Ethiopia’s Alleged RSF Training Camp Near Menge: What Reports Say—and Why the UAE–Gold Pipeline Matters

A 2026 reporting trail connects a purported training base in Benishangul-Gumuz to wider allegations about arms, illicit gold, and the regional political bargains sustaining Sudan’s war.

Updated: April 2026

A set of recent reports alleges that a large training camp near Menge in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region has been used to prepare fighters linked to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with funding and logistics traced by investigators to the UAE. If accurate, the story would expand the Sudan war’s geography—and sharpen questions about how gold, hard currency, and regional port politics intersect with violence on the ground.

Key takeaways

• Reports claim a UAE-funded facility near Menge could train thousands of recruits linked to the RSF.
• If those claims hold, Ethiopia’s posture—while chairing the AU Peace and Security Council—faces heightened scrutiny.
• The alleged financial engine is illicit gold: weapons flow in, untraceable bullion flows out, and public budgets lose out.
• A sustainable exit requires a regional pact that cuts the incentives behind the war economy.

Ethiopia RSF training camp allegations: what has been reported

In early 2026, reports citing Reuters and Genocide Watch described a large, UAE-funded training facility near Menge, in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region. The facility is described as capable of training up to 10,000 recruits and has been cited by observers as a sign that Ethiopian territory is being used to support forces aligned with Sudan’s paramilitary conflict.

AU leadership, sovereignty, and a war spilling across borders

At the same time Ethiopia holds the chairmanship of the AU Peace and Security Council, it faces accusations that its territory is being used to prepare fighters linked to atrocities in Darfur and Khartoum. In the Horn of Africa, borders can become bargaining chips: external actors can leverage local access, logistics, and money to prolong a war that has already displaced millions.

While the world watches Sudan, the leverage points sit in plain sight: money, gold, logistics, and port politics, often routed through the UAE, are traded for the lives of Sudanese and Ethiopian civilians. A regional pact may be the only way out—but is Ethiopia’s leadership too constrained to sign it?

Sudan’s gold, Ethiopia’s transit role, and the conflict ecosystem.

Sudan’s gold sits at the center of its expanding civil war. The precise volume of the trade is hard to measure because much of it is unrecorded and illicit. Still, recent official figures and investigative reporting point to a multibillion-dollar war economy as of April 2026. The war economy also echoes Ethiopia’s own recent experience during the Tigray war (see: Tigray’s plundered gold is being laundered through the UAE).

Ethiopia has reported exporting roughly 3 tons of gold per month to the UAE in recent periods. Critics argue that, alongside legal exports, Ethiopia also functions as a transit corridor for additional, unquantified flows, including gold linked to Sudan’s RSF, before it reaches Dubai.

The conflict ecosystem: weapons in, gold out, hard currency back to politics

This creates what I call the conflict ecosystem: the RSF receives weapons and logistics to fight; the UAE gains access to cheap, hard-to-trace gold; and the Ethiopian leadership gains scarce hard currency that helps sustain the state and its political balance.

The economic impact of the gold wealth drained through illicit channels is a devastating reality for the African public. While official exports generate some revenue, the clandestine trade orchestrated by paramilitary groups like the RSF and their international enablers creates a development vacuum. As of April 2026, the scale of this loss is a massive collapse of public infrastructure in the affected regions.

The fiscal drain: an estimated $40B annual loss across Africa’s mining-related illicit flows

The most direct impact is the loss of tax revenue and foreign exchange that should fund the state. In Sudan, while the nation extracted 70 tons of gold in 2025, only 20 tons entered official channels. The remaining 50 tons of gold, approximately $3.78 billion, vanished.

The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) estimates that Africa loses roughly $40 billion annually, specifically due to illicit financial flows in the mining sector.

Every dollar smuggled out is a dollar not spent on roads, hospitals, or schools. The Sudanese mining sector alone has suffered approximately $7 billion in war-related losses as of February 2026, money that should have been the backbone of the country’s post-oil economy.

Social and environmental externalities

The public pays for missing wealth, not just in lost cash, but in the physical destruction of their environment and health.

Much of the gold trafficked through the RSF and Ethiopia is mined using cyanide and mercury in tailing dumps. The cost of future environmental cleanup and the treatment of chemical-related illnesses will fall on the public, while the profits have already been exported to the UAE.

By exporting raw gold rather than refining it locally, African nations are exporting jobs. The ECA notes that Africa needs 20 million new jobs annually; the illicit gold trade deprives the youth of the industrialization and value-addition roles that a legal, sovereign sector would provide.

Deepening inequality and conflict

The illicit trade doesn’t just leave the country; it stays behind in the form of militarized corruption.  Wealth from the missing gold is used by the RSF to reshape local power structures, which rewards political and military loyalty while displacing communal farmers who live on gold-rich land.

In Sudan, families are being driven into hazardous mining just to afford food and rent. While the shadow networks gain a windfall from record-high global gold prices, the local currency collapses, and the public faces a humanitarian crisis where income falls short of covering basic needs.

Market vulnerability

Because so much of the wealth is missing from official ledgers, African economies become incredibly vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. In Sudan, when diplomatic ties with the UAE soured in 2025, official shipments dropped by nearly 36%, and the public economy fell victim to the whims of a single foreign buyer.

