Colombian mercenaries are now fighting in Sudan’s civil war, their mission shaped by the ambitions of a distant autocrat. It feels as improbable as a forgotten episode from the 1860s, when Sudanese-born soldiers fought in Mexico for the French emperor Napoleon III. In each case, the soldiers were drawn into someone else’s war — and into a conflict their employers neither fully understood nor ultimately controlled.

In 1863, a battalion of Sudanese-born slave soldiers arrived in Mexico as part of an ill-fated French invasion. These men, originally recruited into the Egyptian Army under the Khedive Sa’id Pasha, were contracted by French military officials, who were convinced that African soldiers were resistant to tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria.

The French deployed their Sudanese troops to Veracruz, a tropical lowland region rife with disease. The Sudanese remained in Mexico for four years, alongside tens of thousands of French and imperial troops. The history of this force — known to the French as “le bataillon nègre égyptien” — is detailed in the 2023 book Ordinary Sudan, 1504–2019. It is a story of slavery, race, war, ideology, and ill-conceived military adventurism.

The idea of conquering Mexico took root in the restless mind of Emperor Napoleon III, who clung to illusions of imperial grandeur — of achieving military glory in the vein of his uncle, the great conqueror Napoleon I. Unable to challenge Europe’s major powers, he turned his gaze to distant Mexico, then weakened by civil war.

Napoleon III knew nothing of Mexico. He was an effete socialite who had no military experience, unlike his uncle. Yet he had an army at his disposal, and Mexico was vulnerable. Napoleon framed the invasion as a civilizational mission.

As one historian noted, “Napoleon III and his advisors… regarded Mexicans as members of an inferior, child-like race who needed a monarchist government and European civilization to escape from the chaos that had engulfed them on independence.”
These ideas collapsed in the face of military and political reality.

After six years, Mexican nationalist forces, backed by the United States, drove out the French and executed the Hapsburg archduke whom the French had installed as “Emperor of Mexico.” The Sudanese battalion, reduced from 446 men to 299, was among the last of the imperial forces to leave Mexico, returning to Egypt and then Sudan in 1867.

This was perhaps the only time in history that Sudanese soldiers clashed with Latin American troops — until now.

One hundred and fifty-seven years later, an equally out-of-touch, over-ambitious monarch, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has embarked on a foreign military escapade as fantastical as the French occupation of Mexico. Since 2023, the Emirati ruler — widely known as MBZ — has led a covert intervention in Sudan, funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a regional militia that mutinied against the Sudanese government and triggered the current war.

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