(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration sanctioned the head of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group in Sudan, announcing the move at the same time that it determined the group was guilty of genocide.
The decision was a sharp rebuke of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, more commonly known as Hemedti, who has used his forces to engage in a brutal armed conflict with Sudan’s army, killing tens of thousands of people, displacing 12 million and triggering widespread starvation, the US Treasury Department said in a statement.
“The Treasury Department remains committed to using every tool available to hold accountable those responsible for violating the human rights of the Sudanese people,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said.
Ezzadean Elsafi, an adviser to Hemedti, said the sanction is “irrational” and works “directly against peace and stability, not only in Sudan but the entire region.”
Hemedti is the most senior official to be targeted yet for his role in the 20-month civil war. It remains unclear how much impact the sanctions will have.
Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, bemoaned that it has taken the Biden administration so long to announce the censure and said it should also outlaw the RSF entirely.
“That said, it is not too late for these announcements to be impactful inside Sudan. As RSF and Hemedti attempt to reinvent themselves as legitimate political actors in a post-war Sudan, these determinations make it that much harder,” he said.
By targeting the RSF leader, the US has pulled back from sanctioning other entities fueling the war, such as the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Serbia for reported violations of the Darfur arms embargo, PAEMA, a US-based group dedicated to preventing mass atrocities, said in a statement on Tuesday.
In a separate statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced his determination that members of the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan.
Over the course of the war, human rights groups have documented how the Arab-led RSF and allied militia groups in Sudan have led a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the non-Arab Masalit community in Darfur.
Many killings documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International occurred in June 2023, when violence gripped the city of El Geneina in West Darfur and Masalit forces lost the ability to fight back against RSF attacks. Thousands of people were slain as they fled the city and attempted to reach the border with neighboring Chad.
Janjaweed Militias
The RSF has origins in the government-backed janjaweed militias that perpetrated the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s.
Tuesday’s sanctions also targeted Capital Tap Holding LLC, a United Arab Emirates-based company owned by a Sudanese national called Abu Dharr and its subsidiaries for allegedly providing the RSF with money and weapons.
Last year, United Nations investigators cited evidence that the UAE has supplied the RSF with weaponry via a remote airbase in eastern Chad as “credible,” though the Gulf nation has repeatedly denied the allegations.
The US has previously sanctioned other senior officials involved in the war which erupted in April 2023, including Taha Osman Ahmed al-Hussein, a former state minister under the ousted President Omar al-Bashir, for his role in sending weapons to the RSF.
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