The United States declared on Tuesday that a genocide took place in Sudan, drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities in Africa’s largest war and singling out one side in the conflict as the perpetrators of some of the worst violence.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military in a bitter civil war, and allied militias had committed acts of genocide during a fearsome wave of ethnically targeted violence in the western region of Darfur.
The Treasury Department announced a raft of financial measures intended to support the genocide determination, including sanctions that personally target the R.S.F.’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, as well as seven companies in the United Arab Emirates, the R.S.F.’s main foreign sponsor.
“The R.S.F. and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” Mr. Blinken said in a statement. “Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
The genocide determination comes two decades after the United States took a similar step in 2004, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell determined that the Janjaweed, ruthless ethnic militias allied with Sudan’s military, had committed genocide during a vicious counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur.
The Janjaweed later morphed into the Rapid Support Forces. But instead of being allied with Sudan’s military, the group is now fighting it, in a civil war that has driven one of Africa’s largest countries into a devastating famine, killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people — almost one-quarter of Sudan’s population — to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
Atrocities and war crimes have been committed on both sides, say officials from the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups. The military has repeatedly massacred civilians in indiscriminate bombing raids, sometimes killing dozens at once.
But only the R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing, particularly during a systematic wave of violence in Darfur between April 2023 — when the civil war began — and November of that year. The group targeted members of the Masalit ethnic group, a central element in the American genocide determination, said two senior U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. (The Masalit are ethnic Africans and the R.S.F. are dominated by ethnic Arabs.)
The toll of that violence is unclear. The Sudanese Red Crescent said it counted 2,000 bodies in a single day, then stopped counting. U.N. investigators later estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed in the city of Geneina alone.
More than three million people have fled Sudan for neighboring countries, the United Nations says, including hundreds of thousands of Masalit civilians who are living in squalid, overcrowded camps in Chad.
The genocide determination followed months of deliberation inside the U.S. government, as lawyers and intelligence officials evaluated the merits of the case, said the two senior U.S. officials. Some officials hesitated to support the determination because they feared it might draw further criticism of the Biden administration over its refusal to declare Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip a genocide against Palestinians, the officials said.
But on Monday, while traveling in Asia, Mr. Blinken signed off on the genocide determination.
Under international law, the finding does not oblige the U.S. to take action, although officials said the sanctions provide some immediate teeth to the measure. More broadly, experts said it might propel a new drive for accountability in a war that has caused up to 150,000 deaths, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, estimated last year.
The genocide determination may also bring new scrutiny to the role of the United Arab Emirates, which has supplied the R.S.F. with smuggled weapons and powerful drones, according to American officials and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.
Mr. Blinken said the finding did not mean the United States was supporting Sudan’s army in the war. “Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan,” he said.
Critics who have accused the United States of acting too slowly on Sudan welcomed the finding, with caveats.
“This attempt to position the administration on the right side of history won’t work,” Cameron Hudson, a former American diplomat and Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on social media of the Biden administration. “It’s too late and too many people have died for that to happen.”
