Major host country and transit geography for refugees from Darfur and western Sudan.
This morning the UN General Assembly met to discuss the cost of inaction and urgent need to collectively scale up the humanitarian response in Sudan and the region. I recently returned from Chad, where I met Sudanese refugees who have escaped across... https://t.co/lEy5ij0WjK
When I travelled to Chad in December 2025 with , I met Sudanese women and girls who had endured unimaginable violence and fled inexplicable loss. Their strength and dignity have stayed with me. Despite the trauma and loss, they are quietly rebuildin... https://t.co/cZZYMuo3Ky
Your Support Brings Hope Beyond This Event! This event is a powerful reminder of what can happen when a community comes together for a greater purpose. We are deeply grateful to @pace4peace5k and to every sponsor, organizer, volunteer, runner, donor, and supporter who helped make this day a success. Your commitment to service and humanitarian action demonstrates that compassion has the power to create meaningful change. Atiye Charity Association (ACA) continues to support Sudanese refugees, in Eastern Chad, internally displaced families in Sudan, and vulnerable communities in the neighboring countries through initiatives focused on food security, clean water, education, medical assistance, and emergency relief. We invite you to follow our journey, learn about the communities we serve, and see the impact of your support through our website and social media platforms. Whether you choose to volunteer, partner with us, donate, or simply help spread awareness, you become part of a growing movement dedicated to restoring hope and dignity to those affected by crisis. Together, we can ensure that vulnerable families are seen, supported, and never forgotten. @fleetfeettreasurevalley @islamic.center.of.boise @connectionscreditunion @idahosierraclub @safeconnectionsllc @tanta.inc @agnew_beck Website: atiyeaca.org Social platforms: Atiye Charity Association Email:[email protected] 240-705-1642 #thankyou #sudan #السودان #atiyecharityassociation
mereka, ada aktor regional yang lebih besar: Uni Emirat Arab (UEA): Mendukung RSF (melalui jalur rahasia di Chad, Libya, dan Uganda). Motif tersembunyinya adalah mengamankan akses ke tambang emas Sudan, dan memporak-porandakan gerakan Islamis yang tidak disukai UEA.
@myhiddenvalue @TRobinsonNewEra False. Iran: 3.5 million refugees Turkey: 2.9 million refugees Pakistan: 1.5 million refugees Chad: 1.2 million refugees, Bangladesh: 1 million refugees Jordan and Lebanon: 640,000 and 750,000 refugees respectively
"From Bogotá to El Fasher": How UAE Trained Colombian Mercenaries to Fight Alongside RSF in Sudan 🇸🇩 Colombian mercenaries accused of committing war crimes in Sudan were trained on military bases in the United Arab Emirates, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. The group's investigation outlines how, since 2024, the Abu Dhabi-based security company Global Security Services Group hired hundreds of Colombian private military contractors, who were then deployed to Sudan to fight alongside the Rapid Support Forces. Human Rights Watch found evidence that the private military contractors were in El Fasher in October 2025, when the RSF seized the key city and committed widespread massacres and rape. The report adds to evidence of the UAE's involvement in the war in Sudan, despite the government's repeated denials. The UAE’s Role in the Deployment of Colombian Fighters and Other Backing to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan In October 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the parties to Sudan’s conflict, took over El Fasher, the capital of the North Darfur state, following an 18-month siege that, along with continuous shelling and drone strikes, led to starvation among civilians in and around the city. The RSF unleashed mass killings and other abuses against civilians and hors-de-combat fighters–who were disarmed or injured–and trying to flee. They waited at a trench they had built–three meters deep, along a berm roughly two meters high–to ambush those trying to cross. “We met a group of RSF, and they stopped us,” recalled Amal, a 29-year-old woman: We had … families with people with special needs, like deaf, and then children [with Down syndrome] … One RSF member called the other and said: “Come and see this mad [person]!” and finally they killed them … And after killing, they arrested some of the women ... And they said: “Kill the ambayat [slaves].” Amal said those doing the killing were Arab Sudanese, but standing next to them were white people, who she said were shorter than the Sudanese fighters, and, unlike them, wore fatigues and helmets. “They had sniper rifles, … small weapons with silencers. … They were wearing something around their chest, short sleeves, and insignia.” Evidence collected by Human Rights Watch indicates that, since 2024, an Abu Dhabi-based security company–which is licensed to work for the Emirati government and has links to the ruling family and senior United Arab Emirates (UAE) officials–has appeared to hire Colombian private