President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) asked him to work on a peace deal between the factions in Sudan’s long and brutal civil war, and Trump has already begun working on a deal.
“Working with the crown prince was amazing because he said, ‘Sir, you’re talking about a lot of wars, but there’s a place on Earth called Sudan, and it’s horrible what’s happening,’” Trump said of his meeting with MBS at the White House on Wednesday.
Trump was speaking at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, an event MBS also attended.
WATCH — President Trump Delivers Remarks at U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum:
“You know we’ve already started working on that, OK?” Trump said to the Saudi crown prince at the Kennedy Center. “We’re working on that. We started about 30 minutes after you explained to us the great importance of that. I view it differently now than I did just a day ago.”
“His majesty would like me to do something very powerful having to do with Sudan,” Trump told the audience. “It was not on my charts to be involved in, I thought it was just something that was crazy and out of control. But I just see how important that is to you, and to a lot of your friends in the room, Sudan. And we’re going to start working on Sudan.”
Trump returned to the subject in a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday afternoon.
“Tremendous atrocities are taking place in Sudan. It has become the most violent place on Earth and, likewise, the single biggest Humanitarian Crisis. Food, doctors, and everything else are desperately needed,” Trump wrote.
Trump described Sudan as a “great civilization and culture” that has “unfortunately gone bad, but one that can be fixed with the cooperation and coordination of countries, including those in the region of tremendous wealth, who want this to happen.”
“We will work with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern partners to get these atrocities to end, while at the same time stabilizing Sudan,” he promised.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jim Risch (R-ID) applauded Trump’s “call to action to end the war in Sudan,” and said Congress “stands ready to work with President Trump to reach a sustainable peace, end the suffering of the Sudanese people, and help stabilize this critical ally in the Red Sea corridor.”
Sudan was ruled by a dictator named Omar al-Bashir for almost 30 years, until he was overthrown by the military in 2019. The junta allowed a civilian transitional government to take over, but not for very long.
Another coup was staged in 2021, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of a paramilitary militia called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a group descended from the savage Janjaweed militia that helped to keep Bashir in power during the latter years of his reign.
Burhan and Dagalo planned to rule together, but that did not last very long, either. They turned against each other in 2023, launching the civil war that Trump, Risch, MBS, and other observers have described as one of the most brutal conflicts and horrifying humanitarian disasters on Earth. Allegations of war crimes and human rights atrocities are widespread against both the SAF and RSF.
Pope Leo named Sudan as one of the countries where Christians are in the greatest danger when he spoke out against persecution on Sunday. Christian persecution watchdog Open Doors said in September that at least 150,000 Christians have been killed during the Sudanese civil war, and up to 15 million have been driven from their homes.
“Neither side is sympathetic to Christians, and the conflict has given Islamist extremists more opportunity to target them. Christians are also experiencing exceptional hardship in the hunger crisis because local communities discriminate against them and won’t give them support. Much of the church in Sudan, which might have been able to help with aid distribution, is on the run,” Open Doors said.
Both sides in the conflict have been accused of blocking humanitarian aid to civilian populations seen as aiding the other side. The RSF is arguably somewhat worse in this regard, having been accused of outright genocide by former Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the final days of the Biden administration. The Biden State Department imposed sanctions on Dagalo and a number of companies and individuals linked to his war effort.
Adversaries inclined to criticize Trump for waiting months to speak out on Sudan would be well-advised to remember that the Biden administration waited a very long time before noticing the conflict, and President Joe Biden himself was not inclined to discuss it at all. Humanitarian groups accused Biden of keeping his distance from the Sudan quagmire until the atrocities became too embarrassing to ignore.
Many organizations believe it is too dangerous for them to continue attempting to render aid in Sudan. There is no end in sight to the conflict, as both the SAF and RSF have held the upper hand in different regions across the past two and a half years, but neither has been able to gain a decisive advantage. Neighboring countries are afraid the war will spill over Sudan’s borders and destabilize the region.
As Trump said to MBS at the forum on Wednesday, his administration has been trying to negotiate at least a humanitarian truce. In early November, the State Department said it was speaking directly to the SAF and RSF to arrange a ceasefire. The RSF was reportedly open to discussing a humanitarian truce.
According to U.S. intelligence reports, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been supplying weapons to the RSF, while Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia support the SAF. Trump’s task would implicitly be persuading all of these third-party backers to stop financing both sides of the endless conflict.
Last Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a press conference that “the fundamental problem we have is that the RSF agrees to things and then never follows through with it, so now what you have is a calamity on your hands.”
“We discussed it multiple times with multiple countries today, and I think something needs to be done to cut off the weapons and the support that the RSF is getting as they continue with their advances,” he said.
“When you raise the issue of these atrocities, they always hide behind the argument that this is rogue elements. Well, it’s not rogue elements. They’re doing it systematically,” Rubio said of the RSF.
“I think unfortunately what’s happening here is the RSF has concluded that they’re winning and they want to keep going,” he reflected. “They’re not just fighting a war, which war alone is bad enough. They’re committing acts of sexual violence and atrocities, just horrifying atrocities, against women, children, innocent civilians of the most horrific kind. And it needs to end immediately.”
Within minutes of Trump and MBS discussing peace in Sudan on Wednesday, Gen. Burhan of the SAF welcomed their efforts to “bring about a fair and just peace in Sudan.”
“The government thanks them for their continuing interest and efforts to end the Sudanese bloodshed and assures them of its readiness to seriously engage with them to realize the peace that Sudanese people expect,” Burhan said.
If Burhan’s remarks were sincere, it would be a remarkable turnaround from his previous insistence that he would continue fighting until the RSF is utterly defeated and Dagalo is dead.
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