The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces is committing genocide in Sudan, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned its chief, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, in a sharp departure from U.S. policy that has treated both sides as equally culpable for one of the world’s most brutal conflicts.
[Well deserved as this decision may be, in the absence of comparable treatment of the genocide in Palestine, it will convince the world that the U.S. is incorrigibly racist and believes that the charge of genocide is one to be leveled only at peoples not considered to be part of the collective West.]
U.S. declares genocide in Sudan, sanctions paramilitary leader
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces has used systematic murder and sexual violence in its war in Sudan, the U.S. government says.
January 7, 2025
“The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
“Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies,” Blinken said, concluding that “members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.”
The war between the RSF and Sudan’s military has plunged parts of the nation of 50 million into a spreading famine, created the world’s largest refugee crisis and sucked in fighters from neighboring nations. The death toll is unknown — large parts of the country have no internet or phone network — but U.S. officials estimated last year that about 150,000 people had been killed.
The genocide designation and sanctions announcement will further tarnish the international image of Dagalo — universally known as Hemedti — which was already damaged by a drumbeat of reports that the RSF and its allied militias have engaged in a frenzy of gang rapes, looting, ethnic cleansing, kidnapping, enslavement, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Commanders frequently post videos boasting about their exploits, or showing them abusing villagers.
The U.S. government has declared a genocide only six times before, since the end of the Cold War, according to the National Security Council: in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, Iraq in 1995, Sudan’s Darfur region in 2004, areas under the control of the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017, and in Myanmar in 2022. Tuesday’s twin declarations are the strongest steps yet taken by the U.S. government since Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023.
RSF attacks on El Geneina from April to November 2023 marked an inflection point in the conflict. The United Nations said between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in the city of about 540,000. Dozens of witnesses said civilians were targeted because of their ethnicity: Children were reportedly shot on their mothers’ backs as they fled or were thrown into the river, and captives were tortured and killed.
That occurred when Hemedti was still positioning himself as a possible future statesman, portraying himself as a champion of democracy against the autocratic military, a bulwark against Islamists in the military and a defender of human rights. Last year, after the RSF stormed across vast swaths of Sudan, he embarked on a victory tour of African nations and was received by leaders in nations from Kenya to South Africa to Ethiopia — all diplomatic heavyweights on the continent.
The genocide declaration and sanctions would chill those relationships, and represent a significant break in U.S. policy up until now, said Kholood Khair, founder of the Sudan-focused Confluence Advisory think tank.
“Until now, whatever the U.S. had done to one side, they did to the other — for example, the war crimes designation, which was fair,” she said. Hemedti’s two younger brothers have previously been sanctioned, but Tuesday’s announcement, coming in the dying days of the Biden administration, was the first time Hemedti has been directly targeted. It also namechecked his backers in the United Arab Emirates, something Khair said Washington had avoided doing thus far because it needed Emirati cooperation on Gaza.
Hemedti presides over a sprawling family empire estimated to be worth billions of dollars and encompassing gold, weapons, property and holding companies — many operating out of the UAE. Tuesday’s sanctions declaration also targeted seven companies controlled by the RSF, all based in the UAE.
The sanctions are unlikely to scoop up all of Hemedti’s fortune — before the conflict erupted, he was wealthy enough to personally pledge over $1 billion to help stabilize the Sudanese Central Bank in the aftermath of Sudan’s economic crisis.
Since then, his forces have carried out an orgy of looting in much of the country that has taken crops, gold, vehicles and so much cash from the banking system that citizens are chronically short of paper money. When the military retook the famed gold market in the capital last year, blocks of streets glittered with shards of glass from smashed jewelry shopfronts, the safes inside wrenched open like the petals of a flower. The RSF and its allied forces have also repeatedly looted aid organizations: The U.N. World Food Program alone has had more than $60 million worth of food looted; 85 other aid groups were attacked and looted at a time when children are starving to death.
Reporters for The Washington Post interviewed families who had had members kidnapped and held for ransom by RSF soldiers, and witnessed RSF soldiers selling hundreds of looted vehicles at a time in markets. Hemedti’s forces still control gold mines that previously operated in partnership with the Wagner Group before it was fully taken over by Moscow.
On Monday, the United States accused Russia of fueling both sides in Sudan’s conflict; Washington says Russia values gold received from Sudan and other nations because it helps Russia evade international sanctions.
The RSF was not immediately available to comment on the designation of genocide or the sanctions. A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid preempting the announcement, said Hemedti accepted command and control of his forces at talks in Geneva in the summer, where he pledged to abide by a code of conduct that would protect civilians. That promise was not honored. An analysis of reported attacks published last month by the British nonprofit ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) said the RSF was responsible for 77 percent of the incidents it recorded last year that targeted civilians.
Sudan’s worsening hunger crisis — more than 30 million people need aid — is being exacerbated by the RSF’s repeated raids on crops, the killing and displacement of farmers, and the deliberate destruction of farming equipment such as irrigation pipes, pumps and water tanks, villagers said. On Tuesday, Sudanese civilians told The Post that RSF fighters were advancing in White Nile state. Resident Muhammad Ali from the Umm al-Qura area said RSF fighters there had looted grain and killed 33 residents who tried to resist on Monday. They had detained 20 other villagers, he said.
Human rights activist Essam al-Rashid said that the RSF killed 40 farmers last month in the village of Tabun in White Nile and that the RSF had attacked another farming area near the border of South Sudan on Monday.
The Sudanese military has also engaged in war crimes, the U.S. State Department says, amid numerous reports from witnesses of indiscriminate airstrikes that have killed dozens of civilians at a time, extrajudicial executions and ethnically targeted arrests. It has also frequently obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid, although that has partly eased in recent months.
“The famine was created by the RSF … but perpetrated by” the Sudanese armed forces, the U.S. official said in exasperation.
Khair said the designation of Hemedti should also serve as a warning to the Sudanese armed forces, known as SAF.
“SAF should be very mindful that this [designation] means if they do anything that the RSF doesn’t do — including denying famine, stopping access to food aid, using starvation as a weapon of war — then the U.S. can also come down on them unilaterally,” she said.
Before the war, the RSF and Sudanese military were allies. In 2021, the forces had cooperated to kill and imprison hundreds of pro-democracy protesters. The two forces had overthrown a fledgling civilian-military government that had been in power for two years, since massive demonstrations helped topple longtime dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Bashir is still wanted by the International Criminal Court — also on genocide charges — for crimes his forces committed during a previous war in the western region of Darfur. The RSF grew out of tribal militias that supported the military against rebel forces during that time, but eventually grew large and powerful enough to challenge the military for supremacy.
Hafiz Haroun in Nairobi and Matt Viser in Washington contributed to this report.