military contractors (PMCs) who were deployed to Sudan to fight alongside the RSF. Human Rights Watch believes that the white uniformed fighters described by Amal were most likely Colombian PMCs, who stood by while RSF fighters killed men and women, including people with disabilities. This report adds to a growing body of evidence documenting UAE efforts to provide military support to the RSF, which the UAE steadfastly denies, and of which the provision of Colombian PMCs is but one component. Provision by the UAE of military support to the RSF, including the recruitment and supply of PMCs through a company acting as its proxy, despite the RSF’s grave and well-publicized abuses in Sudan, could constitute aiding and abetting in, or otherwise substantially contributing to, the RSF’s commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The information in this report about the deployment of Colombian PMCs is based on interviews with two of those Colombians who were deployed to Sudan to assist the RSF; three informed sources with knowledge of Colombian private military recruitment companies and Emirati private security companies; six residents of El Fasher who saw foreign fighters Human Rights Watch believes were Colombians in the city; two El Fasher residents who identified Colombians who had been captured; and other informed sources. It also draws extensively on research on social media platforms to identify profiles of Colombian PMCs and to analyze and verify their content, including by geolocating videos and photographs; an analysis of satellite imagery of transit points; a review of documents, including two internal to the Global Security Services Group (GSSG) and four licenses issued by the UAE authorities; and publicly available reporting by media outlets and other research organizations. At least 300 Colombians had been deployed as early as August 2024, media reports indicate. The RSF at the time was tightening its siege of El Fasher, the only remaining city in the region under the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and allied forces’ control, and conducting escalating ground and air attacks. Evidence collected by Human Rights Watch indicates that Colombians took part in combat in and around El Fasher and, according to media reports, provided training to RSF recruits–including child soldiers. Retired military personnel in Colombia first learned about the job through A4SI, a Colombia-based recruitment agency and their first point of contact. A4SI worked closely with Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), which appears to have hired the contractors who were deployed to Sudan. The recruitment effort was ostensibly private. But on their way to Sudan, this report shows, the contractors transited through at least two UAE military facilities in the UAE. Videos published by contractors on their social media and analyzed by Human Rights Watch, along with other content sent directly by interviewed contractors, identify the UAE military base in Ghiyathi and an apparent military facility in Al Wathba, both in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, as transit points. A contractor said he received training by Emirati nationals in one such base. In addition, Human Rights Watch identified four additional contractors who made confirmed stopovers in the UAE prior to their deployment to Sudan. One contractor told Human Rights Watch that he departed Abu Dhabi from a “smaller special airport” outside the city. Another told Human Rights Watch that when he arrived in the UAE on a private flight, he skipped immigration controls and, with other contractors, was immediately transferred to a UAE military base in Ghiyathi. “They didn’t stamp our passports. We went in and went out and there was a bus waiting for us to take us to a military base,” he said. The contractors, Human Rights Watch found, then traveled to Sudan through a complex network of ostensibly private companies and transit points, using an air bridge spanning multiple countries. The transit points include eastern Libya, Bossaso–in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in Somalia–and N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. Contractors who went the eastern Libya route traveled through the UAE and then to Benghazi, continuing overland to Darfur. One contractor who took the Bossaso route traveled via commercial airlines to the Puntland capital, where he stayed for roughly 10 days, before flying to the UAE. From there, he took a private flight to N’Djamena, in Chad, where he changed planes, flying to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur in Sudan. The first public evidence of the Colombians’ presence came through videos posted on social media in November 2024, 19 months into the conflict in Sudan. In the desert of North Darfur, the Joint Force of Armed Struggle Movements (JFASM or Joint Forces), a coalition of armed groups allied with the Sudanese Armed Forces, had intercepted a convoy of vehicles that had entered Sudan from Libya. In one of the videos, a fighter films himself flipping through documents recovered from the convoy, including