Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Sudan faces an expanding sanctions regime amid civil war, countries seek to bolster relations with the Alliance of Sahel States, and the African Union’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia is in jeopardy.
The European Union is the latest set of countries to expand a sanctions regime on Sudan as famine and massacres mount amid the country’s four-year civil war.
On Monday, the EU banned the purchase, import, and transfer of gold from Sudan. EU officials said that gold, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of Sudan’s total export value, had become a lifeline in financing the country’s civil war. The bloc also banned exports to Sudan of mercury and cyanide, which are used in gold mining.
The EU decision comes after the United States moved last month to expand its sanctions to target individuals and companies that have helped the two warring factions—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—procure weapons and recruit mercenaries.
Since the Sudanese conflict erupted in April 2023, it has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, killing more than 150,000 people and forcing more than 14 million to flee their homes. Evidence of wartime atrocities has only grown in recent months.
A new United Nations report published on July 8 said that at least three of the material crimes of genocide are “overwhelmingly present” in the RSF’s actions in the city of El Fasher, which the paramilitary group took in October following an 18-month siege. It built on an earlier U.N. report released in February, which found evidence of sexual violence, forced disappearances, and mass killings of non-Arab communities in El Fasher.
Meanwhile, experts have warned of looming atrocities in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, which is held by the SAF. El Obeid is on a vital supply corridor between central Sudan, including Khartoum, and the west. It is also home to a major oil pipeline and the heart of Sudan’s gum arabic market.
The RSF has encircled El Obeid in recent weeks, looking to seize it from the military. The city’s more than 500,000 residents are facing severe shortages of food, water, and medicine while under bombardment from RSF drone strikes.
“At a moment when serious concerns are being raised about the risks facing civilians in El Obeid, the findings from El Fasher underscore the need for urgent protection measures before more lives are lost,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, a U.N. expert.
U.N. investigators have also accused Sudan’s military and its allies of killing communities suspected of sympathizing with or supporting the RSF. In areas retaken by the army, viral videos have circulated that appear to show SAF soldiers beating and killing civilians for suspected RSF collaboration.
Both SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo have weaponized institutional structures and diplomatic outreach to project themselves as legitimate authority figures in the country.
Dagalo, known as Hemeti, has embarked on a series of diplomatic visits across Africa, meeting with several heads of state while ostensibly suggesting that he is open to ending the war. The RSF and its allies also signed a charter in Kenya in May to announce their intention to form a rival parallel government in Sudan.
Meanwhile, Burhan’s regime has sought to distract attention away from war crime accusations against the SAF. On Monday, an SAF-controlled court said that it had sentenced Hemeti and other RSF members to death by hanging for war crimes. The largely symbolic trial in absentia was dismissed by RSF members as not worthy of a comment.
International efforts to end the war have largely stalled. Neither warring party has indicated an openness to relinquishing power, and global powers—including the United States—have been unwilling to directly sanction the foreign actors accused of supporting or enabling the war, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
While Washington has sanctioned Emirati companies and networks connected to RSF leaders, foreign powers have stopped short of directly sanctioning the Emirati state, which denies arming the RSF despite ample evidence to the contrary.
“That has shown how effective the UAE has become at leveraging [its] economic and trade relationships to fully insulate itself from any human rights criticism from its allies,” said Joey Shea, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Monday, July 13, to Saturday, July 18: U.S. Africa envoy Frank Garcia visits Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Mali in his first official trip to Africa.
Tuesday, July 14, to Friday, July 17: Energy and water ministers from the Southern African Development Community hold a meeting in Pretoria, South Africa.
Sunday, July 19: São Tomé and Príncipe holds a presidential election.
Wednesday, July 22: Rescheduled protests are set to take place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over a referendum bill that could change the constitution.
Sahel diplomacy. Algeria and Mali have resumed diplomatic relations after more than a year of tensions. Both nations reinstated ambassadors and reopened their airspace, which had been closed to each other since April 2025, when Algeria said a strike made by its military shot down a Malian armed drone near their shared border town of Tinzaouaten.
