The UN’s reporting on Colombian mercenaries in Sudan reveals a grim new map of violence, where Latin American fighters, Emirati networks, and African atrocities meet, showing how private war now travels through fragile labor markets, deniable alliances, and exported skill.
A Siege with Colombian Hands
The story is horrifying not only because of what happened in Sudan, but because of who helped make it possible. “The Working Group was informed that there could be as many as over 10,000 Colombians recruited abroad, many into armed conflict situations. Due to a lack of precise data, it is often difficult to ascertain who among these individuals are voluntary enlisters, contractors, or mercenaries,” the statement by the UN working group said.
According to another report by the Conflict Insights Group, a network of Colombian mercenaries backed by the United Arab Emirates provided critical support to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces as it captured the western city of el-Fasher last year. The investigation, used mobile phone tracking data tied to Colombian fighters to map a pipeline of movement, logistics, and battlefield presence that linked Abu Dhabi to the siege and fall of one of the conflict’s most brutal chapters. Tens of thousands were killed across the wider war, millions were driven from their homes, and el-Fasher itself became a place later associated by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court with war crimes and crimes against humanity, while UN investigators said the atrocities carried the hallmarks of genocide.
That should shake Colombia, and it should shake Latin America more broadly. The region is used to exporting labor, commodities, and migrants. It is less comfortable admitting that it also exports trained violence. Yet this case suggests exactly that. Colombian fighters did not appear in Sudan as lost drifters or isolated adventurers. According to the Conflict Insights Group, they were part of a structured network, working as drone pilots, artillerymen, and instructors inside the Desert Wolves brigade, a force allegedly paid and employed by a UAE-based company with ties to senior Emirati officials. One device connected to Wi-Fi networks named “DRONES” and “LOBOS DEL DISIERTO [sic],” while others linked to Spanish-language networks such as “ANTIAEREO,” “AirDefense” and “ATACADOR.” This is not the language of chaos. It is the language of organization.
The political meaning is hard to miss. Latin America is present in this war not as a mediator, not as a humanitarian voice, but as manpower. Colombia, the country most associated in the region with professionalized conflict and armed endurance, is showing up in Africa through retired officers, recruiters, and hired specialists. President Gustavo Petro called the mercenaries “specters of death” and described their recruitment as a form of human trafficking. That description matters because it pushes against the old glamour that private military work sometimes borrows from elite training and nationalist mythology. Strip the rhetoric away, and what remains is a labor market for killing.
The Business of Deniable War
What makes this case so important is the structure of deniability wrapped around it.
The UAE has long denied supporting the RSF, and it previously rejected what it called false and unfounded allegations while condemning atrocities in el-Fasher. Yet Justin Lynch, director of the Conflict Insights Group, says this is the first research in which UAE involvement can be proved with certainty. The report used commercially available tracking technology originally designed to personalize advertising, along with flight tracking data, satellite imagery, social media videos, and news and academic material. It followed one phone from Colombia to Abu Dhabi’s Zayad International Airport and then to a military training facility in Ghayathi. It found devices configured in Spanish, then traced some of them onward to South Darfur and Nyala, the de facto RSF capital and a prominent hub for Colombian mercenaries and drone operations.
That is the real machinery of modern proxy war. States do not always need uniforms, flags, or official declarations. They need contractors, logistics hubs, training facilities, plausible denials, and expendable foreign specialists. The Colombian role here fits that model almost too neatly. Retired army Colonel Alvaro Quijano, based in the UAE, is identified by the Colombian outlet La Silla Vacía as the leader of the Desert Wolves brigade and has already been sanctioned by the U.S. and UK for recruiting Colombians to fight in Sudan. The U.S. has twice sanctioned Colombian nationals and associated companies for recruiting mercenaries to fight there, first in December and then again last week. Yet even the U.S. Treasury Department, while saying Colombian fighters supported the RSF capture of el-Fasher, stopped short of making a direct connection to the UAE. That gap is where impunity lives.
There is another uncomfortable truth here for Latin America. Foreign wars increasingly consume the skills produced by local histories of militarization. Colombia did not create the Sudan war, but Colombians appear to have become useful to those trying to win it from the shadows. The region has spent generations training men for conflict, disciplining them into battlefield competence, then failing to offer enough moral or economic alternatives once those skills leave formal service. When that happens, military knowledge becomes migratory. It goes where money is. It goes where the law is weakest. It goes where someone powerful wants a war fought without fingerprints.
What Latin America Should Hear in This
Latin America should hear three warnings in this story.
The first is that the region’s long intimacy with armed violence now travels well. It can be packaged, subcontracted, and redeployed overseas. The report says the number of Colombian fighters in Sudan has previously been estimated in the low hundreds. That may sound small compared with whole armies, but mercenary wars are not built from mass alone. They are built from specialized nodes of force. Drone operators, artillerymen, and instructors can tilt a siege without ever becoming a national debate back home. That is exactly what makes them politically convenient.
The second warning is moral. When Colombian fighters help an armed group take a city whose fall is then associated with atrocity, the question is no longer whether they were merely contractors following orders. The Conflict Insights Group says the UAE-Colombian mercenary network bears shared responsibility for those outcomes, and Lynch argues the scale of atrocities and siege in el-Fasher would not have happened without the drone operations they provided. Latin America has long demanded that the world recognize the suffering caused by foreign-backed violence in its own lands. It cannot ignore the ethical reversal when people from the region become hired instruments in someone else’s catastrophe.
The third warning is political. Foreign support for both sides has been crucial to the continuation and expansion of Sudan’s civil war. That means the Colombian mercenary story is not a side plot. It is part of the mechanism that keeps the war alive. In that sense, this is not simply a Colombian scandal or a Sudan story. It is a global story about how conflict now sustains itself through networks that cross continents faster than accountability can follow.
And that may be the hardest truth of all. Colombia is still trying to live with the afterlife of its own violence, yet fragments of that afterlife are already being sold abroad. The phones, the flights, the Spanish-language Wi-Fi networks, the training compound, the drone hubs in Nyala, they all point to the same bleak conclusion. War has become a service economy. And Latin America, whether it wants to say it aloud or not, is already part of the supply chain.
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