the passport, driver's license, and other identity documents of a man from Colombia. “We captured mercenaries,” says the man filming, “Look, not even one of them is Sudanese.” In the video, stocks of munitions are also visible. These include Bulgarian-made mortar shells, that, France 24 would later reveal, had first been purchased for the UAE military–one of three instances Human Rights Watch is aware of equipment which appears to have been diverted from UAE military stockpiles to the RSF in violation of end-user agreements. International media have reported that the UAE has been providing the RSF with military support since April 15, 2023, when the current war in Sudan began. Since the war’s onset, the RSF have committed widespread violations and abuses across the country, including mass extrajudicial killings, rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, looting, and destruction of civilian infrastructure. In the regions of Darfur and Kordofan and in Gezira state, they laid towns and villages to waste, displacing millions of people. The RSF and allied militias have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Massalit and other non-Arab communities of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state. They targeted civilians for killing based on their ethnicity, and the context of RSF abuses against the Massalit raises the possibility that they may have had the intent to commit acts of genocide in El Geneina. The RSF’s widespread sexual violence nationwide also constitutes crimes against humanity. The impact of the conflict on civilians has been immense. It has created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, and at least 150,000 people have likely died as a result. An estimated 12.9 million people have fled their homes. Half the country’s population faces acute hunger, and famine is spreading–a clear consequence of the denial of humanitarian access by both parties, and of the widespread looting and attacks on civilians and civilian objects notably by the RSF. Support for the RSF from the UAE, or other sources, in the form of fighters and weapons would have contributed to the siege and assault on El Fasher. Media reports indicate that Colombian military contractors had deployed as early as August 2024, and that they were present in and around El Fasher since late 2024. Videos geolocated by Human Rights Watch show PMCs fighting in El Fasher including one video from January 2025 which shows a contractor operating a mortar. Two Colombians told Human Rights Watch that they directly supported the RSF’s operations in Sudan, the first in late 2024 and the second in April 2025. One said he trained RSF recruits around April 2025 at boot camps around Nyala–the de facto RSF capital located in South Darfur–and that many recruits were “young children.” In November and December 2025, six El Fasher residents told Human Rights Watch they saw people they believed were Colombian in the city in October 2025, when mass killings were taking place. GSSG appears to be the company hiring the contractors deployed to Sudan. According to third party corporate data reviewed by The Sentry, an investigative nonprofit organization, GSSG was founded in 2016 by Ahmed Mohammed al-Humairi, the secretary general of the UAE’s presidential court, who reports to UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. In 2017, The Sentry reported, al-Humairi transferred his shares in GSSG to Mohamed Hamdan al-Zaabi, a longtime business partner. Al-Zaabi, who has remained GSSG's CEO ever since, has extensive business and familial ties with the UAE authorities, Human Rights Watch has found. The evidence indicates that GSSG has close ties to the highest levels of the UAE government and has continued to work closely with, and for the benefit of, the UAE government. It boasts of being “the first private security company in the United Arab Emirates to be awarded an armed security license.” Until recently, it also advertised having key Emirati ministries as its clients. A former GSSG employee interviewed by Human Rights Watch and a cache of leaked emails examined by Human Rights Watch also show that senior members of the ruling family were likely among the company’s clients. The UAE is a highly centralized authoritarian state with few, if any, checks on the president’s state security apparatus backed by invasive mass surveillance. Emirati state authorities should therefore be fully aware of activities taking place on Emirati territory and especially on government property and military bases. Under UAE law, private security companies are required to coordinate their activities with UAE authorities and ensure that their activities are not in conflict with other security measures. UAE support for the RSF would be consistent with their pattern of behavior in the Middle East and Africa for a decade and a half. Human Rights Watch has documented the UAE’s interventions in Yemen and Libya in support of abusive local armed forces and groups, including funneling vast amounts of money and weapons, and training fighters. The media reported that the UAE authorities recruited