Sudan’s war enters its fourth year with no end in sight. Since April 2023, the conflict between the country’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia has displaced nearly 14 million people, including more than 4 million who have fled to other countries. International attention has waned even as the violence intensifies and the humanitarian catastrophe deepens. And international mediation efforts appear to be as stalemated as the fighting, and Sudan’s self-declared leaders cannot even agree on who should get a seat in any future political talks.
Meanwhile, the battlefield has few clear front lines. Territorial control across the central Kordofan region, rich in gold, agriculture, and gum arabic, flips between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF as both sides fight for control of the country’s economic heartland. From Kordofan, the RSF can threaten ground assaults on the capital, Khartoum, creating a major challenge for the army-led administration, which is trying to promote a return to normalcy.
The SAF, meanwhile, has ambitions of unifying the country, retaking Darfur in the west, and driving the RSF into the vast Sahelian hinterlands from where many of its fighters emerged. However, this could take years to achieve and worsen the already dire humanitarian circumstances for the very Darfuris they seek to liberate from RSF control.
Last summer, the RSF declared a government headquartered in the Darfuri city of Nyala and announced a cabinet, unironically, of “peace and unity.” The group has promised to print its own currency and license new banks in areas under its control. Last month, it created a Security and Defense Council that appears to be poised to establish a rival national army comprising a genocidal mix of rebel and militia fighters. With the RSF in control of a little less than half the country and now helmed by a competing governing body, the risks of Sudan’s disintegration are growing.
As this potential outcome comes into sharper relief, the international community may be concluding that allowing the RSF to establish a territorial administration, much less achieve a full victory, must be prevented. For that reason, a growing number of countries, beyond Khartoum’s traditional backers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have issued calls to respect Sudan’s territorial sovereignty.
Most recently, the Quintet—which comprises the African Union, European Union and United Nations, Intergovernmental Authority on Development, and Arab League—has condemned recognition of “parallel government structures.” And the Trump Administration’s Envoy Massad Boulos recently acknowledged, grudgingly, that Sudan’s army was the country’s “constitutional institution” that must be preserved to avoid state collapse.
By most measures, the RSF bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for the war’s widespread crimes against civilians. The group was behind the massacres of tens of thousands in the Darfur towns of El Fasher and El Geneina, along with repeated drone strikes on exclusively civilian targets. At the same time, Sudan’s army has also been responsible for indiscriminate bombing of civilian locations and arbitrary arrests and detention of perceived political opponents. As a result, many countries, led by the United States, have held both sides equally at fault. Of the sanctions that Washington has imposed, most have been intentionally even-handed—targeting each side’s leadership, forces, weapons suppliers, and financial networks.
In fact, Washington went a step further this March when it labeled Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. In doing so, it signaled that any return to power for the former ruling Islamist faction, currently allying itself militarily with the army, would not be tolerated. Sudan’s allies and military authorities interpreted this measure as influenced by Israeli and Emirati lobbying, as the latter two countries view Muslim Brotherhood chapters across the wider region as direct threats to their respective national security. Unintentionally or not, the designation strengthened the RSF’s claims of governing legitimacy and made the army even less inclined to negotiate a cease-fire than it already was.
Continuing to treat the two belligerents as equals only serves to undermine efforts to convene cease-fire talks—and thereby prolongs the war. Instead, U.S. policy should proceed with moral and strategic clarity. This means recognizing that while the SAF’s violations are real, they are of a different level of magnitude than the RSF’s shocking brand of genocidal violence. It also means recognizing that the potential breakup of Africa’s third-largest country poses a direct threat to Red Sea security and the regional balance of power. Against these threats, the SAF’s consolidation of military control is the only acceptable path forward for ultimately establishing a transition to civilian rule.
Washington should now proceed to designate the Rapid Support Forces as a foreign terrorist organization and explicitly state that its consolidation of power and crimes against Sudanese civilians represent a clear threat to U.S. national security interests.
Such a designation would help to reinforce the international community’s intolerance of a divided Sudan; make the creation and the legitimacy of any RSF government or political institutions that much more difficult to achieve; and undermine efforts by the RSF to reinvent itself as a legitimate policy actor. Perhaps most importantly, it would put pressure on the vast security and financial network, mostly running through the UAE, that has sustained the RSF’s violent and destabilizing war effort.
The case for designating the RSF as a terrorist group is an easy one to make.
U.S. officials and U.N. investigators have both accused the RSF of multiple episodes of genocidal violence since the war began. In the siege of El Fasher, RSF fighters conducted mass executions of civilians, subjected women and girls to sexual slavery and systematic rape, and carried out ethnically targeted killings of non-Arab communities. Human Rights Watch documented that the RSF specifically targeted people with disabilities during the takeover, along with hospitals and other health facilities.
