Today's Edition
SHAMSA AREF AL QUBAISI*
There are multiple reasons to classify Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood as a global terrorist organisation. The movement promotes extremism, perpetrates violence against civilians, obstructs efforts to end the war and maintains suspicious alliances with regional actors.
The time has come for the United States to finally designate the Islamist movement and its armed wing, the Al-Baraa bin Malik Battalion, as terrorist entities. This is a long-overdue step to curb the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in the Middle East — one that has now come to light amid escalating violence, the squandering of Sudan’s resources, and the destabilisation of the region.
The Muslim Brotherhood has normalised violence against civilians as a means of undermining efforts to resolve the Sudanese conflict. It deploys its fighters across battlefields while receiving training and logistical support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The group has been implicated in executions of civilians, especially as these militias have gained access to drones and advanced weaponry, enabling them to spread destruction, corruption and killing across the land.
Brotherhood-affiliated armed formations have emerged prominently in Sudan’s war within a multi-layered system encompassing ideological, political, security and military dimensions. Their influence has not been limited to political activity or indoctrination; it has penetrated the core of security and military institutions.
Designating these entities would expose their networks and could contribute to isolating them by freezing assets within the United States, halting all commercial transactions with designated individuals or entities, and tracking the financial and organisational networks linked to the group.
Isolating currents of violence is a pathway toward peace and the rebuilding of institutions that represent society rather than its extremist elements. This, in turn, could restore hope for ending the war, curbing manifestations of extremism and preparing the ground for political transition — particularly as the group continues to undermine all such efforts, while the Sudanese people endure years of continuous war with little hope.
Today, it has become imperative for the armed forces to adopt a clear and appropriate stance toward their allies from the Brotherhood, current and similar factions.
The Sudanese situation reflects a broader dimension of international pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood and the targeting of its transnational organisational structures, alongside tightening restrictions on its financial and logistical support networks.
This shift reflects the evolving international view of the group, particularly in light of its extremist activities and a war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Sudanese and displaced around 12 million people, creating what the United Nations has described as the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis.
Historically, the Brotherhood’s influence has undermined Sudan’s path toward stability and development for decades, after the group succeeded in taking control of state institutions from top to bottom.
This approach has persisted, including its alliance in combat alongside the armed forces, its ideological infiltration of the military, and the formation of militias fighting alongside the army, while committing acts of violence and crime against the population, including mass executions, according to the United Nations.
Deepening the designation of the Brotherhood is, therefore, insufficient on its own, given its deep entrenchment within the military. This underscores the importance of restructuring the armed forces and state institutions and purging them of Brotherhood cells.
In recent months, the United States has designated certain branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organisations, particularly in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
Including the Sudanese branch would expand this designation, especially given the interconnected organisational structures among these groups across countries and their involvement in regional conflicts and wars.
However, such measures should not stop there, as the group continues to operate behind the scenes, infiltrating state structures or aligning with them to create conflicts that may ultimately destroy the state itself.
The Brotherhood’s transnational ambitions remain deeply embedded in its ideology. Whenever pressure is applied to one branch, it creates new entities and shifts its operations into permissible spaces despite designations and sanctions.
This calls for stricter monitoring of cross-border financing, sustained international oversight, the dismantling of global networks, the removal of Brotherhood-affiliated elements from state structures and the development of alternative narratives to counter its discourse of violence and bloodshed.
It also requires supporting the establishment of international committees to investigate and hold the group accountable for crimes committed against civilians, severing its ties with the military, state institutions and armed groups abroad.
Only then can Sudan emerge from the trap of war, prevent international initiatives from being stifled at birth, and move toward a future where its citizens can live in peace.
*The writer is a researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory
