Batot Air is a cargo service registered in the capital of Burkina Faso. However it appears to fly almost exclusively between the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia, where Sudan’s military leadership claims the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces operates training camps just over the border from Sudan.
An investigation by Le Monde newspaper tracked Batot Air’s activity since it began operating in November 2025. The airline operates Ilyushin-Il76 aircraft that spent the last decade sitting unused in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
According to Le Monde, the cargo planes have made at least 36 trips between the UAE and Ethiopia over the past four months. At no point during those months have Batot Air aircraft spent any time in Burkina Faso.
Le Monde’s investigation raised questions about Batot Air’s finances. The company bought three Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft worth millions of dollars while reporting just over $17,000 in the bank when it was registered in Burkina Faso. The source of the money to purchase the planes remains unclear.
According to Le Monde, the company is owned by Sudanese businessman Mohamed Omer Suleiman Idriss. In addition to transporting military supplies, the aircraft also quietly flies Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo and his second-in-command, his brother Abdelrahim Dagalo, around the region.
While traveling between the UAE and Ethiopia, Batot Air pilots typically turn off their transponders over the Red Sea as they approach Ethiopia. The aircraft then land either at Ethiopia’s Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa or at the Ethiopia National Defense Force’s Bishoftu airbase southeast of the capital.
Sudan’s army has repeatedly accused the UAE of supplying the RSF with weapons. United Nations experts have said the claim is credible. Early in Sudan’s civil war, U.N. officials found that the UAE was supplying the RSF with weapons through a UAE-built airfield in eastern Chad.
The UAE has strongly denied that it is supporting the RSF. However, analysts point to an ongoing relationship with Hemedti and the RSF built around gold, which the RSF is suspected to be smuggling out of the Darfur region to be laundered in the UAE.
The UAE is also heavily invested in Sudan’s agricultural sector, which is predominantly located in al-Gezira and Sennar states just north of Blue Nile state, which government forces reclaimed from the RSF in 2024.
Reuters reported in February that the UAE was funding a training camp in the Benishangul Gumuz region of northwestern Ethiopia that included a drone base at the nearby Asosa airfield. Satellite images show tents and shipping containers in a camp capable of training thousands of RSF fighters. Observers have suggested that Ethiopia has allowed the camp to operate as part of its growing relationship with the UAE.
“The camp constitutes the first direct evidence of Ethiopia’s involvement in Sudan’s civil war, marking a potentially dangerous development that provides the RSF a substantial supply of fresh soldiers as fighting escalates in Sudan’s south,” Reuters reported.
The RSF launched an attack on Blue Nile state in late January. Sudanese authorities told Middle East Eye that the attackers came from Ethiopia and controlled drones used in the attack from there. Government forces repelled the attack.