Since the fall of El Fasher, many of the RSF’s crimes have moved from the ground to the air. Almost every week, crowds of civilians are targeted by one of the RSF’s UAE-supplied drones. In late May, as markets swelled in the lead up to the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, the RSF struck shoppers provisioning for the celebrations later that day, killing at least 14 civilians.
A recent Reuters investigation revealed that one sanctioned RSF commander, proudly filmed directing atrocities against Darfuri civilians during the fall of El Fasher in October, was quietly released from RSF detention and returned to his command earlier this year to help “boost the morale” of his beleaguered troops after suffering numerous battlefield setbacks. His return to active duty demonstrates the RSF’s complete impunity and its leadership’s endorsement of terrorism against civilian populations.
The RSF’s systematic attacks on exclusively civilian targets—hospitals, displacement camps, agricultural infrastructure, ethnic communities—meets the legal definition of terrorism under the U.S. code that creates the basis for designating foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). The RSF does not merely commit atrocities as a byproduct of military operations. It deliberately targets civilians to achieve political objectives through terror. That is terrorism.
Since coming back to office, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken an expansive view of FTO designations. As of early June, he had designated 29 new FTOs—more than any single president since the FTO designation was created in 1997. This is in addition to 11 FTO designations from his first term. It is a tool that he knows well.
Many humanitarians have expressed concern about the impact of such a designation. They remember during the Bashir era, from 1993 to 2020, when Sudan’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism meant that international aid to the country was often tied up in needless Treasury Department delays and required difficult-to-obtain licenses. These concerns are legitimate. But there are also important distinctions that make an RSF terrorist designation qualitatively different from the “state sponsor of terrorism” model.
First, the RSF is not an internationally recognized government, and the area under its control is only a portion of the country. Indeed, areas under SAF control enjoy substantial humanitarian access, including via the country’s main Red Sea port, from where most assistance arrives. By contrast, areas under RSF control already face serious aid constraints. An FTO designation may not improve this, but it could do little to worsen the constraints that the RSF already imposes.
What’s more, since Sudan’s days on the terror list, Washington has better learned how to shape terror designations to limit the impact on humanitarian operations. The Trump administration demonstrated this in designating Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization in January 2021 and again in March 2025. In 2021, Yemen faced a severe humanitarian crisis, with about 80 percent of the population relying on foreign assistance, mostly in Houthi-controlled areas, which included the country’s main port. To mitigate the designation’s impact, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued four general licenses concurrent with the designation.
These licenses created exemptions for humanitarian projects addressing basic needs—food, medicine, health services, education, democracy-building, disease prevention, and clean water access. Additional licenses allowed exports of agricultural commodities, medicine, medical devices, and COVID-19 response equipment to Yemen. The licenses also provided secondary sanctions relief for all non-U.S. persons facilitating these activities, such as the United Nations and other international nongovernmental organization workers.
While no licenses are perfect, and some institutions may choose to steer clear of the “material support” provisions of the FTO, the model worked. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis may have worsened due to increased Houthi access constraints, but the country did continue to receive assistance despite the FTO designation. The 2025 designation went on to replicate the humanitarian exemptions from 2021 and expanded them. It added general licenses for voice-over-internet-protocol and other telecommunications services, such as the Starlink terminals that are vital for civilians and humanitarian actors in Sudan.
The FTO designation is not simply a label but a point of leverage. It can and should be used to pressure the UAE to cut off the RSF, draw Sudan’s army to the negotiating table, and ultimately end the war. Consecutive U.S. administrations have been loath to confront their Emirati partners directly over their lavish political and military support of the RSF. The FTO designation acknowledges the brutal acts committed by the RSF while avoiding a public dispute with Abu Dhabi. Indirectly, however, it prompts a conversation about enforcing sanctions on numerous Emirati state-owned arms suppliers, as well as the gold brokers who launder illicit RSF mineral exports.
Similarly, this move will help reset relations with the SAF’s leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has consistently claimed that Washington is biased in favor of the UAE. Refusing to have the army treated as an equal partner to the RSF in negotiations, Burhan has rejected diplomatic entreaties and instead strengthened his own alliances with Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. By demonstrating that Washington does not intend to grant the RSF equal political legitimacy, an FTO designation could make it easier for Burhan to engage.
The Trump administration has the influence, the precedent, and the demonstrated capacity to implement FTO designations that impose real costs and prevent a humanitarian collapse, all while preserving the United States’ alliances. The case for designating the RSF now is overwhelming. An evenhanded approach to the belligerents in this conflict has failed in pressuring either side to engage in cease-fire talks. It’s time to recognize the RSF’s fundamental nature, which has been on display since the start of the war, and enforce a red line against its further consolidation of control over the country.
Failing to do so will only accelerate Sudan’s eventual breakup, destabilize the Red Sea region, and undermine U.S. national security for years to come.
