The newly approved EU sanctions lists brings four individuals with ties to the Rapid Support Forces into sharper focus as Sudan’s civil war enters its fourth year
Following today’s PESC meeting, the European Union published on 21 April 2026 a paired Decision and Implementing Regulation removing four individuals from the EU’s autonomous Sudan sanctions list while keeping them fully subject to EU restrictive measures under a parallel regime derived from United Nations Security Council resolutions. These four individuals were first designated under Decision 2023/2135, the EU’s own autonomous framework targeting those who undermine Sudanese stability, then added to the older UNSC-derived EU sanctions list after the UN Security Council’s Sudan Committee listed them on 24 February 2026 and the EU gave that listing direct effect on 5 March 2026. Today’s act eliminates the duplication. The individuals remain sanctioned, with the main change being the legal instrument through which their asset freezes and travel bans are enforced.
The four names at the centre of the action are Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, Elfateh Abdullah Idris Adam, Tijani Ibrahim Moussa Mohamed, and Gedo Hamdan. The most prominent is Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, younger brother of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (universally known as “Hemeti”) the commander of the Rapid Support Forces. Abdelrahim has functioned as a key financial and logistics figure within the RSF’s command structure, managing resource flows and networks that sustain the RSF’s war effort. He had previously been designated by the United States Treasury under programmes linked to the RSF’s conduct in Darfur. His inclusion on the UNSC Sudan list in February 2026 marked a significant escalation of multilateral pressure on the Dagalo family’s inner circle.
The war in Sudan began in April 2023, when the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF under Hemeti turned on each other following a power struggle over the terms of Sudan’s civilian transition. What began as a confrontation between two military factions became one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the decade. By early 2026, more than 10 million Sudanese had been displaced, making Sudan the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis. Famine conditions have been declared across large parts of Darfur and the Kordofan regions. The RSF has faced repeated and credible accusations of systematic sexual violence, ethnic-targeted killings and mass atrocities in Darfur that multiple UN investigators and human rights organisations have characterised as genocidal in scale. The Dagalo family’s business and financial networks, which stretch across the Sahel and into Gulf state investment relationships, have been a central focus of international accountability efforts precisely because they represent the economic infrastructure sustaining the RSF’s capacity to fight.
The EU adopted its autonomous Sudan sanctions framework in October 2023, specifically to cover actors across the conflict landscape whose behaviour undermines Sudan’s stability and political transition donning them with a broader mandate than the Darfur-focused UNSC regime established by Resolution 1591 in 2005. Designations under the autonomous framework require EU Council consensus and have targeted figures on both sides of the conflict. Today’s action follows standard EU practice, as when an individual already listed under an EU autonomous framework is subsequently added to the underlying UNSC list, the EU removes the duplicate entry from its own list to ensure legal certainty for banks, businesses and enforcement authorities applying asset freeze measures in practice.
These measures align with the sustained international effort to impose accountability costs on actors driving the conflict, even as ceasefire diplomacy has produced no durable progress. Talks hosted by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and parallel tracks involving Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United States have repeatedly stalled. For the EU, maintaining and refining its Sudan sanctions architecture represents one of the few concrete policy levers available in a conflict where Brussels has limited direct influence on the ground. Keeping the Dagalo network’s financial exposure to European institutions restricted remains a signal of political commitment even if military outcomes remain beyond reach for the bloc.
