By Muhammad Osman

“The ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful is ridicule.”
— Christopher Hitchens

There is a Sudanese proverb that translates, more or less, as: “He who dislikes you will scowl at you even in the dark.” Because this literal translation does not readily convey its figurative meaning to an English-speaking audience, the proverb needs some explanation. It describes a situation in which a person is already biased against, or ill-disposed toward, another person and therefore has no qualms about accusing that person of wrongdoing—even when they have done nothing wrong. No evidence required. The scowl comes first; the accusation follows.

This proverb came to mind as I watched the latest chapter unfold in diplomatic relations between Sudan and the United States. On 26 June, the U.S. government announced the imposition of an economic sanctions regime on the Sudanese government over allegations that Sudan’s official military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), had used chemical weapons.

Astonishingly, the allegations cited by the U.S. government as the basis for its decision came from none other than the U.S. government itself.

The allegations first surfaced in a New York Times report published on 16 April 2025. The report cited four anonymous U.S. officials who claimed that the SAF had “recently” used chemical weapons against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a rebel group with which the SAF has been engaged in an armed conflict since 2023.

Notably, the report’s anonymous sources provided as little concrete information about the circumstances of the alleged chemical-weapons attacks as they did about their own identities. They claimed only that the weapons had been used “recently,” on “at least two occasions,” and “in remote areas of Sudan,” before warning that they could soon be used in densely populated areas of the capital, Khartoum.

The vagueness of the sources’ claims appeared calculated to give the impression that the information was based on highly classified and reliable intelligence. Yet subsequent events revealed no evidence to substantiate those claims. For example, the concerns expressed by the sources that the alleged chemical weapons could soon be used in Khartoum do not appear to have materialized.

On 20 May 2025, a little over a month after the allegations were published, the SAF successfully concluded more than two years of a brutal and painstaking armed struggle, involving the loss of many SAF soldiers, by recapturing Khartoum and announcing its liberation from the RSF. Since then, more than a year has passed. During that time, the Sudanese government has relocated to the capital and begun rebuilding it, while millions of people have returned to their homes in Khartoum after the RSF was driven out. Yet there have been no credible reports of residents claiming to have observed or been affected by the alleged use of chemical weapons.

Furthermore, the anonymous U.S. government sources who made the allegations appear to have given little thought to the plausibility of their claims. They did not explain why the SAF would risk exposing its own soldiers to chemical agents by using such indiscriminate weapons in the confined urban spaces where its forces were fighting the RSF in Khartoum. Nor did they explain why the SAF would have needed to fight for more than two years to recapture Khartoum if it possessed—and was willing to use—such a sophisticated and deadly weapon.

But none of that stopped Washington from acting as accuser, judge, and executioner all at once, reviving—almost verbatim—the sweeping sanctions regime it had first imposed on Sudan in 1997 and maintained for nearly two decades.

The previous U.S. sanctions regime ended after the two countries began a protracted diplomatic engagement in 2013, during which Washington pressured Sudan to make a series of painful concessions. Among them was a $335 million compensation payment, which Sudan was required to make before the process could conclude in December 2020, with its removal from the U.S. blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism.

That payment drained Sudan’s already depleted coffers, contributed to the collapse of its currency, and may even have inadvertently helped create a socioeconomic environment conducive to the outbreak of the very conflict the U.S. now claims it is sanctioning Sudan to help stop.

In other words, Washington may have helped dig the very hole it is now punishing Sudan for falling into.

Sudanese officials, for their part, reacted to the recent U.S. allegations and accompanying sanctions with seemingly genuine bewilderment, repeatedly offering to cooperate with Washington to verify the claims and get to the bottom of the matter.

Moreover, Sudan formed a national committee to investigate the allegations, pledged to cooperate with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in verifying them, and even requested that a team of U.S. experts travel to Sudan to conduct an on-site investigation. The U.S. government simply ignored the request.

Finally, on 20 July, less than a month after the sanctions were announced, Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally challenged the legitimacy of the U.S. actions. It rejected the allegations as “false,” protested the unilateral nature of the sanctions, and—quite reasonably—asked Washington once again to produce evidence substantiating its claims.

Washington’s answer, on the other hand, was a masterclass in circular reasoning of the sort one might expect from a naked tyrant being called out for his nakedness. Two days later, the U.S. State Department quoted and responded to the Sudanese statement on X with a brief statement containing the following paragraph:

“The United States determined that Sudan used chemical weapons in 2024 in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Unfortunately, Sudan has refused to acknowledge its use of chemical weapons. It has refused to take the necessary steps to address the situation.”

Translated out of diplomatese: “We’ve decided you did it. You have to take our word for it because we cannot possibly be wrong about such things. That will be all.”

Just like that, the U.S. government arrogantly dismissed the old and well-established legal principle that the burden of proof lies with the accuser.

Reading that statement, I laughed, sighed, and thought of the proverb again: they’re scowling at us in the darkness once more.

Fortunately, however, many Sudanese are old enough to remember when the former U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton cited near-identical chemical-weapons allegations to justify bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in August 1998—conveniently timed to coincide with a rough patch in the president’s domestic political fortunes.

Washington later tacitly admitted that the intelligence behind the strike had been flawed and quietly unfroze the factory owner’s U.S. assets after he sued the government for $50 million.

Many Sudanese are also old enough to remember what the previous iteration of the same U.S. sanctions regime recently reimposed on Sudan did to us. It did not bring us peace or change our political realities on the ground. Instead, it terrified the global banking system into blanket overcompliance, cutting ordinary Sudanese citizens—with no connection whatsoever to any wrongdoing—off from the ability to send money home to struggling relatives.

Whatever grand strategic outcomes the architects of these new U.S. sanctions had in mind when they decided to rehash these old allegations to justify imposing them, it is difficult to see how preventing remittances to civilians advances anyone’s stated interest in achieving peace in Sudan.

Given all of this, it is difficult to read the current sanctions as anything other than what they plainly are: a well-worn instrument of political pressure, dusted off and redeployed against a country with little capacity to resist, and presented under the benevolent guise of seeking peace while serving purposes that have little to do with the interests of Sudanese civilians—or with peace itself.

But the real irony here is hard to top: these accusations of chemical-weapons use are being levelled by the only government on Earth that has actually used nuclear weapons—the deadliest category of prohibited weapon ever deployed in warfare.

There is a second Sudanese proverb that captures this perfectly, and one that needs no translation notes at all:

“The one-tooth guy is laughing at the one with two.”

Or, for an English-speaking audience: the pot calling the kettle black.

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The writer is an independent Sudanese journalist and researcher specialising in geopolitical security and the arms industry. He can be contacted via the following email address: Muhammed.eltilib@gmail.com.