ethiopia’s name has entered the war in sudan
sudan’s accusation against ethiopia suggests the war may be entering a more dangerous phase.
Khartoum airport had already become a kind of symbol. In October 2025, Sudan’s army-led government tried to stage a symbolic reopening of the capital’s main airport after more than two years of war. A Badr Airlines plane landed, but it was unannounced, and carried no passengers. The army wanted to show that Khartoum was no longer only a battlefield. But drones targeted the facility almost immediately, proving that the state could not yet protect the idea of recovery.
That recovery narrative continued in stages. On February 1, a Sudan Airways flight from Port Sudan brought roughly 160 passengers to Khartoum, the first scheduled commercial flight since the war began, though still a domestic one. On April 28, a Kuwait Airways flight arrived from Kuwait with about 300 passengers, marking the first direct international commercial arrival in years. For the army-led government, these flights were proof that the capital was reconnecting to the country and then to the outside world.
The is why the drone strikes earlier this month are alarming, not because Khartoum airport had never been targeted before. It had. Not because the RSF had never used drones to disrupt the army’s recovery narrative. It had. The real shift is that Sudan is now accusing Ethiopia, which is a neighboring state and one of the Horn of Africa’s central powers, of serving as the launchpad.
On May 4, drones struck Khartoum airport, military areas and residential areas in Khartoum and Omdurman. The next day, Sudan formally accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates of involvement, claimed the drones had been launched from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport, described the assault as direct aggression, recalled its ambassador from Addis Ababa, and suspended airport operations for 72 hours. On May 6, Ethiopia rejected the accusations as baseless, the UAE called them unfounded propaganda, and Ethiopia counter-accused the SAF of arming TPLF “mercenaries”.
The UAE’s role in Sudan has been discussed for years. I’ve written about it. Sudanese officials, UN experts, rights groups, journalists, and analysts have all pointed in the same direction: the RSF’s war effort has not survived on local looting and battlefield improvisation alone. It has depended on external money, weapons, logistics, and regional access. The UAE denies arming the RSF, but the allegation is now central to how Sudan’s war is understood.
Ethiopia is different. The UAE is a power operating at a distance. Ethiopia is Sudan’s neighbor and they share a long border. It has its own unresolved disputes with Khartoum over land, water, refugees, insurgent movements, and the balance of power in the region. If Sudan’s claim is accurate, then the war is no longer only a civil war with foreign sponsors. It is beginning to look like a proxy conflict involving two of the Horn of Africa/Red Sea’s largest states.
A formal Ethiopia-Sudan war is not inevitable. But the line between Sudan’s internal conflict and the region’s state rivalries is getting thinner.
I argued last May that Sudan had become a template for a new kind of empire. One that is less about formal colonies and more about logistics, ports, militias, drones, gold routes, airstrips, political clients, and deniable violence. That was the deeper story beneath the RSF’s war. Sudan was being pulled apart by a system that rewarded fragmentation. The latest accusation against Ethiopia fits directly into that system.
According to Sudan’s military spokesperson, the army has evidence of several drone attacks since March 1 originated from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport and involved UAE-supplied drones. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry denied the claim and, in turn, accused Sudan of supporting hostile forces, including Tigrayan rebels. The exchange reveals how both governments now see the battlefield.
From Addis Ababa’s perspective, Sudan’s war is a security problem on Ethiopia’s western flank. The SAF is aligned with Egypt, the country challenging Ethiopia over the GERD, and Eritrea, the country Abiy’s government increasingly sees as a hostile actor on its northern border. From the Ethiopian point of view, the fear is not imaginary: if the SAF consolidates power with Egyptian and Eritrean backing, Ethiopia could face pressure from the west and the north at the same time.
In February, I mapped the emerging regional alignment around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and Sudan’s war: UAE, Ethiopia, Israel, Somaliland and the RSF on one side; Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan’s army on the other. Turkey sits awkwardly around this alignment: close to Somalia, increasingly active in Sudan, and too independent to fit neatly into either camp.
