CAIRO/WASHINGTON: The United States on Monday reinstated Sudan’s sovereign immunity, as the US Congress passed legislation formalizing the move, following the ending of Sudan’s designation as a state sponsor of terror.
However, the legislation includes an exemption allowing lawsuits by the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States already underway in US courts to move forward, although experts say Sudan is unlikely to lose those cases.
The state sponsor of terror designation, which was in place for almost three decades, had weighed on Sudan’s economy and restricted its ability to receive aid. For investors, the reinstating of sovereign immunity removes another layer of financial risk.
Sudan had been engaged in talks with the United States for months, and paid a negotiated $335 million settlement to victims of Al-Qaeda attacks on US embassies in East Africa in 1998 who had been awarded much higher damages by US courts.
The process to release the settlement money and restore Sudan’s sovereign immunity — protection against being sued in American courts — had been stalled in the US Congress as it had been tied to the $892 billion coronavirus aid package.
Late on Monday, the wider package was passed in the US Congress after a deal has been worked out in a rare weekend session, and sent to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
According to the bill, Washington will be authorizing $111 million to pay off part of Sudan’s bilateral debt, and $120 to help pay off its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) while making another $700 million available until September 2022 for assistance to the country.
Last week, Sudan’s finance minister announced a US “bridge loan” that would allow Sudan to clear $1 billion in arrears to the World Bank.
A US source familiar with the matter said the debt assistance would help kick off Sudan’s debt relief on a global level, helping make it eligible for the IMF’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program.
With the reinstatement of sovereign immunity and the financial aid, Khartoum will now be “on the hook,” to normalize ties with Israel, a US source familiar with the matter said, a move it has agreed to under US pressure.
In a joint statement in October, Israel and Sudan said they had agreed to normalize relations and end the state of belligerence between the two countries, but Sudan’s civilian leaders have said the final decision would be in the hands of a yet-to-be-formed transitional legislature.
The normalization would make Sudan one of the four Arab countries along with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, over the past several months, to establish relations with Israel in deals brokered with US help.
The bill also appropriates an additional $150 million for Sudan’s settlement payment, in order to redistribute the funds in a way the bill’s sponsors say is more equitable.
The United States designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 on the grounds that former President Omar Al-Bashir’s regime was supporting militant groups including Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.
In the 1990s, the regime became a pariah, hosting Osama bin Laden and positioning itself as a fulcrum for Islamist movements, although experts still say Sudan’s liability for the Sept. 11 attacks is questionable.
US reinstates Sudan’s sovereign immunity, authorizes funds to help pay debt
https://arab.news/jxkp4
US reinstates Sudan’s sovereign immunity, authorizes funds to help pay debt
- The legislation includes an exemption allowing lawsuits by the families of victims of the 9/11 attack
- The state sponsor of terror designation was in place for almost three decades
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
