Washington Signed a Base Deal for Somalia's Bosaso Port in August. In September, UN Investigators Named the Same Port a Hub for the Weapons and Mercenaries Fuelling Sudan's War.

Abstract: The UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan presented a report on 3 September 2026, titled "Fuelling Sudan's Conflict: Weapons, Fighters and External Support Networks," finding reasonable grounds to believe that a transnational network of individuals and entities linked to the United Arab Emirates, Chad, southeastern Libya and Puntland, Somalia sustained the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' (RSF) military operations through interconnected air, land and maritime routes. The mission identified Bosaso, the main port and airport city of Somalia's autonomous Puntland state, as a recurring transit and assembly point for Ilyushin Il-76 cargo flights carrying weapons, including NORINCO AH-4 155mm howitzers and FK-2000 air-defence systems matching equipment previously exported to the UAE, alongside foreign personnel, before onward transfer through Chad or Nyala Airport in South Darfur, the network's principal entry point into Sudan. The mission also documented the recruitment of an estimated 350 to 2,000 Colombian contractors deployed to operate drone systems and train RSF fighters, including during the assault on El Fasher, a city where UN investigators and Amnesty International have separately found the RSF's conduct bore the hallmarks of genocide and ethnic cleansing. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk reinforced the findings in a global update to the Council's 63rd session on 7 September, calling for "an immediate ceasefire, an end to foreign involvement, and a return to inclusive civilian rule." The allegation that Bosaso serves this role is not new: Somalia's defence minister, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, told the Senate in November 2025 that flights of undisclosed cargo had left Bosaso for Chad, Niger and western Sudan, and Puntland's government rejected his account within a day. What has changed is the source. This time the finding belongs to the United Nations' own investigators, published three weeks after Puntland signed an agreement with Washington to expand the American military presence at that same airport, an arrangement FIKIR Institute examined on its own terms in August.

What the Fact-Finding Mission actually found

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, established by the Human Rights Council to investigate violations committed since the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF broke out in April 2023, devoted its latest report specifically to the external networks it says have sustained and escalated the conflict. The mission said it found reasonable grounds to believe that private entities, logistics intermediaries and recruiters operating from or through the United Arab Emirates, Chad, southeastern Libya and Puntland in Somalia facilitated the delivery of personnel, training, weapons and logistics to the RSF, using interconnected air, land and maritime routes. Investigators traced Ilyushin Il-76 cargo flights linking Bosaso with Benghazi, Al-Kufra and Al-Jufra in southeastern Libya and onward to Chad, before cargo and personnel were transferred into Sudan through Chad's border crossings or directly through Nyala Airport in South Darfur, which the mission identified as the network's principal point of entry. Equipment recovered or documented in RSF-held areas, including NORINCO AH-4 155mm howitzers, FK-2000 air-defence systems, radars, armoured vehicles, armed Land Cruisers, munitions and medical supplies, matched systems previously exported to the UAE. The mission separately found that both the SAF and the RSF have expanded their use of long-range drones against civilian targets, including homes, schools, hospitals, markets and displacement sites, and that drone strikes killed more than 1,000 people in the first five months of 2026 alone, conduct the mission said may amount to war crimes on both sides.

Bosaso's specific role, and the Colombians

Among the report's most consequential findings for Somalia is its detailed account of Bosaso's function within the network. Witnesses described regional routes running through the port and airport city that carried not only military hardware but foreign personnel, chief among them an estimated 350 to 2,000 Colombian contractors the mission said were recruited to operate drone systems and train RSF fighters, including during the RSF's assault on El Fasher. That assault is not a peripheral detail: Amnesty International concluded in July 2026 that the RSF's campaign in and around El Fasher amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and a separate UN-backed expert mission found in February that the destruction there bore the hallmarks of genocide. Placing Colombian contractors moving through Bosaso inside the same operation ties Somali territory, at least as a transit point, to the single most scrutinised atrocity of Sudan's war. The mission said two individuals connected to the recruitment network were sanctioned by the UN Security Council in April 2026, evidence that the network's outlines were known to UN sanctions bodies well before this report made the Bosaso connection explicit in an investigative document rather than a press exposé.

