As a student activist in Sudan under Brotherhood rule, I learned what it meant to hold views the regime considered unforgivable. Calling for democracy, liberalism, and secularism carried the constant threat of imprisonment, torture, or death. So, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the Sudanese Islamic Movement (SIM) and its armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, as terrorist organizations last week, I recognized what the designation finally acknowledges. But the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood is not a product of the conflict that erupted in April 2023. It is the architect of the political order that made that conflict inevitable. Understanding how the Brotherhood evolved from an ideological movement into a military force; and why the United States finally acted; requires tracing a lineage that stretches back over seven decades.

From Campus Politics to State Capture

The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1954, modeled on its Egyptian parent organization but shaped by distinctly Sudanese conditions. For its first three decades, the movement operated primarily within universities and professional unions, building a cadre of ideologically committed members who would later occupy key positions in government, the military, and the judiciary. Its transformation from a social movement into a political force was driven almost entirely by one man: Hassan al-Turabi.

Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated legal scholar, understood that the Brotherhood could not seize power through elections alone in a country as ethnically and religiously diverse as Sudan. His strategy was institutional infiltration. By the 1980s, Brotherhood members had penetrated the officer corps of the Sudanese Armed Forces, the banking sector through Islamic finance institutions, and the intelligence services. When General Omar al-Bashir launched his coup on June 30, 1989, it was Turabi’s National Islamic Front (NIF), the Brotherhood’s political vehicle, that provided the ideological blueprint and the civilian governance apparatus. The coup was not a military takeover that the Brotherhood later co-opted; it was a Brotherhood project executed through military means.

The Bashir Era: Islamism as State Policy

Under the Bashir-Turabi partnership, Sudan became a laboratory for political Islam in Africa. The regime-imposed Sharia law on a multi-religious population, purged secularists and moderates from state institutions, and transformed the security services into instruments of ideological enforcement. Khartoum became a haven for Islamist militants from across the region, including, for a period in the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden. The Brotherhood’s influence extended into every dimension of governance, education curricula were rewritten, media was subjected to Islamist censorship, and civil society organizations were either absorbed into the movement or destroyed.

The Brotherhood’s project was not an abstraction to Darfuris; it was the ideology that justified the marginalization of non-Arab and non-Islamist communities across Sudan’s peripheries. The same security apparatus that Turabi built, and that the Brotherhood staffed, would later oversee the genocide in Darfur beginning in 2001. The Janjaweed militias that carried out the killings were armed and directed by a state whose governing ideology was the Brotherhood’s.

When Bashir was overthrown by popular revolution in April 2019, the Brotherhood did not disappear. It retreated into the very institutions it had spent thirty years building: its networks within the military, intelligence, and economy remained intact.

The Brotherhood at War

When civil war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the Brotherhood saw an opportunity to reclaim the state it had lost. The Sudanese Islamic Movement mobilized the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, a fighting force that the U.S. State Department now estimates at upwards of twenty thousand combatants. These are not irregular. They are ideologically trained fighters, many of whom received direct support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as I detailed in my previous article.

The depth of the Brotherhood’s control over the SAF is no longer a matter of speculation. A leaked video, reported by Sky News Arabia, showed a senior Brotherhood figure openly declaring that General al-Burhan serves merely as the public face of the military while the Islamist organization exercises actual command over the army’s strategic direction. This admission aligns with what many Sudanese analysts have long argued: that the Sudanese Islamic Movement, operates as the real power behind the military’s war effort. Its network supplies the SAF with manpower, financing, and public mobilization capacity that al-Burhan’s conventional military structure cannot generate on its own. In return, the Brotherhood secures its grip over Sudan’s institutions and positions itself to dominate the post-war political order.

Further confirmation came from within the army’s own ranks. Lt. Gen. Yasser al-Atta, the assistant commander-in-chief of the SAF, acknowledged in a circulated video that six to seven Brotherhood battalions are actively fighting alongside the military. This is not an allegation from external critics; it is an admission by one of Sudan’s most senior military commanders. The Brotherhood’s wartime role, then, is not peripheral support, it is structural integration. Every serious mediation effort, from the Jeddah talks to African Union initiatives, has been undermined by this alliance, because for the Brotherhood, any compromise represents an existential threat to its project of completing the state capture that the 2019 revolution interrupted.

The Designation and Its Implications

Trump administration’s designation matters for three reasons. First, it formally names the Brotherhood’s armed wing as a terrorist organization, subjecting its members and financiers to sanctions, asset freezes, and potential prosecution. The Brotherhood’s financial networks, spanning Gulf-based charities, and Islamic banking institutions, are now legitimate targets for financial enforcement. Second, the designation draws an explicit connection between the Brotherhood and Iran, identifying Tehran as the enabling force behind the SIM’s military capacity. U.S. senior adviser Massad Boulos confirmed directly that the IRGC has supported Brotherhood-linked fighters in Sudan, placing the conflict squarely within the broader framework of American policy toward Iranian proxy networks. Third, the designation sends an unambiguous political signal to the SAF leadership: continued alliance with the Brotherhood carries international consequences.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'jAqx70CjQbF16JAHFOeKMA',sig:'ufWRfd_rjG3z1RghsoSpPIaihW2_N1xNa1mDuRtZ6Nw=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2212010562',caption: false ,tld:'com',is360: false })}); Whether this signal will alter behavior remains to be seen. The leaked video and al-Atta’s own admissions reveal the core of al-Burhan’s dilemma: the war created a desperate need for fighters that the Brotherhood was only too willing to provide but accepting that support has placed the army under the effective control of the very Islamist movement it claims to be independent from. The designation may provide al-Burhan with political cover to distance the military from its most radical allies. Alternatively, the Brotherhood’s institutional depth may prove too entrenched to dislodge without a more fundamental transformation of Sudan’s power structure.

For those of us who have lived under the Brotherhood’s shadow, the designation is a moment of recognition, belated but consequential. For seventy years, this movement has treated Sudan as its proving ground, its people as subjects of an ideological experiment, and its diversity as a problem to be erased.

The path to peace in Sudan does not run through the Brotherhood. It runs around it, over it, and ultimately without it. The designation is one step. The dismantling of its Iranian patron, as I argued yesterday, is another. Together, they represent the most credible framework for ending a war that the Brotherhood spent decades making inevitable.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)