Egypt Struck an RSF Convoy Before Hosting Saddam Haftar

Egypt’s air force hit an RSF-bound supply convoy at the Libya-Sudan-Egypt triangle on 9 January, two days before Saddam Haftar met Cairo’s defense minister. An Egyptian official said the column carried armoured vehicles through the border desert that joins the three states.

The men who posed for the cameras on 10 and 11 January still talked about joint training. The raid had already named the real file on the table: the road out of eastern Libya that feeds Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.

Cairo Called the Visit Routine

Egypt’s State Information Service put out the public version. General Abdel Mageed Saqr, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and minister of defense, met Lt. Gen. Saddam Haftar, deputy commander-in-chief of the Libyan National Army, for bilateral military cooperation talks and a tour of regional events that, the spokesman said, bear on security in the neighbourhood.

Haftar also saw Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ahmed Khalifa at the defense ministry, with a guard and both anthems. Khalifa spoke of long ties between the two forces and of joint work against threats to Libya. Haftar praised Egypt for backing Libyan unity. Senior officers from both sides sat in. Army spokesman Gharib Abdel Hafez kept the readout inside that frame.

A senior Egyptian army source later described a different meeting. He said Cairo had confirmed that the United Arab Emirates had moved weapons, portable air defenses and drones to the RSF with help from Haftar’s forces, and that the son had been called in to hear it.

Saddam Haftar was literally summoned to Egypt, not invited for a courtesy visit, after confirmation that the UAE had supplied the RSF with weapons, military equipment, portable air defence systems and drones with the help of the LNA.

Senior Egyptian army source, January 2026

Egyptian intelligence, the same source said, laid out fuel moving to RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo from Libya’s Sarir refinery, plus the weapons file. The warning went to Khalifa Haftar through his son. Continued help for the RSF, the source said, would force Egypt to rethink its whole relationship with eastern Libya.

Why Saddam Haftar Was in Cairo

Saddam Haftar is the officer who matters on the south-eastern edge of Libya, the belt that includes Kufra and the triangle. He had already been in the room on 8 December 2025, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi received Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Hassan Rashad sat with them. Sisi pressed the need to confront any external interference and to push foreign forces and mercenaries out of Libya. Sudan was on that agenda.

Egypt has backed Sudan’s army since the war with the RSF began in April 2023, including in Cairo talks on Sudan’s war and on Nile rights. Eastern Libya has been a partner in that same period. The squeeze is that Khalifa Haftar’s camp is also a long-time partner of Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi is the patron Sudan’s army names when it talks about RSF guns. The UAE denies arming the RSF.

So the January trip had two scripts. One was the invitation, the honour guard, and talk of courses and shared threats. The other was a file of aerial pictures, tanker tracks, and a convoy that had already been hit. Cairo and Riyadh, the army source said, also dangled other money and kit if the Haftars stepped away from the Emirati channel. Egyptian officers even walked Saddam through what they said was an Emirati plan to carve his father’s territory once Darfur and Kordofan were locked down, splitting Jufra and Sirte from Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Desert Road Out of Kufra

The geography is blunt. Goods and fighters that leave eastern Libya for Darfur do not need a port in Tripoli. They need Kufra, then a run across the sand toward Jabal Uweinat, where Libya, Egypt and Sudan touch. Analyst Jalel Harchaoui wrote in December that Egyptian MiG-29s were already hitting RSF columns moving from Haftar-held Libya into Sudan. The January convoy was one more column on that same track.

A second Egyptian military source said intelligence had watched Haftar-aligned units, including the Subul al-Salam Brigade, help the RSF take the triangle, with Emirati flights into Kufra and then a land haul to RSF ground. Audio and video surveillance, a separate army briefing said, also caught Colombian and Venezuelan recruits moving through Libya into Sudan. “Without such support, the RSF would not have achieved its recent advances,” that officer said.

THE NODES ON THE LIBYA ROAD

The UN Panel of Experts on Libya later put the same map on paper. It found desert corridors through Libya and Chad, Tebu tribal cover, and Kufrah airport under Subul al-Salam, with tacit room to move from parts of the LNA. The Panel said RSF men were inside Libya in 2025. It treated the pattern as a standing structure, not a one-off smuggling job.

Fuel Trucks Caught Fire at Al-Uwaynat

The January raid, the second military source said, came after the convoy had already crossed the Libyan line in the al-Uwaynat area, southwest of Egypt and southeast of Kufra. That is Saddam’s neighbourhood, not Tripoli’s.

THE 9 JANUARY STRIKE

• The date: 9 January 2026, two days before Saqr’s public session with Saddam Haftar.
• The load: dozens of vehicles carrying fuel, weapons and military equipment, including armoured trucks.
• The damage: most of the vehicles were destroyed and fuel trucks caught fire, the officer said.
• The order: continuous air patrols, and any military movement from Libya toward Sudan to support Hemedti’s militia to be targeted.

He added that the strike was the message: no movement in the al-Uwaynat triangle would be tolerated, and later trucks would get the same. Air traffic into Kufra from Abu Dhabi and Somaliland, he said then, had been halted. Cairo did not put any of that in a signed communique. A diplomat briefed by Egyptian officials said the raid was flown from a southern Egyptian airbase. Egypt has not released gun-camera video or a wreck list.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The meeting: Saqr and Khalifa received Saddam Haftar in Cairo on 10 and 11 January, and the armed forces issued a cooperation statement.
• The official leak: Egyptian officers described a 9 January strike on an RSF-bound column at the triangle.
• The road: UN investigators later mapped weapons, fuel and fighters through southeastern Libya toward the RSF.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• A public claim: Egypt has not announced the raid in its own name.
• The death toll: no Egyptian figure has been issued for the column.
• The UAE role: Abu Dhabi denies sending arms to the RSF, while UN missions cite transit networks that include the Emirates among other states.