An allegation Somalia's own government has already partly admitted

The Fact-Finding Mission's account does not arrive as a complete surprise to anyone who followed Somali politics last November. A Middle East Eye investigation published in late October 2025 first alleged that undisclosed heavy logistics material was being offloaded at Bosaso Airport and loaded onto other aircraft bound for Sudan. Somalia's Defence Minister, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, was asked about the report before the Senate days later and gave a qualified but real confirmation: "It is true, and I acknowledge before the Senate and the public, that planes have flown from Bosaso, Somalia, to Chad, Niger, and even western Sudan, delivering undisclosed logistics," he said, adding that "we have also received reports alleging that Colombian mercenaries were flown from Bosaso, though we have not been able to confirm this." Puntland's regional government rejected his account within a day, dismissing the reports of Bosaso-linked flights as unsubstantiated. Not every independent assessment has landed on the same side either: a November 2025 analysis by The Horn Affairs argued the Bosaso theory rested more on repetition and online speculation than on hard evidence, noting that the UAE's own facility at Bosaso was built for maritime policing and that more solidly documented reporting, from Reuters, Amnesty International and the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, had instead traced Emirati cargo flights to a Chadian airfield at Amdjarass near the Sudanese border. What the 3 September Fact-Finding Mission report does is resolve that dispute, at least provisionally, in favour of the version Fiqi partially confirmed and Puntland denied: a UN investigative body with a mandate to establish facts, not an anonymous leak or a single newspaper's sourcing, has now put Bosaso inside the documented network.

The base deal sitting on top of the same airport

The timing compounds the significance for Somalia specifically. FIKIR Institute reported in August on the security agreement Puntland's president, Said Abdullahi Deni, signed with Washington on 3 August 2026 to expand the American military footprint at Bosaso, an arrangement negotiated without Mogadishu's participation and struck days before Puntland's own forces moved against federal-aligned units in the same port city. That article examined the deal on its own terms, as a further data point in the standoff between Puntland and Somalia's federal government over who controls security policy in the country's north. The UN Fact-Finding Mission's report adds a dimension that article could not have anticipated: the same airport Washington is expanding its presence at is now the subject of a UN investigative finding tying it to weapons and personnel flows implicated in Sudan's worst documented atrocities. Neither the report nor any subsequent statement claims the US military presence at Bosaso is connected to the flights in question, and no evidence public as of this writing suggests it is. But a security partner's credibility is a function of what happens on the ground it controls, and Washington's expanding footprint at Bosaso now sits alongside a UN body's finding that the same ground has served as a hub for a network fuelling atrocities the United States itself has separately labelled as constituting acts of genocide.

The silence from Mogadishu, Garowe and Abu Dhabi

As of this writing, neither Puntland's government nor Somalia's federal authorities have issued a public response to the 3 September report specifically, a notable contrast to the swift and specific denial Puntland issued against Fiqi's Senate testimony ten months ago. Officials briefed on the matter say Somalia's National Intelligence and Security Agency is reviewing the mission's evidence, and analysts expect a joint federal-Puntland statement once that review concludes, though no timeline has been given. The United Arab Emirates has been more vocal, telling regional media it "categorically" rejects any claims of providing support to either warring party in Sudan and condemning atrocities committed by both the RSF and Sudan's army, a position consistent with the denial Abu Dhabi has maintained since Sudan filed a genocide-complicity case against it at the International Court of Justice in 2025, a case the UAE has called "a cynical publicity stunt." None of the three governments most directly implicated, Somalia's federal authorities, Puntland's administration, or the UAE, has offered a substantive rebuttal of the specific routes, aircraft or equipment the Fact-Finding Mission documented.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether this report changes anything beyond the diplomatic record. First, whether Somalia's federal government or Puntland issue a substantive response, rather than continued silence, addressing the specific Bosaso routes the mission documented, since a government confident the allegations are unfounded would ordinarily rebut them rather than let a UN finding stand unanswered. Second, whether the UN Security Council's sanctions committee on Sudan, which has already sanctioned two individuals tied to the Colombian recruitment network, extends any sanctions designation to entities or individuals operating through Bosaso specifically, which would move the finding from a fact-finding mission's report into an enforcement mechanism with real consequences. Third, whether the United States says anything about the finding given its expanding military presence at the same airport, since continued silence from Washington on a UN report implicating its Puntland security partner's territory would itself be a signal about how much weight the administration is prepared to place on the finding.

Policy implications

For Somalia's federal government, a UN body's finding that Puntland territory served as a transit hub for a network implicated in genocide-level atrocities is a sovereignty and accountability problem it cannot resolve by pointing to Puntland's autonomy, since the world will not distinguish between Mogadishu's writ and Garowe's when weighing Somalia's international standing. For Puntland's administration, having rejected an allegation from its own federal defence minister only to see the same claim reappear with a UN Fact-Finding Mission's institutional weight behind it, silence is a materially weaker position now than it was in November, and continued non-response risks being read as tacit confirmation. For the United States, a security partnership built around expanding the Bosaso base for counter-ISIS and Red Sea security purposes now carries a reputational adjacency to a UN finding about the same port's role in Sudan's war, a risk Washington's own Sudan policy, which has already found the RSF responsible for genocide, gives it particular reason to take seriously rather than treat as someone else's problem. For the UAE, a categorical denial repeated across multiple controversies, the Amdjarass route, the Bosaso route, and the pending ICJ case, is wearing thinner with each report that finds equipment matching its export profile inside RSF-held territory, regardless of whether Abu Dhabi's own hand in any specific transfer is ever conclusively proven.