Colombian security and military personnel as far back as 2011, and that in 2015, they had deployed hundreds of Colombians to fight in Yemen. In Sudan, the UAE appears to be using the same playbook. Despite mounting evidence, the UAE has continued to steadfastly deny that it provides any military support to the RSF. “We categorically reject any claims of providing any form of support to either warring party,” the UAE said in a statement to the Associated Press in November 2025. Instead, UAE authorities said it supported efforts to “achieve an immediate ceasefire, protect civilians and ensure accountability.” Governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union member states, and international and regional bodies, such as the United Nations and African Union, are aware of the evidence of the UAE's support. Yet, in their statements on the conflict in Sudan, they have largely abstained from being explicit about the UAE’s support, or condemning such support for the RSF which carries out widespread rape and unlawful civilian killings. Instead, they have stuck to vague references condemning “external backers.” The UAE’s allies and UN and AU security council members should publicly call for UAE authorities to immediately and urgently end the provision of weapons, equipment, personnel, and other assistance to the RSF. The UN Security Council should ask its Panel of Experts to investigate GSSG, as well as its CEO Mohamed Hamdan al-Zaabi, for the company’s role in providing PMCs to assist the RSF’s activities in Darfur in violation of the UN arms embargo established by the UN Security Council since 2004. Other actors, including private companies such as airlines, and UAE officials should also be investigated to determine if they are indeed involved in providing assistance to the RSF in Darfur in violation of the UN arms embargo. Based on the Panel’s findings, the Security Council should impose targeted sanctions on those aiding and abetting the RSF. Only when perpetrators and those aiding them pay the price of their actions will the cycle of abuse and atrocities end.
Your Support Brings Hope Beyond This Event! This event is a powerful reminder of what can happen when a community comes together for a greater purpose. We are deeply grateful to @pace4peace5k and to every sponsor, organizer, volunteer, runner, donor, and supporter who helped make this day a success. Your commitment to service and humanitarian action demonstrates that compassion has the power to create meaningful change. Atiye Charity Association (ACA) continues to support Sudanese refugees, in Eastern Chad, internally displaced families in Sudan, and vulnerable communities in the neighboring countries through initiatives focused on food security, clean water, education, medical assistance, and emergency relief. We invite you to follow our journey, learn about the communities we serve, and see the impact of your support through our website and social media platforms. Whether you choose to volunteer, partner with us, donate, or simply help spread awareness, you become part of a growing movement dedicated to restoring hope and dignity to those affected by crisis. Together, we can ensure that vulnerable families are seen, supported, and never forgotten. @fleetfeettreasurevalley @islamic.center.of.boise @connectionscreditunion @idahosierraclub @safeconnectionsllc @tanta.inc @agnew_beck Website: atiyeaca.org Social platforms: Atiye Charity Association Email:[email protected] 240-705-1642 #thankyou #sudan #السودان #atiyecharityassociation
She was nine years old when she got polio. This was 1954 — one year before Jonas Salk's vaccine was declared safe and effective. She was kept in isolation as she recovered, surrounded by other children in iron lungs, watching some of them die. She survived. Decades later, she would spend years of her life traveling the world trying to eradicate the disease that had nearly taken her as a child. That is the kind of person Mia Farrow is — and it is almost never the first thing anyone mentions about her. She was born María de Lourdes Villiers Farrow on February 9, 1945, in Los Angeles, California. Her father, John Farrow, was an Australian-born film director. Her mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, was the Irish actress best known for playing Jane in the Tarzan films — one of the most recognized faces in Hollywood. There were seven children in the family. Mia was the third. Her childhood was marked by loss as well as privilege. At nine, she fought through polio in isolation. At thirteen, her nineteen-year-old brother Michael was killed in a plane crash. Much later in life, her brother Patrick — who had become a sculptor — died by suicide in 2009. She carried all of it, and kept moving. She was sixteen when she began pursuing acting seriously. Her first credited film role came in 1964. That same year, she was cast in the primetime television soap opera Peyton Place as Allison MacKenzie — a role that made her one of the most recognized young actresses in America almost overnight. She left the show in 1966 after marrying Frank Sinatra. She was twenty-one. He