Sudan’s Disparate Civilian Forces Agree The Islamists Have Got To Go

[John Ashworth]

One Thing Sudan’s Disparate Civilian Forces Agree On: The Islamists
Have Got To Go

OpEd By Carla Davies
Eurasia Review
June 15, 2026

Sudan’s warring political class has finally found one point of
agreement: the Islamists who dominated Omar alBashir’s long rule
should have no seat at the table where the country’s future is
decided.

Sudanese civilian and political forces from rival camps – some aligned
with the army, others closer to the Rapid Support Forces – met in
Addis Ababa under the auspices of the socalled Quintet – the African
Union, IGAD, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab
League – during the first week of June.

The Addis initiative is an attempt to improvise a rescue plan for
Sudan’s shattered political transition. If it develops, it will at
least serve as a counterweight to the Burhan military junta’s declared
ambition to stagemanage its own “national dialogue.” And while it
produced no shortage of ambiguity and unresolved questions, on this
one issue the picture was unusually clear: there is now a broad,
crosscutting consensus that Sudan’s former ruling National Congress
Party and its organised Islamist movement should be excluded from
shaping the next political order.

The participants included a shifting cast of Sudanese political
parties, professional associations and civil coalitions such as
Somoud, the Democratic Bloc and other civilian alliances. In carefully
negotiated language, they converged on the view that any credible
transition must prevent the architects of Bashirera state capture and
postcoup rollback from reentering the system through the front or back
door. In a landscape otherwise defined by fragmentation, sequencing
disputes and competing ceasefire formulas, this exclusion principle
has emerged as one of the most widely shared points of agreement among
those gathered in Addis.

For a country scarred by coups, militia rule and endlessly multiplying
factions, that shared red line is striking. It is also the hinge on
which a fragile new political process now turns.

Their joint statement sketched an ambitious threetrack approach –
humanitarian, security and political – that reads less like a grand
bargain and more like a last attempt to impose some order on a
conflict that has shredded institutions and scattered millions. The
document calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, monitored by
regional and UN mechanisms, and for opening safe corridors to besieged
cities and camps in Darfur and Kordofan, where civilians survive on
sporadic aid or nothing at all.

It lays out a path toward a comprehensive Sudanese dialogue, a new
social contract transitional justice, and accountability for war
crimes – human rights investigators accuse the Sudanese Armed Forces
of shelling civilians and using chemical weapons against them,
besieging cities, targeting hospitals and aid workers, conducting
extrajudicial killings, torture, and sexual violence.

The language agreed in Addis has floated through previous peace
conferences, but here it was anchored by a clear commitment to keep
the former ruling party, and the Islamist movement around it, out of
any future governing arrangement.

The composition of the Addis breakthrough underlines how unusual that
consensus is.

On paper, the agreement brings together antiwar forces such as the
Civil Democratic Alliance Somoud, led by former prime minister Abdalla
Hamdok, and the Democratic Bloc, the largest political coalition
backing the Sudanese army, along with an array of smaller parties,
women’s and youth groups and public figures. These were not natural
partners when the war erupted in April 2023 and they have largely
spoken past one another since – one camp blaming the army, the other
the RSF, both accusing each other of naïveté or complicity. Yet their
convergence on the necessity of excluding Sudan’s Islamists matters
because it cuts across Sudan’s familiar divides: between Islamists and
nonIslamists, between the riverine centre and the peripheries, between
those who seek to salvage the army’s authority and those who want to
break it.

At the same time, the process is anything but tidy. In a separate
press conference, the Sudan Founding Alliance, known by its Arabic
acronym TASIS and broadly aligned with the RSF, announced that it saw
no reason to hold direct or indirect talks with what it calls the Port
Sudan “junta.” Its spokesperson dismissed reports of backchannel
contacts with the authorities as “completely unfounded” and warned
that any attempt to exclude or bypass TASIS from an eventual
settlement would fail on the ground. But it pointedly made clear its
rejection of participation by the Islamic Movement, the National
Congress Party, or any of their political or organisational fronts in
negotiations or a political settlement. It tied its participation in
any process to a threemonth humanitarian truce floated by a separate
“Quartet on Sudan” and even raised the prospect of a parallel
government – a reminder that even actors who agree on keeping
Islamists out disagree sharply on who should be in.

Overall, the outcome is a kind of twotier process: an inner circle of
forces that can at least tolerate one another long enough to draft a
vision document, and a set of armed and semiarmed actors whose buyin
will be essential if any paper agreement is to survive contact with
reality. For now, both tiers appear to accept that the Islamists are
beyond the pale; the question is whether that shared stance can be
translated into a broader consensus on powersharing, security
arrangements and accountability.

After that there’ll be the small matter of dealing with the army, the
Islamists, and Sudan’s deep state.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/15062026-one-thing-sudans-disparate-civilian-forces-agree-on-the-islamists-have-got-to-go-oped/

END
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