Across the Red Sea, the Wars Feed Each Other

By Vijay Prashad

Sudan’s war is usually described as an African catastrophe, Yemen’s as an Arabian conflict, and the war around Iran as a Gulf crisis. Such divisions obscure the movement of weapons, money, soldiers, and commercial interests between them. Look from Africa’s Red Sea coast and another picture emerges. These wars have distinct origins, but they increasingly sustain one another through military patronage, competition over ports, and the destruction of civilian livelihoods.

The starting point must be Sudan’s people. The World Food Programme currently estimates that 19.5 million face acute hunger, while around 8.6 million are internally displaced. It reports that sorghum prices are nearly three times higher than a year ago and wheat flour prices have almost doubled. Maritime disruption is raising fuel and fertiliser costs. Sudanese families therefore confront their own war and the economic consequences of wars across the water.

The fighting that began in April 2023 between Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces grew out of from Sudan’s militarised political economy. Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, built his power through a paramilitary apparatus rooted in Darfur’s violence. Both military centres accumulated economic power and obstructed civilian democracy. Foreign intervention enlarged their capacity to destroy a country whose popular movement had demanded a different future.

Yemen helped prepare this disaster. After Sudan joined the Saudi-led intervention in 2015, Sudanese soldiers, including large RSF contingents, crossed the Red Sea. The International Crisis Group’s 2019 investigation found that Hemedti supplied considerably more troops than the regular army and that his forces frequently occupied frontline positions. Poor families supplied recruits attracted by military earnings. An impoverished African population became a source of fighting labour for wealthy Gulf monarchies.

That deployment strengthened Hemedti’s standing and external relationships. His forces acquired battlefield experience while he cultivated patrons beyond Sudan’s borders. The significance exceeds any individual payment or deployment. Gulf intervention helped a Sudanese commander consolidate an armed organisation with resources and relationships outside civilian control. A war fought in Yemen contributed to the growth of a military centre that would later wage war inside Sudan. The connection is direct and historical.

Gold supplied another foundation. The UN Panel of Experts’ January 2024 report described gold as a continuing revenue source for Sudan’s warring parties and documented smuggling networks. One consignment linked to an RSF-associated trader reached Dubai through Port Sudan in May 2023. The panel also found that routes shifted towards Egypt after fighting began. This is a regional war economy, capable of changing its commercial pathways when circumstances require.

Interventions in Sudan

The UAE’s role requires scrutiny. Amnesty International reported in May 2025 that guided bombs and howitzers used by the RSF had almost certainly been re-exported through the Emirates. Its analysis examined identifiable weapons and munition remnants. Abu Dhabi denies supplying the RSF, but that denial must be recorded alongside the visual evidence. International arms suppliers also bear responsibility for preventing diversion into Sudan.

An October 2026 European Union Agency for Asylum assessment describes reported RSF supply routes through eastern Chad, southeastern Libya, and northeastern Somalia. These routes connect Sudan’s interior to a much wider African geography. Airfields, border crossings, commercial intermediaries, and military patrons matter as much as formal alliances. Darfur cannot be protected while the networks replenishing armed groups remain intact. Nor can responsibility be confined to the men who pull the trigger.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt, meanwhile, favour the Sudanese army, although their interests and policies differ. Riyadh combines mediation with support for the continuity represented by Burhan’s authorities, while Cairo regards Sudan’s territorial integrity and the survival of a central state as strategic concerns. These preferences do not make either government an advocate of Sudanese popular democracy. The danger is that negotiations become a bargain among military patrons over the country’s future.

There is consequently no single Gulf policy towards Africa. Saudi and Emirati interests overlap, then collide. Sudan exposes these differences, as does Yemen. Nor does hostility towards Iran produce an uncomplicated regional division. Such relationships show how local military authorities seek assistance from different sources, while foreign governments calculate their interests separately in each theatre. Their alignments are practical, contingent, and dangerous.

