After sweeping through Tunisia and Egypt, the Arab Spring spread to Yemen in 2011, and then to Libya, where Qaddafi met protests with violence. When unrest reached Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s regime responded with similar brutality, sparking significant army desertions.
In both Libya and Syria, Qatar leveraged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist networks, providing them with weapons and funding. Pursuing a parallel strategy, the UAE and Saudi Arabia channelled support to secular insurgents. Among these Arab monarchies, there was little appetite or manpower to put their own soldiers on the ground.
Upon Libya’s collapse in 2011, President Vladimir Putin blamed Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian Federation’s president at that time, for allowing the NATO alliance to oust Qaddafi (Arutunyan, 2022). This blame partially set the stage for Putin’s return to the presidency and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In the war that followed in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Kremlin sought proxy forces to support separatists, and Prigozhin was in a perfect position to step in.
In 2015, Bashir was seeking wealthy allies amid deepening US sanctions and IMF pressure in Sudan (Young, forthcoming). He cut ties with Iran—which was providing military training—and pivoted to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of which needed fighters to confront Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Up to 40,000 Sudanese fighters (Magdy, 2019), along with 450 Latin Americans—mostly Colombian ex-soldiers—were deployed to the conflict with backing from the UAE (Calvo Ospina, 2024). The programme enriched men like Hemeti, who, for a time, transformed RSF into a quasi-mercenary recruitment agency (Abbas, 2023; Craze and Makawi, 2025). In 2016, the Wagner Group arrived in Khartoum,[1] laying the groundwork for the November 2017 agreements between the Russian Federation and Sudan on military training and gold mining (Russian Federation Government, 2017a; 2017b).
[1] Author interview with a Wagner Group associate, location withheld, June 2023.
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