Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting against Sudan’s military had committed acts of genocide, including ethnically targeted violence in the western region of Darfur.
The Treasury Department backed the determination of genocide with a raft of sanctions targeting the R.S.F.’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, as well as seven companies in the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor, that have traded in weapons and gold on his behalf.
“The R.S.F. 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,” Mr. 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.”
The genocide determination comes two decades after the United States took a similar step in 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell determined that the Janjaweed, ruthless ethnic militias allied with Sudan’s military, had committed genocide during a vicious counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur.
The Janjaweed later morphed into the Rapid Support Forces. But instead of being allied with Sudan’s military, the group is now fighting it, in a civil war that has driven one of Africa’s largest countries into a devastating famine, killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people — almost one-quarter of Sudan’s population — to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
The moves deal a blow to the RSF's attempts to burnish its image and assert legitimacy - including by installing a civilian government- as the paramilitary group seeks to expand its territory beyond the roughly half of the country it currently controls.
Atrocities and war crimes have been committed on both sides, say officials from the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups. The military has repeatedly massacred civilians in indiscriminate bombing raids, sometimes killing dozens at once.
But only the R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing, particularly during a systematic violence in Darfur between April 2023 — when the civil war began — and November of that year. Its fighters, who are mostly ethnic Arabs, targeted members of the Masalit, a non-Arab ethnic group, in a brutal assault that became a central element of the American genocide determination, said two senior U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
The genocide determination followed months of deliberation inside the U.S. government, as lawyers and intelligence officials evaluated the merits of the case, said the two senior U.S. officials. Some officials hesitated to support the determination because they feared it might draw further criticism of the Biden administration over its refusal to declare Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip a genocide against Palestinians, the officials said.
The genocide determination may also bring new scrutiny to the role of the United Arab Emirates in the war. The Emirates has supplied the R.S.F. with smuggled weapons and powerful drones, according to American officials and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.
Capital Tap Holding, one of the seven Emirati companies sanctioned on Tuesday, manages another 50 companies in 10 countries that have supplied the R.S.F. with money and military equipment, the Treasury Department said. Another company, AZ Gold, traded millions of dollars in gold.
