Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan’s Genocide

The American weapons maker Anduril says its founding purpose is to arm democratic governments to safeguard the Western way of life The company s official mission document titled Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy contains separate references to democracy two more than the name of the company Building weapons isn t only a matter of national measure the company argues but a moral imperative to protect the democratic tradition The challenge ahead is gigantic the manifesto says but so are the rewards of success continued peace and prosperity in the democratic world Mentions of democracy are noticeably absent however from Anduril s modern announcement of a new joint venture with a state-run bomb maker from an authoritarian monarchy that is facilitating a genocide Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the programs typically associated with democratic societies In the UAE free expression and association are outlawed and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process A assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House a U S State Department-backed think tank gave the UAE a amount of out of The EDGE Anduril Production Alliance as it will be known will focus on autonomous weapons systems including the production of Anduril s Omen drone The UAE has agreed to purchase the first Omen drones built through the partnership according to a press release the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture The Omen drone was described as a personal project of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey a longtime Trump ally and benefit EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech militia-style militant groups The UAE has been eager to sell its weapons around the world both to generate profit and to exert political influence This the greater part in recent months and brutally includes Sudan where the Emirates supply the Rapid Backing Forces an anti-government militia Weapons furnished by the UAE have been instrumental in the ongoing civil war now widely described as having descended into an RSF-perpetrated genocide In October video imagery emerged from Sudan showing RSF soldiers indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in Darfur Reports of rape torture and other atrocities at the hands of the RSF are now widespread and a current low estimate of people murdered by the RSF during its latest takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher is according to a modern account by The Guardian The Trump administration determined in January that the RSF s massacres constituted a genocide echoing assessments by the Biden administration and human rights observers The RSF has been able to rapidly overtake the Sudanese army with the help of weapons from Anduril s new partner An April probe by France unveiled EDGE subsidiary International Golden Group funneled tens of thousands of mortar rounds into Sudan for use by the RSF Nathaniel Raymonds who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Society Robustness communicated The Intercept mortars were among three weapons systems that went into the hands of RSF that changed the unit of the war Raymonds whose office at Yale previously partnered with the State Department to monitor atrocities in the Sudanese civil war described Anduril s joint venture as mind-boggling given the role Emirati drones and other weapons have played in facilitating the RSF s genocide You have a DIA and State Department assessment that in a just world will trigger Leahy Act and shut this thing down from day one Raymonds announced referring to ordinance that nominally prohibits the provision of assistance to foreign militaries that have committed major human rights violations Related Trump s Big Beautiful Gift to Anduril Neither Anduril nor EDGE Group responded to a request for comment A November press release from both companies noted EDGE and Anduril will work closely with U S and UAE officials to ensure full compliance with applicable laws and regulations including pact compliance rules and regulations A statement by Human Rights Watch noted the use of drone-delivered thermobaric bombs sold by EDGE In October The Guardian informed the RSF s use of armored personnel carriers manufactured by an EDGE subsidiary In a United Nations panel of experts deemed the UAE s backing of the RSF as credible and this year a bipartisan group of U S lawmakers issued a report criticizing f oreign backers of the RSF and SAF including the United Arab Emirates The Wall Street Journal broadcasted in October that both the State Department s intelligence office and the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed the UAE was supplying the RSF with a wide array of weapons vehicles and ammunition The UAE has repeatedly denied this help despite ample evidence Jean-Baptiste Gallopin a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has tracked the flow of arms into Sudan informed The Intercept that EDGE Group s products have exacerbated the horror of the ongoing war The rapid backing forces which we located responsible for crimes against humanity across Sudan has made widespread use of armored vehicles made by Nimr a subsidiary of Edge Group he reported The name of Adasi another subsidiary of Edge Group which specializes in drone machinery appeared on crates of Serbian-made mm munitions that the RSF has been using and which equip a few of their quadcopter attack drones Nan Tian a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute added that the Nimr vehicles are armed with a gun that is made by KNDS which is a French-German arms maker KNDS has a military partnership with EDGE Group Raymonds argued that not since Operation Cyclone the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences EDGE was launched at a inauguration ceremony overseen by Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and consists of over subsidiaries spanning bombs drones ammunition and various military and intelligence application systems EDGE s chair of the board Faisal Al Bannai is a businessman and adviser to the prince There s very scant conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven t had a hand in and very often a rather malign hand EDGE isn t the only Emirati weapons company but the conglomerate represents the bulk of the country s arms industry by volume and illustrates the amorality of its export program according to Sam Perlo-Freeman a researcher with the Campaign Against the Arms Arrangement which has advocated for an arms embargo against the UAE As a state-owned company they will be used as an agent of Emirati state framework he announced Arms supplies to allies and proxies across the Middle East North and East Africa has been for quite a while a major facet of Emirati state plan This has manifested beyond furnishing arms to the RSF with the UAE arming militaries in Libya Somalia and the ongoing genocidal war in Tigray There s very minimal conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven t had a hand in and very often a rather malign hand Reports of EDGE wares winding up in the hands of armed proxies stretches back over a decade A statement by the United Nations Measure Council detected International Golden Group facilitated the import of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into Libya in violation of a global arms embargo In a review by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism detected UAE-backed combatants in the ongoing Yemeni civil war armed with pistols manufactured by Caracal an EDGE subsidiary As in Sudan a nominal civil war waged within the Tigray region of Ethiopia was exacerbated by foreign entanglement and a flood of outside weaponry In Gerjon s Aircraft Finds an aviation analysis Substack published imagery indicating the import of guided bombs manufactured by Al Tariq another EDGE subsidiary for use by the Ethiopian Air Force responsible for widespread civilian death during the Tigray war Anduril the bulk in the past few days valued by private investors at over billion has a wide array of weapons in the U S and with its allies including Australia and Taiwan It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U S Mexico perimeter for nearly a decade Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China matching the company s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy Related OpenAI s Pitch to Trump Rank the World on U S Tech Interests Luckey has long cast his company as a defender of democracy Soldiers who defend western values should all be superheroes with superpowers he tweeted in In an interview that year Luckey explained backing democratic allies against rogue nations around the world I like working with the British he commented Everyone s a little bit different but more or less we all believe in western values and democracy and universal human rights Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm similarly advanced the company s moral event for an arms race on human rights grounds describing China in a interview as the world s greatest evil denouncing the Chinese state s basic approach to human rights Grimm added that I think they re conducting an ongoing genocide with their Uyghur population I think their approach to free speech to political speech to religious freedom are fundamentally antithetical to how the West values human life and how we think about human rights The fact of Anduril saying they re an arsenal of democracy and partnering with EDGE Group it s obviously ridiculous explained Perlo-Freeman but it s part of the broader picture of Western democracies treating the UAE as a valued partner and ally and shielding them from consequences The post Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan s Genocide appeared first on The Intercept