A senior State Department official told lawmakers on Thursday that the U.S. believes there are “no good actors” in the brutal civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the East African nation, and said the U.S.’ focus is on cutting off external support to both parties and achieving a temporary ceasefire.

“From our perspective, there are no good actors in this conflict,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Vincent Spera said during a House Foreign Affairs Africa subcommittee hearing. “The administration unequivocally condemns the atrocities committed by both parties. Members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanitry and ethnic cleansing, and members of the SAF have also committed war crimes, including in May when the United States announced the government of Sudan used chemical weapons in 2024.”

Spera said that the administration is “committed to helping end these atrocities in Sudan,” and that “external support to the warring parties must stop.” 

The United Arab Emirates is a key backer of the RSF, though it denies providing support to the paramilitary group, while Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Russia back the SAF.

Spera said the administration has sanctioned leaders on both sides of the conflict and their supporters, including SAF-aligned Islamic actors, “to limit Islamist influence and curtail Iran’s destabilizing influence.”

He said President Donald Trump is “personally driving” the effort to reach a humanitarian truce and ultimately a transition to new civilian leadership and end external support to the SAF and RSF, in cooperation with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — referred to as the Quad — as well as other international partners.

“President Trump recognizes the importance of endless conflict and that an unstable Sudan threatens regional stability along the critical Red Sea corridor,” Spera said. “It also creates a permissive environment for terrorists, adversaries such as Iran and transnational criminal organizations.”

Lawmakers broadly condemned all outside actors fueling the violence in Sudan and called for accountability for atrocities by both the RSF and SAF. Significant criticism from both sides of the aisle focused on the UAE, with lawmakers questioning whether the U.S. can place more pressure on its ally to cut ties with the RSF. 

“With the UAE, obviously [RSF leader] Hemedti is counting on the support he gets from them,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said. “Is this something where the president could pick up the phone and talk to the UAE and say, ‘Just stop it’?”

Smith also called for the RSF to be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Spera said that the administration has been clear that “we need to do everything we can to bring an end to external support, and that needs to stop. We’ve been making the case at the highest levels, and working through the Quad and other mechanisms, with any and all parties that have influence on actors to bring an end to that support.”

Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA), the subcommittee’s ranking member, called for the U.S. to cut off arms sales to both the UAE and to the other foreign powers involved in the conflict and potentially impose sanctions on Emirati entities involved in supporting the RSF.

Spera demurred on questions about leveraging U.S. arms sales, directing those questions to others at the State Department.

Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said that an end to external support would quickly bring the conflict to a close.

“This means not only pressing the RSF and SAF to agree to ceasefire negotiations, but also enforcing real consequences for external actors — all of them — who continue to fuel the conflict by providing arms or money or mercenaries,” Meeks said. “Without these external resources, both sides would be unable to continue killing civilians and committing mass atrocities and their push to take total control of Sudan. Let me be clear, this brutal war could end tomorrow, if the parties fueling this conflict ended their support, and there’s a number of them that are doing it. I’m talking about, all the parties need to be held accountable.”

In recent days, a chorus of left-wing lawmakers in Congress have ramped up their ire towards the United Arab Emirates, accusing the Gulf country of helping fuel the yearslong civil war in Sudan by reportedly backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the non-Islamist Arab force fighting the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). 

The UAE has long denied allegations of involvement in the war. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that, according to sources, recent assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department’s intelligence bureau purport to show the UAE sending Chinese drones to the RSF. 

On the other side, Iran, Russia, Egypt and Turkey have provided support to the SAF, according to conflict monitors and reporting by Bloomberg and The Washington Post.

The war in Sudan has wrought havoc upon the eastern African nation, with both warring factions committing crimes against humanity. The conflict has killed as many as 150,000 people and has displaced around 12 million. 

Over the more than two-year long conflict, both militias have been accused of widespread sexual assault, mass killings of civilians, torture and deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure. On Monday, the RSF captured the city of El Fasher after an 18-month blockade which saw the group effectively devastate the city, with reports of mass killings, sexual violence and the destruction of hospitals and displacement camps.

The U.S. government, under former President Joe Biden, determined the RSF was committing genocide and found both the RSF and SAF guilty of committing war crimes.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing influence with the Sudanese Armed Forces has alarmed experts, who warn that the SAF’s deepening ties to Islamist networks threaten regional stability and could pose a risk far beyond the eastern African nation.