That was not a neat alliance system. These states do not all agree with one another. Some barely trust one another. But their interests were beginning to line up around the same pressure points like the Nile, the Red Sea, Bab Al Mandeb Strait, Sudan’s future, Somaliland, Ethiopia’s rise, Egypt’s anxiety, Eritrea’s fear of Ethiopian expansion, and the UAE’s desire to control strategic corridors from the Gulf to Africa.
The drone accusation makes that alignment harder to dismiss. If the attacks did originate from Ethiopian territory, then the UAE-Ethiopia-RSF axis becomes a possible operational reality. Drones do not fly themselves across borders. They require launch sites, permissions, air corridors, intelligence, fuel, technicians, or at minimum a state unwilling or unable to stop its territory from being used. That leaves two possible explanations, and neither is reassuring.
Either Ethiopia actively allowed its territory to be used in attacks on Sudan, or it is too weak, fragmented, or compromised to prevent foreign-backed military activity from operating through its own airports. One explanation points to policy. The other points to loss of control. Either explanation would put Addis Ababa under serious scrutiny.
There is another reason this matters. Sudan and Ethiopia are not minor conflicts sitting at the edge of the international system. They are two of the worst war zones of the last few years. The Tigray war killed vast numbers of people, with estimates ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to as high as 600,000. Sudan’s war has also killed vast numbers of people, with estimates running well into the hundreds of thousands, displaced more than 13 million people, produced famine conditions, and turned cities and markets into battlefields. Both conflicts are treated as separate crises. Ethiopia as a troubled but still functioning state, Sudan as a collapsed neighbor. That separation could be becoming harder to sustain. The Sudan-Ethiopia dynamic now looks like a cross-border proxy system: both governments are fighting internal enemies, and both suspect the other of helping those enemies.
The sad part is that both countries may be telling the truth. Sudan has real reasons to believe Ethiopia is giving the RSF strategic depth through the UAE-linked networks now surrounding the war. Ethiopia, in turn, has real reasons to believe the SAF is leaning into ties with it’s enemies. The SAF has deepened ties with Ethiopia’s adversaries in Tigray and Eritrea, while on Ethiopia’s side, the key link is its relationship with the UAE, alleged RSF logistics, and historical relationships with armed actors near Sudan’s border, including the SPLM-N faction led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, which is aligned with the RSF and active around the Blue Nile State frontier.
That is a real danger. Not simply that Sudan’s war expands outward, but that Sudan’s war and Ethiopia’s unresolved internal conflicts begin to overlap. If that happens, the region is no longer dealing with one civil war next to another unstable state. It is dealing with the possible merger of two mass-casualty conflict systems into a single regional battlefield.
the place to watch is blue nile state.
Blue Nile sits in southeastern Sudan, directly along the border with Ethiopia and South Sudan. It borders Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, the same region that hosts the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and it connects Sudan’s southeast to routes leading north toward Sennar, Gezira, and eventually Khartoum.
For much of the war, Blue Nile was relatively quiet compared with Khartoum or Darfur. That has started to change. Sudan is also accusing Ethiopia of allowing the RSF and its allies to use Ethiopian territory bordering Blue Nile State as rear depth. Those claims are still denied by Addis Ababa, but the fighting is largely happening exactly where SAF says the problem is. Reuters has reported that Ethiopia hosted a camp in Benishangul-Gumuz to train thousands of RSF fighters, with alleged UAE financing and logistical support, and that Asosa airport had been upgraded with infrastructure consistent with drone operations. This is why Sudan’s accusation cannot be treated as just another diplomatic spat.
the rsf’s supply network has never depended on one route.
Sudanese officials and outside observers have pointed to networks running through Chad, the Central African Republic, Libya, South Sudan, and maritime corridors connected to the UAE. I’ve previously written about how Chad and CAR as part of the RSF supply line. The Sudanese army has also accused similar drone-linked activity around Bosaso in Somalia, suggesting that the war’s logistics have stretched from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden into the Sahelian interior. Ethiopia’s naming extends that map.
