Chama Mechtaly at Quillette on the career of former Biden-appointed US Special Envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello. Instead of helping to return the country to civilian rule, Sudanese democrats say that he did the exact opposite: siding with the Islamists at every opportunity.
In January, Sudan’s last civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, received me in Abu Dhabi like a daughter. This soft-spoken and scholarly man, who built his career inside the United Nations, had invited me to his office for what became an hour and a half of testimony. I have not stopped thinking about that meeting since. He had read an essay I had written about Sudan in December that named what most of the Western commentariat would not: the Islamist architecture behind the brutal war devouring his country. Within days of its publication, Sudanese democrats I had never met began contacting me from across the diaspora. “A khawajiya—a foreigner—who understood. At last.”
To understand why Hamdok was sitting in exile in the first place, it is important to understand what Sudan almost became. In 2019, after three decades of Islamist rule under Omar al-Bashir—a dictator wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur—Sudanese civilians poured into the streets in unprecedented numbers: doctors, teachers, mothers, students. They did not just demand the fall of the regime. They wanted the entire Muslim Brotherhood-aligned system that had sustained it to be dismantled: the security services, the morality police, and the patronage economy of looted contracts, captured banks, and shell companies that enriched Bashir-loyalists while ordinary Sudanese watched their currency collapse, their savings vanish, and sanctions drive the country into poverty. For two extraordinary years, a fragile civilian transition led by Hamdok tried to deliver exactly that.
Then came the coup of 2021, when generals aligned with Sudan’s Islamist networks detained Hamdok and recaptured the state. The transitional military council split into two armed factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Burhan, which became the political vehicle for the Brotherhood-aligned old guard, and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group with its own brutal history that broke from Burhan as the alliance collapsed. In April 2023, that rupture became a brutal war. The country has since become one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on earth, with millions displaced, famine spreading, and Darfur once again a site of mass killing. Roughly half the country’s territory is now under RSF control, while the other half languishes under Sudan’s Islamist-aligned military.
Hamdok discussed all of this with the precision of a man who has decided that accuracy is the last remaining dignity. He was exactly the kind of civilian leader the United States should have empowered on the Red Sea—a corridor where Iranian-backed proxies now threaten America’s allies and the arteries of global commerce. And then he told me about Tom Perriello.
Perriello was appointed US Special Envoy to Sudan in February 2024, ten months into the war. Yet Hamdok told me that he could not secure a formal meeting with him. Sudan’s last civilian prime minister, overthrown and forced into exile for leading the country’s most serious democratic experiment, was sitting in the United Arab Emirates, available and waiting, while Washington’s envoy moved through a landscape of Islamist-aligned generals and their approved intermediaries….
Sudanese civilians did not expect Washington to end the war. But they did expect the American envoy sent to support civilian rule not to provide the Islamist networks inside the army with access, legitimacy, aid channels, and diplomatic weight. These were the forces they had been warning were waging war to recapture the state.
According to multiple Sudanese sources I interviewed, Perriello’s engagement across Sudan was systematically conditioned on approval from Port Sudan. Since the start of the war, the port city has functioned as the operational capital of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Islamist-aligned military leadership—the political nerve centre of the faction that overthrew Sudan’s civilian government.
“Tom would not meet with anyone that Port Sudan did not approve of,” a former minister in Hamdok’s government told me. American-Sudanese activists confirmed the pattern. They were forced to invoke their US citizenship and professional credentials repeatedly, calling and emailing Perriello’s office over and over again, just to secure a conversation with the man sent to advocate for their democratic future. The asymmetry was not subtle. It told every regional power broker exactly where the Biden administration had decided Sudan’s future resided. “Tom came to Sudan as an activist, not a statesman,” the former minister continued. His assessment: “He only ended up supporting those who crush democracy.”
Mohamed Hasan al-Taishi, prime minister of the unrecognised (by the African Union and the UN) civilian government based in Nyala, told me in January: “I wish any Westerner would talk about the Nazis in Sudan.” By which he meant the Islamist old guard that steals American aid and has prosecuted the current war with a violence Westerners can hardly imagine. Al-Taishi spent years building relationships between Sudan and the United States, and he was stunned that Perriello would not meet him. “We believe that for Sudan to become democratic, we need Americans,” he told me. It was a statement of faith in America. And it was a measure of what Perriello had squandered….
Perriello arrived in Sudan carrying the Obama-era assumption—long since falsified across the region—that political Islam could be domesticated with inclusion, accommodation, funding, and diplomacy. He co-founded Avaaz, the global civic-mobilisation platform and darfurgenocide.org. He led the Center for American Progress Action Fund, one of the political engines of the Obama years. He then spent four and a half years as executive director of Open Society Foundations’ US Programs after Soros’s family had contributed US$685,470 to Perriello’s 2017 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. While there, he appeared seventeen times in Biden White House visitor logs before being handed the Sudan portfolio.
By then, the model had already failed across the region. In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, Islamist movements exploited what Western diplomats called democracy, mastered the language of elections and dignity, captured institutions, crushed secular and spiritual rivals, and dragged states into collapse. It sounds civilised in Washington, where no one has to live under the men it empowers. It sounds different when you sit with the people carrying permanent scars.
It’s the same naivete – or blindness – that saw Obama campaigning with Abdul El-Sayed, now elected Senator for Michigan, who has a problematic history of antisemitism and past family links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
On 16 January 2025, Perriello was asked directly about SAF chemical-weapons use at the Council on Foreign Relations. An Amnesty International representative wanted to know why Washington was only now contemplating sanctions against Burhan, given earlier allegations of chemical attacks by Sudanese government forces. “I’m not going to comment on the first question,” he replied. A few months later, the State Department confirmed that Sudan’s government had used chemical weapons in 2024, during Perriello’s diplomatic tenure. In September 2026, investigations by the Washington Post and the New York Times uncovered evidence that Sudanese military officers had diverted chlorine from water-treatment facilities supplied by international-aid organisations to manufacture chemical weapons.
And now:
Now Perriello is asking voters in Virginia to send him back to Congress. He sells himself as a defender of democracy against kings, fascists, and the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. But Sudan is his most recent record: Islamist-aligned generals got the meetings. Qatar got exclusive access. Brotherhood-linked networks got American legitimacy and generosity. Sudanese democrats got delays, excuses, and corridor encounters. Chemical-weapons survivors got nothing.
As I write the result for Virginia District 5 hasn’t yet been called. With 98% of the votes counted, the Republican candidate is just leading Perriello 49.90% to 48.35%. It’s going to the wire.
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