Washington Tries to Correct Course on Sudan’s Civil War

By Robbie Gramer

“””Lawmakers are pressing for a fresh approach with a new envoy and by leaning on the proxy powers abetting atrocities””””

U.S. lawmakers are ramping up pressure on the Biden administration to take a more forceful approach to Sudan’s civil war, as months of intense fighting and atrocities have plunged the East African country into further chaos following failed U.S.-brokered efforts to halt the conflict.
Powerful U.S. senators have pushed the administration to tap a new U.S. special envoy to Sudan to focus on crisis response full time and breathe new life into U.S. policy on the conflict, which has lately been overshadowed by one war in the Middle East, one in eastern Europe, and possibly one on the horizon in Asia.
Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman and Obama administration diplomat, is the top contender for the job, current and former officials said, though they cautioned that no final decision had been made and that there’s an ongoing internal debate over how high-level the envoy would be. One fight is over whether the envoy would report to the president, the secretary of state, or to the top diplomat overseeing African affairs, Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee; lawmakers want a high-level envoy with high-level access.
Perriello did not respond to a request for comment.
Sudan erupted into chaos this April after rival factions of a military junta—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—broke apart and began fighting for control of the country. More than 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the ensuing conflict since then, and at least 6.7 million people have been displaced. Aid agencies say more than 6 million people in Sudan are at risk of famine. The conflict took a grim new turn this week when the RSF captured and ransacked Wad Madani, Sudan’s second-biggest city, which was viewed as one of the last major safe havens in the country and a major hub for humanitarian operations.
The United States has accused both sides of committing war crimes in the conflict and accused the RSF of committing crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. The conflict has also devolved into a proxy war between regional rivals, with Egypt backing the SAF and the United Arab Emirates backing the RSF; even Russia threw its hat in to support the RSF through its mercenary Wagner Group force. (The fate of that group remains uncertain after the untimely death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in August.)
The UAE’s support for the RSF, a paramilitary group formed from militias that carried out a genocide in Darfur two decades ago, has particularly riled Congress. Another group of Democratic lawmakers in the House have taken the unusual, though not unprecedented, step of sending a letter directly to the Emirati foreign minister condemning its reported support for the RSF, warning that such support could damage U.S.-Emirati relations, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Foreign Policy.
Taken together, these initiatives reveal mounting frustration on Capitol Hill over the U.S. and the international community’s response to the conflict in Sudan. The conflict is considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises but has garnered only a fraction of the attention or resources devoted to the crisis in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war or the war in Ukraine. Human rights advocates, meanwhile, are growing frustrated with the fact that the Biden administration hasn’t put enough political and public pressure on the UAE to stop covertly supplying the RSF with arms and ammunition—in violation of existing U.N. arms embargoes on Darfur—as it carries out widespread atrocities against civilians, including reports of mass rape and ethnic killings, in its campaign for control of the country.
The UAE is one of the United States’ closest partners in the Middle East, and top Biden administration officials have met repeatedly with their Emirati counterparts to coordinate responses to the Israel-Hamas war.
A New York Times investigation published in September revealed that the UAE supplied the RSF with powerful weapons and drones to fuel its fight against the SAF. The Emirati Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment, though the Emirati government has in the past denied the allegations that it arms the RSF.
The U.S. government has said it raises arms embargo-busting issues to countries reported to violate them, “but obviously at this stage of the expanding brutal conflict, these overtures by the [U.S. government], if they are happening, are having no impact,” said Nicole Widdersheim, the deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch. Widdersheim said the U.N. Security Council needs to be “fully engaged in enforcing” the arms embargo to quell the violence.
U.S. Sudan Sanctions Won’t Work Without the UAE’s Help
The UAE supplying the RSF “would be a grave reputational risk for the UAE and put the longstanding close partnership with the United States into question,” the lawmakers wrote to Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Ten Democratic lawmakers—led by Rep. Sara Jacobs, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Africa subcommittee—signed the letter. “Members of Congress are paying attention to the UAE’s actions in Sudan. Most importantly, we are concerned that the UAE is at odds with the efforts of Sudanese civilians, the region, and the broader international community to stop the fighting,” they wrote.
“The UAE is an economic giant in the region. It is on the U.N. Security Council, and at the same time, it is brazenly breaking the U.N. arms embargo on Darfur,” said Kholood Khair, the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a think tank based in Khartoum. “The UAE is getting away with murder, quite literally, and for all intents and purposes, its guy is winning, so it has no incentives to change its position absent any real outside pressure.”
Some U.S. lawmakers and officials privately remain deeply frustrated at the Biden administration’s role in Sudan’s botched transition to democracy, the collapse of which sparked the current conflict. These lawmakers and officials feel the administration wasted valuable time and resources trying to revive peace talks between the SAF and RSF in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that collapsed without any meaningful gains and feel the administration needs fresh eyes and a new senior envoy to tackle the crisis.
Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin and Republican Sen. Jim Risch, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a joint resolution on Tuesday calling for a new high-level special envoy to Sudan.
“This joint resolution should clearly signal to the administration the urgent need to revise its Sudan policy, both in terms of personnel and strategy,” Risch said in a statement.
“The ongoing and escalating violence in Sudan, as well as Sudan’s history of genocide, require additional urgent action from the United States and international community before more lives are lost,” Cardin said. Two other Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, sent a separate letter of their own calling for a special envoy on Sudan, adding to the pressure on the Biden administration to act.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
U.S. officials also increasingly fear that the head of the SAF and de facto ruler of the country, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, could be ousted from power by elements of his own army after the SAF faced embarrassing battlefield defeats by the RSF.
The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemeti,” led an infamous Arab militia responsible for committing genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region in the early 2000s on behalf of Sudan’s long-serving dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Bashir was ousted from power amid widespread pro-democracy protests in 2019, leading Sudan to an abortive democratic transition.
That transition derailed when Burhan and Hemeti jointly orchestrated a coup against the civilian-led transitional government and grabbed power in 2021. War broke out this April, following months of simmering tensions between Burhan and Hemeti.
Since then, the RSF and allied Arab militias have carried out a massive ethnic cleansing campaign against the Masalit, an ethnic African tribe, in Sudan’s Darfur region that has pushed some 1.4 million people to flee into neighboring countries, including Chad and Egypt. The campaign, which some human rights groups have labeled a genocide, harks back to the Darfur genocide that began in 2003.
Many experts and officials believe the conflict will only get worse as the RSF gains ground and concede that there are no real prospects for viable peace talks without more powerful diplomatic interventions by major Western powers—especially Washington.
• Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.