allows gold to be brought into the country undeclared in hand luggage. Thus, countries as far away as Venezuela have utilized these weak import-export procedures to launder gold, with an estimated $1 billion in Venezuelan gold trafficked through Mali in 2020. The UAE also does not require origin certificates for gold that it imports. Meanwhile, Wagner Group has moved in on Mali’s artisanal mines, occupying four, including the largest, Intahaka mine in Gao. It’s likely that the Russians will again make use of the UAE to launder gold or send it directly back to Russia, as it has likely done in CAR.
Having experimented with different levers of force in deployments across Africa, Abu Dhabi seems to have slid into a role as an arms merchant, a precious metal exchange, and an intermediary with various private military actors. However, it may go further in the near future by returning to the concept of its own mercenary organizations. As reported this year by Deutsche Welle, the UAE is apparently considering establishing its own Foreign Legion. The Manar Military Company, which is based in Abu Dhabi, apparently circulated ads for recruits “under 50, highly disciplined, physically fit, with at least five years of military experience and able to deal with ‘high stress conditions.’” These recruits would allegedly be bound for Yemen or Somalia after their training concluded. Such an approach would attempt to lend legitimacy to the UAE’s foreign fighter activities by connecting the organization to the state, however it’s unclear in practice if this organization would look functionally different from an operation like Wagner Group, or perhaps like the Spear Operations Group that the UAE employed in Yemen. Further, unless the UAE is offering citizenship in exchange for service, any comparison to the French Foreign Legion will be limited. However, Abu Dhabi prefers to keep these developments under wraps, insisting that the concept is false. Regardless, regional experts will need to continue tracking this potential development, as it could have significant regional impacts should it ever come to fruition.
Taken together, Abu Dhabi’s various ventures across Africa point to a studied disinterest in ideological involvement or long-term political alliances. Instead, the UAE appears far more interested in war profiteering, securing other economic benefits such as a gold trafficking capacity, and building alliances with other military operators such as Wagner Group. To this point, the United States and the West in general have chosen to ignore this behavior, despite significant hair pulling over Wagner Group’s role in Africa. While individual UAE companies have been sanctioned for their involvement with Wagner Group, broader diplomatic messages about the UAE’s behavior in Africa have been muted. In order to limit growing instability across the continent, it would be in the West’s best interest to put pressure on Abu Dhabi to reevaluate the way it does business in Africa. Allowing the status quo to continue will almost certainly elongate the continent’s ongoing civil wars, while also contributing to mounting refugee crises and expanding jihadism in Central and West Africa.
The views and opinions presented in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the stance of the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA).