Introduction/Thesis

Before the start of the Iran war, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were already escalating. The initial spark came in early December 2025 when the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-backed separatist faction within Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, launched an offensive in Hadramawt Governorate targeting rival forces aligned with other government-affiliated factions. Riyadh reacted sharply. The Saudi-led coalition carried out a strike on the southern port of Mukalla, where the UAE was reported to have supplied the STC, and Riyadh publicly called on the UAE to withdraw its remaining forces from Yemen within 24 hours.

Alongside a cascade of competitive moves across Djibouti, Somalia, and the Red Sea, it quickly became evident that what had long been a quiet divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had finally hardened into open competition. Many observers anticipated that the rift would deepen further, with Sudan emerging as one of the principal arenas in which it would play out, given the patronage relationships that have shaped the war in Sudan, between the UAE and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and between Saudi Arabia and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

That trajectory of escalating competition was abruptly disrupted on 28 February 2026, when US and Israeli strikes on Iran opened the most consequential regional war in a generation. Iran’s subsequent retaliation, with drones and missiles striking Gulf territory, transformed the strategic environment overnight. For Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, long-standing disagreements were temporarily eclipsed by far more immediate concerns: the security of their own territory, energy infrastructure, and shipping lanes. Within days, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohamed bin Zayed were on the phone, and Saudi Arabia was reportedly urging Gulf allies to avoid any steps that might escalate further tensions with Tehran.

This forced rapprochement raised an obvious question: if the common threat from Iran was sufficient to pull the two Gulf powers back together, what did that mean for Sudan? Several months on, the answer is more complicated than the early framing of a new rapprochement suggested. The shock of the Iran war did not produce a rebalancing of patronage in Sudan in an immediate or a clear way. The UAE has not visibly scaled back its support for the RSF; if anything, that support has continued to underwrite RSF operations. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, appears to have grown noticeably more cautious in its backing of the SAF, as most evidently portrayed through the cancellation of Pakistan’s $1.5 billion sale of weapons to Sudan, brokered by Saudi Arabia. It is worth noting that another $4 billion arms deal to the Libyan National Army, which is also backed by Saudi Arabia, has also been put on hold, indicating that Saudi Arabia is revisiting its wider foreign policy strategy and alignments amidst new priorities. The picture is not one of two states behaving identically under the pressure of a common threat, but of two states making different calculations about cost, exposure, and reputational risk.

The UAE’s recent decision to withdraw from OPEC and OPEC+, announced in late April 2026 and effective from 1 May, has reopened the question of whether the rift is genuinely on pause or simply playing out in a different register. The move was framed by Abu Dhabi as a purely national policy decision, made without consultation with Riyadh, and it reflects long-standing Emirati frustration with Saudi-led production cuts. Officials close to the Saudi establishment moved quickly to downplay the announcement, but the timing, in the middle of a regional war that has already strained Gulf cohesion, is striking. It suggests that even at a moment of supposed unity, each side is still committed to its own security and perceived benefit. For those watching how these changes impact the war in Sudan, this is a reminder that the appearance of Gulf alignment under Iranian pressure should not be mistaken for a structural reset.

Gulf Countries Navigating Changing Priorities

For the UAE, the US/Israeli war on Iran has been a security shock, but it has not fundamentally altered the strategic logic that drives Emirati involvement in Sudan. Abu Dhabi’s investment in the RSF has always been part of a broader transnational strategy that connects gold flows, port access, and influence networks across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. The fall of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, in October 2025 to the hands of the RSF, consolidated the group’s dominance over Darfur and gave the UAE a partner that controls a meaningful share of Sudan’s territory, gold supply, and external trade routes via Libya and Chad. From November 2025 onwards, Emirati-linked flights to Ethiopia began to increase sharply, as Abu Dhabi adapted its supply lines under pressure from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, all of which had begun denying the UAE overflight permission, while eastern Libyan authorities temporarily closed Kufra airport.