was fifty. It was one of the most talked-about marriages in Hollywood history, and it lasted two years. After the divorce, she went to India. In early 1968, she traveled to the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh to study transcendental meditation. She was not the only notable figure there. The Beatles were in residence — John, Paul, George, and Ringo — along with Donovan and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Her younger sister Prudence was also there. Prudence became so deeply immersed in meditation that she would not come out of her room for days at a time. John Lennon wrote a song for her — calling her back to the world, back to the sunshine. It became one of the most beloved songs the Beatles ever recorded. Dear Prudence. Later that year, Rosemary's Baby was released. Roman Polanski's horror masterpiece — in which Mia Farrow played a young woman who comes to believe her unborn child has been given to the Devil — is considered one of the defining American films of the 1960s. Her performance earned her a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. She was not yet twenty-four. In the 1970s, she became the first American actress invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company — spending years in London doing classical theater, building a craft that her Hollywood work had only partially showcased. She married composer and conductor André Previn in 1970. They had three biological children and adopted three more together — including children from Vietnam and Korea. The marriage ended in 1979. Throughout the 1980s, she collaborated extensively with director Woody Allen on thirteen films — Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and others. The films brought her the most sustained critical recognition of her career. The relationship ended in 1992 under circumstances that became one of the most publicly complicated personal stories in entertainment history. She has raised fourteen children — biological and adopted — many of them from countries in crisis. She has never stopped. In April 2004, she read an op-ed in the New York Times about the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — and what was then unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan. She described the piece as making her knees buckle. She booked a trip. What followed was years of direct, sustained activism that went far beyond celebrity endorsement. She made repeated trips to refugee camps in eastern Chad — sitting at the Darfur border, documenting what she saw, photographing survivors, and reporting what she found to anyone who would listen. She became a board member of the Darfur Women Action Group. She became a leading voice in the international campaign to hold China accountable for its oil trade with Sudan — a relationship she and others argued was directly funding the atrocities. In March 2007, she co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with her son Ronan targeting Steven Spielberg, who had been named an artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The argument was precise: China was the largest buyer of Sudanese oil. Sudan's government was conducting a genocide. Spielberg's involvement was lending legitimacy to a regime that was enabling it. Spielberg resigned from his role as artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics. China — responding to what had become an international campaign — appointed a special envoy to Darfur and took steps that had been previously refused. Mia Farrow had, through strategic public pressure, moved one of the most powerful governments on earth. She co-founded the Olympic Dream for Darfur campaign. She carried an alternative Olympic torch through genocide memorial sites — Rwanda, Sarajevo, the Darfur-Chad border — in a relay that reached nine countries. In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. She was also, that same year, standing in a refugee camp at the edge of the Sahara, at the Darfur border, talking to the people the world was not watching. She had become a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000. Part of what drove that work was deeply personal. She had survived polio as a child. One of her adopted sons, Thaddeus, had also contracted polio. She understood the disease from the inside — what it took from children, what it left behind. She dedicated years to UNICEF's global polio eradication campaign, traveling to conflict zones where the disease still persisted, raising funds, and drawing attention to areas where vaccination programs had been disrupted by war. She has fourteen children. She has appeared in more than fifty films. She survived polio at nine and spent decades fighting to make sure other children didn't have to. She sat at the edge of the Sahara and made China blink. The girl from Beverly Hills, daughter of two Hollywood legends, who grew up in the shadow of the biggest industry in the world and spent the last twenty years of her career doing the work that had nothing to do with cameras or fame or recognition. The actress who turned out to be, above everything else, a witness.
