Leaked Files Point To Secret Chlorine Bomb Program In Sudan’s Civil War

Washington determined more than a year ago that Sudan’s army had used chemical weapons against its own countrymen. What’s new is the paper trail.The written record starts with a bombshell dossier published September 5, built from more than 150 leaked documents, photographs, videos and intercepted communications describing a secretive military program.That reporting has since been corroborated by a group of former chemical weapons inspectors, who last month said interviews with eight witnesses in Nairobi turned up what the former senior officials of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons described as credible accounts of unexplained illness following military activity in Sudan. They are now pressing the OPCW to open a formal investigation.The dossier and the inspectors’ interviews point to the same conclusion: Investigators describe a secretive Sudanese army program built to manufacture and deploy chlorine-based munitions. The target was the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group the army has been fighting for control of Khartoum since the war began. The setting was the battle for that city. The chlorine, the documents allege, was diverted in part from a civilian water-treatment plant meant to keep the taps running for ordinary Sudanese.A power struggle between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary’s commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into open war in April 2023, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions.Sudan’s military has denied the chemical weapons allegations outright, calling the reporting baseless. The volume and specificity of the new evidence, however, has pushed a claim that has simmered for more than a year, largely obscured behind sanctions notices and diplomatic statements, into the open in a way that is proving difficult for Khartoum to dismiss.What has changed, in other words, is not the accusation itself but the depth of the evidence now stacked behind it.“Allegedly, a Sudan Armed Forces general leaked portions of a Port Sudan investigation report, and second, the United Nations fact-finding mission merely confirmed what NGOs had already reported earlier this year,” a defense expert and the executive director of the American Center for South Yemen Studies, Fernando Carvajal, tells The New York Sun.So if the finding isn’t new, what exactly does the new evidence show?A Bomb Built In The DesertThe program, according to the leaked records, traces to July 2024, when Brigadier General Tariq Hussain proposed using chlorine gas to break a battlefield deadlock. Rapid Support Forces fighters had dug into large sections of Khartoum, and the army, according to the documents, was searching for an edge.In his sketches, Mr. Hussain shows a prototype munition that combines an explosive warhead with roughly 33 pounds of chlorine gas, designed to kill by shrapnel or poisoning while destroying much of the chemical evidence in the process.A prototype was flown out of Merowe airport for a desert test that July. “The test went 100 percent,” Mr. Hussain reported afterward, in an intercepted message cited by the New York Times. By October 2024, the files indicate that close to 300 munitions had been manufactured and stored, primarily at Merowe.Some of the chlorine is alleged to have come from a water-treatment plant near Khartoum that received supplies from international aid groups for purely civilian use. At the same time, additional stock was imported from Egypt.A UNICEF spokesperson confirmed the agency supplied chlorine to six treatment plants in the Khartoum area, including one at Al-Manara, between 2023 and 2025. The agency stressed that it has no record of any chlorine it provided being diverted or misused.The clearest alleged instance of use came in September 2024 at the Al-Jaili oil refinery north of Khartoum, then under Rapid Support Forces control. Mr. Hussain is said to have texted a colleague afterward: “They drank the gas.”The Rapid Support Forces publicly accused the army of firing “toxic” missiles at the refinery around the same time, and footage that circulated online showed men in civilian clothing wearing oxygen masks inside the facility. A separate France 24 investigation, published in October 2025, independently found evidence consistent with chlorine barrel bombs at the same site.Experts Weigh The EvidenceFormer officials of the watchdog who reviewed the material said this month that the evidence looked, on its surface, like a chemical weapons program, and that it warranted formal scrutiny. One specialist in chemical and nuclear weapons who spent 26 years in British military intelligence has noted that the underlying technology required is not sophisticated: a pressurized canister and an explosive charge to disperse it.It’s precisely chlorine’s ordinariness — not any exotic property — that makes it dangerous as a weapon. Inhaled, the gas meets the moisture lining the lungs and turns into hydrochloric acid on contact, burning the airways from within. Enough exposure, and the damage to the lungs can be fatal.What may set Sudan apart from other chlorine attacks, however, is the setting: The country’s extreme heat would have caused any gas released to disperse quickly, which experts say may help explain why documented casualty counts here have been difficult to pin down, even where the strikes themselves are well corroborated.The crudeness of the weapon fits the character of the force accused of using it, according to Mr. Carvajal.