A credible U.S. Africa Strategy must include the Sudan Crisis

by Areig Elhag and Paolo von Schirach

July 22,2026

Since February 28, 2026, when direct military confrontation erupted between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, in what the Pentagon named “Operation Epic Fury,” the Red Sea and Gulf regions required a comprehensive threat reassessment. An April 8 ceasefire and the Islamabad negotiations on the 11th of that month failed to produce a final agreement. On April 28, 2026 the Jeddah Gulf consultative summit, chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, placed the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of its closure at the top of the policy agenda. All parties were and are aware that the Strait’s closure blocked roughly 20 percent of global oil exports. The global energy markets reacted negatively to this new reality. Oil prices climbed beyond $110 a barrel. This global reaction to what had started as a regional crisis proved to all observers that the conflict was no longer a purely Gulf affair. High oil prices served as a reminder that any disruption to maritime traffic between the Gulf and the Red Sea immediately affects Washington’s security calculus encompassing the entire region — first and foremost the Horn of Africa.

Security in the Horn of Africa

The Red Sea does not end at Bab al-Mandab. By virtue of geography, economics, and politics, it extends to the opposite African coast, where Djibouti hosts an important American base, Camp Lemonnier, and where Washington, according to a report by Responsible Statecraft, is trying to open a normalization channel with Eritrea. This is in pursuit of an additional foothold on the Red Sea managed by Massad Boulos, the U.S. president’s Africa advisor. Yet this effort to shift from “Gulf security” to “Horn of Africa security” runs into Sudan, a gap that cannot be easily bridged. Sudan holds the longest Red Sea coastline among Horn of Africa states. Still, Sudan remains outside any coherent American strategic framework, even as every element of instability threatening the very corridor that the Iran’s war nearly closed from its eastern flank converges on Sudanese territory.

First: Sudan’s Location and Its Resources

What exactly makes Sudan so important? The answer begins with geography and resources before it reaches politics. Sudan, Africa’s third-largest country at roughly 1.9 million square kilometers, sits at a confluence governed by both rivers and coastlines. It faces the Red Sea to the east. It connects in the north to one of the world’s most important shipping chokepoints: the Suez Canal. It borders Chad, Libya, and the Sahel region to the west. It borders South Sudan and its oil fields to the south. The Nile River runs through it. The White and Blue Niles meet at Khartoum before the river continues toward Egypt, giving Sudan a central position in any regional management of the Nile waters, particularly amid the ongoing dispute over Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. According to a WorldAtlas report, more than half of Sudan’s territory is rangeland and grazing area, while its fertile agricultural land is concentrated between the White and Blue Niles in Gezira state. This is one of the most fertile farmland regions in Africa. Sudan also holds an estimated five billion barrels of oil reserves, in addition to significant reserves of chromium, iron, and zinc, alongside existing gold production that, per WorldAtlas, jumped from about seven tons in 2008 to more than ninety tons in 2017 — turning the revenue from gold sales into one of the most important sources of financing for the current war itself.

This wealth specifically is what makes the war raging since April 2023 more complex than a conventional military conflict. According to an analysis by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), shipments of gold extracted from conflict zones flow through multiple regional smuggling routes that cross a number of neighboring countries before reaching their final markets, making these revenues a direct resource funding both sides of the war at once. In other words, Sudanese gold has become one of the tools used to simultaneously wage and finance the war, not merely a dormant fortune waiting for peace to be brought to fruition.

Second: A War in Its Fourth Year

On the ground, the war in Sudan has entered its fourth year with no clear prospect for any settlement. According to Al Jazeera’s coverage in April 2026, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces remain locked in a military stalemate. The army regained control of the Khartoum region in May of last year, after more than two years of fighting. As a result, it formally returned the government to the capital in January 2026, after it had been moved to Port Sudan.

The RSF still controls most of the Darfur region — including the city of el-Fasher, which fell into its hands in October 2025 — as well as parts of Kordofan in alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu. UN reporting, according to the Security Council Report’s June 2026 monthly forecast, has documented an escalation of the conflict, characterized by the use of drones, including strikes on Khartoum International Airport and on military installations in the capital last May. The Sudanese army also announced in mid-July 2026, according to Sudan Tribune, the destruction of about 205 combat vehicles and four drones belonging to the RSF within just two weeks of clashes in Darfur, Kordofan, and Blue Nile — reflecting a continued high tempo of fighting even as the war enters its fourth year.

The U.S. Congress acts

This battlefield stalemate has pushed the U.S. Congress to take legislative action. In May 2026, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, by a vote of 44 to 2, approved a resolution introduced by Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Sara Jacobs recognizing the military actions in Darfur as genocide. It also called for the  designation of the RSF as a foreign terrorist organization — building on the State Department’s January 7, 2025 determination that the RSF “is committing genocide,” which itself followed the Treasury Department’s describing that same month the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and army commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as individuals responsible for “destabilizing Sudan and undermining the goal of a democratic transition.” In June 2026, four senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from both parties and led by Committee Chairman Jim Risch, introduced the Preventing External Aggression and Conflict Escalation (PEACE) in Sudan Act. The law would expand sanctions authority. It also requires the State Department to submit a clear strategy for achieving a ceasefire. It extends the authorization for a special envoy for Sudan and strengthens information-sharing with Congress. Risch described the war as “a humanitarian catastrophe, a source of instability in Africa, and a threat to U.S. national security.” Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted that the conflict has “no military solution.” She also added that the new legislation gives Washington additional tools to hold accountable those financing the violence. This growing legislative momentum reflects a rising awareness within the U.S. Congress that Sudan is no longer just a marginal humanitarian crisis. That said, this new awareness still lacks translation into a fully integrated, comprehensive strategy toward the Horn of Africa as a whole.