But Ethiopia is not just another route on that list. Chad and Libya feed the war from Sudan’s far west, through Darfur and the desert corridors. Somalia is not that close to Sudan. The Ethiopian frontier sits much closer to Sudan’s central and eastern core and the routes lead toward Khartoum. That means an Ethiopian route brings the war closer to Sudan’s agricultural heartland, population centers, and state infrastructure.
so why now?
The first reason is military momentum. The Sudanese army has regained ground since 2025. That changed the political atmosphere around the war. The RSF’s early image as brutal, mobile, terrifying, and seemingly unstoppable has been damaged. The army has been able to present itself as the side restoring the capital, reopening roads, reviving airports, and returning state authority. Even limited recovery matters in a war of narratives.
But momentum does not mean consolidation. Sudan is increasingly becoming a checkerboard rather than a two-sided battlefield. The SAF may hold the north, east, and much of the center, while the RSF and allied forces remain entrenched in Darfur and parts of the south and southeast. The country is not simply moving toward victory by one side. It is drifting toward de facto partition.
The second reason is Ethiopia’s own pressure. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is governing a country that has never fully stabilized after the Tigray war. The Pretoria agreement ended one phase of fighting, but it did not produce a durable national settlement. Tigray remains politically fractured, and the possibility of renewed fighting there now hangs over the region. The Amhara region has been consumed by conflict with Fano militias. Oromia remains unstable. Ethiopia’s quest for sea access has alienated and sharpened tensions with Somalia and Eritrea.
For Abiy, the RSF and its allies may offer a way to create breathing room along Ethiopia’s western frontier. Not only for GERD but also for stopping Sudan from becoming a pipeline for weapons, fighters, and political support into Ethiopia’s own conflicts. The RSF has its own reasons to see Tigrayan forces as hostile, since Ethiopia and RSF-aligned readings of the war increasingly place TPLF-linked fighters on the SAF side of the conflict. So if the UAE-backed RSF weakens SAF-controlled border areas, Addis Ababa may see that as useful, even if it never says so openly.
Ethiopia does not need to invade Sudan for the two wars to begin merging. If Tigrayan or Amhara fighters, SAF-aligned networks, Eritrean-backed forces, RSF units, or eastern Sudanese militias begin moving across these borderlands with greater purpose, Sudan’s civil war will become entangled with Ethiopia’s unfinished wars. What looks like two separate conflicts on a map can become one chain reaction of proxy ties, ethnic border communities, rebel units, and state patrons pulling each other into the same battlefield.
This is also where Abiy Ahmed’s broader regional posture becomes relevant. Ethiopia is pushing for Red Sea access and managing renewed tensions with Eritrea. That does not mean Addis Ababa is acting irrationally. From an Ethiopian strategic perspective, a weakened SAF is less able to coordinate with Cairo and Asmara against Ethiopia over the Nile and the Red Sea. But it does mean Ethiopia may be attempting regional leverage from a position of internal fragility. That is a dangerous combination.
the uae is not just another foreign partner to addis ababa.
It has been one of the central external pillars of Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia from the beginning. In 2018, shortly after Abiy came to power, the UAE pledged $3 billion in aid and investment to Ethiopia, including a $1 billion deposit into the National Bank of Ethiopia to ease a severe foreign-currency shortage. That was not ordinary development finance. It was fast Emirati statecraft: direct, political, and binding.
By the end of 2022, UAE investment in Ethiopia had reportedly reached about $2.9 billion across more than 100 projects, and the relationship has since expanded through trade, energy commitments, security cooperation, and financial instruments. In July 2024, the two countries signed a currency swap agreement worth up to roughly $817 million, giving Ethiopia another buffer against its chronic hard-currency problem.
During the Tigray war, Emirati drone support was widely reported as part of the military balance that helped Abiy’s government survive one of its most dangerous periods. More recently, that relationship has moved beyond money and drones into police training, cybercrime cooperation, VIP security, counterterrorism, and defense ties. Ethiopia’s relationship with the UAE is therefore not simply diplomatic. It is financial, military, technological, and political. It is tied to Abiy’s economic survival, his security architecture, and the regional strategy that followed.