Bilateral relations had deteriorated in the years leading up to the incident over Mali’s use of Russian mercenaries and Algeria’s hosting of Malian opposition figure Mahmoud Dicko.
This year, Algeria has also renewed political collaboration with the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), composed of the junta-led nations of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, to protect its southern border from the spillover of al Qaeda and Islamic State insurgencies.
Meanwhile, other powers have sought to renew or bolster relations with the AES to tackle spreading insecurity, including neighboring countries such as Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana.
Under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, Washington is also seeking to engage more closely with AES states on security and economic issues. Garcia, the new U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, began his debut trip to West Africa this week. The visit includes stops in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Mali.
Also cementing ties was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who visited Niger’s capital of Niamey on July 8 for a Russia-AES ministers meeting. Lavrov said that Moscow would “continue its support for strengthening the operational capacities of AES member states’ armed forces.” Moscow also promised continued joint projects in Malian mining. Mali began construction of a new Russia-backed gold refinery last month.
Somalia impasse. The African Union’s (AU) peacekeeping mission in Somalia is facing significant financial challenges following Washington’s recent decision to veto U.N. funding for its operations beginning in 2027.
Since assuming its current form in 2007, the AU mission has helped push back al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militants in Somalia. This year, the Trump administration has expressed frustration with the country’s internal “rivalries and political infighting” and what it described as the Somali government’s failure to “take ownership of most of its own security functions.”
As we covered in Africa Brief last month, armed clashes recently broke out in Mogadishu between the government and opposition-allied forces over the former’s decision to delay elections and extend President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term by one year.
Somali-U.S. relations appear to have deteriorated further on Sunday, when the U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu denounced the recent desecration of the U.S. flag by Somali forces in a viral video. The Somali government said in a statement two days prior that it had arrested the soldiers for the behavior, which it described as “inconsistent” with the values of its army.
Fuel deal. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)’s retail arm has announced that it will buy Shell’s South Africa fuel business in a $1 billion deal. The move will give the Emirati state-owned company access to about 10 percent of the biggest African economy’s fuel market.
As part of the deal, which is expected to close next year, ADNOC will sell 28 percent of the business to a local partner and an employee stock ownership scheme to comply with South Africa’s Black economic empowerment laws. ADNOC’s African expansion follows its acquisition of 50 percent of TotalEnergies Egypt in 2023.
Octagon opening. Last week, Egypt inaugurated its new military headquarters, which is named the Octagon in a likely nod to the U.S. Pentagon. It is located in the New Administrative Capital, just outside of Cairo—a strategic decision to keep it away from Egypt’s urban population, reducing the risk of a 2011-style uprising, Christin El-Kholy argues in New Lines magazine.
Under the Sisi regime, the “military was expanded economically and politically, while the boundaries between civilian administration and security structures became increasingly blurred,” she writes. “The Octagon represents the architectural expression of that broader transformation: a state where command, surveillance and decision-making are concentrated and physically separated from the society over which they rule.”
Cape Verdean identity. Cape Verde’s World Cup debut received overwhelming pan-African support, but within the island nation itself, the issue of African solidarity is far more complex, Eromo Egbejule reports in the Guardian.
Some Cape Verdeans identify as Portuguese and not African, despite just 1 percent of the population being of exclusively European descent. The archipelago, which was uninhabited until the mid-15th century, was a former depot for West African enslaved people who were shipped to the Americas. Most of its inhabitants today are of mixed West African and European descent.
“Cabo Verde was a laboratory for the Latinisation of Africans, for losing your identity,” Nardi Sousa, a professor of sociology at the University of Santiago in Cape Verde, told Egbelule. Today, Egbejule writes, “Reports of Black Africans, especially Nigerians and Senegalese, being targeted for profiling at Cabo Verde’s airports remain frequent.”
