Committee member urges colleagues to heed classified briefings, cites Sudan humanitarian crisis

A committee member at a House Committee on Foreign Affairs markup praised Rep. Jayapal and urged colleagues to use classified briefings to inform action on the conflict in Sudan.

"I thank representative Jayapal, your team for working in a bipartisan fashion to get this resolution to a place where it could garner bipartisan support in today's markup," the committee member said, opening remarks that framed the resolution as the product of cross-party cooperation.

The speaker emphasized the humanitarian scale of the crisis, saying the conflict is now in its fourth year and that "the humanitarian toll, as everybody has mentioned, is staggering. Sudan remains the world's largest humanitarian disaster." The comment set the humanitarian stakes for the markup.

Turning to oversight tools, the committee member urged colleagues to attend classified briefings provided for members. "Every day that we fly in to Washington DC, our fly in days, we have a foreign affairs classified briefing," the committee member said, describing a recent roughly hour-long session "very specifically on Sudan, on the the SAF, on the RSF, and a very deep dive on everything going on there." The speaker said those briefings "provide the information that you need on conflicts like this."

On the parties to the fighting, the committee member stated that both the SAF and the RSF "need to, on both sides, work to bring this to an end," and added that "the United States Congress is watching. The American people are watching." The remarks did not include a formal motion or a recorded vote in the excerpt provided.

In the provided transcript excerpt, the committee member closed by reiterating the briefing's detail and offering no further comments.