By Lance Lokas
AMIDST the widespread devastation wrought by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the U.S. State Department announced its decision to reimpose countrywide sanctions on Sudan, only five years after the last remaining sanctions were lifted. These sanctions, which took effect on June 27, 2025, include a ban on transactions in U.S. dollars and sweeping restrictions on U.S. exports and access to U.S. and U.S.-backed international credit lines.
The Biden administration had already imposed targeted sanctions on leaders and companies associated with the warring factions in January 2025, but the June broad-based sanctions affect the entire country. Sudan’s heightened isolation from the global market is likely to accelerate hyperinflation and the decline of wheat and fuel imports to a nation where two-thirds of the population are in dire need of humanitarian assistance and 638,000 people are experiencing famine conditions. Life-saving drugs, vaccines and medical supplies may become even more scarce as the healthcare system has entered a state of total collapse and diseases like cholera are rapidly spreading. These sanctions follow massive budget cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which have resulted in the closure of 80 percent of emergency kitchens across Sudan.
These sanctions must be understood in the context of a hybrid warfare strategy to consolidate U.S. power in Sudan, a crucial part of Washington’s broader project to balkanize the region into ever smaller, divided polities capable of being easily dominated by the United States. In Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, the U.S. has armed and funded separatist rebel groups, fomented sectarianism, starved civilian populations, toppled stable governments, and occupied land through its military or that of its Zionist proxy. Sudan is no exception; its former status as the largest country in Africa and the Middle East, its rich gold, oil and agricultural resources, and its vital geopolitical position have historically made Sudan a prime target for U.S. partition efforts.
First U.S. Sanctions on Sudan
Following a military coup against Sudan’s nascent democratic government in 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir formed an alliance with the National Islamic Front (NIF), the largest Islamist political organization in Sudan. Al-Bashir and the NIF worked together to consolidate power domestically through the imposition of Islamic law and the brutal repression of Sudan’s peripheral regions. Despite the condemnatory rhetoric of U.S. officials throughout the 1990s, political persecution and violence have never been a significant influence on U.S. policy toward Sudan. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the NIF allied with the dictatorship of Gaafar Nimeiry to pursue a similar domestic agenda, and the U.S. provided economic and military aid to the regime, in part due to Nimeiry’s brutal repression of Sudan’s communist movement.
The Clinton administration severed relations with Sudan when al-Bashir and the NIF attempted to form international alliances and coordination with Islamist groups and other political formations opposed to the U.S. and Israel’s efforts in the region. “A matter of great concern” to Washington was Sudan’s formation of the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC) as a rival to the Saudi-dominated Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Their convenings in Khartoum from 1991 to 1995 brought together leaders and representatives from 45 countries from ideologically divergent groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Ba’ath-led Iraqi government, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Palestine Liberation Organization, Al-Qaeda, the Abu Nidal Organization, and a wide variety of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated formations to build a Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic union opposed to U.S. regional power.
To obstruct these efforts, the U.S. sanctioned Sudan for the first time by placing it on its State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 1993. While the PAIC ultimately lost momentum, the U.S. accused Sudan of continuing to provide safe haven, training and material support to many of the same militant groups. In 1997, the Clinton administration announced additional financial and trade sanctions, prohibiting the export of U.S. goods, technology and services while banning American companies and citizens from trade and investment in Sudan.
Throughout the 1990s, living conditions in Sudan declined as the country became isolated from much of the global market. Agricultural production stagnated and medical supplies became more scarce. In 1998, the Clinton administration bombed and destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, the largest of its kind in Sudan, claiming without evidence that it was being used to produce chemical weapons for groups like Al-Qaeda. The destruction of Al-Shifa, which manufactured half of all drugs in the country, was devastating for communities across Sudan that relied on these medications.
At the same time, Washington covertly worked to destabilize Sudan and exacerbate the ongoing civil war by selectively funneling funds and arms to secessionist groups across the country. In 1996, the U.S. sent $20 million in military equipment to Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda, which was widely known to be transferred to groups in southern Sudan. Israel also supplied weapons to Sudanese rebel groups, including the transfer of anti-tank missiles through its embassy in Kenya.
