I presume there will be protests at Columbia University?
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Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
91–100 of 211 posts
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#92> ...the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accused of backing the RSF with supplies and mercenaries... And also helping to launder Hemedti's gold via Dubai. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-resources/ex...
How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet? They’ve been laundering everything for ages, esp Russian oil. How are they so immune to this?
They are stable and predicable. If you lend them some money, you can expect to still have it next year.
Not calling Dubai the devil but you could make deals with the devil if the devil was known to religiously fulfill his contracts.
There are a lot of places where you don’t know whether their currency or political system could be rocked next year.
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#93Just wanna plug the most thorough and useful video I've seen on the history of this conflict. The US, Russia, and many other players are more heavily involved in this conflict than is often discussed in media. It breaks down the specific ways many international players are profiting from the conflict and helps makes sense of the motives driving it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqIMES53rsY
It's not a conflict, it's a genocide
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet? The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.) They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
> The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland And whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
Perhaps, but that comment did not speak fondly about UAE.
One might say your own comment tells everyone all they need to know about you.
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#95I presume there will be protests at Columbia University?
I take it that’s supposed to be funny. Most people have absolutely zero agency over what happens beyond their own city’s borders, proclaiming your views loudly in public is one of the very few ways you can influence society.
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#96As always, conflicts are much easier to understand when viewed through the lens of materialism. Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire. The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland. The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supp…
This is almost exactly wrong. Like, if you wanted to invent a plausible-on-its-face position that formed a perfect -1 dot product with the truth, this is what you’d come up with.
Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.
But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet? They’ve been laundering everything for ages, esp Russian oil. How are they so immune to this?
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet? The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.) They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
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Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#98Just wanna plug the most thorough and useful video I've seen on the history of this conflict. The US, Russia, and many other players are more heavily involved in this conflict than is often discussed in media. It breaks down the specific ways many international players are profiting from the conflict and helps makes sense of the motives driving it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqIMES53rsY
It's not a conflict, it's a genocide
Yes ofc. The RSF is just the rebranded Janjaweed which were legally classified as having committed genocide. But they never faced any international consequences and here they are committing genocide once again. It's also a major conflict though as the SAF is the major oppositional force fighting against the RSF. SAF was the military that took control after a democratic revolution pushed out the dictator Omar al-Bashir
Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#99I presume there will be protests at Columbia University?
I take it that’s supposed to be funny. Most people have absolutely zero agency over what happens beyond their own city’s borders, proclaiming your views loudly in public is one of the very few ways you can influence society.
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Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands
#100Sudan is the 3rd largest producer of gold in Africa but it remains the poorest country in Africa because the companies that exploit those resources are never Sudanese. The RSF got their weapons by acting as mercenaries for the UAE to fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Fighting as a mercenary is pretty much the only reliable source of income for many people in the country.
From wikipedia : On examination of photos and videos of weapons used in the conflict that were posted on social media, the rights group identified that companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia, and the UAE were associated with the weapons provided to RSF.[96] Human Rights Watch reviewed images of show crates with markings indicating they were manufactured in 2020 and initially acquired by the UAE Armed For…
Yes, to clarify the primary international players:
Russia: initially supported the RSF, then at one point was trading with both sides, and in 2024/2025 fully switched sides to back the SAF
Iran: stayed out of it until 2024 when it finally backed the SAF which caused a major turning point in the conflict
UAE/the US: the main player responsible for RSF's rise. It hired out RSF mercenaries to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At one point there were more than 40,000 RSF mercenaries (mostly between the ages of 14-17) in Yemen. It continues to be the primary funder of the RSF
Israel: the RSF buys surveillance tech and weapons from Israel
Saudi Arabia: the largest smuggler of (illegally acquired) gold from RSF. A major source of funding for the RSF
China: doesn't directly deal with either side but Chinese-made weapons were found in the hands of the RSF mostly through the UAE reselling them. The SAF also has some Chinese made weapons through Russia and Turkey
tl;dr: it's a very complex disaster but international players simply don't have an interest in ending it. The SAF is the main opposition to the genocidal RSF, but they are also uninterested in maintaining the democracy that the people fought for and the sides backing the SAF (mostly Iran, and now Russia) are likely hoping to continue their exploitation of gold if they defeat the RSF