On 9 March, the United States announced its intent to designate the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a "foreign terrorist organisation."
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the move by claiming that Sudan’s Islamic Movement - a broad and ambivalent label - had direct links with Iran.
While Sudan’s former autocratic leader and Islamist, Omar al-Bashir, cultivated close relations with Iran during his 30-year reign, it’s unclear to what extent Sudanese Islamists have ties with Iran today.
The FTO designation came days after the US and Israel waged an illegal war on Iran, which prompted some notable Sudanese Islamists, such as Al-Naji Abdullah, to vow support for Iran's defence.
The timing suggests that the US aims to punish groups with previous links to Iran or who support Iran rather than take measures to end Sudan’s devastating civil war, analysts say.
“Now that the US government as a whole has linked Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood with Iran, it draws Sudan far more into the theatre of this war between the US, Israel, and Iran,” Kholood Khair, an expert on Sudan and the founder of Confluence Advisory, a local think-tank, told The New Arab.
"Now, Sudan won’t be able to stay out of [this escalation] to the extent it might have wanted to."
Nobody spared
Beyond the FTO designation, analysts say the war on Iran will impact Sudan’s warring parties in the short and long term.
They expect immediate disruption to supply lines and for the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) to conceal its support for Islamist militias to appeal to the US. However, Gulf powers are likely to pour in more money, not less, to fuel Sudan’s war in the longer term.
Sudan erupted into an all-out war when the national army, or SAF, fell out with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023 over the timing of integrating the latter into the former.
The war drew in Arab powers, with Saudi Arabia and Egypt supporting the SAF and the UAE backing the RSF. These powers are now managing the repercussions from the regional war on Iran.
Over the last two weeks, Iran has fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf countries, targeting US military bases but also civilian infrastructure.
The attacks are destabilising the global economy and shattering the Gulf’s image of safety and stability. The knock-on effects are also compounding economic hardship in Egypt by hitting the tourism industry, causing capital flight, and depreciating the currency.
Suliman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, believes that both the SAF and the RSF will see a temporary disruption to supply lines as their regional backers prioritise their own security.
Shocks to the global economy will also make it difficult for both sides to import fuel, although that won’t stop them from fighting.
“What we will see in Sudan is a balance of weakness and an ongoing stalemate,” Baldo told TNA, suggesting the SAF and the RSF will be at an equal disadvantage.
The narrative war
The US intention to impose an FTO designation on groups aligned with Sudan’s Islamic Movement is a huge win for the RSF and the UAE, say analysts.
Both sides - and their backers - have lobbied Western governments to brand one another as terrorists since the start of the Sudan war.
The army argues that the RSF is a foreign-backed militia rebelling against the state, while the RSF portrays the SAF as an institution captured by Muslim extremists. Both sides oversimplify the war’s messy dynamics and Sudan’s complex history in an attempt to win Western legitimacy for their cause.
The RSF, for instance, has Islamists from the former ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in its ranks and ad-hoc bureaucracy. Many sided with the RSF due to their tribal ties with nomadic Arab militias that comprise the group's main base, not out of ideology.
Meanwhile, during the early 2000s, the SAF equipped and trained the nomadic Arab militias to crush a mainly non-Arab rebellion in Darfur. Those militias were later repackaged by al-Bashir into the RSF.
Echoing history, the SAF has created and empowered new militias to fight against the RSF, including overt Islamists.
“The SAF is in a position where it’s now going to have to distance itself from Islamists due to the FTO designation,” said Hamid Khalafallah, an expert on Sudan and a PhD candidate at Manchester University, UK.
On 15 March, the SAF arrested Al-Naji Abdullah, the Islamist commander who made remarks in support of Iran.
Khalafallah expects the army to make more cosmetic changes, such as giving militia leaders formal ranks and bringing groups nominally under the army’s command.
“In theory, the SAF had command over the RSF before the war erupted, but what did that amount to in practice?” said Khalafallah, noting that the RSF acted independently.
“I think we’ll see a similar arrangement between the army and these militias,” he added.
'Always money for war'
Before the US-Israeli war on Iran, the rivalry for regional influence between the UAE and Saudi Arabia was fuelling Sudan’s conflict.
With both Gulf powers now under attack, Baldo expects them to put their differences aside until the war is over. This could lead Saudi Arabia to dial back some of its investments in the Red Sea basin and Horn of Africa, according to Baldo.
He adds that this could hurt the SAF, which was counting on Saudi military aid to counter the UAE’s influence in Sudan.
“Now that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have to cooperate in the face of a common threat, I don’t think that is going to work in the favour of the [SAF-backed] government in Khartoum,” he told The New Arab.
"It’s going to reduce Khartoum’s ability to exploit the tensions between both Gulf powers."
Khair, from Confluence Advisory, also anticipates the Gulf to reduce its humanitarian assistance to prioritise its own reconstruction once the US-Israeli war on Iran ends.
Yet she argues that in the long term, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE will pour in even more money to aid their security clients in Sudan and the surrounding region.
Gulf powers, Khair says, will compete to buttress their own strategic regional depth while reassessing the utility of the US’s security architecture, which has exposed them to Iranian strikes.
“We need to make one thing clear: While [Gulf] money for civilian assets and humanitarian assistance will go down, there will always be money for wars,” Khair told TNA.
Mat Nashed is an award-nominated journalist who has covered the MENA region since the Arab Spring
Follow him on X: @matnashed
Edited by Charlie Hoyle