Ethiopia’s gold export boom—and what critics say is missing from the ledger

While Ethiopia officially reported a record $1.5 billion in gold revenue for just the first half of the 2025 fiscal year, the shadow numbers are far more staggering. In Tigray—the heart of Ethiopia’s gold production—officials estimate that the amount of gold smuggled out is three to four times what is legally sold to the central bank. This suggests that while 22 tons moved through official channels in late 2025, as much as 36,600kg of gold—worth roughly $2.5 billion—may have been laundered through the UAE in a single year.

This is not only a revenue loss; critics describe it as a repeatable laundering pipeline. One commonly cited mechanism is passenger-based gold movement: smugglers exploit thresholds and weak enforcement to move gold in small lots without meaningful scrutiny. Once in Dubai, the gold can be sold for cash and routed—directly or indirectly—back into the networks that keep the war supplied.

For the African public, the cost is clear: Ethiopia’s entire annual regional budget for Tigray is just $100 million, yet over $2 billion in wealth is drained from that same soil every year to fund a war that neither the Sudanese nor the Ethiopian people asked for.

The reversed development cycle

Instead of resource extraction for taxation, public investment, and prosperity, the illicit model becomes resource extraction for smuggling, conflict financing, à public displacement, and poverty. The missing wealth is the difference between an Africa that builds its own future and an Africa that remains a quarry for the rest of the world.

Addis Ababa’s defense: sovereignty, economics, and geopolitics

sovereignty or subversion?

The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government Communication Service have consistently dismissed reports of hosting RSF training camps as fabrications. Ethiopia argues that these reports are designed to sour its relationship with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and to frame Ethiopia as a destabilizing force in the Horn of Africa. In its peace argument,Ethiopia points to its role as the Chair of the AU Peace and Security Council as evidence of its commitment to a negotiated settlement, rather than a military one.

Economic justification: mining as a national pillar

From the Ethiopian government’s view, the surge in gold exports is a success story of economic reform, not a laundering scheme.The Ministry of Mines emphasizes its efforts to formalize artisanal mining and bring it into the official economy.They view the US$1.5 billion in gold exports as a legitimate achievement of their economic diversification strategy, intended to reduce reliance on agricultural exports like coffee. Ethiopia frames its trade with the UAE as a strategic partnership with a major global hub, intended to secure the foreign exchange necessary to stabilize its own internal currency crisis.

The port deal: a sovereign necessity

Ethiopia’s perspective on the Somaliland MoU is centered on the right of access to the sea. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has argued that a nation of 120 million people cannot remain landlocked without risking future poverty and conflict.Ethiopia views its historical claim to the Red Sea as a legitimate sovereign interest that was unfairly stripped away when Eritrea became independent. To them, the port deal is a peaceful, commercial solution to a 30-year-old bottleneck.

The ‘victim of geopolitics’ defense

Ethiopian officials often suggest that the country is being targeted by a Western-Arab coalition that wants to keep Ethiopia weak and dependent.Ethiopia believes that much of the international pressure, including the accusations regarding Sudan, is actually a tactic to force concessions on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).They argue that international human rights organizations and news outlets ignore the thousands of Ethiopians displaced by the TPLF and other insurgents while focusing exclusively on the government’s military movements.

Key Sources

• Camp allegations & regional diplomacy: Reuters (via Geeska); Genocide Watch; AU PSC programme (April 2026)
• Gold & illicit finance: SudanTribune (official vs. unofficial gold flows); UN ECA on illicit financial flows; The Continent (Tigray/UAE laundering)
• Arms & logistics: ADF Magazine (cargo flights)
• Ethiopia economics & port context: FurtherAfrica (mining/export revenue); IISS (Ethiopia–Somaliland deal)

FAQ

Where is Menge, Ethiopia?

Menge is described in the reporting cited above as a locality in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, near the Sudan border. That border proximity is central to the allegation, because it would make cross-border movement, supply, and concealment easier than in Ethiopia’s interior.

What is the RSF?

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are a Sudanese paramilitary force that has become one of the main combatants in Sudan’s current civil war. The RSF have been accused by multiple observers and human-rights monitors of severe abuses during the conflict, including in Darfur and in and around Khartoum.

What is being alleged about the training camp near Menge?

The core claim is that a UAE-funded facility near Menge has been used to train recruits linked to Sudan’s RSF, potentially at large scale (figures cited in the reporting go as high as 10,000). In this framing, the camp is less an isolated incident and more a logistics node in a broader system that moves fighters, weapons, and money through the region.

Has Ethiopia confirmed or denied hosting an RSF camp?

Ethiopian officials have denied the allegation and framed it as misinformation intended to damage Ethiopia’s regional standing and its relationship with Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF). This dispute over basic facts is why independent verification—and transparent, consistent investigations—matter as much as diplomatic statements.

Why does gold matter in a story about a training camp?

Because wars don’t run on slogans; they run on cash flow. In my view, illicit gold is a key financial rail that helps convert territorial control into weapons, patronage, and political staying power. If the gold pipeline remains intact, camps, supply routes, and recruitment can reappear even after public condemnations.

Conclusion: what a regional pact would need to change

Whether every detail in the Menge allegations proves true or not, the larger pattern is hard to ignore: Sudan’s war is sustained by cross-border logistics and a political economy that rewards disruption. That is why focusing only on battlefield events, or only on formal diplomacy, misses the machinery underneath.

A credible regional pact that actually reduces violence would have to target incentives, not just rhetoric.