The African coastline gives these relationships their strategic setting. Port Sudan connects a vast hinterland to the Red Sea. Further south, ports facing the Gulf of Aden offer access to shipping near Bab al-Mandab. Commercial investment can meet real development needs, but port contracts become politically combustible when combined with foreign security arrangements or agreements that bypass national institutions. Control of an entry point can shape an entire country’s economic options.

Somalia has challenged this pattern. In a January interview with Al Jazeera, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs minister of state for foreign affairs Ali Mohamed Omar explained his government’s cancellation of agreements with the UAE. He accused Abu Dhabi of undermining Somali sovereignty through dealings with entities outside the federal government. He said military personnel and equipment should leave, while investments in Berbera and Bosaso required a legal settlement. These were Mogadishu’s stated demands, not proof that every arrangement immediately ended.

The dispute reveals the African stakes of competition across the water. Somaliland and Puntland have their own political histories and interests, but outside powers can exploit disputes over authority to secure ports and military access. African sovereignty then becomes negotiable between external capitals and competing local authorities. What appears from abroad as logistical efficiency may appear locally as the fragmentation of the state and the loss of democratic control.

Yemen provides a warning against assuming that such arrangements are permanent. One assessment records the collapse of much of the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council’s territorial control in January 2026 after advances by Saudi-backed forces. Emirati troops withdrew, including from Socotra and Perim. Yet local allies retained influence. Withdrawal therefore changed the form and extent of Emirati power without demonstrating that Abu Dhabi had ceased to matter in Yemen.

Renewed fighting now threatens the southern Red Sea. On October 29, Ansarallah claimed attacks on Saudi refineries, an Aramco facility, and airports. Saudi authorities reported interceptions and limited casualties and damage from debris. On October 30, the coalition announced another interception towards the Mecca region, which Ansarallah denied targeting that day. These competing statements establish escalation, but they cannot establish that every claimed target was struck.

Saudi–Emirati rivalry nevertheless coexists with security cooperation. On October 7, the UAE Foreign Ministryforeign ministry condemned attacks on Saudi civilian and economic facilities and Saudi vessels in the southern Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab. The two governments can oppose each other’s local partners while supporting each other against another adversary. Treating them as either a unified bloc or irreconcilable enemies conceals how intervention actually operates.

The United States and Israel widened this system of insecurity through their war against Iran. The military escalation made countries already involved in African conflicts confront new threats at home. Yet their vulnerability has not dissolved their competing African ambitions. For Africa, the lesson is that dependence on outside military patrons imports their wider confrontations. A government seeking weapons for one battlefield may become entangled in struggles whose decisions are taken elsewhere, while its own population inherits the economic costs and the political dangers of those decisions for years afterwards.

The war around Iran magnifies these dangers through the maritime economy. Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab are separate straits, but disruption at both strains connected trading systems. UNCTAD estimated in March that about one-third of global seaborne fertiliser trade passes through Hormuz. Energy costs, insurance premiums, and freight charges transmit military escalation into agricultural costs. African countries experience this connection through import bills, shortages, and pressure on already restricted public finances.

For a Sudanese farmer, these pressures arrive on top of displacement and lost harvests, and for neighbouring countries sheltering refugees, they increase the cost of supporting people driven from their homes. The consequences extend far beyond the coastline. War damages production directly, then raises the price of restoring it. The same commercial system that facilitates the circulation of weapons becomes more expensive for those trying to move food and fertiliser.

Diplomacy must address these connections without denying each conflict’s political roots. On October 20, Iranian Foreign Minister foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Saudi Arabia and Ansarallah had not responded to Tehran’s mediation offer. An understanding involving Washington and Tehran could reduce regional pressure, but it would not automatically settle Yemen’s struggles over government, territory, and resources. Likewise, a Saudi–Emirati accommodation would leave Sudan’s demand for civilian democracy unresolved.

An African agenda for peace must therefore insist on halting external military supplies, protecting humanitarian routes, and defending sovereign control over ports and resources. Sudanese civilian organisations must have decisive political space in any settlement. The Red Sea should connect peoples through trade and cooperation, and its shores cannot be surrendered to arrangements in which African wealth pays for African destruction while outside powers negotiate their shares of the resulting ruin.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.