Rather than scaling back, the UAE rerouted, finding other routes of maintaining support. On 10 February 2026, a Reuters investigation confirmed that an Emirati-funded military base in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region had been training around 4,300 RSF fighters and was serving as the launchpad for the RSF’s offensive into Blue Nile state. The pattern held even after the strikes on Iran began. Analysts’ reports indicated that the Iran war had not produced any visible scaling back of Emirati support, as an investigation detailed that cargo flights from the UAE destined to reach the RSF were suspended only for four days after Iranian strikes began on 28 February and resumed promptly, indicating that even at the height of a security crisis in which thousands of commercial flights had been suspended, resuming transport to the RSF remained a top priority.

The willingness to build new corridors under pressure, to invest in cross-border training infrastructure, and to restart flights within days of direct attacks on Emirati territory does not lend itself to evidence of the behavior of a state reconsidering its commitment, but rather the behavior of a state hardening its support.

Saudi Arabia’s position is more delicate. Riyadh had to confront the Iran war while facing two converging pressures. The first is the direct security cost of Iranian retaliation on Gulf territory, which has reinforced the Kingdom’s preference for de-escalation and made any open-ended commitment to Sudan’s war less attractive. The second is the political cost of being publicly associated with the SAF at a moment when its Iranian ties, most exemplified through their reliance on Iranian drones and recent restoration of ties with Tehran in 2024, have become harder to defend. The US State Department’s March 2026 designation of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Bara Bin Malik Brigade as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with explicit reference to support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, complicated Saudi Arabia’s position considerably. The al-Bara Bin Malik Brigade, which is primarily formed from members of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been active in supporting the SAF in their ongoing battles against the RSF. Riyadh has spent years presenting itself in Washington as the indispensable counterweight to Iranian influence in the region, and aligning too visibly with a Sudanese army whose battlefield resilience has partly depended on Iranian Mohajer-6 drones is increasingly uncomfortable.

This does not mean Saudi Arabia is withdrawing from Sudan or stopping its backing of the SAF. Although the Saudi-backed weapons sale from Pakistan to the SAF has been put on hold, the gold refining agreement between Saudi Arabia’s state-run gold refinery and Khartoum’s state mining firm signed in January is still presumably on the table, and Mohammed bin Salman hosted Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the SAF chief, in late April, where the focus of discussions was on strengthening bilateral cooperation and ensuring Sudan’s stability. Although this range of support is not military in nature, it plays a valuable role in bolstering the Port Sudan Authorities’ political legitimacy, international stature, and infrastructure goals. But the public posture has become more restrained, and the appetite for new commitments appears to have softened. Much analysis suggests that Saudi Arabia is now widely dialing back some of its Red Sea and Horn of Africa investments in favor of a more cautious approach, which primarily prioritizes national consolidation, which could weaken the SAF’s capacity to counter Emirati influence over time. The implication is that even if Riyadh and Abu Dhabi appear aligned at the diplomatic level, the asymmetry on the ground in Sudan may actually be widening, with the UAE continuing to invest in the RSF while Saudi support for the SAF becomes more conditional and reputationally guarded.

Sudan’s Warring Parties Must Reposition

Given the shifting regional environment where Gulf actors have become more tactical in their positioning, dependent on where they perceive their priorities to lie, the SAF and the RSF must work harder to remain valuable to their respective backers. Both sides have to navigate a regional landscape in which their patrons are balancing the Iran war, energy markets, US relations, and broader questions of regional reputation. The room for maximalist positioning has narrowed.

This challenge is particularly acute for the SAF. Burhan’s coalition has long been an uncomfortable mix of conventional military officers, Islamist networks linked to the former Bashir era, and non-aligned figures who joined out of necessity. The restoration of ties with Iran in 2024, followed by the delivery of Iranian drones, was a battlefield necessity at a moment when the army was on the back foot. Yet the same dependency that helped the SAF survive the early phase of the war has now become a strategic liability. The video circulated by Al-Naji Abdullah, a senior Islamist commander aligned with the SAF, in which he openly pledged Sudanese fighters to defend Iran against any US or Israeli ground operation, was arguably the moment at which the Iranian connection moved from a tactical necessity to a political problem. Burhan’s subsequent arrest of Abdullah and his foreign ministry’s decision to condemn Iranian strikes on Gulf states rather than US and Israeli strikes on Iran were transparent attempts to manage the optics. However, because the army’s history with Iran is well-documented, such gestures are unlikely to be sufficient to position SAF as a reliable anti-Iran partner in the region.

