A tall plume of black smoke ascends following an explosion in the Fujairah industrial zone in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday.FADEL SENNA/AFP/Getty Images
As they voiced their sympathy for the victims of Iranian air strikes this week, two African governments made the curious decision to omit a key country from their commiseration list: the United Arab Emirates.
The reluctance of Sudan and Somalia to condemn the attacks on the UAE, even as it struggled to fight off hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones, was the latest sign of the oil-rich Gulf state’s controversial and expanding role in some of Africa’s biggest conflicts.
The UAE’s financial and military support has fuelled wars in Sudan and Ethiopia and bolstered a secessionist movement in Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, according to widespread reports from the region. The Gulf state has also invested billions of dollars in commercial projects across Africa in a bid to boost its political and economic influence.
Now, those same African countries are trying to calculate the impact of the UAE’s sudden involvement in the Iran conflict. Some believe the steep cost of the war could force the Emirates to pull back from Africa to conserve its financial and military resources. Others say the Iranian assault on the UAE could generate enough international sympathy to discourage any Western pressure to scale back its role in Sudan and elsewhere.
Analysts worry that the Mideast conflagration could distract Western attention from Africa, making it easier for African armies and their foreign backers to pursue more aggressive tactics on the continent.
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Sudan and Somalia responded to the Iran conflict with similar statements, clearly signalling their anger at the Emirati role in the Horn of Africa. While they condemned Iran’s attacks on several Middle East countries, both conspicuously omitted the UAE from their expressions of concern.
Sudan’s military-backed government has accused the UAE of supplying weapons to its enemy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces − an allegation denied by Abu Dhabi but endorsed by many human-rights groups and independent analysts.
Somalia, for its part, believes the UAE is supporting Somaliland’s bid for independence. The Emiratis have also reportedly provided weapons to Ethiopia, including drones that the Ethiopian army wielded in the Tigray region during the 2020 to 2022 war there.
Saudi Arabia, which suffered its own missile attacks from Iran this week, is another Gulf state with interests in Africa, including a history of support for Sudan’s military.
If the Iran war forces the rival Gulf states to scale back their African presence, it could raise the prospect of resolving the Horn of Africa conflicts. Analysts are closely watching the pace of cargo flights from the UAE to the Horn of Africa to calibrate whether its weapons shipments are being reduced.
But after six days of Mideast fighting, there is no strong indication of whether the war will improve or dampen the chances of peace in Sudan and Ethiopia.
“It’s not clear whether the Iran war will de-escalate externally fuelled conflicts in the Horn – Sudan and potentially northern Ethiopia − by diverting Gulf attention away from Africa, or create opportunities for African actors and their partners to escalate conflicts with impunity while the world is distracted or otherwise unwilling to react,” said Liam Karr, the Africa team lead for the Critical Threats Project, an analysis unit at the U.S.-based American Enterprise Institute.
Nicholas Coghlan, a former top Canadian diplomat in Sudan, said the Iran conflict could encourage the West to overlook the UAE’s actions in Sudan. “Certainly any voices within the U.S. administration or indeed in Congress are likely now to feel inhibited and mute their calls for pressure on Abu Dhabi,” he told The Globe and Mail.
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The U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and the Iranian attacks on the Gulf states, could have a greater impact on Africa by triggering a surge in energy and food costs and by disrupting the supply of humanitarian aid.
The African Union Commission, in its first reaction to the Mideast war, voiced its fear that the conflict will have “serious implications for energy markets, food security and economic resilience – particularly in Africa.”
Since then, fertilizer and oil prices have begun to increase, fuel costs across Africa have jumped, and shipping costs have risen. “Africa is already experiencing the impact of the escalating conflict in the Middle East, with strains on supply chains and higher energy prices,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told an African energy conference on Wednesday.
Humanitarian groups say the damage will rise rapidly if the war continues for much longer. “The continuation of the regional conflict could have devastating consequences for global aid operations,” said Kelly Razzouk, vice-president for policy and advocacy at the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee.
“The impact is felt most acutely in import-dependent crisis contexts across East Africa, Yemen and parts of South Asia, where rising costs strain already underfunded operations,” she told The Globe and Mail. “In a fragile global humanitarian system, these disruptions risk reducing the scale and speed of life-saving assistance worldwide.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, another U.S.-based humanitarian agency, has similar concerns. “Prolonged disruption to global energy supplies would hit low-income countries and humanitarian crisis responses hard,” he told The Globe. “Rising transport costs would drive up food prices across the board.”