Sudan Partitioned
Economic sanctions, civil wars in the South and Darfur regions, the brutality and corruption of the al-Bashir regime and attacks on critical infrastructure resulted in the division and decimation of the Sudanese people. Famines roiled parts of the country, international aid was halted almost entirely, and the health sector suffered major losses. Over two million people died throughout these wars, the majority from starvation, drought and disease that can be partially attributed to the U.S. economic blockade imposed on the country.
Following a decade of deprivation and covert warfare in Sudan, the U.S. moved to consolidate their gains by heightening pressure towards partition under the guise of “peace” and the provision of aid. In 2002, the Bush administration passed the Sudan Peace Act, which linked the lifting of sanctions to negotiation of a final settlement with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
By this point, the al-Bashir government had been considerably weakened over a decade of brutal counterinsurgency, economic isolation and internal discontent. The Sudanese government signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the SPLA in 2005, which led to the 2011 South Sudan referendum and Sudan agreeing to the south’s secession later that year. The al-Bashir government believed, as the U.S. had presented it, that sanctions would be promptly lifted following the partition. However, Washington maintained its economic stranglehold on the nation to extract new concessions. At the same time, Israel worked to exacerbate the deterioration of Sudan’s political and economic situation by bombing Sudanese factories and warehouses from 2009 to 2014 and continuing to covertly fuel the war in Darfur by supporting regional rebel groups, with a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement even opening an office in Israel in 2008. This joint U.S.-Israel strategy was largely successful in forcing Sudan to capitulate to U.S. demands.
By 2014, over 36.1 percent of the population was living below the poverty line and unemployment was at 20.6 percent. To appease the U.S., Sudan expelled Iranian diplomats, began working with the European Union to clamp down on migration in exchange for aid, and sent thousands of soldiers to fight in the catastrophic U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen against Ansarallah. In 2017, Sudan even allowed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to open their largest office in the region in Khartoum. Sanctions were temporarily eased that same year but were only lifted when Sudan severed alleged ties with the DPRK during the first Trump administration.
The deteriorating economic situation and growing discontent, exacerbated by austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund, culminated in the 2018 Sudanese revolution and a military coup that ended Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule. The subsequent short-lived transitional government of Sudan (TGS) was formed between the military and civilian political parties. Over the next several years, popular uprisings continued and were violently repressed as Sudanese people demanded the termination of the power-sharing agreement with the military and the establishment of complete civilian rule. The U.S., however, propped up TGS as Sudan’s legitimate government in exchange for concessions that would fulfill their longtime strategy in the country.
At the urging of the United States with the looming State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, TGS and Israeli officials held secret talks over normalizing relations between the two regimes. Sudan was finally removed from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list in December 2020 in exchange for the transitional government’s agreement to join the “Abraham Accords” despite the widespread rejection of the Sudanese masses.
U.S. Imperialism Fuels War in Sudan
Four years later, the Trump administration has justified the reimposition of sanctions as a response to the SAF’s alleged use of chemical weapons, which are illegal under international law, despite the lack of concrete evidence or details provided by the U.S. government. Regardless of the allegations’ legitimacy, the accusation of chemical weapons falls flat in the face of Washington’s other regional engagements, including the United States’ own deployment of chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria and Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Gaza and Lebanon.
The war in Sudan today, which has killed over 150,000 people and displaced 13 million, is one fought between proxies of U.S. regional client states. The RSF, once a group of rudimentary horse-and-camelback militias, is now a modern military armed to the teeth by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has long backed regional proxies to further its interests in countries like Libya, Yemen and Somalia. The SAF, in turn, enjoys the strong backing and support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The UAE and Saudi Arabia, growing regional rivals, seek to counter each other’s influence on the Red Sea, while Egypt aims to secure its control over the Nile River. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which import 80 to 90 percent of their food, also have a significant stake in securing the rich agricultural land of “the breadbasket of the Arab world.” The UAE, the primary buyer of Sudanese gold for over a decade, has fueled the RSF’s massacres in Darfur largely to maintain control over the region’s extensive gold mines. Gold production remains the only industry that has continued to thrive in the midst of this war, over 90 percent of which is smuggled through illicit trading routes, largely to the UAE.
