The US State Department has designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), and also plans to designate it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO).
In an announcement on 9 March, the State Department identified the Sudanese Islamic Movement and the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade (BBMB) - the political and armed wings of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood respectively – as terrorist organisations. The groups stand accused of using ‘unrestrained violence against civilians’ to undermine attempts to resolve the conflict in Sudan, and advancing a ‘violent Islamist ideology’.
The BBMB, which is affiliated with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), is responsible for extensive human rights violations, including vandalising and detonating explosives in a mosque in an SAF-controlled area in March 2024, and ethnically motivated attacks against South Sudanese nationals and the Kanabi community, who are predominantly from Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State, following the SAF takeover of Gezira State in January 2025.
The brigade is also among a range of SAF-affiliated extremist militias responsible for extrajudicial killings of suspected Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters or civilians accused of being affiliated with them. CSW sources reported that the attacks and killings were incited by Islamist extremist preachers, who encouraged the SAF to leave no captives alive.
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood in various forms had dominated Sudan’s politics, legal frameworks, policy and military after the 1989 coup led by former President Omar al Bashir. The 2018/2019 civilian-led protests that resulted in the arrest and removal of al Bashir were a resounding popular rejection of the Islamist project in Sudan. Under the civilian-led transitional government, members of al Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) were banned from participating in the administration and accessing government jobs.
The civilian transition also created a ‘dismantling committee’ tasked with investigating and undoing the mechanisms that had enabled the NCP to dominate the state. However, after the October 2021 coup by the SAF and RSF terminated the agreed transition process, civilian politicians were arrested or detained, the former NCP leader was briefly released from prison before being rearrested, and the military leadership appointed several former members of the NCP to political office.
In its 2026 Annual Report the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended for the first time that the US State Department designate the RSF as an Entity of Particular Concern (EPC). USCIRF’s recommendation highlighted the ‘harmful effects to religious freedom and Sudan’s diverse religious and ethnic communities’ caused by the RSF’s campaign of mass atrocities and widespread human rights violations.
CSW’s Founder President Mervyn Thomas said: ‘CSW welcomes the US State Department’s decision to designate the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, and especially its armed wing, as terrorist groups for the severe human rights abuses they have committed, and continue to commit, during the current conflict. The designation supports the rejection of the Islamist political project by the overwhelming majority of the Sudanese people, whose protests during the 2018/19 revolution ousted Omar al Bashir. We also call on the State Department to review the acts of the RSF under the terrorism designation and adopt the recommendation of USCIRF to designate that militia an Entity of Particular Concern.’
Note to Editors:
- A Specially Designated Global Terrorist is an individual or entity designated by the US State Department, or the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, for committing, or posing a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism.