“Who said the Muslim Brotherhood controls the army?” Sudan's army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan indignantly asked in a recent address to his nation.
“Where exactly are they? It's hearsay. Come and show us where they are. Tell us what they look like. These are lies perpetuated to scare the Americans and our brothers in Egypt,” said the furious de facto ruler.
Gen Al Burhan's angry reaction to widespread reports that he's allied the army with Islamists once loyal to former dictator Omar Al Bashir, say analysts, amounts to little more than a crude ruse timed to coincide with efforts by the US and regional powers to end Sudan's 31-month-old civil war.
The general's perceived association with the Islamists, however, is far from being baseless and can hardly be viewed as far-fetched. Admission to the military academy had, for most of Al Bashir's 29-year rule, been conditional on a written recommendation by the dictator's then-ruling National Conference Party.
“For nearly three decades, no one joined the military academy who wasn't directly connected to the Islamist movement,” said Sami Saeed, a US-based Sudan expert. “The Islamists don't control Al Burhan as much as they control the entire army. They decide who does what and when, and he simply cannot get away from them. This is something that all Sudanese know to be a fact.”
It's also true that Gen Mohamed Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces – the army's war foe – has not shied away from repeatedly citing this to promote the RSF's cause and curry favour with the West and regional powers suspicious of Islamists.
Gen Dagalo, whose paramilitary's forerunner is a notorious militia called Janjaweed, has also been using the army's links to the Islamists as a central plank in a public discourse casting him as a champion of nationalism fighting to save Sudan from a repeat of the authoritarian and corrupt rule of the Islamists under Al Bashir.
Fighters and assets
While seemingly unconvincing, Gen Al Burhan's denial of links to Islamists coincides with moves by US President Donald Trump to designate the Muslim Brotherhood − source of the Islamist movement in Sudan and elsewhere in the region − as a terrorist organisation. It also comes at a time of growing calls by mediators to exclude the Islamists of Al Bashir's NCP from Sudan's postwar democratic transition.
“Talk about the influence of Islamists in the army, maybe a little exaggerated, but there certainly exists a tactical alliance between them that, at least for now, serves the interests of both parties,” said Sudanese analyst Osman Al Mirghani.
“Al Burhan needs their men in the fight against the Rapid Support Forces and to train civilian volunteers. He also needs their vast economic and political assets, because he has none of his own.
“For the Islamists, Al Burhan and the war offer them a possible route back to power,” said Mr Al Mirghani, who cited the appointment in May of several Islamists in the military-backed government of Prime Minister Kamil Idris.
The Islamists, moreover, are known to have close links with several regional powers. Those connections are believed to have helped the army procure weapons from Islamist-friendly countries.
In reality, contend Mr Al Mirghani and other analysts, Gen Al Burhan is the architect of the return of the Islamists to the public sphere after their patron Al Bashir was toppled by the military in 2019 amid a popular uprising against his regime.
Their resurgence began when Gen Al Burhan and Gen Dagalo staged a coup in 2021 that toppled a civilian-led, transitional government, plunged the country into chaos and revived its international standing as a pariah state, as it was for most of Al Bashir's years in power.
Soon after, a powerful committee set up to dismantle Al Bashir's Islamist legacy was dissolved. Al Bashir loyalists who had been purged from government and security agencies were reinstated. The suspension or dissolution of charities and institutions belonging to Al Bashir's NCP were reversed, as party stalwarts had their convictions overturned and walked free.
But the significant part of the Islamists' comeback did not begin until shortly after the war between the army and the RSF broke out in April 2023.
Walking free
Islamists imprisoned by the civilian-led government toppled in the 2021 coup, including Al Bashir, walked free, and an acute army shortage of soldiers meant that thousands of Al Bashir-era security operatives joined in the fight against the RSF.
That shortage of troops has been growing over the years. Traditionally, the army relied on recruits from outlying regions like Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile. These are areas where rebels have taken up arms against the central government in long-running insurgencies that have steadily lured foot soldiers away from the army and into the ranks of the rebels.
