Sudanese Child Soldiers Say Colombian Mercenaries Trained Them, Chained Them to Guns

A 17-year-old boy told the Associated Press he was shackled by his hands and legs to an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck in Khartoum while Sudanese warplanes attacked overhead. He was 15 when it happened. He said his captors, fighters with Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, told him to shoot down the jets or be killed. If the RSF didn't kill him, he said, the planes might.

He saw another child chained to the steering wheel of a vehicle nearby.

The boy, interviewed at a rehabilitation center run by Sudan's military-backed government in Khartoum, said the men who ordered him strapped to the weapon were Colombian mercenaries providing military support to the RSF. He said he'd never held a gun before he was thrown onto the front lines.

"I was extremely scared. I just wanted to escape and go home," he told the AP.

Six kids, six horror stories

The AP spoke with six former child soldiers who say they were abducted and forced to fight for the RSF, all on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. Two said they were trained by Colombians.

One boy said he was rounded up by RSF fighters in a market in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city, where he'd been selling cigarettes. The paramilitaries were hunting deserters and grabbed him by mistake, he said. He was held at a base called Central Reserve Camp with dozens of other children, hands bound around the clock, even at meals.

"We weren't allowed to bathe. Instead, they would pour water over us while we were still bound," he said.

He said dozens of foreign fighters, identified by RSF fighters as Colombians, taught the children how to operate anti-aircraft guns through translators and told the RSF to bind the kids to the weapons so they couldn't run.

"When the planes flew overhead, the Colombians would retreat to their bunkers, leaving us outside shackled to the vehicles," he said.

Another boy, held at a separate camp, said he was locked up and only brought out to fire artillery at targets identified by drones, including civilian targets. When he refused, his captors beat him, sometimes with an electric baton. He said a Colombian beat him unconscious on one occasion. An 18-year-old friend was shot dead trying to escape, he said.

At the rehabilitation center, AP journalists saw a boy missing a hand, another with scars from what he said was torture, and a third with a bone visibly jutting from his side. A member of Sudan's military media office accompanied the AP during the visit but did not select which children were interviewed, according to the AP, which says it retained full editorial control of its reporting.

A war with no shortage of guns-for-hire

Sudan's civil war, now in its fourth year, pits the RSF against the Sudanese army. Tens of thousands of children as young as 8 have been conscripted by all sides in the conflict, according to the AP's reporting.

Human Rights Watch and the Conflict Insights Group, a private research firm, say the accounts point to a broader deployment of Colombian mercenaries in Sudan. Colombia passed a law banning its citizens from serving as foreign fighters, but rights groups say tens of thousands of veterans of Colombia's decades-long internal conflicts have hired out their combat experience in wars abroad anyway.

Rights groups say a state-linked firm in the United Arab Emirates recruited the Colombians to fight alongside the RSF. Human rights organizations and Sudan's military both accuse the UAE of arming the RSF. A United Nations panel says it tracked weapons shipments to the RSF that originated in the UAE.

The UAE did not respond to multiple AP requests for comment on this report. It has previously and repeatedly denied arming the RSF or recruiting and training foreign fighters, saying the shipments in question were humanitarian aid intended for refugees.

What's proven, what isn't

The firsthand accounts from six named-anonymous former child soldiers, corroborated by physical evidence AP journalists observed at the rehabilitation center, establish that children were used as combatants and subjected to torture.

What's alleged but not independently verified in this reporting: the exact scale of Colombian mercenary deployment across RSF-controlled territory, and whether the UAE-linked recruiting firm rights groups point to operated with the knowledge or direction of the Emirati government itself. The UAE's denial stands on the record, unrebutted by anything beyond the U.N. panel's tracking of weapons shipments and rights groups' recruitment claims.

The system here makes this hard to fully verify by design. Sudan's war zones are largely inaccessible to independent monitors, mercenary recruitment networks operate through private intermediaries specifically to obscure state involvement, and the only witnesses are traumatized children speaking through a government-arranged visit. That doesn't mean the allegations are false. It means nobody outside Sudan's rehabilitation centers has been able to independently confirm the full scope.

No sanctions, indictment, or UN investigation targeting the alleged Colombian recruitment pipeline has been announced as of this reporting. Colombia's government has not commented publicly on citizens serving as mercenaries in Sudan despite its domestic ban on the practice. The open question is whether any government, Colombian, Emirati, or otherwise, will act on evidence that keeps surfacing in accounts like these.