Crosscut · 21 min
Global Money Fueling Sudan's War
If you want to know what’s happening in Sudan, follow the trail from drone strikes in Darfur back to the NBA business deals that help the United Arab Emirates keep Western leaders quiet about the war.
U.S., U.K. Won’t Stop UAE’s Support to Sudan’s RSF by Tiptoeing Around It × The NBA’s Genocide Problem
Published 2026-07-19
0:00 / 20:58 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
Just Security
U.S., U.K. Won’t Stop UAE’s Support to Sudan’s RSF by Tiptoeing Around It
by Mutasim Ali
The connection
Looking into what is happening in Sudan reveals a trail of money and power that stretches far beyond East Africa. Writing in late June, Mutasim Ali tracks how weapons flow from the United Arab Emirates to paramilitary groups while Western diplomats look the other way. It is a story of political choices made in private rooms. But something unexpected appears in a piece from earlier that month. Eric A. Friedman points to the NBA’s business partnerships with that same Gulf nation, suggesting that professional basketball serves as a polished screen for the violence in Darfur. It is worth pausing on the link between a luxury stadium box and a war zone thousands of miles away.
Ali leaves the listener with the image of diplomats like Marco Rubio offering generic platitudes in Gulf palaces while the RSF sacks cities like El Fasher. It’s a picture of high-level political paralysis, where the United States treats the United Arab Emirates as too big to bully. The assumption is that the lever for change is state-to-state pressure—sanctions, hard talk, and reputational shaming in the halls of power. But then Eric A. Friedman shifts the gaze from the State Department to the basketball court. It’s a jarring jump. While Ali looks at the failure of government officials to name the UAE’s role in the genocide, Friedman points at the Emirates logo on an NBA referee’s jersey. What jumps out is how these two perspectives fit together. If Ali’s concern is that the UAE is too diplomatically important to touch, Friedman suggests that importance extends beyond oil or Iran to the $30 million the New York Knicks get for a jersey patch. Read alongside Ali, Friedman’s focus on the NBA makes the diplomatic tiptoeing look less like a strategic choice and more like a symptom of a much broader brand takeover. The UAE isn't just avoiding sanctions; it's buying a reputation for being futuristic through historic comebacks and overtime thrillers. Putting these two together surfaces an uncomfortable loop: the money fueling the RSF's atrocities in Darfur is the same money paying for the Experience Abu Dhabi logo on the screen during the playoffs.
A basketball jersey with a corporate logo and a drone over a village in Darfur seem like they belong to different worlds. Yet the money flows in a straight line. When a sports league accepts a check from a government funding a paramilitary group, the boundary between entertainment and conflict disappears. It’s hard to look at a scoreboard without seeing the cost of the game. What lingers is the sense that silence is its own kind of currency. How much distance is enough before a person can honestly say they aren't helping pay for it?