The State Department escalated pressure on Sudan’s army-backed government on Monday, rolling out a fresh round of sanctions tied to allegations that Khartoum has deployed chemical weapons against its rivals in a brutal civil war that has already claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The move marks the second wave of sanctions in as many months, building on a determination made last year that the Sudanese government used chemical weapons in 2024, a direct violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention that Sudan itself ratified back in 1999.
Washington has been notably tight-lipped about the specifics: no dates, no locations, and no forensic details have been made public. But the broad strokes have already been filled in by independent reporting.
The most detailed account came from a French media investigation last October, which pieced together open-source data, social media footage, and analysis from five independent experts to conclude that Sudan’s military air-dropped two barrels of chlorine gas near the al-Jaili oil refinery, just north of Khartoum, in September 2024.
At the time, the refinery, Sudan’s largest oil facility, was under the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group locked in a two-year power struggle with the national army.
That account echoed earlier reporting from an American outlet, which cited four anonymous senior US officials pinning direct responsibility on army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan himself.
Khartoum has flatly rejected the allegations, branding them “baseless” and dismissing the whole affair as “political blackmail” orchestrated by Washington.
The sanctions taking effect Monday go beyond symbolism. They choke off Sudan’s access to international financing, restrict US exports to the country, and ban Sudanese-owned carriers from American airspace, a menu of measures designed to squeeze a government already isolated on the world stage.
This isn’t the first accusation of its kind leveled at Khartoum. Back in 2016, Amnesty International accused the Sudanese army, then still allied with the Janjaweed militia that would later evolve into the RSF, of using chemical weapons against civilians in Darfur.
And the history stretches back further still: in 1998, the US destroyed Khartoum’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in a missile strike, alleging it was manufacturing chemical precursors for Al-Qaeda.
Sudan’s relationship with the United States has been fraught for decades. Sanctions first imposed in the early 1990s, during the Islamist-military rule of Omar al-Bashir, were tightened further in 2006 amid accusations of genocide in Darfur carried out by the Janjaweed on the government’s behalf.
A brief thaw followed Bashir’s ouster in a 2019 popular uprising, when Washington struck Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and began unwinding sanctions.
That reprieve didn’t last. A 2021 coup led jointly by Burhan and his then-deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, better known as Hemeti, brought sanctions creeping back.
The uneasy alliance between the two men collapsed entirely in April 2023, plunging the country into all-out war. By January 2025, Washington had sanctioned both men personally, along with accusing RSF commanders of genocide in Darfur.
There’s a bitter irony running through Sudan’s sanctions history: those bearing the highest cost have rarely been the men in power. Both Burhan’s and Hemeti’s factions have managed to accumulate substantial wealth despite, and in some ways because of, the country’s decades under sanctions, exploiting transnational financial networks even as the broader economy stagnated.
Today, the toll is staggering. The United Nations has labeled Sudan’s crisis the largest humanitarian emergency in the world, with close to 20 million people facing acute food insecurity.
Washington hasn’t stood entirely on the sidelines. It co-hosted early ceasefire talks with Saudi Arabia, an effort that ultimately went nowhere, and more recently pushed for a three-month humanitarian truce, an initiative that couldn’t even get both warring parties to the negotiating table.
The underlying problem, analysts note, is that neither side appears genuinely interested in a truce. Both the army and the RSF seem to believe outright military victory is still within reach, even as the war has settled into a grinding stalemate that shows no sign of breaking.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Washington has sanctioned Sudan’s government over its alleged use of chlorine gas in the civil war, but with over 200,000 dead and nearly 20 million facing starvation, sanctions alone won’t stop the fighting.
Both Burhan’s army and the RSF believe they can still win outright, so neither side has real incentive to negotiate.
Meanwhile, history shows Sudan’s leaders have weathered sanctions before while ordinary civilians pay the price. Until one side loses the will or ability to keep fighting, this war, and the atrocities fueling it, will continue.
