New dossiers add internal files to US charge that Sudan used chlorine bombs

A dossier shared with The New York Times and a separate cache reviewed by The Washington Post on 5 September add detail to the United States claim that Sudan's army developed and used chemical weapons in 2024. Sudan's government has denied the charge. Its United Nations envoy has said American inspectors took samples and produced no public proof. The new files are the first large set of internal material to reach two major newspapers on the same day.

The Times described nearly 150 documents, images, videos and voice notes, plus several thousand text messages, that appear to come from the phones of senior Sudanese officers. A Middle Eastern intelligence service supplied the file. The papers describe bomb tests in the desert, scorpions found dead on a factory floor, and chlorine canisters taken from a water-treatment plant in Khartoum. Some of that chlorine, the dossier suggests, had arrived as aid for drinking water.

The Post described videos of an apparent test in which yellow vapour rose from a desert pit. Specialists who saw the footage associated the colour with chlorine. One text to an officer involved in airstrikes included a video of a person with burned skin and the words "Your cooking."

Washington first determined, on 24 April 2025, that the Government of Sudan had used chemical weapons in 2024. Sanctions followed in June 2025 under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act. Extra measures took effect on 20 July 2026, including opposition to multilateral development-bank loans and aviation limits on Sudanese state airlines. At the OPCW Executive Council in July, the United States repeated that Sudan remained out of compliance.

Sudan is a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Chlorine as a factory chemical is legal. Chlorine dropped from an aircraft as a choking agent is not. A France 24 investigation published in late 2025, with the research group C4ADS, had already described barrel bombs near the al-Jaili refinery north of Khartoum on 5 and 13 September 2024, when the army was trying to retake the site from the Rapid Support Forces.

That earlier report traced chlorine exports from an Indian firm, Chemtrade International Corporation. The company told France 24 that the Sudanese buyer had promised the chemical would treat drinking water. The new dossier, if authentic, would show how a civilian chemical moved into a weapons line and how officers later tried to hide the work after the American determination.

Sudan's UN ambassador, Al-Harith Idris, said in June that a national committee found no material evidence at sites American officials had named. He said a US team had visited and sampled four locations. He asked that the file stay with the OPCW. A Sudanese official warned the Times of legal action in an American court if the dossier was published.

Authenticity is the first test. Phone extracts can be forged. A foreign service has a motive. The two newspapers independently described overlapping themes: desert tests, chlorine, a cover-up after detection. That is not the same as a courtroom finding. It is more than the public record contained on 4 September.

The war in Sudan has already killed and displaced people on a scale that does not need a chemical addendum to be a catastrophe. The addendum matters for law. If chlorine bombs were used, the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the officers on those message threads sit inside a treaty crime. If the files are wrong, Khartoum will say the West manufactured a pretext for sanctions that were coming anyway.

The OPCW now has a thicker public file than it had on Friday morning. What it does with that file will decide whether the charge stays a bilateral American sanction or becomes an international inspection.