Will Burhan Urge the World to Designate the Rapid Support Forces as a Terrorist Organization?

Abdallah Ali Ibrahim

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Chairman of the Sudanese Sovereign Council and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, has called on the world to classify the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with whom he has been engaged in conflict for a year and a half, as a terrorist organization. In a recent speech in China, he stated that their rebellion aims to “seize power through armed force, serving the ambitions of irrational regional powers.” He urged the international community to designate them as a “terrorist group, help eliminate them, and condemn their actions or any cooperation with them.”

Burhan had made a similar request during Sudan’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on June 21, 2023, where he said the Sudanese people have been facing a devastating war since mid-April 2023, waged by the RSF in alliance with “tribal, regional, and international militias, and mercenaries from around the world.” He added that the RSF had committed “crimes against humanity and war crimes across much of Sudan, including ethnic cleansing and sexual violence.” He emphasized that the crimes committed in areas such as Geneina in West Darfur were shocking to the global conscience and reiterated his demand to classify the RSF as a terrorist group and help eliminate them.

The UN heard this request again from Sudan’s ambassador, who reiterated the same call during a Security Council meeting on Sudan’s war last Monday. He emphasized that the RSF is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the state and noted that his demand coincided with the U.S. remembrance of 9/11, which shaped America’s doctrine on terrorism.

But what are the chances of Burhan successfully convincing the world to label the RSF as a terrorist organization? It’s not hard to predict that Western circles are unlikely to heed this call. The RSF does not bear the Islamic label that would make it easy to associate them with terrorism. Their name and agenda are in no way connected to Islam. In fact, their open hostility to Sudanese Islamists might even grant them a “clean bill of health,” as some might say.

The United States, more than any other country, has been heavily invested in defining terrorism due to its global stature and the 9/11 attacks, which marked the beginning of the “War on Terror.” Before 9/11, neither the U.S. nor other Western nations had a consistent definition of terrorism, relying instead on the UN’s definition, which focused on criminal elements such as hijacking, hostage-taking, and assassinations. Canada was one of the first to legislate on terrorism in 2001, distinguishing it from ordinary criminal acts.

The fact that a group of extremist Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks deeply influenced America’s concept of terrorism. Since then, terrorism has become synonymous with extremist Islamic acts both domestically and internationally. One analyst observed that, in focusing so heavily on Islamic extremists, the U.S. even neglected to address domestic terrorism committed by its own citizens, which is now referred to as “domestic terrorism.” In reality, domestic terrorism has been more prevalent than Islamic terrorism, with 70 attacks by right-wing groups between 2008 and 2016, compared to only 18 attacks by Islamic extremists.

Despite this, the U.S. has yet to classify right-wing attacks as terrorism and has made limited efforts to understand the sources and dynamics of domestic terrorism. Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. allocated funding to academic institutions to study neo-Nazism and white supremacy alongside Islamic extremism. However, under former President Donald Trump, funding was restricted to research on Islamic terrorism alone. This deliberate neglect has resulted in terrorism being defined almost exclusively as acts committed by Muslim men.

This bias is evident in the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations from 1997 to 2021, where 68 organizations are listed, 61 of which are Muslim groups, with only seven non-Muslim groups like the Irish Republican Army, Shining Path (Peru), and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Additionally, 20 organizations have been removed from the terrorism list, half of which were Muslim and the other half non-Muslim.

It’s difficult to say that the U.S., which may exclusively hold the power to label groups as terrorists, will agree with Burhan’s request. If we consider the stance of U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello on the ongoing war, it seems more likely that he would label Burhan a terrorist, if that were an option.

Perriello has recently criticized the Sudanese government for skipping a Geneva conference in August, which aimed to address the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and secure commitments from the warring parties to provide humanitarian aid. He told Al-Hadath TV last Wednesday that members of the old Islamist regime need the war to open a backdoor to power. He expanded on this in an interview with Luqman Ahmed on BBC last Monday, stating that the mediation team had not seen any political will from the warring parties to ease the suffering of Sudanese civilians, especially from the army and its allies from the ousted President Omar al-Bashir’s National Congress Party.

While Perriello stopped short of labeling the army as harboring terrorist tendencies from the old “Rescue State,” the RSF had no qualms about accusing the military of terrorism. Ibrahim Mukhair, an RSF adviser, told Eram News that “there is ongoing communication between Sudanese intelligence and terrorist groups, notably Boko Haram, to recruit fighters from Libya through Chad,” thus widening the accusation.

It’s hard to imagine a mediator siding with one party in a war he is supposed to help resolve, as seen in Perriello’s statement, which the RSF has used as evidence to accuse the Sudanese army of terrorism. One might hope that Perriello avoids the mistakes the U.S. made when dealing with the Islamist regime during the “Rescue State” era, especially since that regime is now history. The Sudanese people were the ones who overthrew it, and yet they found themselves subject to international sanctions inherited from the same regime they struggled under for three decades.

It was a mistake that U.S. Ambassador to Sudan in the mid-1990s Timothy Carney and American intelligence officer Mansour Ijaz, tasked with negotiating with Sudanese intelligence on counterterrorism, both acknowledged. They concluded that the U.S. had misunderstood the political environment following the end of colonial rule, which was marked by a determination to reconcile contemporary life with religious faith. While U.S. suspicions of the Sudanese regime were justified in its early years, by the late 1990s, the regime had shifted toward political pragmatism, and Sudanese intelligence held insights that could have provided a better understanding of the country beyond it being merely a “terrorist haven.” Yet, the U.S. prioritized politics over facts, even bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in retaliation for Sudan’s alleged role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi. After further investigation, the justification for the bombing was debunked, but the U.S. defended it as an unquestionable presidential order.

From the official American stance, the “Rescue State” and its Islamist supporters were seen as a curse on Sudan, with some comparing their lingering influence to the eternal punishment of Sisyphus, cursed by the Greek gods to eternally push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time.