The New York Times and The Washington Post recently published investigations built on some 150 leaked documents, photographs, and intercepted messages from inside the Sudanese Armed Forces. The picture is chilling: a program, launched in mid-2024, to build chlorine bombs; a stockpile of roughly 290 munitions at Merowe air base; indications that more than 100 may already have been dropped. Most disturbing is where the chlorine came from.
Much of it was reportedly diverted from water-treatment plants in Sudan — chlorine that UNICEF, the Red Cross, and CARE had supplied to stop cholera from spreading among displaced families. When Washington imposed sanctions over chemical-weapons use last year, intercepted messages suggest the army’s commander, Gen. Abdel Fattah al Burhan, ordered his officers to “erase all traces.”
Think about what that means. Chlorine sent to keep children alive during a cholera outbreak was loaded into bombs and dropped on a country already devastated by war. The world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe has produced many horrors, but this one is different in kind: an army did not merely fail to protect its people — it turned the very aid meant to save them into a weapon against them. If that does not mark a threshold, nothing does.
Sudan has become the clearest example in our time of a catastrophe the world chose to watch. The 2021 coup that overthrew a civilian government and crushed a peaceful revolution is what set Sudan on the road to this war, and both sides — the SAF and the RSF — have brutalized civilians on a scale that defies description. The junta in Khartoum has walked away from every credible path to peace. It has handed the levers of the state back to the Islamist movement whose three-decade rule brought Sudan to ruin. It flies Iranian drones, draws on Iranian expertise, and has established connections with the Houthis across the Red Sea. And it now faces, in its own internal documents, the charge of building chemical weapons out of relief supplies.
Anywhere else, a single item on that list would set off alarms in every Western capital. In Sudan, the entire list is public knowledge. The problem was never a shortage of evidence. It is a shortage of will. Here is how Washington could begin to supply it.
First, make the humanitarian truce binding rather than optional. Working with its Quad partners — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt — the United States should set a date for a nationwide humanitarian truce and attach consequences to it: any commander, on either side, who blocks an aid convoy, bombs a hospital, or maintains a siege after that date should face Treasury designation by name within days, not months. Truces in Sudan have failed because breaking them has been free. Change the price.
Second, choke off the weapons. Washington should press the security council to extend the existing Darfur arms embargo to the whole country. But it need not wait on the council’s verdict. Working with its allies and a coalition of willing partners, the U.S. can impose coordinated sanctions on any state, company, or broker that delivers weapons, drones, or ammunition to either belligerent. The supply chains feeding this war run through a handful of ports, airfields, and financiers. They are within reach.
Third, stop the plunder of Sudan’s wealth. Gold and gum arabic are being extracted and exported by both sides to pay for the killing. Targeted sanctions on the refineries, export companies, and trading networks controlled by the belligerents, coupled with traceability requirements for buyers in the U.S. and beyond, would deny both armies the revenue that keeps their guns firing while preserving these resources for the Sudanese people to whom they belong.
Fourth, investigate the chlorine — properly. The United Nations must open a formal inquiry into how chlorine supplied through its own agencies for water purification ended up, as the documents allege, in aerial bombs. And the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons should launch a full investigation of the weapons themselves, with access to Merowe and every other site named in the files. SAF’s denials cannot be allowed to close the matter. Its membership in the Chemical Weapons Convention creates obligations, not immunity.
THE WORLD’S WORST WAR RUNS ON IMPORTED WEAPONS. CUT THEM OFF
Fifth, suspend the seat. The Burhan authority occupies Sudan’s chair at the U.N. and its agencies. It has used that legitimacy to obstruct aid to areas outside its control — and, if these reports are accurate, to convert humanitarian supplies into weapons. A party to a war should not hold the diplomatic credentials of the nation it is destroying. The African Union suspended Sudan after the coup; the UN should follow, holding the seat in trust until a credible civilian authority with genuine legitimacy can reclaim it. This is no gift to the RSF, which deserves no recognition either; it is a refusal to let any warlord speak for Sudan.
None of these steps is beyond America’s reach. Each rests on tools Washington already holds and on partners who already share its reading of the facts. The leaked documents have removed the last excuse for delay. The question is no longer what the world knows about Sudan, but what it is prepared to do. The U.S. can answer that question — and it should answer it now.
Khalid Omer Yousif is a Sudanese political leader and former Minister of Cabinet Affairs in Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government (2019–2021). A longtime advocate of democracy, peace, and civilian rule, he has opposed Sudan’s Islamist regime since his student activism in the late 1990s. He played a leading role in the 2018-19 revolution, helped negotiate Sudan’s democratic transition, and has remained active in efforts to end the current war through a civilian-led political process. He writes and speaks regularly on Sudan, regional security, and countering extremist movements.