Secretive bomb tests in the Sudanese desert. Suffocated scorpions, found dead on the floor of a weapons factory. Chlorine canisters taken from a water treatment plant in the war-torn capital.
Sudan’s military has long denied American accusations that it used chemical weapons as part of the country’s devastating civil war. That accusation brought punishing U.S. sanctions on Sudan and its army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Yet the United States has never publicly substantiated the claim with proof.
Now a dossier of evidence shared with The New York Times by a Middle Eastern intelligence agency bolsters those allegations, describing how and why Sudan’s military developed and produced chemical weapons over six months in 2024.
Photographs, videos, documents and intercepted communications portray a secretive Sudanese military unit said to have produced chlorine-based munitions for use against the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group the army is fighting for control of the country.
The dossier contains bomb blueprints, details of an apparent effort to cover up the project after its discovery by the United States, and a suggestion that some of the chlorine used to make the bombs was sourced at a civilian water treatment center that received the chemical from international aid groups.
The U. S. government appears to have taken the dossier seriously. Some of its visuals were shared with American intelligence and were used by American officials in January 2025 to assess whether Sudan had chemical weapons, according to two foreign officials and a former U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
A Sudanese military spokesman rejected the dossier’s findings as “baseless and without material foundation.” Noting that Sudan had signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, he threatened legal action against The Times in a U.S. court if the dossier’s contents were published.
Much of the dossier — nearly 150 documents, images, videos, and voice notes, as well as several thousand text messages — appears to come from the cellphones of senior Sudanese officers. It was provided on the condition that its source not be identified.
Voice and text messages involving General al-Burhan suggest Sudan’s military chief had direct knowledge of the alleged chemical weapons effort — a key factor in the U.S. decision to sanction him in January 2025, The Times reported.
Proving chemical weapons use is notoriously complicated. Experts who reviewed images from the dossier for The Times said they looked like a plausible chemical weapons effort, but cautioned they could be confirmed only through an investigation by impartial experts on the ground in Sudan.
While chemical attacks during Syria’s civil war set off global outrage and led to American military strikes in 2017 and 2018, the Sudanese episode has received relatively little outside scrutiny.
Elisabeth Waechter, a spokeswoman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said several countries had requested that the organization “obtain clarifications from Sudan regarding allegations of chemical weapon use.” The process is “ongoing,” she said.
The pressure is coming mostly from the United States, which in June announced a second round of sanctions over chemical weapons as part of a broader effort to force Sudan’s military to agree to a cease-fire.
Sudan’s military has responded to the U.S. measures with defiance, saying that it does not trust the United States to be an impartial mediator in the conflict.
A State Department spokesperson said in a statement that sanctions would remain until Sudan destroyed “all chemical weapons and production facilities under international verification.”
Since Sudan’s war began in 2023, it has brought famine and disease and forced over 12 million people from their homes. While both sides are accused of war crimes, the worst atrocities have been blamed on the military’s enemy — the R.S.F. — who the United States and the United Nations say has committed genocide.
The paramilitary’s reputation touched a new low last year in El Fasher, a city in Darfur, where its fighters were credibly accused of starving, slaughtering and gang raping fleeing civilians.
Through it all, the R.S.F. has enjoyed support from its main foreign backer, the United Arab Emirates, which has supplied it with mercenaries, guns and powerful drones, American and U.N. officials say. The Emirates denies backing either side in the war.
The Sudanese military may have turned to chemical weapons to solve a problem early in the war. By mid-2024, the military had lost most of Khartoum, and its forces struggled to expel R.S.F. fighters embedded deep in the vast capital.
In July, according to the dossier, Brig. Gen. Tariq Hussain, the head of the chlorine bomb project, proposed a solution: chlorine.
In a message to colleagues that was later intercepted, General Hussain explained how the deadly gas could be weaponized to gain an edge in the battle for Khartoum. He circulated sketches of prototypes of a new munition that, he said, combined an explosive warhead with about 33 pounds of chlorine gas.
