U.S. Says Sudan’s R.S.F. Committed Genocide and Sanctions Its Leader

The United States on Tuesday accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide, singling them out in a conflict of unchecked brutality and drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities being perpetrated in Africa’s largest war.

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 a fearsome wave of 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.

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 toll of that violence is unclear. The Sudanese Red Crescent said it counted 2,000 bodies in a single day, then stopped counting. U.N. investigators later estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed in the city of Geneina alone.

Hundreds of thousands of Masalit have since fled into Chad, where they live in squalid and overcrowded camps — part of an exodus of three million Sudanese pushed into neighboring countries by the war, the United Nations says.

General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, is a one-time camel trader who rose to prominence as a mid-ranking Janjaweed commander in the 2000s. Once a loyal ally of Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019, General Hamdan got rich after he seized Sudan’s biggest gold mine, and by sending mercenaries to Yemen.

Only a year ago, General Hamdan’s troops were storming across Sudan, and he embarked on a tour of six African nations where he presented himself as a leader in waiting.

But more recently, his forces have lost some territory, and the new American measures could restrict his ability to travel, use the international financial system, or present himself as a champion of democratic ambitions, as he has often done. In light of mass rape committed by soldiers in Darfur under General Hamdan’s control, the State Department said it was also barring him and his family from traveling to the United States.

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.

But on Monday, while traveling in Asia, Mr. Blinken signed off on the genocide determination.

Under international law, the finding does not oblige the U.S. to take action, although officials said the sanctions provide some immediate teeth to the measure. Experts said it could propel a new drive for accountability in a war that has killed as many as 150,000 people, by American estimates, and caused one of the world’s worst famines in decades.

Last month the global hunger watchdog, known as the I.P.C., confirmed that famine was underway in five districts of Sudan, and said it was likely to spread to another five areas in the coming months. Across the country, 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger, the body said.

The R.S.F. has used aid as a weapon of war, denying help in some areas and violating an agreement signed during failed U.S.-led peace talks in Switzerland in August, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

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.

The Emirates also provides a crucial financial and logistical hub where the R.S.F. can trade gold and procure weapons through a vast network of companies.

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.

The Treasury Department also sanctioned a Sudanese businessman, Abu Dharr, listed as the owner of at least five of the seven companies.

Mr. Blinken said the genocide finding did not mean the United States was supporting Sudan’s army in the war. “Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan,” he said.

Critics who have accused the United States of acting too slowly on Sudan welcomed the finding, with caveats.

“This attempt to position the administration on the right side of history won’t work,” Cameron Hudson, a former American diplomat and Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on social media of the Biden administration. “It’s too late and too many people have died for that to happen.”