Reuters links U.S. veteran's fleet to Sudan paramilitary supply routes

A Boeing 727 tied to Steven Shaulis’s aviation network was shot down at Nyala Airport in October 2025, killing all 19 people on board, after another Shaulis-linked jet had already been destroyed at the same airfield months earlier. The aircraft trail now runs through airports and logistics hubs long associated with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, exposing how a private fleet can move through a war economy even under intense scrutiny.

Shaulis, a 63-year-old former U.S. Army Special Forces veteran, heads CADG, a Singapore-based firm formerly known as Central Asia Development Group. His companies have taken in at least $419 million from American taxpayers over more than two decades, including work for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, air-conditioning support in Iraq, and an airfield project for the Pentagon in Kenya. That record shows the network was not a fringe operator but a contractor with deep ties to government work and international logistics.

The route through Sudan became starkest at Nyala Airport in Darfur. A Boeing 737 destroyed there in May 2025 was linked to 54 deaths, including 51 RSF fighters, according to a source with direct knowledge. Aviation records also show a Boeing 727 at Nyala was shot down on October 23, 2025, and all 19 occupants died. The repeated losses at the same airport underline why Nyala has become a choke point in the conflict, not a normal commercial stop.

The aircraft did not move in isolation. Two additional Boeing 727s linked to Shaulis’s firms moved from Brazil and the United States to Chad starting in October 2024, then flew on to hubs used by the RSF. Those stops included Al-Kufra Airport in southeastern Libya, N’Djamena Airport in Chad and Bosaso in Somalia, all part of a regional map that investigators have tied to weapons, fuel and personnel moving toward RSF-controlled territory. A draft from the United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan also examined supply routes through Chad and Libya, including the Am Djarass airport area, and described a shift toward decentralized logistics nodes in eastern Chad and southern Libya.

Sudan’s war began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The RSF traces back to the Janjaweed militias of Darfur, and conflict trackers now say the war is in its fourth year, with death toll estimates varying widely and displacement continuing across the region. Reuters found no evidence that Shaulis or his companies had been sanctioned or formally accused by authorities, and neither Shaulis nor the RSF answered detailed questions, leaving the aviation trail as the clearest public map of how a distant war is kept supplied.