This article was written in conjunction with two senior former ministers of the Sudanese civilian government.
When Sudan joined the Abraham Accords framework in late 2020, it represented something genuinely remarkable. Here was a country that had spent three decades as a hub for jihadist networks and radical ideology under Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime – now pivoting toward civilian governance, regional integration, and normalization with Israel. It was a shining example of what the Abraham Accords could mean beyond the Gulf: not merely a diplomatic transaction, but a civilizational reorientation.
That promise was not killed by the Abraham Accords. It was killed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
How Sudan Got Here
The 2019 revolution that toppled Bashir represented a genuine popular uprising against thirty years of Islamist rule. The Sudanese people – not foreign powers, not Western pressure – drove that change. The transitional civilian government that followed began dismantling the networks, confiscating the assets, and reversing the radical infrastructure the Brotherhood had built. It was within that context that Sudan entered the Abraham Accords framework in 2020, less than a year into the transition.
Then came the coup.
In October 2021, the military, deeply infiltrated by Brotherhood cadres, staged a takeover and ended the civilian transition. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who presents himself to Western and Gulf audiences as a pragmatic nationalist, is in fact the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational network within the Sudanese armed forces. The coup was not a military power grab in the conventional sense. It was the Brotherhood’s mechanism for recapturing the state before the civilians could permanently dismantle their infrastructure.
The war that erupted in 2023 completed that capture.
The Scale of the Reversal
The reversal of Sudan’s democratic opening has been total and deliberate. One of the first acts following the coup was the return of billions of dollars in assets – estimates range into the tens of billions – that had been confiscated from Islamist and Hamas-linked networks during the transitional period. Those funds went back to the Brotherhood’s financial ecosystem.
The security apparatus has been rebuilt along the lines of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the establishment of a unit modeled on the IRGC’s Quds Force. Key ambassadorial posts have been filled with senior Brotherhood cadres: the ambassador to Iran is a former head of intelligence operations targeting universities and student bodies; the ambassador to Oman previously served as director of the Islamic Movement’s military office. These are not technocrats. They are operatives.
Burhan has simultaneously deepened Sudan’s relationship with Tehran. Iran, which had been pushed out of Sudan by 2015 through the efforts of figures like General Taha and with support from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has now returned in force. Sudan’s military-industrial complex, a billion-dollar enterprise producing munitions, missiles, and drones, is substantially Iranian-built and Iranian-staffed. Iranian experts are now operating from a base on the Red Sea, supporting Sudanese drone operations directly.
Most alarmingly, Iran is working to link Sudan’s military infrastructure directly to the Houthi network in Yemen, creating a continuous Iranian operational corridor across the Red Sea. The Houthis threatened Israeli and Western shipping from Yemen. That threat would become geometrically more dangerous if extended westward to Sudan, a country far closer to Israeli territory and to the Suez corridor.
The Brotherhood networks operating within the Sudanese state are in active communication with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard through an organizational cell headed by a former Deputy Director of Sudanese Intelligence. The U.S. Treasury’s 2023 sanctions on Abdul Bassit Hamza, a prominent Sudanese Islamist figure identified as part of the financial network supporting Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, confirm that Sudan’s Islamist infrastructure was not merely passive during the lead-up to that massacre.
Meanwhile, militia forces aligned with Burhan openly chant anti-Jewish slogans and vow to “liberate Jerusalem” after winning in Sudan – wearing Palestinian keffiyehs as they do so. The symbolism is not accidental.
The Narrative War
There is now an active campaign by Brotherhood-aligned voices to declare the Abraham Accords a failure in Sudan. The argument goes: normalization brought no stability, no prosperity, no security – therefore, normalization is meaningless. This narrative must be rejected clearly. The Abraham Accords did not destabilize Sudan. The Brotherhood’s coup destabilized Sudan. The Accords’ promise was aborted before it could be realized, precisely because the forces that oppose normalization understood the stakes and acted accordingly.
What Must Happen Now
Restoring Sudan’s trajectory, and with it the possibility of returning to the Abraham Accords framework, requires a coordinated strategy across several tracks.
First, the war must end. The continuation of the conflict benefits only the Brotherhood, which uses it as cover for consolidating control of state institutions, the security services, and the economy. Ceasing hostilities is the precondition for everything else.
Second, the civilian transition must be restored and supported. The civilians who initiated the democratic opening and participated in the Abraham Accords framework are still there. They represent Sudan’s genuine pro-peace constituency, and they need international backing.
Third, the Muslim Brotherhood’s networks must be systematically targeted and dismantled. The United States has already designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a significant step that should now be operationalized. That means targeting financial networks, sanctioning key leaders, and cutting off weapons supply lines. Europe, which remains a significant operating base for Brotherhood-linked entities, must be brought into this framework. The American designation creates a legal and political foundation; a broader alliance is needed to enforce it.
Fourth, the Iran-Sudan axis must be disrupted. The military-industrial cooperation, the drone infrastructure, and the emerging Houthi-Sudan corridor in the Red Sea represent a regional threat that extends far beyond Sudan’s borders.
If these conditions can be created, Sudan’s return to the Abraham Accords framework becomes not only possible but potentially transformative. Sudan has oil, gas, gold, critical minerals, and vast agricultural capacity. Post-conflict reconstruction cannot be built on charity; it requires investment. The Abraham Accords network – Israeli, American, Emirati, Saudi – can provide exactly that investment framework, linking Sudan’s reconstruction to its reintegration into the regional order.
The story of Sudan and the Abraham Accords is not a story of failure. It is a story interrupted. The Brotherhood aborted a democratic transition that the Sudanese people built. The question now is whether the international community has the strategic clarity to help them finish what they started.
