The Biden administration is launching a new initiative to end the war in Sudan—one of the world’s deadliest conflicts—with fresh peace talks following months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, according to five current and former officials familiar with the matter.
The Biden administration is launching a new initiative to end the war in Sudan—one of the world’s deadliest conflicts—with fresh peace talks following months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, according to five current and former officials familiar with the matter.
The United States plans to convene talks between Sudan’s two warring parties in Switzerland next month to revive long-stagnant efforts to end a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed millions more to the brink of famine. Switzerland and Saudi Arabia will co-host the talks, and other regional powers and institutions with stakes in the conflict, including the United Nations, African Union, Egypt, and United Arab Emirates, will be invited to observe, the officials said. The talks are scheduled for mid-August.
The U.S. special envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, plans to brief congressional overseers on the plan this week and will be actively involved in convincing top negotiators from both sides of the conflict to attend the upcoming talks, several officials said. If both sides signal their seriousness about ending the conflict and send senior negotiators, then U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield—both of whom have been closely involved in Sudan policy—could open or preside directly over the talks, the officials said. These officials spoke on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Despite ongoing humanitarian efforts, Sudan’s war is worsening following 15 months of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. U.S. officials estimate that around 150,000 people have been killed—though precise figures are hard to come by—and as many as 11 million have been displaced due to the conflict.
“Sudan right now is probably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and yet it’s not getting the attention it deserves,” Blinken said during an interview at the Aspen Security Forum on July 19.
A senior State Department official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Blinken was “very personally engaged on Sudan policy, including forthcoming initiatives.”
“Far too much of the world is looking at this crisis saying ‘it’s far too complicated,’ or they’re looking away, and we’re looking at this crisis and saying, ‘yes, it is that complicated, and we have to find a way,’” the senior official said.
The conflict in Sudan has also become a locus of foreign powers competing for influence, which analysts say is prolonging and worsening the war. The SAF is backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while the United Arab Emirates backs the RSF. Iran is supplying the SAF with weapons, and the Russian government is courting the SAF, offering military support in exchange for access to a Sudanese port on the strategic Red Sea corridor. Russian mercenary groups, meanwhile, have reportedly armed the RSF.
Earlier this month, the head of the SAF, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, hosted Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for talks in Port Sudan, Sudan’s provisional capital under the SAF. (Both sides are still vying for full control over the capital city of Khartoum.) Since June, the RSF has seized swathes of territory near the borders to Ethiopia and South Sudan, heightening the risk of the conflict spilling into new territories or derailing the fragile peace process in Ethiopia’s Tigray region following a devastating war there that ended in 2022.
Both the SAF and RSF have been accused of widespread atrocities, including mass rape, torture, and civilian massacres. The United States has also concluded that the RSF is responsible for ethnic cleansing. Republican lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee have criticized the Biden administration for not having a coherent Sudan policy and introduced resolutions recognizing the atrocities in Sudan as acts of genocide—a step that the administration has yet to take.
Officials and aid workers focused on Sudan warn that while it is being overshadowed by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan risks becoming the world’s deadliest conflict and could spiral into a full-blown regional crisis without international intervention. Perriello has warned in the past that the conflict could become a “Somalia on steroids.” Around half of the people of Sudan, some 25 million people, face a food crisis. Of them, some 8.5 million people are acutely malnourished and more than 750,000 are on the brink of starvation, according to a report released last month by a group of experts from U.N. agencies and top aid organizations.
In 2021, Burhan seized power in a coup with the help of the head of the RSF, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as “Hemeti,” derailing a yearslong effort to transition Sudan to a democracy. Tensions between the two leaders mounted as both jockeyed for power and influence, until they erupted into war in April 2023.
Past efforts to broker a peace deal in a format of talks hosted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, have failed, prompting Perriello and other envoys to push for a reset in a new venue with buy-in from other regional powers and the United States. This initiative follows recent efforts by the U.N. envoy for Sudan, Ramtane Lamamra, to bring both RSF and SAF representatives to indirect talks in Geneva, focusing on the limited goals of expanding humanitarian aid access and protecting civilians. The two delegations did not directly meet, though the U.N. called the talks an “encouraging initial step in a longer and complex process.”
The U.S.-brokered negotiations are designed to achieve broader ambitions of bringing both sides face-to-face with a goal of ending the war.
“If a new round of peace talks do come to fruition, it would mean that all these outside actors who have been driving the conflict would now be on board with a peace process,” said Cameron Hudson, an expert on U.S.-African affairs “If that is true, and everyone is rowing in the same direction, that would give us some cause for some hope in Sudan, really for the first time.”
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