Khartoum was a close partner of Tehran during the Bashir era, before joining the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen in 2015 and severing diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic in 2016. The institutional memory of that earlier alignment, particularly within the Islamist faction of the SAF coalition, is part of what makes the army’s current positioning so difficult to manage. It is true that Riyadh’s posture towards Islamist movements has shifted over the last decade, favoring a more diplomatic approach to Islamist and Brotherhood-aligned actors as manifested in the recent rapprochement with Turkey and Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria. However, the main issue for Saudi Arabia is alignment with Iran-linked actors, and this is where SAF’s bind becomes clearer.

These two elements, which can appear disconnected – the SAF’s own internal Islamist ties and its relationship with Iran – were bound together by a consequential US action in March 2026, where it designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a specifically designated Global Terrorist organization, citing support received from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Amongst those reported to have received support is the al-Baraa bin Malik Brigade, which is a key armed group affiliated with the Sudanese Armed Forces. From Washington’s perspective, SAF’s Islamist coalition and its Iranian connections are a single problem, and this is what makes Saudi alignment with Burhan politically tenuous.

The SAF’s task, which it has been navigating in recent months, is therefore to demonstrate to Riyadh and, by extension, to Washington that it can credibly distance itself from the Iran-linked components of its coalition. That requires more than rhetoric. It requires a credible distancing from the Islamist networks that gave the army its mobilization base, pockets of Iranian support, and that distancing carries serious risks for Burhan’s own coalition.

The RSF’s repositioning challenge is different, but no less real. Hemedti’s entire strategy has been to convert battlefield gains into political legitimacy. The RSF is now using the SAF’s Iran problem and Brotherhood designation to frame itself as the more pragmatic partner along the Red Sea, an actor that, whatever its conduct, does not carry the ideological baggage that has made Burhan’s coalition in Western capitals undesirable. Whether this framing succeeds depends less on the merits of the argument than on whether the UAE judges that pushing it too aggressively, at a moment when atrocity reports are still fresh, would damage its own standing in Washington.

Looking Ahead

The Iran war did not reset the Gulf rivalry. It interrupted it, briefly, and forced both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to manage the optics of their disagreement more carefully. But the underlying drivers of competition, including divergent visions for the Red Sea, divergent attitudes towards Islamist movements, divergent commercial interests in the Horn of Africa, and divergent positions on energy policy as the OPEC withdrawal makes plain, remain in place. What has changed is the texture of the competition, which has become quieter, more procedural, and harder to read from the outside, but which has not stopped shaping the war in Sudan.

For Sudanese actors, the lesson is that the era of confidently exploiting Gulf divergence is largely over. The SAF can no longer assume that Saudi support will arrive in the volumes and with the political cover it received in late 2025. The RSF can no longer assume that Emirati support is fully insulated from broader scrutiny, even if it has so far survived a great deal of it. Both sides will need to position themselves more deliberately, not just militarily but politically, to remain useful to backers who are themselves balancing more priorities than before. That repositioning will require difficult choices. For the SAF, it will mean managing the Iranian connection and the Islamist coalition in ways that do not collapse the army’s domestic base. For the RSF, it will mean reckoning with the political ceiling that mounting atrocity evidence has placed on the value the UAE can extract from its patronage.

It remains too early to answer whether the Iran war will mark a genuine inflection point in Gulf politics or a temporary pause in a competition that is deeply rooted in structural divergence. The early evidence, including the OPEC withdrawal, the continued flow of support to the RSF, and the cautious but unbroken Saudi engagement with the SAF, suggests the latter. Sudan remains one of the clearest places to observe how the rivalry is evolving, precisely because the war there is too important to either Gulf capital to be left alone, and too costly for either to fully own. As Saudi Arabia and the UAE work out what their relationship looks like after the immediate shock of the Iran war fades, Sudan will continue to be one of the arenas in which that recalibration is tested. Understanding that recalibration and how the SAF and RSF respond to it will be essential for understanding where the war goes from here.