Trump has a vested interest in a peace deal in sanctioned Sudan

Before he left office Joe Biden saw fit to sanction the two generals creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan's all but forgotten war.

With Sudan witnessing the worst atrocities of any current conflict in its almost two-year civil conflict, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, de facto ruler of Sudan was sanctioned just one week after his enemy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The decision was prompted by evidence that al-Burhan, who represents his country in the United Nations, has used chemical weapons twice against Dagalo’s forces who the US has accused of genocide.

The fear is that these deadly weapons will be used in densely populated areas such as the capital Khartoum, The New York Times reports.

The man who ushered in a brief period of democracy after toppling the longstanding dictator Omar al-Bashir with Dagalo’s help back in 2019, also stands accused of using starvation as a weapon.

Al-Burhan has reacted defiantly to the sanctions, on Al-Jazeera TV, saying “I hear there’s going to be sanctions on the army leadership. We welcome any sanctions for serving this country.”

The Sudan conflict has been raging relentlessly since April 2023 when the coalition between al-Burhan and Dagalo broke down and the two went to war.

The result has been the world's worst humanitarian crisis to date, with 150,000 killed and over 11 million displaced.

Now experts are watching to see if the new US president, Donald Trump might be the one to put an end to the war, the Foreign Policy news site reports.

Eager to support Sudan’s stab at democracy back in 2019, Trump’s administration removed Sudan from the lists of states that sponsor terrorism, which entailed signing the Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords are a bilateral agreement on Arab-Israeli normalization and in October 2020, Sudan became one of only three Arab nations to sign.

Now over four years later, one of Trump’s foreign policy goals is to resume this normalization process, something it cannot do if one of its five signatories is in a state of collapse. A deal looks like it could be on the cards.

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