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Sudan has apparently told the United States that it will not normalize relations with Israel until Washington removes the African country from the list of states that “sponsor” terrorism. New York Times he reported. The interim government in Khartoum is said to have marked the end of this year as the deadline to be removed from the list.
After the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Sudan was to be the third Arab government to normalize with Israel in recent months, encouraged by the United States. Such a move, the Trump administration believes, helps put aside Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East and sideline the Palestinian issue.
The Israel-Sudan normalization agreement, announced on October 23, has yet to be formally signed and still requires parliamentary approval in Khartoum.
“The whole thing felt compelled from the start by an administration that wanted to use a designation of terrorism as a political tool to try to achieve normalization with Israel,” said Ilan Goldenberg, the director of the Middle’s security program. East at the Center for a New American Security. “When you prepare these kinds of very transactional deals with unrelated items that don’t make a lot of sense, this sometimes happens.”
READ: Normalization has included deliberate humiliation of the UAE
The deal is expected to see Sudan pay US $ 335 million in compensation for the victims of the 1998 terrorist attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224 people were killed and thousands injured. Although not directly involved, Sudan was home to Osama bin Laden at the time, and Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks.
In an interview on Saturday evening with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk, the head of the Sovereignty Council of Sudan, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, said removing Sudan from the terrorist list “is an obstacle that must be removed, in order to deepen the prospects for cooperation. We must make good use of our tools. and capabilities the United States needs and we can make better use of them. “
The Sudanese official added that the United States is not a charity that donates money without expecting anything in return. “We just need to market our country and its assets in a better way, emphasizing what Washington can achieve and what we can benefit from.”
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