When a draft of the United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan reached Reuters on 29 July, its preliminary findings were partially revealed. Reuters reported that the report traced Boeing 727 aircraft and a Chadian air corridor moving fighters, drones and weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, and judged credible the recruitment of some 1,500 to 2,000 Colombian mercenaries through a private company based in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Upon further review of the draft UN report, meant to be submitted to Security Council in early August, it is clear the work is not just incomplete but mismanaged.
What the report leaves out is as telling as what it contains. There is very little published finding on Iranian, Turkish supplies that have sustained the Sudanese Armed Forces, and no reference to the chemical weapons that Washington and others say the army has already used. For the civilians on the receiving end of those weapons, the omission carries a quiet injustice. The same conflict, examined by the same body, yields intense scrutiny on one side and near silence for the other.
The report also arrived quickly, and late. Some of the Panel’s five expert seats were filled only in the closing months of the mandate, according to the Secretary-General’s appointment letters. Its armed-groups expert, Charles Cater, was named in February 2026 shortly after a senior investigative role at The Sentry, a private organisation that publishes dossiers and campaigns for sanctions and asset recovery, raising questions of potential bias. Its arms expert, Guido Potters, was appointed only on 6 May, moving across from the Panel’s aviation portfolio with roughly ten weeks to assemble a multi-country weapons case before the deadline. Neither fact impugns the men’s good faith. It does mean that findings capable of triggering sanctions in a murky conflict were produced, on a compressed timetable and on expertise and independence that the report does not set out for the reader.
All of this matters because the allegations left outside it are grave, and in one case already the subject of a formal government determination. In April 2025 the United States concluded that Sudan’s government used chemical weapons in 2024, and imposed sanctions that it widened again in July 2026 after finding Khartoum still non-compliant.. No comparably authoritative international body has tested these findings, because the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has opened no fact-finding mission, even as American diplomats pressed the case at its Executive Council in July.
The foreign hand behind the army is documented with similar clarity outside the UN process. Reuters and satellite analysts have placed Iranian drones at bases north of the capital. The Washington Post detailed a Turkish contract worth roughly $120 million for Bayraktar drones and warheads delivered to Port Sudan. Egypt, for its part, has been photographed flying an Akinci drone from an airstrip near the Sudanese border. None of this appears among the Panel’s conclusions. While some of this is mentioned its done so in passing.
The result is an accountability landscape tilted at its very foundations. The one mechanism able to trigger Council sanctions concentrates on the RSF, and singles out a single country, while the Sudanese army’s suppliers are mentioned only in passing and its alleged chemical attacks are left to a patchwork of unilateral sanctions, open-source investigators and rights groups, none of which commands the same enforcement power.
The UAE, which denies arming the RSF, complicates the Panel’s claims further it is the second-largest humanitarian donor to Sudan after the United States, having given some 784 million dollars since the war began, according to figures its foreign ministry attributes to UN data. That standing does not answer the specific allegations against Emirati-located networks alleged in these reports, yet it underlines how partial any single-party accounting must be in a war this diffuse.
Sudan’s catastrophe is now the largest in the world by almost every measure the UN keeps. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counts 33.7 million people in need of aid, famine confirmed in El Fasher and Kadugli, and more than eight million people displaced inside the country. Both sides stand accused of atrocities, including the army of indiscriminate bombardment and chemical use.
None of this is to say that the RSF and its alleged backers deserve less scrutiny. It argues that the other half of the war deserves as much. A sanctions regime that examines one party in forensic detail and treats the other as a footnote does not merely produce an incomplete record. It signals to the victims of the unexamined half that their suffering counts for less, and it hands every government a grievance to wield against the next inquiry. If the Security Council wants its findings to carry the authority of law rather than the appearance of a verdict written in advance, the Panel must weigh every foreign hand in Sudan by the same standard, name every supplier its evidence can reach but frame them accurately be they private entities or official government ones. , and pursue the chemical file with the energy it brought to the flight logs over Nyala. Anything less examines one party while the war consumes them all, and risks compounding the very injustice done to the civilians the United Nations exists to protect.