“The Muslim Brotherhood has had a strong presence in Sudan since the 1940s and that presence has evolved over the years,” Norman Roule, a former senior U.S. intelligence official, told Jewish Insider. “It’s important to note that this presence is also why Iran is such a strong supporter of the Burhan [head of SAF] government.” 

Liam Karr, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, who has condemned actions on both sides of the conflict, says the ties date back to former Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan for several decades before the SAF overthrew him in 2019. 

“The SAF is working with several Islamist brigades that consist of former Bashir-era army, police and intelligence personnel,” Karr told JI. “This includes the al Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade, which is widely associated with the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and Bashir and has an estimated 20,000 fighters.” 

In recent months, the SAF has received explosive attack drones from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to aid in the conflict, while Egypt, one of their key backers, arrested a key Islamist militia leader aligned with the group — signaling that even staunch regional supporters of the group are “growing wary of its Islamist factions,” according to Foundation for Defense of Democracies Research Fellow Hussain Adbul-Hussain. 

Roule said Iran has a vested interest in providing the SAF with weaponry in order to reestablish a presence in the region and revitalize their “broken proxies,” following Israel’s degrading of its military capabilities and of its proxy Hezbollah, as well as the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. 

“This is of extreme importance to the U.S. and its partners in the region, because if the Quds Force [IRGC] is able to establish a presence it lost in Syria, it would be able to reestablish training camps it operated a decade ago for Hamas smugglers, routes for weapons that it could send back into Gaza and revitalize Lebanese Hezbollah, as well as provide a transshipment location of weapons to the Houthis,” said Roule. “The Muslim Brotherhood presence in Khartoum is of serious concern for the United States and deserves much greater attention. It is a significant threat to the United States, Israel and the region.” 

Anti-Israel lawmakers, including some of the Jewish state’s most vocal critics in the House, have sounded the alarm on the RSF, but have notably glossed over the SAF and its increasingly Islamist alignment. 

“Sudan is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and a genocide,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in a post on social media on Tuesday. “The UAE and other arms dealers to the RSF and RSF-aligned militias must be held accountable.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) echoed the same sentiment, saying she is “horrified” by the RSF’s “mass killings of civilians.”

“We must do everything in our power to stop this genocide, including cutting off all weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates who are arming and funding this ethnic cleansing,” said Tlaib on social media on Wednesday.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) followed suit and similarly directed his criticism at the Emirates. 

“I am incredibly concerned about the deepening humanitarian crisis in Sudan, and the atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces,” Castro wrote on social media on Wednesday. “The United States must put pressure on the RSF and those who back it — including the United Arab Emirates — to end these atrocities.”

A number of far-left activists online have also singled out the RSF and its reported Emirati ties for condemnation. 

Kenneth Roth, a virulent critic of Israel and former head of Human Rights Watch, posted on Tuesday, “British arms sold to the United Arab Emirates are being found in Sudan, where the UAE is arming the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces as they commit genocide.” 

“Both the Biden and Trump administrations refused to hold the UAE accountable as it armed Sudan’s RSF, despite massacre after massacre, atrocity after atrocity,” wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, adding, “Members of Congress are showing more responsibility and initiative.” 

House Democrats, led by Reps. Gregory Meeks and Sara Jacobs, released a statement in April marking the two year anniversary of the conflict. “External actors like the UAE must immediately stop fueling the conflict by arming the warring parties,” the statement said notably only listing the UAE and omitting any mention of Turkey, Iran, Russia, and other countries who have sent arms to factions in Sudan.

A bi-partisan group of senators, including Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, released a statement on Thursday breaking in tone from the other lawmakers – condemning both sides and making mention of all nations reportedly backing the war. 

“Both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have committed atrocities against civilians and pursued a zero-sum war at any cost,” the lawmakers said in a statement. “Foreign backers of the RSF and SAF-including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Russia, Iran, China and governments in the immediate region-have fueled and profited from the conflict and legitimized the monsters destroying Sudan,” the senators continued. 

Secular forces in Sudan have called for the country’s Islamist movement to be classified as a terrorist group, according to Hussain. Sudan’s Civil Democratic Alliance of Revolutionary Forces (Sumud) has stated that the “Islamist movement sees no pathway for ending the fighting other than the complete submission of the Sudanese people to its terrorist regime, an arrangement that has never achieved peace.” 

Karr says the Trump administration and the SAF’s own partners have put “heavy pressure” on the group to “distance itself politically from the Islamist groups.” Karr also believes pressure should be applied to the RSF.

In his second term, President Donald Trump voiced support for designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Various members of congress have introduced legislation that would require the secretary of state to use this designation, though Congress has yet to move forward with the legislation.