Inside the Sudanese army coalition split over Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood
On Wednesday, as the proposed two-week halt to the war on Iran was being announced, Sudan’s army-led government issued a statement condemning Iranian strikes on energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia’s Jubail industrial city.
The statement joined others issued in the six weeks since the US and Israel attacked Iran, and appeared again to be a bit of diplomatic repositioning from Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Sudan’s de facto head of state, after elements of his coalition had very publicly backed the Islamic Republic.
The war on Iran has highlighted divisions in the Sudanese army’s coalition, which includes self-proclaimed jihadist groups as well as secular activists who participated in the Sudanese revolution that led to the removal of Islamist-backed autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
Three overlapping disputes haunt this political landscape: Iran, the rift between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the US designation of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.
In 2015, Bashir, who came to power in 1989, cut ties with his former ally Iran and joined the Saudi and Emirati coalition’s war against the Houthis in Yemen, sending Sudanese fighters drawn primarily from Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
While the UAE, which today backs the RSF in its war against the SAF, has been excluded from official statements of Sudanese sympathy, Burhan has largely followed late-era Bashir in choosing to condemn Iranian attacks on Gulf countries rather than US and Israeli attacks on Iran.
Despite Iran sending drones to the SAF - drones that have helped tip the balance of power in Sudan’s war against the RSF - the Sudanese foreign ministry has spoken out against attacks on Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan and even Azerbaijan.
Support for Iran
Burhan’s attempt to distance himself and his Port Sudan government from Iran was challenged shortly after the war on Iran began, when Al-Naji Abdullah, a self-proclaimed jihadist, prominent member of the Popular Congress Party (PCP) and strong ally of Burhan during Sudan’s war, announced his support for Iran.
“We say in front of everyone that if the Americans and Zionists continue their aggression against our brothers in Iran and want to begin a ground invasion there, we will send our forces to fight with them,” Abdullah said at a Ramadan gathering on 3 March.
“We have the equipment, munitions and drones ready to go,” he said, having only recently come back from commanding forces on the front lines against the RSF.
Burhan reacted to the remarks by threatening to eradicate anyone within the SAF coalition who wanted to put out a different position on foreign affairs to that of the Sudanese government.
'Sudan is still very fragile and we won’t complicate the situation... We are standing with the SAF in whatever it decides'
- National Congress Party source
“We have a message for those causing disturbance inside Sudan, this group that appeared yesterday,” the general said, referring to Abdullah. “We won’t allow any group to speak out instead of the SAF, to hijack its voice or the name of the Sudanese state.” On 15 March, Abdullah was arrested.
Other Islamist factions, including Bashir’s former National Congress Party (NCP), and the self-described jihadist group al-Bara ibn Malik brigade, which has been fighting alongside the SAF, have toed the line with Burhan.
“Sudan is still very fragile and we won’t complicate the situation. We only want to focus right now on how we contain the impact of this regional war [the Iran war] on us,” a source close to the NCP leadership, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Middle East Eye.
“We are standing with the SAF in whatever it decides. We need to keep the SAF supplies as they are not so far impacted by the war and continue defeating the RSF and its regional suppliers militarily,” the source said. “This is our only aim at the moment.”
Cameron Hudson, a former intelligence analyst in the CIA’s Africa directorate, told MEE he thought Sudan had for a long time served its immediate interests, not its strategic ones.
“Sudan has a lot of experience shifting allegiances to serve its immediate interests. Bashir perfected this during his time in power. I am not sure that the current SAF leadership is as good at this as Bashir was, but their survival depends on it,” Hudson said.
“Sudan has been warned throughout the war by the US and others of the risks of their association with Iran. When Washington announced its recent sanctions on the Muslim Brotherhood it linked the action directly back to Iran,” Hudson said.
Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood designation
The support shown by the al-Bara ibn Malik brigade over the SAF’s decision not to back Iran following US and Israeli attacks did not save it from the wrath of US lawmakers.
On 9 March, the US state department released a statement saying it had designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) a terrorist group, citing “training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)”.
The designation included al-Bara ibn Malik, which the US described as the “armed wing” of the SMB. The state department said both groups use “unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology”.
'This designation is only ink on paper… It is aimed at supporting the RSF'
- Ammar Abdul Wahab, al-Bara ibn Malik
It went on to say that the SMB had contributed “upwards of 20,000 fighters to the war in Sudan”, and that many of them had been trained or supported by the IRGC.
