The US Had Known it — So Why Did It Allow Sudanese to Be Massacred?

By: Al-Obeid Ahmed Murawih
On the ninth day of the current war in Sudan (24 April 2023), then–US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces had agreed to a 72-hour “humanitarian ceasefire” to allow civilians in Khartoum State to meet their essential needs, and to enable the evacuation of foreign nationals and diplomatic staff. This announcement followed direct calls made by the Commander of US Central Command to both the Chairman of the Sovereignty Council and his deputy to ensure the safety of Americans in Sudan, especially the diplomatic mission. On the third day of the war, the United States began preparing a full evacuation plan and coordinated with “both sides” safe routes for the arrival and landing of US military aircraft from Djibouti, landing at the American Embassy compound in the Soba district.
At that time, Washington realised that the coup plan—shared with it by its ally, the United Arab Emirates, to seize power in Sudan through the Rapid Support Forces—had failed. Because the US was aware of the scale of preparation that had gone into carrying out that coup, particularly its military component, and knew that the arsenal and weaponry amassed by the RSF were enough to turn the capital into ashes, the Secretary of State declared that “there is no military solution to the conflict.” This has remained the American narrative, adopted by Washington and its allies to this very day.
Before the end of the first month of the war, the US State Department announced that it had opened an online portal to document “violations” taking place in Sudan, and invited Sudanese to report what they witnessed or suffered. Some people engaged with the initiative, while others questioned American intentions. What matters here is that the United States was expecting violations because it knew the criminal nature of the RSF and understood that the “party” backing it would not accept the failure of their “project” — even if it meant plunging the country into civil war or partition, as happened in Libya and Yemen.
Two months after the war began, RSF forces completed their siege of the city of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. They killed Governor Khamis Abdullah Abakar and mutilated his body in a widely publicised incident. It was then that the US realised that massacres in Darfur would return with even greater ferocity than those of the early 2000s. The State Department called in the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had been active in documenting violations in Ukraine, to switch its attention to Sudan. Dr Nathaniel Raymond and his team arrived equipped with satellite capabilities that had been directed over Darfur since 2006 — initially to monitor violations, and later to track the flow of weapons into the region in accordance with relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
Among the most publicly known of these satellites were those used by The Sentry, an investigative organisation co-founded by actor and director George Clooney and human-rights activist John Prendergast. The organisation says its mission is to expose and disrupt the financing of conflicts in Africa by tracing illicit money and war criminals to bar them from the international financial system. The Sentry works as a strategic partner of the Clooney Foundation for Justice and has published detailed reports on events in Darfur, particularly during the siege of El Fasher.
But the monitoring of violations of international humanitarian law and of Security Council resolutions banning weapons transfers to Darfur did not stop at satellite imagery. Leading international media outlets — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, France 24, The Guardian, and others — published a series of investigative reports tracing the routes of specialised weapons and ammunition supplied to the RSF in Darfur, whether from Bulgaria or Greece, delivered directly from the UAE by air and sea, or weapons of Canadian, British, or Chinese origin re-manufactured in the UAE and supplied onwards to Darfur in defiance of Security Council resolutions.
On the diplomatic level, Sudan’s permanent mission in New York repeatedly filed complaints to the UN Security Council, supported by documents and evidence, demonstrating the UAE’s role in fuelling the war in Sudan and sending thousands of tonnes of weapons to Darfur — sometimes via Chad, at other times through South Sudan. Sudan warned that the grave violations of human rights and breaches of international humanitarian law that had occurred across central Sudan would also be committed in Darfur. But all these submissions remained shelved, except for a timid statement issued by the US State Department early this year describing some RSF actions as amounting to genocide.
When the scandal involving Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the RSF in El Fasher and other areas broke out — with surviving fighters admitting that they had been recruited by Emirati security companies for work inside the UAE, only to find themselves in the deserts of Darfur fighting alongside the RSF and training its members on various weapon systems — nothing remained that could conceal the UAE’s involvement in Sudan’s war.
Some may ask: the fifteen members of the UN Security Council knew the extent of Emirati involvement in supplying the RSF with advanced weaponry, and many states around the world knew of the violations and crimes committed with those weapons — so why direct this argument specifically at the United States?
To answer this, I remind readers of what I noted at the beginning of this article, and add that the United States was not only the first to present itself as a mediator and call for negotiations between “both sides” — as happened in Jeddah before the first month of war had ended — nor the last “party” today calling for an end to the war and adopting a mediation initiative. Rather, Washington was one of the principal architects of remodelling Sudan even after successfully overseeing the secession of South Sudan. It was also fully aware of what its partner, the UAE, intended to do. Indeed, I might add that the US Special Envoy at the time, Tom Perriello, told the Sudanese army’s representative during the Jeddah talks — with confidence and arrogance — “It is better for you to sign, so that you can preserve what remains of your army,” to which the army representative replied: “You do not know the Sudanese army.”
Dr Nathaniel Raymond’s testimony at Harvard University last week — which reverberated widely — was the most credible and up-to-date evidence of US complicity and of Washington allowing its ally, the UAE, to continue supplying the RSF with the most advanced weapons, weapons through which virtually every conceivable war crime or crime against humanity has been committed. Without the UAE’s continuous support, the war would not have lasted three years, nor would the violations and atrocities have multiplied. And had the US truly cared about Sudanese lives — as it claims to care about civilian rule — it would have told its ally in the first year, once the project had clearly failed: “Enough — stop what you are doing.”
And so the question that we Sudanese must ask ourselves remains:
Why did the United States allow the Sudanese to be massacred when it had known from the beginning that massacres would occur, and when it documented, from very early on, the atrocities and violations that were unfolding?

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=9296