One year into his retirement, a Colombian military drone specialist noticed a WhatsApp message: “Any veterans interested in working? We’re looking for reservists from any force.”
The job was in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to a man who claimed to be a former air force colonel. On a follow-up call, however, the veteran learned that he would undergo a few months of training in Dubai before deploying to Africa to conduct tactical reconnaissance. He declined the offer after a friend in UAE warned him that the job likely was in one of the worst war zones in the world — the front lines of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) offensive in western Sudan.
Another Colombian veteran wasn’t as fortunate. The 33-year-old died within three months of arriving in Sudan in mid-2024, when the RSF was struggling to capture El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. His widow was too afraid to give her name when asked about his fate.
“They still haven’t brought his body home,” she told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
A December 12 AFP investigation revealed the shadowy recruitment channels that sent hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to the UAE and then on to Darfur via Libya and Somalia. The news service interviewed mercenaries and family members and reviewed corporate records and geolocation data from battlefield videos.
Abel Rojas, a former coordinator for Colombia’s Ministry of Defense veterans’ group, said the situation is alarming and public outrage in the South American country continues to intensify.
“Soldiers are deceived by companies, organizations and even veterans leading these processes,” he told Semana magazine in 2024. “They are tricked into traveling to other countries to carry out activities that might fall under criminal offenses.”
Sudan’s warring factions remain locked in a bloody power struggle with the RSF controlling all five states in the Darfur region. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and the United Nations estimates that 13.6 million have been displaced since the war began in April 2023.
In September 2025, Sudan’s permanent representative to the U.N. filed a formal complaint with the U.N. Security Council, saying they had “extensive evidence” of a “systematic campaign by the UAE to undermine the peace and security and the sovereignty of Sudan through the recruitment, financing and deployment of mercenaries to fight along with the Rapid Support Forces.”
In August 2025, the Sudanese Armed Forces said an airstrike hit an RSF-controlled airport in Nyala in the Darfur region and destroyed an Emirati military plane, killing at least 40 suspected mercenaries from Colombia.
One of the new details uncovered by AFP’s investigation was the transit role of an airbase in Bosaso, Somalia, that houses Emirati military officials. Local sources and satellite imagery confirmed that since early 2025, platoons of foreign fighters have connected to Sudan through the airport, which was built in 2007 with funds from UAE-based financiers.
The foreign fighters often arrive in cargo planes and are then flown toward the Sudanese border. Somali Defense Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi told parliament in 2025 that aircraft have been moving personnel from Bosaso to Chad and Niger to facilitate entry into Darfur.
As many as 380 Colombian mercenaries have deployed to Sudan since 2024, according to La Silla Vacía, a news website based in Bogotá. Most serve in a battalion known as the Desert Wolves, which is composed of four companies of retired Colombian military personnel.
Veteran Colombian fighters have become sought-after commodities in modern, asymmetrical warfare with their combat experience and reputations for discipline and adaptability to harsh conditions. They are readily available, as more than 22,000 members of Colombia’s security forces have voluntarily retired since 2022.
“The world of mercenary work is seen internally as an opportunity,” Jose Angel Espinosa, a former sergeant in the Colombian Army who now runs a veterans’ association, told the Middle East Eye news website in 2025.
With Colombian fighters appearing in conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine in recent years, public opinion in Colombia has surged against the recruitment of mercenaries, and lawmakers have pushed to ban the practice.
“Things are ugly here, we’re being held captive,” a Colombian mercenary in Sudan said in an audio recording, according to La Silla Vacía.
“This is human trafficking,” another said. “They hire us for one thing and then take us somewhere else to do something different.”