Intelligence dossier adds detail to U.S. claims that Sudan's army built chlorine bombs

A dossier shared with The New York Times by a Middle Eastern intelligence agency, and a parallel cache reviewed by The Washington Post, adds internal detail to American accusations that Sudan's army developed and used chlorine-based munitions in the civil war against the Rapid Support Forces.

Washington has already sanctioned Sudan and army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan over chemical-weapons claims. It has not published its own proof. The new files, dated around a six-month effort in 2024, are the first public cache that describes production sites, storage and internal talk about use.

The Times and the Post describe desert test blasts, dead scorpions on a factory floor, and chlorine canisters taken from a water plant in the capital. Voice and text messages involving Burhan, the papers report, suggest he knew about the effort, a point that fed the U.S. sanctions decision in January 2025. A commander named in the files, Brig. Gen. Tariq Hussain, is described as leading the work.

Internal messages from October 2024 put output at about 290 to 300 munitions, most of them stored at Merowe Air Base. Later messages said 106 of those bombs had been used against RSF positions. One text to an officer who had flown strike sorties included video of a burned body and the words "Your cooking," the Post reported. Experts shown a test video told the paper the yellow vapour was consistent with chlorine.

The files say chlorine was gathered from more than one source, including large cylinders brought across an Egyptian border crossing. The army, according to the same cache, later tried to hide the stockpile after the weapons had been used. Sudan's military has long denied the American charge. It had not, as of Saturday, issued a detailed public rebuttal of the new documents.

Chlorine as a wartime agent is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. Sudan is a party to that treaty. The legal question for outside governments is not the chemistry. It is whether the messages, videos and stock counts now circulating are authentic and whether they meet the standard for further sanctions or a referral.

The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF has already emptied cities and filled mass graves. A chemical programme, if the dossier holds, is an attempt to break a ground fight the army was losing in Khartoum in 2024. That motive is in the files. The human cost is in the same war's civilian death book, which does not need a new munition to be intolerable.

What changes this week is the evidence trail. Before Saturday the U.S. claim sat on an unpublished intelligence base. Now two newspapers have printed internal numbers, a named commander, a storage airfield and a use count. Investigators at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and any government that still talks to Khartoum, have a public target list they did not have on Friday.

Burhan remains the man Washington has already sanctioned. The dossier's value is that it tries to show why. Sudan's next statement will have to deal with Merowe, with 106, and with the messages the papers say carry his name. Silence will be read as an answer.