PREVIEW
Some of the most effective Islamist militias fighting alongside Burhan’s SAF could be hit by the US ban
On the face of it, the US State Department’s designation on 9 March of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation is a setback for General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, the leader of the Sudan Armed Forces. The designation aims to target some of the Islamist factions, who make up some of the most effective units, fighting alongside Burhan and the SAF.
But US officials may struggle to reach their targets. Many of the Islamist groupings in Sudan were initially affiliated to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. But Hassan el Turabi, the Islamist éminence grise behind the 1989 coup in Sudan, differed with his Egyptian counterparts and started his own organisation and was the political brains behind the National Islamic Front regime under General Omer Ahmed Hassan el Beshir. Since then Sudan’s Islamist grouplets have proliferated, often below the radar.
The US decision is seen as a win for the United Arab Emirates, the main supporter of the rival Rapid Support Forces militia in Sudan’s devastating war. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Brotherhood had been ‘trained and supported’ by Iran. The UAE government is determined to shut down the Muslim Brotherhood across the region.
The Iran connection could be awkward for Burhan, particularly statements by Islamist leaders in Sudan backing the Khamenei regime in Tehran. The State Department’s move may prompt a tactical change from Burhan. Ali Ahmed Karti, Secretary General of the Sudanese Islamic Movement and a former foreign minister, has been an influential force in the SAF for several years (AC Vol 63 No 10, Burhan lets the Islamists back in).
The government in Khartoum has hired the Williams Group, a firm dominated by former Democratic party staffers, on a $60,000 monthly retainer to provide ‘strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance’, according to a contract filed in early March under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. But Burhan’s first priority is for the US and others in the international community to designate the Rapid Support Forces as a terrorist organisation. That campaign was gaining some momentum in Washington.
Last October, Senator Jim Risch, the Republican chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, urged the Trump administration to apply terrorist designation to the RSF, which, he said, had ‘waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people’ (Dispatches, 23/2/26, UN says Hemeti’s RSF committed genocide in siege of El Fasher). Jeanne Shaheen, the senior Democratic party Senator on the committee, has said that she, too, would support this designation.
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