Crews who work that sand already treat the sky as the threat. After repeated air attacks, the overland Libya-to-Nyala run became a route people refused even when the pay went up, and remaining lift tried to move by cargo aircraft instead of by truck. That is the point of bombing a convoy two days before you seat its political patron: the road itself becomes the subject of the meeting.

After the Triangle Changed Hands

Cairo’s patience did not snap on a single January morning. It snapped after the RSF, with Libyan help, took the ground that makes the road possible.

FROM THE TRIANGLE TO CAIRO

1. April 2023: War starts between Sudan’s army and the RSF.
2. 10 June 2025: Witnesses describe more than 250 military vehicles entering the market at al-Katma in the triangle, with RSF fighters and Libyan groups tied to Haftar.
3. 12 June 2025: The RSF says it holds Almuthallath, the junction of Sudan, Libya and Egypt.
4. June 2025: Egyptian aircraft strike RSF-linked forces on the Sudanese side of the same triangle, an Egyptian official later said.
5. 8 December 2025: Sisi receives Khalifa Haftar, with Saddam present, and Sudan is discussed.
6. 9 January 2026: Egyptian aircraft hit the RSF-bound convoy at al-Uwaynat, according to Egyptian officials.
7. 10-11 January 2026: Saddam Haftar meets Saqr and Khalifa in Cairo.

The triangle is not only a gun road. It is a gold and smuggling desert, which is why a later Egyptian gold mining sweep near Sudan belongs on the same map. Who holds that sand decides who eats, who fuels, and who drives on to el-Fasher. The RSF’s seizure of the triangle, Egyptian officers argued, fed the later fall of el-Fasher after a siege of more than 550 days. Sisi called the horrors there a red line. By then the northern neighbour had already started shooting at the supply that made those advances possible.

UN Maps Still Run Through Libya

The January raid did not close the file. In early February, satellite images and flight records described drones working from East Oweinat, a southern desert airfield built inside a farming project about 60 km from Sudan. Egyptian security officials said two southern airports had been fitted out over the previous months to guard the border and to strike. The RSF has accused Egypt of hitting it from the air since at least October 2024, which Cairo denied at the time.

On 3 September 2026, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan warned that external support networks fuelling Sudan’s war still ran through Chad, southeastern Libya and Bosaso in Somalia. Mona Rishmawi, an expert on the mission, said a chain of networks across several countries had given the RSF foreign personnel, training, weapons and logistics, and that this feed ran into Zamzam camp and then into the takeover of el-Fasher.

We found a transnational chain of networks spanning several countries that provided the RSF with foreign personnel, training, weapons, and logistics. This support fed into RSF operations in Zamzam camp and later during the takeover of El-Fasher, where the Mission documented grave human rights and international humanitarian law violations and international crimes, including conduct displaying hallmarks of genocide.

Mona Rishmawi, expert member, UN Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, 3 September 2026

The same desert was still a target in late September. A Sudanese military source said the army destroyed more than 50 combat vehicles and fuel and ammunition tankers on a convoy coming from Haftar’s forces through the triangle. That was a Sudanese strike, not an Egyptian one, and it sat on a different date. It showed the same road still carrying the same cargo.

Haftar’s camp never walked out of Cairo’s reception rooms. Egyptian and Libyan chiefs of staff were still exchanging compliments in Libya in February. The January visit kept the partnership in public and put a price on it in private. Nine months later the UN was still drawing lines through Kufra. The convoy Egypt hit on 9 January was a warning to the man who arrived two days later. The road he was told to shut was still a working road.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Is Saddam Haftar?

He is lieutenant general and deputy commander-in-chief of the Libyan National Army, and the son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. The January delegation that came with him to Cairo included the LNA chiefs of staff for land forces, the air force and the navy, and he attended a graduation of Libyan students training at Egyptian military academies during the same trip.

Who Commands the Subul al-Salam Battalion?

The UN Panel of Experts on Libya named Abdulrahman Hashem al-Kilani as the leader of Subul al-Salam. It said the battalion, between January 2025 and January 2026, reworked its supply system until it had near-complete control of key south-eastern routes, and that as of December 2025 Kufrah airport sat under its de facto control, with 166 Brigade and 87 Battalion sent in as reinforcement because LNA leaders were uneasy about the group’s growing weight in Kufra.

What Did UN Investigators Say About Foreign Fighters?

The UN Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan documented the deployment of up to 2,000 former Colombian military contractors who ran combat drones, artillery and other advanced weapons alongside RSF units in Darfur and Kordofan. It said private firms, logistics middlemen and recruiters working from countries including Colombia and the United Arab Emirates used transit points in Chad, southeastern Libya and Bosaso to move people, training, weapons and supplies.

What Was East Oweinat Built For?

East Oweinat began as a civilian strip for a desert farming project in Egypt’s Western Desert, with wheat circles visible from the air. Satellite images showed a second runway and extra hangars added in later years, and retired Egyptian officer Samir Farag has called it one of the main bases through which Egypt can secure its southern border.

Has Cairo Released Proof of the 9 January Raid?

No. The armed forces spokesman confined public remarks to the Haftar meetings and to “deep-rooted ties.” Egypt has not issued serial numbers, gun-camera film or a casualty count for the column, so the strike account rests on unnamed officials even as later UN reports kept treating the Kufra-Uweinat track as a live embargo problem.