It's a predicament that helped lead Gen Al Burhan to rely on the Islamists who once fought for Al Bashir in Darfur, where a civil war raged in the 2000s, or in Southern Sudan, where another one continued for more than 20 years, ending in 2005 when the mainly Christian region won self-determination and eventually seceded in 2011.
According to some estimates, the number of fighters who joined the army in its war against the RSF and are directly linked to the NCP is about 5,000, mainly serving in “special forces” units that have made some of the largest gains for the military, particularly in Khartoum, which was retaken from the RSF in March.
Other Islamist-trained combatants are believed to be serving in an elite, reconstituted unit belonging to the general intelligence service.
The Islamists also take credit for training hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians who answered SAF calls for public mobilisation. Of those, more than 70,000 joined operations − a move that greatly bolstered the army's diminished ground forces.
The current war in Sudan is the latest episode in a history of strife that has plagued the country since independence in 1956. It's essentially a fight for political domination between Gen Al Burhan and his one-time ally Gen Dagalo. Tension between the two over their future in a democratic Sudan boiled over into open warfare on April 15, 2023, which has killed tens of thousands and led to the world's worst humanitarian and displacement crises.
Politically, according to an interview given to Reuters earlier this year by Ahmed Haroun, the NCP chairman and one of four Sudanese wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur in the 2000s, the Islamists expect the army to stay in power after the war, and that elections would provide a route back to power for his party and the greater Islamist movement.
“We have taken a strategic decision not to return to power other than by the ballot box after the war,” said Mr Haroun, who escaped from prison at the start of the war and is now in hiding.
Anticipated power grab
Gen Al Burhan had on several occasions denied that militias fighting with the army belonged to a political party or were of a certain ideological persuasion, insisting they were ordinary citizens who answered his call to arms.
But indications that an alliance exists between him and the Islamists persist, straining relations with regional powers that see the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated groups as an existential threat to stability.
“The influence of the Islamists is not rooted in popularity but rather in a number of security and administrative networks that have long been in place and remained loyal to this day,” said Sudanese analyst Osman Fadlallah.
“Al Burhan deliberately tries to publicly distance himself from them to avoid international isolation, and that's why when differences between him and the Islamists surface, they always seem to be a mix of competition for influence and calculated deception.”
Al Burhan's alliance with the Islamists is also partially rooted in his own political ambitions, of which his detractors see glimpses in his insistence on pressing on with the war until the RSF is vanquished − a goal widely deemed to be somewhat unrealistic without a significant change in the balance of power.
Another sign is his adamant rejection of any roadmap for peace that gives the RSF a place in postwar Sudan, insisting that a “militia” held responsible for ethnic cleansing and other war crimes cannot be a future political stakeholder.
That line of argument, however, ignores the fact that both Gen Al Burhan and Gen Dagalo stand accused of war crimes and are sanctioned by the US − though the RSF is blamed for much more serious crimes, including the killing of civilians in the Darfur city of El Fasher when its fighters captured it last month and the mass killings in Geneina, another Darfur city, of ethnic African tribesmen in the summer of 2023.
The army is accused of indiscriminately shelling and conducting air strikes that have killed thousands of civilians, and of using chemical weapons. Its allied militias, particularly the Islamists, are also accused of extrajudicial killings of suspected RSF collaborators or arbitrary detentions.
“I believe that Al Burhan and the Islamists, though allied, don't trust each other but realise they do need each other at this stage,” said another Sudanese analyst, Omar Abdelaziz.
“Al Burhan needs their men to fight with him now, but may not feel obliged to reward the Islamists when the war is over, and he goes for his anticipated power grab. For their part, the Islamists realise that prolonging the war serves their quest for power since all peace roadmaps want them out of Sudan's future.”
Al Shafie Ahmed contributed to this report from Kampala, Uganda.