Rights group accuses UAE of being transit point for mercenaries on way to Sudan BBC Colombian mercenaries were recruited by a United Arab Emirates-based company and transited through Emirati military bases to support paramilitary troops who committed atrocities in Sudan, a leading rights organisation alleges. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the findings are further evidence of UAE-backing for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been accused of war crimes during the Sudanese civil war. The UAE denies claims it recruited and trained foreign fighters in its territory. "The UAE does not permit its territory to be used for the recruitment, training, financing or transit of foreign fighters to any conflict, including Sudan," its ministry of foreign affairs said. The HRW investigation was conducted through interviews with Colombian mercenaries between March and September 2025 as well as an analysis of social media posts identifying key locations and weapons in videos and images. War broke out in Sudan on 15 April 2023, following growing tension between the paramilitary RSF forces and the Sudanese army. Since then more 150,000 people are believed to have died from the violence and more than 12.9 million have been displaced. Millions of refugees have fled abroad including to neighbouring Chad The HRW report follows last month's research by security analysis organisation, the Conflict Insights Group (CIG), which also highlighted the alleged involvement of Colombian mercenaries in Darfur, Sudan's western region now largely held by the RSF. Colombian President Gustavo Petro was quoted last year as calling the mercenaries "spectres of death" and describing their recruitment as a "form of human trafficking". HRW says airports in the UAE, Libya, Chad and Somalia were used as transit points for the mercenaries before travelling to the frontlines in the Darfur region. "They didn't stamp our passports," a mercenary told the rights group, describing his journey through the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi. "We went in and went out and there was a bus waiting for us to take us to a military base." Investigations by the rights organisation point to the involvement of a complex network of Colombian and Emirati companies which advertised "drone pilot work in Africa" targeting former Colombian army men. A simple guide to what is happening in Sudan Sudanese city under siege: 'My son's whole body is full of shrapnel' HRW alleged that an Abu Dhabi-based company recruited the Colombian contractors who were deployed to Sudan to "provide the RSF with tactical and technical expertise, serving as infantry and artillerymen, drone pilots, vehicle operators, and instructors". According to HRW, the mercenaries were then trained in UAE military facilities in Ghiyathi and Al Wathba before covert deployment to war zones in Sudan where gross human rights violations such as mass extrajudicial killings, rape and gang rape, sexual slavery, looting and destruction of civilian infrastructure were allegedly committed. The RSF has faced particular international outrage following its violent capture of the city of el-Fasher last year. The United Nations Human Rights Office estimates that more than "6,000 were killed within the first three days of the RSF offensive". "In November and December 2025, six el-Fasher residents told Human Rights Watch they saw people they believed were Colombians in the city in October 2025, when mass killings were taking place," the HRW report states. A survivor detained by the RSF who is quoted in the report said he saw "foreign fighters" who "looked on silently" as RSF fighters opened fire on crowds. Another reported seeing "white fighters" alongside RSF fighters who killed three. "They were there when the executions happened, but they didn't execute." RSF leader Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo last year declared an investigation into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the capture of el-Fasher. The HRW report also says munitions belonging to the UAE armed forces were found after the capture of Colombian mercenaries inside Sudan. Some of the munitions were manufactured in Serbia and Bulgaria but purchased by the UAE, according to HRW. According to the UN, thousands were killed in the first three days of RSF's offensive on el-Fasher HRW has called for the UN, African Union, and the UK and US governments to speak out about the UAE's alleged involvement in the war in Sudan. In December 2025, the US imposed sanctions on a network and individuals - primarily of Colombian nationality - it said was recruiting former Colombian soldiers and training them to fight in Sudan. The UAE told the BBC allegations that Emirati companies were involved in supporting the RSF had been investigated. "Where allegations have been made about specific entities, the relevant authorities have investigated, including by making inquiries with companies cited in open sources," the foreign ministry said in a statement. "Any individual or entity - Emirati or foreign - that were to act in a way that could reasonably be interpreted as providing operational support to an armed non-State actor would be doing so without state authorisation, in violation of Emirati law, and would be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution." The statement added that the country "remains committed" to working with its partners to "alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people" by securing a lasting ceasefire and help create what it called an "inclusive, Sudanese-owned transition to an independent civilian-led government".
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