Despite condemnations and sanctions against the warring parties in Sudan in the name of civilian protection, the U.S. has only strengthened its relationships with the client states fueling Sudan’s destruction. Earlier this year the U.S. State Department announced Israel and Egypt as the only exceptions to the Trump administration’s massive foreign aid cuts. In May, the U.S. approved $1.4 billion in new arm sales to the UAE and a $142 billion defense sale agreement with Saudi Arabia which the White House has touted as “the largest defense cooperation agreement in U.S. history.”
For the U.S. and Israel, the continuation of the war in Sudan presents an opportunity to consolidate control over critical supply routes and Sudan’s political future, and sanctions remain a critical weapon in their arsenal toward this end. Israel has played a large role through covert backing of both sides of the war. It aims to finalize the normalization agreement and secure commitments from both parties to combat the transport of weapons to Palestinian resistance groups, for which Sudan has long been a critical supply route.
The RSF established direct ties with the Mossad at a meeting held in the UAE in 2020, and has also appeared in photos and videos since 2023 using Israeli LAR-160 rocket launchers. This backing, along with the sanctions, acts as a tacit threat to the SAF to concede to Israel’s demands. The pressure culminated in a secret visit to Tel Aviv by an envoy of SAF leader General al-Burhan in April 2025, during which he promised to fulfill all of Israel’s conditions for the conclusion of normalization, previously agreed to but not yet fully implemented, aiming, in turn, to secure military assistance from the Israel Defense Forces.
The continuation of the war also works toward the shared efforts of the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt to secure the lucrative Red Sea trade route and combat Ansarallah’s disruptions to the flow of weapons and capital greasing the wheels of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A War on the Sudanese People
This war was always a counterrevolutionary war, a war meant to destroy the gains of the 2019 revolution as well as the people of Sudan who achieved them. The revolution, spurred by popular anger over the impoverishment of the Sudanese people suffering under sanctions and the imposition of Washington’s neoliberal economic agenda, became one that set forward a vision of a united Sudan led by the will of the Sudanese masses, who overwhelmingly oppose the Zionist project and support the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
The war on Sudan must therefore be understood as a war on the Sudanese people whose revolutionary potential threatens U.S. regional hegemony. These sanctions ultimately serve the primary purpose of starving and weakening the people of Sudan and cementing the rule of U.S.-aligned military factions against civilian rule. At this stage of the war, much of Sudan has hardened behind borders dividing SAF and RSF-controlled areas, both of whom have begun infant state-building projects in their respective territory. The Trump administration, alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, has recently indicated its desire to broker a ceasefire that, despite hollow statements supporting the re-establishment of civilian governance, would likely only cement the informal division into formalized parallel governments. The sanctions today follow the same playbook used by the U.S. in Sudan in previous decades, destabilizing the nation, exacerbating the war and division of territory, then imposing pressure to consolidate and formalize partition, and are thus a continuation of the decades-long U.S. project of balkanization.
Throughout Sudanese history, however, expressions of unity across sectarian lines have managed to break through the cloud of fomented divisions. John Garang, a Sudanese leader in the SPLM, galvanized millions across the country with a vision of a unified, multiethnic, multireligious Sudan until he died in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances only three weeks after he became vice president following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. These same sentiments rang through the revolutionary streets of Khartoum in 2019 in chants of “kul al-balad Darfur!” (The whole country is Darfur!)
It is this unity that Washington has pursued decades of hybrid warfare to destroy. The starvation of people across the world under sanctions are not simply unintended consequences or signs of a failing strategy. Sanctions are deliberate acts of violence, collective punishment, and political subjugation against the people for asserting sovereignty, dignity, and unity in the face of U.S. domination. In the midst of this war and the ravages of imperialist crisis, we must be clear-eyed about what is happening in Sudan. This is the culmination of Washington’s decades-long war on the Sudanese people and the people of the region.