A civil war’s erupted in Sudan, pitting Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s president since 2021, against Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Hostilities began in April 2023 over how to blend the RSF into al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and what the political future holds for Sudan.
Now, the SAF are no strangers to human rights violations, but they’ve cranked it up with the addition of chemical weapons. Back in 2016, Amnesty International blew the whistle on 30 attacks in Darfur’s Jebel Marra, using the likes of sulphur mustard, lewisite, or nitrogen mustard, killing up to 250 civilians, including kids. The Sudanese government, predictably, denies everything.
They’ve also been blocking third-party inspections from the likes of Amnesty and the UN. Why? Something to hide perhaps?
But chemical weapons are just the tip of the iceberg for the SAF’s atrocities. After the RSF took Wad Madani in December 2023, the SAF recaptured it on January 11th of this year. Since then, there have been disturbing allegations emerging about rape, summary executions, and ethnic cleansing among different Islamic groups, which screams war crimes.
These are unambigously “crimes against humanity,” especially since Sudan signed off on the Chemical Weapons Convention. So, it’s about time that al-Burhan and Ahmed Abdullah (a senior official in the Sudanese Military Industries Corporation) were facing sanctions.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s dropped sanctions on them, likely including freezing their assets, travel bans, or cutting off their business deals. With the change of administration in Washington, these may well bite even deeper.
What Sudan needs now is peace, not more of al-Burhan and his SAF goons.
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