The scale of the catastrophe makes the mismatch even more indefensible. More than 30 million people now require humanitarian assistance, and 14 million have fled their homes. Tens of thousands have been killed, with the true toll almost certainly far higher. Famine has been confirmed, and millions more remain at risk.

Wars of this duration do not sustain themselves. They are sustained by supply chains. The drone provision deserves particular urgency.

Between January and June, the U.N. human rights office documented roughly 1,100 civilians killed by drone strikes — nearly four of every five conflict-related civilian deaths it recorded. The U.N. human rights chief has called armed drones “by far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths” in Sudan. They have struck markets, hospitals, aid routes, and families fleeing violence. Both belligerents deploy them, and foreign suppliers provide them. Bringing drones explicitly under the embargo would remove any ambiguity and allow monitors to pursue the manufacturers, brokers, financiers, and transporters who keep those aircraft in the sky. It targets the weapon now killing the most civilians.

The army’s supporters argue that the embargo should bind only the RSF, that a sovereign state retains the right to acquire arms. But sovereignty is not a blank check to bomb civilians. Resolution 1591 was adopted over Khartoum’s objections precisely because the state’s own campaign in Darfur had produced mass atrocities. And the officer leading today’s objections, Gen. Abdel Fattah al Burhan, was himself a commander coordinating army and militia operations in Darfur at the height of that genocidal campaign — survivors there still name him among its authors. His war today is an extension of the same project, and his resistance to an arms cutoff shows who is invested in keeping this war alive. Sovereignty was no shield for those crimes then; it cannot become one now, when both sides are attacking civilians with imported weapons. Applying the embargo to every belligerent does not assign equal guilt. It recognizes that a civilian’s right to live does not depend on the uniform worn by the person launching the drone.

Nor is a nationwide embargo a foreign demand, or a new one. In November 2024, Taqaddum, one of Sudan’s largest civilian democratic coalitions, formally urged the Security Council to expand the embargo nationwide. The U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission recommended the same course: a convergence of Sudanese civilian forces and international investigators who watched the existing embargo fail to keep pace with the war. Whoever obstructs its expansion now stands against both.

Nor is this only Sudan’s emergency. The corridors carrying weapons and mercenaries into Sudan stretch across neighboring countries, and arms entering Sudan do not remain neatly within its borders. Neither do the fighters, trafficking networks, and war economies they sustain. A nationwide embargo is not merely civilian-protection policy. It is regional security policy.

Russia may stand in the way, as it did when it vetoed a ceasefire demand in 2024. That prospect is itself the strongest argument for acting — and acting now. A Sudanese state captured by Muslim Brotherhood networks, hosting a deepening Turkish and Iranian footprint — including their drones — and shielded by a Russian veto, with each patron promised rewards on the Red Sea: this is precisely the danger that demands action, inside the Council or beyond it.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS, TERRORISTS, AND IRAN: TRUMP IS IGNORING AMERICA’S NEXT NIGHTMARE

The sequence is clear: Circulate the text, organize the votes, and force a decision before Sept. 12. If the Council is paralyzed, expose the veto and move outside it. Washington and Brussels should activate a coordinated sanctions program targeting arms suppliers, logistics networks, and the gold trade, building on the European Union’s July ban on Sudanese gold. Dry up the weapons and the gold that pays for them, and the war loses its fuel.

At Monday’s session, the U.N. humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, put it plainly: “The people of Sudan need food, water and medicine. Yet the world sends drones, weapons, and mercenaries.” And then: “Sudan does not suffer from a lack of analysis. It suffers from a lack of action.” The embargo is that action — and every week of delay is another weapons flight, another drone strike, another village pushed into famine. The world knows what to do. What it needs, at last, is the will to do it now.

Khalid Omer Yousif is a Sudanese political leader and former Minister of Cabinet Affairs in Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government (2019–2021). A longtime advocate for democracy, peace, and civilian rule, he has opposed Sudan’s Islamist regime since his student activism in the late 1990s. He played a leading role in the 2018-19 revolution, helped negotiate Sudan’s democratic transition, and has remained active in efforts to end the current war through a civilian-led political process. He writes and speaks regularly on Sudan, regional security, and countering extremist movements.