News - Middle East: Passports recovered from battlefields in Sudan suggest the United Arab Emirates is covertly putting boots on the ground in the country’s devastating civil war, according to leaked documents.

A 41-page document, sent to the UN security council and seen by the Guardian, contains images of Emirati passports allegedly found in Sudan and linked to soldiers of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the African nation’s notorious paramilitary.

The papers include photographs of pages of four passports apparently belonging to UAE male nationals, two born in Dubai, one in the city of Al Ain and another Ajman, the fifth-largest city in the UAE. All are aged between 29 and 49.

A source familiar with the discovery said the passports were recovered from the wreckage of a vehicle found in Omdurman in February. “The assessment is that they belong to UAE intelligence officers,” they added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Two passports belonging to Yemeni nationals were found in the same location, with one, a 38-year-old, born in Dubai, and a 31-year-old from Dhale, south-west Yemen. The RSF has previously sent thousands of its fighters to Yemen to fight against the Houthis.

The UAE has previously denied all accusations of supplying arms to the RSF, which is holding the city of El Fasher under siege in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

However, the suggestion that the Emirates has deployed personnel to assist the fighting in Sudan would be an escalation, further inflaming the geopolitical complexities of the 15-month long civil war between the RSF and Sudanese military.

The passports are claimed to have been recovered from Omdurman, the city across the Nile from the capital, Khartoum, in an area that was held by the RSF but recently reclaimed by the Sudanese army.

Images of boxes containing armaments are marked as being sent by a Serbian arms company to the “UAE Armed Forces, joint logistics command based in Abu Dhabi.

According to the document, the bombs were recovered from Sudan’s state broadcast headquarters in Omdurman after the country’s military – also accused of numerous war crimes – forced the RSF from the building.