“This junta regime is the continuation of the Bashir regime, and Burhan and his Islamist allies were part of the war and the crimes in Darfur when Bashir was sanctioned,” he explains. “Only the SAF has an air force and the capability to use these weapons. This was a major test of the international community, as the SAF did not expect this much attention, or expected their narrative would dismiss RSF claims as mere propaganda, since the SAF were not allowing investigators into the country.”Diverting a civilian chemical for military use is not without precedent in Sudan’s wars.“It is not the first time Sudan’s government has tried to use chemicals to fight a war. There were indications it attempted this in South Sudan during the civil war. However, the weapons they tried to use in the past had not been their own production,” a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, Jok Madut Jok, tells The Sun.“This one is now more serious, because they are using a product that was supposed to help the population with clean water. If they are the ones producing it, then it can be more lethal, and it can be expected to happen again.”Sanctions, Denials And A Stalled InquiryWashington determined in April 2025 that Sudan’s government had used chemical weapons the previous year, a finding that triggered a first round of American sanctions that June, followed by additional restrictions, including limits on Sudanese government aviation, that took effect in July of this year.At the 112th session of the OPCW’s Executive Council, American diplomats pressed Sudan to declare any production facilities and munitions and to work with the organization on verification, warning that the risk of further use had not gone away.Khartoum has consistently rejected the allegations, insisting it does not produce, stockpile or use chemical weapons and pointing to its membership in the Chemical Weapons Convention. Sudanese officials have said Washington ignored an invitation to send American experts to verify the claims on the ground, and Sudan’s United Nations ambassador told the Security Council in June that a prior American inspection team had collected samples from four sites without producing evidence of use.Accountability, however, is tangled up in politics well beyond Sudan’s borders, according to Mr. Carvajal.“There is currently a complaint filed with the International Criminal Court by Sudanese civil-society organizations, and there has been no progress,” he notes. “America must follow through on its sanctions against the SAF for use of chemical weapons and support a comprehensive investigation and a case at the ICC. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s position on the ICC complicates this process, as the president has worked hard to dismiss the court’s relevance.”A Country Already GaspingWhatever the final verdict on the chemical weapons allegations, they are unfolding against a humanitarian catastrophe that shows no sign of loosening its grip. The Rapid Support Forces have their own offenses to answer for. Washington determined in January 2025 that RSF fighters had committed genocide in Darfur, citing the systematic killing of men and boys and the targeted rape of women and girls from non-Arab ethnic groups — a finding that carried sanctions against the paramilitary’s commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Then, in late October 2025, the RSF seized El Fasher, the last army-held city in Darfur, and reports of mass killings followed almost immediately, many of them accompanied by ethnic slurs against the same communities. In all, nearly 19.5 million people, about two of every five Sudanese, are facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity, according to the latest joint assessment from the United Nations’ food agencies, with roughly 135,000 people in the most catastrophic category across hotspots in Darfur and South Kordofan.An estimated 825,000 children under age 5 are expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year alone, a sharp rise over pre-war levels. Close to 9 million people have been displaced inside the country since fighting erupted between the army and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023.If the world looks away, Mr. Carvajal warns, the consequences fall hardest on civilians already caught between two armies.“If the international community ignores this matter, it will empower Port Sudan actors to further escalate their war against the RSF with no regard for civilians,” he says.Mr. Jok, for his part, doubts the war will end on a battlefield at all.“It’s a quagmire, it’s not a militarily winnable war. It will simply continue,” he says. “In the end, it will still be settled through negotiation, not decisive military victory in the field. But the consequence is that the people will suffer more. The humanitarian crisis is, we are told, the worst now in the world.”

Leaked Files Point To Secret Chlorine Bomb Program In Sudan’s Civil War

Leaked Files Point To Secret Chlorine Bomb Program In Sudan’s Civil War

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