51³Ô¹Ï

Last month, Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr , hosted a gathering that, on its surface, looked like the kind of multilateral consultations that define crisis diplomacy. Abdelatty met with his Saudi and Turkish counterparts alongside Mosaad , the senior White House advisor for Arab and African affairs, in Cairo to discuss developments in Sudan. Port Sudan’s foreign minister, Mohi El-Din Salem, was in Cairo at the same and was conspicuously from the meeting where his country’s future was being .

The snub was hard to miss. Boulos later a summary of the talks naming Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with no mention of Sudan. The minister representing General Abd al-Fattah al-’s Transitional Sovereign Council, by several accounts, stood entirely outside the picture — physically and politically. Arabic-language commentary noted the absurdity of a meeting convened to discuss Sudan’s future from which Sudan’s own representatives would be excluded.

The issue here is not about diplomatic bad manners. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are, by several regional accounts, the same three shielding the Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks embedded inside Sudan’s army. Sudan’s exclusion from its own negotiation is not incidental; it is the clearest evidence yet of who that process actually serves.

Whatever is being decided about Sudan’s trajectory, it is being decided over the heads of officials nominally governing the country. That would be uncomfortable under any circumstances. It becomes something else when you factor in what else was happening simultaneously in Riyadh.

A terrorist commander arrives in Riyadh

While the Cairo talks were underway, Misbah Abu Zaid Talha, commander of the Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, was reported to have in Saudi Arabia. Talha was hit with personal US on September 12, 2025, under Executive Order 14098, and his brigade was formally a Foreign Terrorist Organization the following March for ties to Iran and atrocities committed against Sudanese civilians. That a US-designated terrorist commander was holding court in Riyadh on the same weekend his country’s ceasefire prospects were being mapped out in Cairo is not a coincidence that explains itself.

The brigade is not a peripheral actor. By most credible accounts, it is deeply embedded in the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) war . The armed wing of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (Kizan) traces its organizational lineage to the Popular Defense Forces established under former leader Omar al-Bashir in 1989. Since the civil war began in April 2023, the brigade has grown from a battalion into a force estimated at roughly 35,000 , operating as an integrated component of SAF financing, recruitment and battlefield operations — not a militia fighting alongside the army, but one that has effectively into it.

Its record in the field has drawn international condemnation. The UN Human Rights Council received documentation of the brigade’s participation in the Halfiya Massacre, in which 33 detainees were summarily executed in northern Khartoum. Investigative journalists at Lighthouse the brigade’s role in atrocities in Gezira State, which included beheadings.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been identified by Arabic-language analysts as providing the Brotherhood-linked networks inside the SAF with their essential political . The Kizaniyya, as these Brotherhood-affiliated factions embedded in Sudan’s military command are known in regional discourse, are not treated as an embarrassing fringe. They are, by most accounts, running the .

Meanwhile, warnings out of eastern Sudan are growing louder. Brotherhood-linked actors are accelerating tribal in the region — a pressure campaign that risks cracking open a second front in a war already producing one of the worst humanitarian disasters on earth.

That is the context in which last month’s Cairo meeting took place, and in which Port Sudan’s foreign minister watched from outside the room.

A peace process without Sudan

Peace talks ultimately fail for many reasons. One of the surest is when the country bleeding out gets a seat outside the room while the neighbors decide its future. Another is when a US-designated terrorist commander turns up in the host capital mid-negotiation, and nobody says anything. Cairo may have been deliberate, or it may have been sloppy. Either answer is damning.

What is harder to dismiss is the pattern. The powers most invested in Sudan’s diplomatic future are the same ones with the most to gain from leaving its Islamist military networks intact. That is not a coincidence. It is a strategy, and Sudan is paying for it.

Sudan is running out of time for stories that don’t add up.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï’s editorial policy.