None of this proves Ethiopia helped launch drones into Sudan. It does explain why Sudan’s accusation has strategic logic. If Addis Ababa has grown dependent on Emirati security ties, and if the UAE sees Sudan as a central front in its regional project, then Ethiopia becomes a plausible platform.
The third reason is the UAE’s own position. The UAE has been losing the public-relations battle over Sudan. Its denials have not erased the growing body of reporting, diplomacy, and Sudanese accusations linking it to the RSF. The more the RSF is associated with atrocities, looting, ethnic violence, and the destruction of Sudanese cities, the more toxic that relationship becomes.
This is where deniability becomes useful. A drone launched from Emirati territory would be absurd. A drone supplied through Emirati-linked networks, moved through third countries, launched from an African state such as Ethiopia, Libya, or Somalia, and then attributed to the RSF is the logic of modern proxy war. Nobody fully owns the violence. The sponsor can deny it. The host state can deny it. The militia can absorb the blame. The fog benefits the actors most invested in deniability.
Sudan’s accusation against Ethiopia is not yet independently proven in the public record. Governments use external enemies to explain internal weakness, and wartime claims need evidence. But the broader pattern is familiar: move the tools through regional corridors, launch from somewhere plausibly deniable, and force everyone else to prove what the architecture already suggests.
what will egypt do if it believes ethiopia has entered sudan’s war.
Cairo has already signaled where it stands, condemning attacks launched from the territory of a neighboring country as a violation of Sudanese sovereignty. Saudi Arabia used similar language, calling on Sudan’s neighbors not to let their territory become a launchpad for attacks. Neither statement needed to name Ethiopia directly for the message to be understood.
Cairo has every reason to see this through the lens of encirclement. Egypt has historically treated Sudan as part of its natural sphere of influence, not simply as a neighboring state. The Nile runs through both countries and their militaries, intelligence services, borders, and political histories are deeply entangled. Sudan is supposed to be the strategic depth that protects Egypt’s southern flank. Instead, Sudan has become a battlefield where Ethiopia, the UAE, and the RSF can pressure Egyptian interests from below.
That is especially dangerous because Egypt is powerful, but strategically constrained. They have a large military, a huge population, the Suez Canal, and major diplomatic weight. But it lacks the financial depth, commercial networks, deniable logistics, and indigenous defense-industrial ecosystem that allow the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey to project influence more flexibly. So Egypt is left making mostly defensive moves like deepening ties with Eritrea, expanding cooperation with Somalia and Djibouti, backing the SAF, issuing statements on Sudanese sovereignty, striking RSF supply routes, and applying diplomatic pressure about the GERD. It’s something but it’s limited. They can slow the UAE-RSF network down, but they do not give Cairo the same freedom to shape the battlefield that Abu Dhabi has built through money, logistics, and proxies.
Egypt has recently become more active, offensively. In February, Reuters reported that Turkish-made Bayraktar Akinci drones had been deployed to Egypt’s East Oweinat airbase near the Sudanese border. The New York Times also reported that Akinci drones were operating from southwestern Egypt and striking RSF convoys in western Sudan, with Egyptian officials saying Cairo’s position had hardened after the fall of El Fasher. Egypt and Saudi pressure, tighter airspace access, scrutiny on Haftar’s Libya route, and the heat around Chad have all made the old UAE-to-RSF pipeline through Libya and Chad more costly.
Chad can be pressured. Libya has been Balkanized. Ethiopia is different. It is a major Horn of Africa state with more than 120 million people, has a large army, controls the GERD, and has serious regional weight. That means it can absorb more outside criticism than a smaller transit country and still maneuver freely. That makes it harder to pressure, and more useful to Abu Dhabi, as other RSF supply routes become more visible and politically costly.
In February, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan met Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa. Officially, it was a standard diplomatic meeting about bilateral and regional issues. But the fact that nothing publicly shifted afterward is the point. Saudi Arabia does not appear to have much leverage over Ethiopia on this file. Abiy had little reason to distance himself from Abu Dhabi, because the UAE relationship is central to Ethiopia’s money, security, and regional strategy.
