Sudan’s army-aligned government recalled its ambassador to Ethiopia on Monday and accused Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi of jointly executing a drone strike on Khartoum International Airport earlier that day. Foreign Minister Mohieddin Salem made the announcement in Port Sudan. The military spokesman, Brigadier General Asim Awad Abdelwahab, presented what he described as conclusive evidence (data recovered from a Rapid Support Forces drone shot down near el-Obeid) that four drone attacks since March 1 had been launched from Bahir Dar airport in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, using airframes supplied by the United Arab Emirates. Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the claims baseless and counter-accused the Sudanese Armed Forces of arming Tigrayan fighters. The UAE, through an unnamed official quoted by regional outlets, called the accusation a fabrication. The diplomatic rupture is real. The U.S. consequence is that one of the named parties is the same UAE that the Trump administration has notified Congress it will sell $1.4 billion in weapons to.
What Khartoum said, and what it produced as evidence
The military press conference, held in Port Sudan and broadcast through Sudan’s state outlets, ran in two registers. Abdelwahab spoke in his uniformed capacity and laid out the technical case: a drone downed near el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, carried navigation and telemetry data that the SAF says traces its launch corridor back to Bahir Dar airport in northwestern Ethiopia. Four strikes since March 1 fit the same launch profile, by the SAF’s count: the May 5 attack on Khartoum airport, a May 1 strike on the airport’s radar and air-defence systems, and earlier hits on sites in central Sudan. Salem then spoke in his civilian capacity and framed the accusation diplomatically: “The attack originated from Ethiopia, a country that is supposed to be a sister nation.” Sudan’s ambassador was recalled the same day, for consultations.
The Bahir Dar claim is the part that matters strategically. The airport sits in Amhara, the region whose own militias are at war with the federal government in Addis Ababa over a separate, unresolved insurgency. Khartoum is not accusing the Ethiopian state of operating drones; it is accusing Ethiopian territory of being used as a staging ground. That is a narrower claim and, for that reason, a more durable one: harder for Addis Ababa to disprove and easier for Sudan to keep alleging. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry rejected the accusations and shifted the focus: the SAF, it said, has “provided arms and financial support” to TPLF mercenaries conducting cross-border incursions. The two governments, in other words, are now openly accusing each other of operating proxies on each other’s soil.
Addis Ababa: the counter-accusation, and what it is doing
Ethiopia’s rebuttal performs two functions at once. It denies the Bahir Dar staging claim, which it must, and it puts Sudan on the defensive over Tigray, where the federal government in Addis Ababa has a live counterinsurgency interest. The TPLF, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, is the political-military movement that fought a 2020-22 war against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and which Addis Ababa still treats as a security threat. Accusing Khartoum of arming TPLF fighters is, for Abiy’s government, both a useful deflection and a signal to Amhara, where the federal government is itself fighting an insurgency, that the Sudan front is being managed. None of that proves the counter-claim. It does explain why Addis Ababa would make it.
Abu Dhabi: a denial that arrives over a record
The UAE’s denial, attributed to an unnamed UAE official quoted in regional press, called the accusation “part of a calculated pattern of deflection.” That denial arrives over a documentary record that congressional Democrats in Washington have spent two years building. Representative Sara Jacobs of California and Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland have, in successive letters and committee statements, described U.S. intelligence assessments that contradict the UAE’s public denials of arming the RSF. The U.S. Treasury Department, separately and on the record, has sanctioned three RSF commanders for atrocities in El-Fasher in February 2026, designated RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”) in January 2025 under Executive Order 14098, and sanctioned a Colombian-mercenary recruitment network supplying the RSF in April 2026. The U.S. government, in its sanctions posture, treats the RSF as a force committing atrocities. The U.S. government, in its arms-sales posture, treats the UAE as a partner. Those two postures have been in tension throughout the war; the May 5 accusation makes the tension public on a new continent.
Whoever attacks us will be met with a response. — Mohieddin Salem, Sudan Foreign Minister, Port Sudan, May 5
Washington: a $1.4 billion weapons notification, and the question it raises
The Trump administration notified Congress in early May of a $1.4 billion weapons and military equipment sale to the United Arab Emirates, ahead of a presidential visit to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh later in the month. House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks placed an informal hold on the package; the administration has indicated it intends to proceed. The Sudanese accusation, filed Monday in Port Sudan, names the buyer of those weapons as a co-belligerent in an undeclared drone war on a sovereign African state. The U.S. consequence runs through three doors. The first is the Arms Export Control Act notification process itself, where the Sudan evidence becomes a fact the State Department has to either rebut or absorb. The second is the genocide determination, issued by the outgoing Biden State Department on January 7, 2025, and not formally retracted, which finds that the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Darfur. The third is the Red Sea, where Sudan’s Port Sudan and Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah sit across from each other on a corridor through which roughly twelve percent of global trade transits. A Horn of Africa diplomatic rupture is not a Red Sea closure; it is a step in that direction.
What is not in the accusation
Two things the SAF did not allege Monday are worth naming. It did not present its evidence publicly in any form a third-party investigator could verify; the el-Obeid drone telemetry is, at present, a claim. And it did not accuse Ethiopia of operating drones itself, only of permitting its territory to be used. Both omissions are deliberate. The first preserves Khartoum’s options if the evidence does not hold; the second keeps the diplomatic exit ramp open, in case Addis Ababa decides the Amhara airport question is worth a back-channel conversation rather than an escalation. For now, the channel is closed and the ambassador is on a plane home.
The Sudanese civilians who live downstream of the accusation are the ones the diplomacy is not, on its surface, about. Sudan’s war has displaced roughly twelve million people, killed an unknown number in the tens of thousands, and produced what United Nations agencies have repeatedly called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. The May 3 RSF drone strike on the Kenana Sugar industrial complex in White Nile State, which set fire to one of the country’s largest food and ethanol producers, is the kind of infrastructure attack the accusation against Abu Dhabi and Addis Ababa is meant to explain. If the SAF is right about who supplied the drone, the accusation is not a foreign-policy story; it is a war-crimes story routed through a foreign-policy file. The two stories are now the same file.