Sudan's civil war paves way for political comeback of Al Bashir's Islamist followers

Islamists are making a comeback in Sudan, activists and pro-democracy politicians say, taking advantage of the civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces to gain political influence five years after their patron, dictator Omar Al Bashir, was overthrown after a popular uprising.

“God has sent us this war to restore the glory and strength of the Islamic movement,” said Sheikh Abdul Hay Youssef, one of Sudan's most influential Islamist leaders. “Tens of thousands of our youths have been trained to use arms and serve in the so-called 'Popular Resistance', which they use to avoid using the word jihad,” he said in a recent television interview.

Islamists, not Sudan's army, were behind recent battlefield gains against the RSF, he said, a claim that drew an angry response from armed forces commander Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan.

In what probably is the Islamists' boldest step since 2019, Al Bashir's once-ruling National Congress Party (NCP), held a meeting of its advisory council in Atbara in northern Sudan last month and elected as party leader Ahmed Haroun, a top Al Bashir aide wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur in the 2000s.

“The decision to elect Ahmed Haroun sends a strong and clear message to the international community that political Islam in Sudan is back without heed to moral or legal considerations,” said Nisreen Mukhtar, a political activist who rose to prominence in Sudan as a women's rights advocate.

“To elect a man wanted by the International Criminal Court is … a dangerous political development that signals the demise of the [2019] revolution” that toppled Al Bashir.

Sudan's armed forces, particularly the army, have long been known to harbour Islamists within the ranks of their top brass, the fruition of three decades of relentless so-called Islamisation by Al Bashir to ensure that supporters infiltrated key state institutions and served as a shield against possible military coups.

These Islamists are deeply resentful of the secular, pro-democracy politicians who seek to force the military out of politics, and are also known to have facilitated the return of the former dictator's supporters to the political stage, according to activists.

“The muddled political environment in Sudan that became even more so because of the continuing war has allowed members of the [Islamist] National Conference Party to move freely at all levels of the state,” said Zuheir Osman, a prominent activist and a leader of the anti-Al Bashir uprising in 2019.

The return of Islamists to a position of political eminence in the vast, resource-rich, Afro-Arab nation, according to prominent Sudanese analyst Osman Al Mirghany and the activists, carries potentially grave consequences not only for Sudan but also for the security of East Africa, the Sahel and the Middle East; regions where extremists are fighting government forces, giving rise to lawlessness and chaos.

Under Al Bashir's 29-year Islamist rule, Sudan was an international pariah that suffered damaging sanctions and was scarred by widespread human rights abuse. The ethnically and religiously diverse nation with a long coastline on the strategic Red Sea also became a magnet for militants under Al Bashir – the late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sojourned there in the 1990s – and was designated a sponsor of terrorism by the US.

The repeated rejection by Gen Al Burhan of initiatives presented by foreign powers to end Sudan's civil war through negotiations is widely believed to be inspired by the general's own political ambitions, said Mr Al Mirghany. It is also attributed to Islamists who are convinced that a military victory over the RSF is their ticket back to power in Sudan, he added.

“The Islamists are grossly exaggerating their contribution to military operations against the RSF as part of a political agenda designed to shame civilian political factions and appear before the Sudanese public as the heroes who saved Sudan,” he said.

“In fact, both the army and the Islamists are in this alliance for different reasons. Al Burhan is using them to his advantage in the hope he can later get rid of them and secure his leadership of the nation while they are hoping to emerge from the war as saviours who enjoy popular support for their return to power.”

RSF commander Gen Mohamed Dagalo has tirelessly vilified the army for forging an alliance with the Islamists, claiming Gen Al Burhan and his top aides are beholden to them. He has done that in large part to promote an image of the paramilitary and himself as proponents of a democratic and inclusive Sudan.

The war has devastated the impoverished a nation of about 50 million people. Tens of thousands have been killed and more than half the population faces acute hunger. More than 10 million people have fled their homes, with three million finding refuge in neighbouring countries.

The Islamists' journey back to the political scene in Sudan began when Gen Al Burhan and his one-time ally Gen Dagalo seized power in a 2021 coup. Their power grab derailed Sudan's democratic transition, ushered in a political and security vacuum, and the reversal of many of the measures taken after Al Bashir's ousting to dismantle the legacy of his corrupt rule.

However, the single event that accelerated the Islamists' march back to political relevance may have been the outbreak of the war in which the RSF quickly made important territorial gains, pushing the army out of most of Khartoum, almost all of the western region of Darfur, parts of Kordofan to the south-west and Al Gezira region south of the capital.

Short-handed and embarrassed by the battlefield setbacks, Gen Al Burhan and his top army aides turned to the Islamists, looking to the thousands of men who once served in Al Bashir's infamous militias to take up arms and join them in the fight against the RSF.

Soon after the outbreak of the war on April 15, 2023, Al Bashir's top lieutenants were sprung out of jail. Once free, they worked diligently to reorganise the ranks of the Islamists once grouped in Al Bashir's ruling NCP. Al Bashir himself has been moved out of the capital and now lives in Meroe, a city north of Khartoum, where he resides in a state guesthouse protected by troops.

For his part, Gen Al Burhan has gone to great lengths to try to conceal the political persuasion of the thousands of volunteers who joined the fight against the RSF, calling them “Popular Resistance” brigades or the Mustanfareen, Arabic for those who rise up and rally behind a cause.

“The people fighting do not belong to anyone … they are Sudanese who care about their country,” he said last month of the volunteers, who themselves and their leaders appear to have had no qualms about publicising their political persuasion. They give their units names with clear Islamist slants.

Video clips shared online of end-of-training or induction ceremonies for volunteers have a distinct Islamist character too, be it the chants screamed by the men or the rhetoric of speakers.

“The Islamist movement with all its strength and youths entered this war and applied what it had learnt from the war in south Sudan in the 1990s,” Sheikh Youssef said, alluding to the 1983-2005 civil war between the government in Khartoum and rebels from the mainly Christian and animist south of Sudan.

Rights groups in Sudan have accused the Islamist volunteers of abusing civilians in areas retaken by army units they fight with, singling out residents who hail from Darfur – birthplace of the RSF's forerunner, the Janjaweed militia – accusing them of being RSF sympathisers or spies.

The election of Mr Haroun, the top Al Bashir aide, to lead the NCP, has implications for the party and the nation at a critical time. It has opened a rift within the party, with another senior NCP leader, Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamed, rejecting Mr Haroun's election and insisting he remains the legitimate party leader.

The schism appears to have alarmed Gen Al Burhan, fearing that it could negatively impact on the commitment and unity of the thousands of volunteers fighting alongside the army.

In a speech late last month that underlined the army's heavy reliance on the volunteers as well as Gen Al Burhan's own commitment to prosecute the war until victory, he said the advisory council meeting in Atbara was divisive.

“We do not accept any political activity that threatens the unity of Sudan or its fighters,” he said in Port Sudan, seat of the military-backed government on the Red Sea east of Khartoum. “We do not need any [political] conflicts or divisions, we have one goal which is to defeat the rebels.”

Significantly, Gen Al Burhan said nothing about whether the dissolved NCP had a right to hold a public meeting, but his assessment of the likely impact of the rift within the party was echoed by a Sudanese legal expert, Megahed Osman.

“The situation cannot accommodate political rifts,” said Mr Osman. “Things must be wisely handled and the dissolved party must not be seen to be active before the Sudanese people and international community.”

With reports from Al Shafie Ahmed in Kampala