With Emirati money, security ties, drones, trade, and political cover behind it, Addis Ababa can push outward even while it is under severe internal pressure. Egypt, by contrast, is tied to the UAE in a very different way. Abu Dhabi was one of the outside powers that helped stabilize the post-2013 order with Gulf aid, deposits, fuel support, and political backing. A decade later, Egypt’s foreign-currency crises and deals like Ras El Hekma show how much Cairo still depends on Emirati capital. The UAE appears to benefit from a stronger, more assertive Ethiopia, while also benefiting from Egypt remaining financially dependent and strategically cautious.
Saudi Arabia shares some of Egypt’s concerns in Sudan, especially when it comes to limiting UAE influence, protecting Red Sea stability, and preventing the RSF from becoming the dominant force. But Riyadh is still a state that moves like a state. Slowly, cautiously, and only when Sudan intersects with Saudi priorities. Egypt may want faster backing, but Saudi Arabia is not Cairo’s patron or its instrument. It will move when the issue affects Saudi interests too like competition with Abu Dhabi, the future of the Red Sea, Sudanese state collapse, or the RSF becoming too powerful. That gives Egypt a useful partner, but not a force multiplier it can command.
Ethiopia’s relationship with the UAE works differently. Addis Ababa does not command Abu Dhabi either, but it does not need to. The UAE’s own regional project already benefits from a stronger, more assertive Ethiopia. Egypt gets selective Saudi support when interests overlap. Ethiopia gets Emirati backing that actively expands its room to maneuver. That is what makes the UAE’s role in Sudan humiliating for Egypt. One of the countries Cairo relies on financially is also helping shape a battlefield Cairo considers part of its own security depth.
what can happen next?
Sudan’s war and Ethiopia’s internal conflicts are already starting to feed into each other. The next stage would be worse: the crisis would no longer stay mostly inside Sudan and Ethiopia. Eritrea could be pulled in from the north. Somalia, Somaliland, and Djibouti could become part of it. South Sudan could be drawn in from the southwest. Egypt would be pulled in through the Nile.
Cairo already sees the GERD as a threat to Egypt’s survival. That does not mean Egypt is likely to enter the war directly. A direct war with Ethiopia would be enormously risky. The more realistic danger is that Cairo decides a hotter Sudan-Ethiopia front is strategically useful: a way to pressure Addis Ababa, keep Ethiopia stretched, and protect Egypt’s position on the Nile without formally going to war. That would still be dangerous. Once a state starts seeing another country’s war as useful leverage, it has an incentive to fan the flames rather than contain them.
There are now a few things to watch. Does Sudan produce drone wreckage, flight data, or other evidence tying the attacks to Bahir Dar or Asosa? Does commercial satellite imagery show new activity around Ethiopian airfields near the Sudanese border? Does Egypt move beyond diplomatic language and deepen military coordination with Eritrea, Somalia, or the SAF? Does fighting in Blue Nile push closer to Sennar, or Benishangul Gumuz? On May 23, the Sudanese army said it had shot down another hostile drone near Ed Damazin after it crossed into Blue Nile from the direction of Ethiopia. That claim is not independent proof of the entire Sudanese case, but it lands exactly in the corridor this piece is tracking.
Sudan’s war began as an internal struggle between two armed factions fighting over the state. It has since become a regional conflict in which Sudan is the battlefield, the UAE is accused of supplying the tools, Ethiopia is accused of providing the launchpad, and Egypt is forced to watch a war inside what it has long considered its own strategic depth.
Sudan has accused neighboring states before. That alone is not new. What is new is the country being named. Ethiopia is not a distant transit point or a weak, insignificant border state on the edge of the war like Chad. It is a large populous country, Egypt’s Nile rival, the host of the GERD, one of the central powers in the Horn of Africa, and a state already dealing with deep internal conflicts of its own. If Sudan is accusing Ethiopia of being the launchpad, then the war is no longer just about UAE money or RSF supply routes. It is about one major Horn of Africa/Red Sea state accusing another of helping attack its capital. That is what makes this different.