Quad and Quintet meet for the first time in New York and issue a truce demand no party has signed

Sudan Tribune reported that the African Union and the United States co-chaired the first joint Quad–Quintet meeting at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday 23 September, demanding an immediate humanitarian truce, civilian protection and an arms embargo. AU Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf called for an immediate cessation of hostilities to open the way for a durable ceasefire and firmly rejected any territorial division of Sudan. The Irish Times set out the architecture: the Quad met alongside the Quintet, which comprises the UN, the African Union, the European Union, the Arab League and IGAD, with the Quad trying to pause the fighting while the Quintet works the civilian track and maps a future power-sharing structure. Massad Boulos, the US senior presidential adviser for Africa, said: “The Sudanese people deserve a humanitarian truce that facilitates Sudanese-Sudanese dialogue… Neither the SAF nor RSF represent legitimate, constitutional governance for Sudan. We need to expand the UN arms embargo and raise the cost of conflict on all combatants.”

The same week produced a practical illustration of that legitimacy line. Sudan Tribune reported on 22 September that Sudan urged Secretary-General António Guterres to intervene after Washington denied a visa to military chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who had been scheduled to address world leaders in New York on Thursday; the US sanctioned Burhan in January 2025 over alleged military abuses and obstruction of the peace process. The reason for the denial is unconfirmed — the report indicates neither side commented. Meanwhile the Irish Times cited UN estimates of more than 150,000 dead since April 2023, almost nine million driven from their homes and almost 34 million in need of assistance. The National reported on 22 September that Guterres had called the situation “absolutely horrible” and demanded accountability for countries supplying weapons.

Assessment: Asharq Al-Awsat supplies the corrective this week’s diplomacy needs: “The dispute over withdrawal in the latest US proposal shows that the two sides have yet to agree on the terms under which a new truce could be tested.” Nobody has published whose withdrawal, from where, in what sequence — that unpublished text, not the New York communiqué, is the ceasefire story. The precedent is unkind. Crisis Group records the September 2025 Quad roadmap as a mediators' proposal that never became an agreement between the belligerents; Boulos announced in February a peace document acceptable to both parties and a March target for ending the war, and that deadline passed six months ago. Two things to check before reading momentum into any of this: whether the Security Council in fact extended the sanctions regime that expired on 12 September, and whether it expanded it. If it declined again, as HRW records it did in 2025, Boulos’s embargo call is theatre.