Named former child soldiers have testified that Colombian mercenaries trained them to fight for Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, the Associated Press reported Thursday — the first person-level record behind the paramilitary's foreign-fighter supply chain. [1]

The AP investigation documented a contractor pipeline running through UAE-adjacent networks, with receipts, denials on file, and conscripts describing their training. The Washington Post published a matching account the same day, corroborating the documentation and the denials. [2]

The record is testimony-stage: children with names, a pipeline with paper, and parties denying their roles. No court has found anything; no paymaster has been adjudicated. The chain is evidenced, not yet litigated, and the distance between those two states is where the story now lives. The Colombian veterans who crossed an ocean to drill children appear in the account as trainers; the structure that recruited, paid, and delivered them appears as documentation, not defendants.

Who recruited the Colombians, who paid them, how many conscripts passed through, and whether any jurisdiction opens a case are the questions the published record raises without answering. The testimony names the trainers. It does not yet name the men who hired them — and until a court or a government does, that absence is the truest measure of the pipeline's protection.

-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo