My reading of that line requires you to imagine the perspective of the Rohirrim. They're in the west, watching a huge, unnatural storm front move in from the east.
Assuming that it's around mid-day (or at least not first thing in the morning), the sun will have risen into the sky (from the east). But the storm front, like a wall of cloud, is now moving in from the east, seemingly chasing it across the sky.
Notice how many words in that passage are about movement. That whole paragraph is about watching the storm move, how it moves, where it moves. And, most importantly in the sentence you bolded, how it moves relative to the riders. They are riding west, but the storm clouds are closing in on them.
Until the cloud overtakes and blocks out the sun, it is "behind" the sun.
So essentially, the section that reads:
...until far away the Riders on the plain saw its black towers moving behind the sun, as they rode into the West.
could be "translated" as:
...until far away the Riders on the plain saw the black clouds swiftly overtaking the sun, as they rode into the West.
A famous example
You know the famous scene in Independence Day (and plenty of other scifi stories) where the giant spaceship slowly moves its shadow across the city?
That's what is being described here. The cloud front is "behind" the sun, moving quickly across the sky, darkening everything in its path, until it finally overtakes the sun and the world (or the viewer at least) is plunged into darkness.
Update with your sketch
Using the sketch you added to your question, I made my own notations to illustrate my interpretation.
By this moment in time, the Sun has already risen in the east and moved west across most of the sky. The clouds also started in the east and are moving west, but having only recently started, they haven't moved as far across the sky yet.
From the perspective of the Riders, the clouds seem to be chasing the sun across the sky. And because they haven't gotten as far, they seem to be "behind the sun" in the sense of one racer being "behind" another.
The clouds are chasing the sun, they're overtaking the sun. When they reach it, blot it out, and keep going, they will have passed the sun, but until they reach it, they are behind the sun.
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