Sudan's Hemedti closely linked to Dubai property portfolio
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) better known as Hemedti, has been closely linked to a $1.7m property portfolio in Dubai.
A new report from investigative organisation The Sentry reveals that Hemedti bought three apartments in Dubai’s eastern suburbs in March 2020, close to the UAE’s al-Minhad military air base.
The RSF chief, whose forces were recently found by a UN fact-finding mission to have committed genocide in North Darfur, is also linked to the ownership of an office building in the emirate.
While Hemedti originally bought the apartments in his own name, in July 2022 they were sold to Prodigious Real Estate Management Supervision Services, which is registered in the UAE.
The company is owned outright by Abo Zer Abdelnabi Habiballa Ahmmed, who is also known as Abozer Habib.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
In 2025, the US Treasury sanctioned Habib as the owner of the Capital Tap group, which has long been connected to the RSF and which included companies that provided money and military equipment to the paramilitary group.
Former owners of Prodigious include Emirati businessman Naser Helal Abdulla Helal Alhammadi and Sudanese national Islam Badreldine Mohamed Abdalla, who both used to own companies in the Capital Tap group.
Prodigious, Habib, Alhammadi and Abdalla did not respond to The Sentry’s requests for comment. Official Sudanese sources have previously told Middle East Eye that Hemedti owned property in Dubai, Addis Ababa and other foreign locations.
Dubai property leaks
Tuesday’s report from The Sentry estimates the value of the three Dubai properties connected to Hemedti at just under $1m. The Prodigious real estate company also owns commercial property in Dubai worth around $670,000.
The tenant of that property was an interior design company formerly owned by Alhammadi and Mazin Fadlalla, whose role as a suspected frontman for the RSF was revealed by The Sentry last year.
Between 2023 and 2025, Prodigious earned at least $80,000 per year in rent from this portfolio. The tenants of the apartments were ex-patriates working in Dubai who were ignorant of their landlords’ connections to the war in Sudan.
The Sentry found the properties in a database of leaked Dubai property records from 2020 and 2022 first obtained by the Centre for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based research organisation.
The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) helped obtain information that confirmed the current role played by Prodigious.
While the UAE continues to deny supporting the RSF, evidence of the depth of the relationship between Abu Dhabi and the Sudanese paramilitary continues to mount.
Middle East Eye has reported extensively on the supply lines used by the UAE to supply the RSF.
On a recent trip to Uganda, Hemedti admitted to using Colombian mercenaries, who are supplied by an Emirati businessman who is the business partner to the UAE’s most senior bureaucrat.
The Dagalo empire
The relationship between the Dagalo family - including Hemedti and his brothers Abdul Rahim and Algoney - and the UAE precedes the war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, by many years.
In 2019, Hemedti said that Sudan had provided 30,000 fighters to fight alongside the UAE- and Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Most of those came from the RSF.
Al-Junaid, a company sanctioned by the US for its role in financing the RSF, is involved in the export of gold from mines in the Songo area of South Darfur and Jebel Amer area of North Darfur to the souk in Dubai.
At least two other companies based in the UAE, Glow Gold and AZ Gold, are involved in this process.
The gold smuggled out of RSF-controlled territory in Sudan reaches the UAE either through Chad or through South Sudan and then Kenya.
International trade statistics have recently recorded a "massive surge" in the amount of gold coming into the UAE from Kenya.
In 2019, Hemedti claimed he deposited $1bn with Sudan’s central bank. This money is believed to have come from a corporate empire that includes not just gold but livestock, abattoirs, construction, tourism, and banking.
Multinational companies previously connected to this “paramilitary-industrial complex” include UAE-based Tradive General Trading, which was sanctioned by the US Treasury as a front company controlled by RSF Major Algoney Dagalo, and Aoun Commercial Brokers.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