Third: The Islamists’ Return, and an Attempt to Export the Conflict

While Congress is preoccupied with holding the warring parties accountable, a more dangerous phenomenon is advancing inside Sudan: the return of Islamist currents to a position of real influence — not merely in rhetoric, but within the structure of the state itself. In an investigation published by Reuters, Ahmed Haroun, chairman of the former ruling National Congress Party and one of four Sudanese wanted by the International Criminal Court, said in his first media interview in years that he expects the army to remain in politics after the war, and that elections could open a path back to power for his party and the associated Islamist movement. According to Reuters, seven members of the Islamist movement and six military and government sources said the army’s recent battlefield gains — which Islamist operatives claim to have helped achieve by fighting alongside the armed forces — have allowed the movement to entertain a return to the national role it lost after Bashir’s fall in 2019.

Asharq Al-Awsat confirms this trend, with its reporting pointing to accusations against Ali Karti, Secretary-General of the Sudanese Islamic Movement and a former foreign minister, of acting as the real driving force behind the army through Islamist elements within its ranks in a bid to return to power — accusations the army and Burhan consistently deny, even as some of the movement’s own leaders acknowledge it has regained influence within what is described as the “deep state,” and that confronting it would require extensive intelligence and security efforts, while Burhan appears hesitant to take a decisive stance against it.

According to sources cited by the newspaper, the Trump administration had initially decided to designate the movement but delayed the announcement to allow time for ceasefire efforts between the army and the RSF. The National Interest goes further, noting that Sudan’s General Intelligence Service has become, per its reporting, staffed entirely by Islamist officers, and that Islamist Movement leader Haj Majid Suwar recently called on the army to employ “more lethal” measures — implying approval for using unconventional weapons against the RSF and other army adversaries. An analysis by the Observer Research Foundation concludes that these networks, whether through direct governance or behind-the-scenes influence, are “positioning themselves for a dramatic return to power,” and that leaving them unchallenged could entrench long-term authoritarian rule and make Sudan a fertile breeding ground for extremist ideologies and terrorist organizations.

Beyond Sudan

This picture grows even more dangerous when the Islamist faction moves beyond domestic objectives, explicitly signaling that it could export the conflict beyond Sudan’s borders. In a leaked audio recording from a communications group bringing together figures united by a shared organizational background and support for continuing the war, retired security force Major General Abdelhadi Abdelbasit,  known for his affiliation with the Islamist Movement and his proximity to security and military decision-making circles, criticized the handling of the war as confined within Sudan’s borders. Indeed, in his own assessment, this is “a global battle.” He calls for acquiring “long arms” capabilities that would remind regional states of the former regime’s history of harming its adversaries beyond its borders.

This rhetoric translated into a direct threat when Lieutenant General Yasir al-Atta, deputy commander-in-chief of the Sudanese army, warned Chad’s president, describing the airports of N’Djamena and Am Djarass as “legitimate targets for the Sudanese Armed Forces.” This public threat to strike a neighboring country, coming from a military figure at the level of deputy commander-in-chief, explicitly invokes the “long arm” policy for which the Bashir regime was known in supporting insurgent movements hostile to neighboring states as a tool of pressure and destabilization. This is a policy that could give threatened states reasons for a direct involvement in the Sudanese conflict out of fear of preemptive strikes, turning an internal crisis into a regional flashpoint. The impact of such an involvement would extend well beyond Sudan’s borders toward the stability of the entire Horn of Africa and Red Sea.

Domestic conflict fuels global crisis

This is precisely the thread that connects what began a year ago in Jeddah over the Strait of Hormuz to what is unfolding today in Khartoum and Port Sudan. When immense strategic wealth — oil, gold, Nile waters, fertile farmland, and an extensive Red Sea coastline — conflates with a state weakened by war and a military institution contested by a strong ideological faction seeking to reclaim its influence, major trouble is ahead.

The result of this combustion will go way beyond a Sudanese internal crisis. Most likely, it will morph into a regional conflict fueled and exploited by powers with an interest in an unstable Red Sea region. Sudan, sitting at the epicenter of this crisis caldron, cannot remain just a secondary problem in any serious American strategy for the Horn of Africa. Indeed, the Sudan conflict is a real test of whether Washington is capable of linking Red Sea security to who governs its shores, rather than settling for monitoring the ships that pass through it.

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Areig Elhag  is the Arabic Content Editor and analyst at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She has more than fifteen years of experience as a journalist and policy analyst covering Sudan, the broader Middle East and the Africa region.

 

Paolo von Schirach is the President of the Global Policy Institute, a Washington DC think tank, and Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Bay Atlantic University, also in Washington, DC. He is also the Editor of the Schirach Report.

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