President Donald Trump announced on Monday that the United States will remove Sudan from its list of countries that sponsor terrorism, paving the way for the East African country to join the global financial system after nearly three decades as an international pariah and setting the stage for Khartoum to normalize relations with Israel.
The United States had already agreed in principle to lift Sudan from the state sponsor of terrorism list, after it agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of victims of terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the bombing of a U.S. naval vessel in Yemen in 2000. The United States accused the former Sudanese regime of supporting those attacks, carried out by al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden.