This new munition had the advantage of killing enemy forces by either shredding them with shrapnel or gassing them with chlorine, he messaged. And the explosion would ensure that no chemical trace of the attack remained.
From July 2024, General Hussain oversaw a factory that assembled prototypes of this munition, images and messages in the dossier suggest. On July 22, an Antonov cargo plane took off from Merowe airport, about 200 miles north of Khartoum, to test the chlorine-based munition, he reported.
“The test went 100 percent,” General Hussain later wrote, adding a video of an explosion in the desert. “It fell on the target and released the gas.”
“Strict secrecy,” replied Brig. Gen. Amir Idris, who is identified in the records as a supervisor of military drone operations.
The project also encountered challenges, messages show. Chlorine gas often leaked from the bombs, and one morning workers found dead insects and scorpions scattered across a hangar floor, apparently after suffocating in the night, General Hussain wrote.
The chlorine came partly from global markets. Unlike more notorious chemical agents like sarin or VX, chlorine is not a controlled substance. In late August 2024, General Hussain reported the import of 20 chlorine cylinders from Egypt — enough to make 1,100 bombs, he said.
General Hussain said he also obtained chlorine gas from al-Manara water treatment plant in Omdurman, one of the few such facilities still operating in the war. “Al-Manara has some of those cylinders, and we took them from there,” he said in a voice message to Gen. Idris on Aug. 26.
A 2016 public information video about al-Manara shows large yellow chlorine drums similar to those seen inside the munitions factory. During the war, though, much of its supply was donated by international aid groups, which use chlorine to stem recurrent cholera outbreaks.
In emails, the Red Cross said it donated 30 cylinders of chlorine gas to the plant in 2023, while CARE, another aid group, said it gave 35 cylinders between 2024 and 2025. A spokesman for UNICEF said it supplied chlorine gas to six water treatment plants in Khartoum, including al-Manara, between 2023 and 2025.
The Khartoum State Water Corporation, which runs the plant, did not respond to questions.
By October 2024, General Hussain reported that he had manufactured nearly 300 chemical munitions, most of them stored at the airport in Merowe.
“They drank the gas,” he texted to a colleague in September 2024, describing enemy combatants ingesting chlorine gas after an attack. The documents locate the attack at al-Jaili oil refinery, a facility north of Khartoum that the R.S.F. then controlled.
His claim to have used chemical munitions to strike the facility was corroborated by his enemies and news reports. On Sept. 13, the R.S.F. released a statement accusing the Sudanese military of firing “toxic” missiles on the refinery. Photographs circulating on social media showed men in civilian clothes wearing oxygen masks at the plant.
An investigation by France 24, a French state-owned TV network, documented chemical strikes at the oil facility. But the French investigation determined that the chlorine bombs were large gas cylinders, not the smaller munitions built by General Hussain. The reason for the apparent discrepancy was unclear.
There were no confirmed deaths.
Other reported strikes are harder to confirm. On Oct. 17, General Hussain reported a second strike on a munitions factory that he said caused heavy casualties, leading people to flee to nearby villages. That attack did not feature in R.S.F. statements or social media reports at the time.
The alleged chemical program appears to have closed after the U.S. imposed sanctions in May 2025. Days later, General al-Burhan instructed General Hussain to “remove all traces” of its activities, intercepts show.
“The operation was done a month ago,” came the reply.
During the latest round of sanctions, in June, the U.S. placed sanctions on General Hussain for importing explosives to make bombs, although the notice did not mention chemical weapons.
By then, General al-Burhan had set up a committee to investigate the American accusations. The committee’s advisers included General Hussain, the architect of the program, according to a letter in the dossier.
When the committee submitted its interim report in July, it said it found no trace of chemical weapons.
A final report is pending.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
The post Secret Dossier Adds to Evidence of Chemical Weapons in Sudan appeared first on New York Times.
