Sudan's Islamist Era Under al-Bashir

The 1989 Coup and the National Islamic Front

On June 30, 1989, Brigadier Omar al-Bashir led a military coup against the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. The coup was not a typical military takeover — it was orchestrated by Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front (NIF), which used Bashir as its military instrument. Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated Islamist ideologue, had a vision of transforming Sudan into a model Islamic state that would project political Islam across Africa and the Arab world.

The new regime dissolved parliament, banned political parties, shuttered independent media, and imposed sharia law nationally — including on the non-Muslim south, where it intensified an already devastating civil war. The regime's early years were marked by a 'civilizational project' (al-mashru al-hadari) that sought to Islamize every aspect of Sudanese life: the education system, the legal code, the civil service, and the military.

International Pariah: Terrorism and Isolation

In the 1990s, Turabi turned Sudan into a haven for Islamist movements from across the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum from 1991 to 1996, running businesses and building Al-Qaeda's organizational infrastructure. Sudan hosted Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah operatives, and Egyptian jihadist groups. The regime was implicated in the 1995 assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa.

The consequences were severe. The United States designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 — a designation that would strangle the economy for decades. The UN imposed sanctions. In 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, claiming it produced chemical weapons precursors (the evidence remains disputed). Sudan became one of the most internationally isolated countries on Earth.

After 2001, Bashir pivoted. Seeking to escape isolation after 9/11, he expelled jihadists and began cooperating with US intelligence on counterterrorism — a collaboration that continued even as his forces committed atrocities in Darfur. This dual relationship — war criminal and counterterrorism partner — defined the West's uncomfortable engagement with Bashir for the next two decades.

The Lasting Legacy

Thirty years of Islamist rule transformed Sudan in ways that persist after Bashir's fall. The security services — the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) — became the most powerful institution in the country, operating a vast surveillance network and running their own businesses. The military expanded into commercial enterprises, from gold mining to real estate, creating an officer class with enormous economic interests in maintaining the status quo.

The Islamist period also produced the RSF. Bashir cultivated the Janjaweed leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ('Hemedti') as a counterweight to the regular military, formalizing his forces as the Rapid Support Forces in 2013. This decision — creating a parallel army loyal to an individual rather than the state — directly created the conditions for the 2023 war. Bashir's strategy of balancing institutions against each other worked while he held power, but when he fell in 2019, the two armed forces he had nurtured had no reason not to turn on each other.