Ammar Abdul Wahab, a spokesperson for al-Bara ibn Malik, told MEE they had nothing to do with the US designation. “This designation is only ink on paper… It is aimed at supporting the RSF - it’s a tool to weaken the SAF and the forces fighting for it and everybody who rejects external intervention in Sudan,” he said.
The RSF’s main patron, the UAE, has long opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and has lobbied in Washington for it to be designated a terrorist group.
“Our position is that we are calling for the unity of the leadership of the country and the forces that are fighting with it,” Wahab said.
“This designation has no effect on the ground because we have no ties with the US or bank accounts outside Sudan. It’s just an attempt to demonise us but. Our response is to focus on our battle of dignity and the defeat of the enemy [RSF],” said al-Bara ibn Malik’s spokesperson.
Burhan denies any political affiliation
After the UAE-controlled Sky News Arabia leaked a video purporting to show a former deputy of Omar al-Bashir saying that Burhan was close to NCP and SMB figures who previously ruled Sudan, Burhan once again stressed that his leadership had no political affiliation.
Hudson, who has met with Burhan in Sudan multiple times, said he thought the Sudanese general needed to make his position regarding ties to the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood clearer, to avoid western condemnation.
“Like with Iran, Burhan knows that his association with Islamist groups hurts him in the long term with the international community, even if their support in the war helps him in the short term,” the US analyst on Sudan said.
“This is the fundamental trade-off. The fact is that Burhan has made many speeches saying that Islamists would be removed, dismantled and prevented from returning to power, but at the same time they appear to function and even gain in influence.”
Hudson told MEE he believed Burhan would, “at some point very soon”, be “forced to choose”.
Burhan’s government is facing pressure to limit the influence of the SMB and other Islamist groupings not just from Washington but also from regional allies including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed his predecessor, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in a military coup.
Hamdok's group praises terrorist designation
In the meantime, the civilian political coalition led by former Sudanese prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, who is now based in the UAE, has insisted that the SAF-backed government is still on Iran’s side. It has also welcomed the US designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.
Gaafar Hassan, spokesperson for the group, which is now called Somoud, said the designation would help bring peace to Sudan after three years of war.
“This group has practised and is still practising inside and outside the country, including the killing of Sudanese,” he said, of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, referring to several historical attacks connected to the group, including the attempted assassination of former Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
“Anybody who wants to end the war in Sudan has to designate the SMB as a terrorist group, which is responsible for the eruption of the war and for prolonging it,” Hassan said.
While it is not known who fired the first shot, Sudan’s war, which erupted in April 2023, began with an RSF attack on Burhan’s residency in Khartoum. The SAF has been reluctant to negotiate an end to the war, saying there can be no peace while the RSF, which has been widely accused of genocide, still exists.
Somoud has also said it would restart the committee that - before the military coup of 2021 led by Burhan and RSF chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti - was dismantling the network of corruption and money laundering connected to Bashir’s administration.
An official in the SAF-backed Port Sudan government downplayed the establishment of the committee, adding that it has no legal basis or value.
“This committee is an opportunistic way to weaken the SAF and to exploit the recent US decisions against the SMB to create instability in the country, falsely linking Sudan with Iran in order to push the international community into imposing more pressure on the SAF,” the official, who asked not to be named, told MEE. “All it does in the end is help the RSF.”
Balance of power
On the battlefield, the SAF controls the capital Khartoum, as well as the centre, north and east of Sudan.
Despite making inroads into Blue Nile state, with the help of a base in Ethiopia, as exclusively reported by MEE, the RSF’s powerbase remains Darfur, the vast region of western Sudan that has been at war for much of this century.
The paramilitary group has also seized some strategic locations across the Kordofan region of south-central Sudan, including the city of Bara.
“Many analysts have predicted that the UAE will be too preoccupied with the war in Iran to continue their support for the RSF in Sudan, but so far that does not seem to be the case,” Hudson said.
“At the same time, there are many reports suggesting that both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are growing frustrated with the SAF leadership.”
Both sides, said Hudson, “are completely dependent on outside support to continue the war”, with the SAF also receiving help from Turkey.
“But everything depends on what people believe the future role of Islamists will be. Even the army’s allies are growing wary of this question,” said the former CIA analyst.
For now, despite the war on Iran, support for the RSF continues to come from Abu Dhabi, as the three-year anniversary of the war in Sudan, which has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced more than 11 million people, looms into view.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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