By Professor Mekki Medani El Shibly
Executive Director, Cognisance Centre for Strategic Studies
melshibly@hotmail.com
At this critical juncture of Sudan’s brutal war, the greatest danger does not lie in the complexity of peace negotiations themselves, but in the deliberate and malicious manoeuvres undertaken by Islamists to hollow them out from within. This is precisely what Sudan is witnessing today as the country approaches a humanitarian truce and a comprehensive ceasefire under the auspices of the international Quad (the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates).
An irresponsible discourse has emerged, driven by Islamist circles surrounding the army leadership, promoting the claim of the “failure of the Quad” and calling instead for direct bilateral dealings with Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Egypt. On the surface, this rhetoric seeks to project openness to peace. In reality, it is a calculated ploy to obstruct the truce, dismantle its monitoring mechanisms, and block the path toward ending the war, achieving civilian transition, and rebuilding Sudan.
The Quad: can it be fragmented to suit Islamist preferences?
The first reality Islamists must confront is that the Quad is not a political entity that can be broken into pieces, nor is it a rival to Washington, Riyadh, or Cairo. It is the collective framework that provides any agreement with balanced regional and international legitimacy.
The presence of Egypt and the UAE alongside the United States and Saudi Arabia is not cosmetic. It was deliberately designed to prevent the capture of the peace process by any single axis and to strengthen the web of political, economic, and security guarantees necessary to enforce a truce and ceasefire. Islamist claims of Quad failure, and their naïve calls for fragmentation, do not reflect an objective assessment of performance. Instead, they expose a deep fear of collective monitoring, because such oversight deprives war advocates of their traditional ability to manoeuvre, deny violations, and evade accountability.
The Islamist rhetorical trap: rejecting the Quad while embracing those who designate them as terrorists
Islamist opposition to the Quad is not principled; it is a transparent exercise in political hypocrisy. The same movement attacking the Quad as “hostile to Islamists” openly promotes bilateral engagement with Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Egypt, even though Saudi Arabia designates political Islamist groups as terrorist organisations, the United States treats them within the same counter-terrorism framework, and Egypt itself officially classifies them as terrorists.
This contradiction can only be explained as an attempt to flee from a collective framework that constrains Islamist manoeuvres and replaces ambiguity with verification. The Quad’s strength lies precisely in what Islamists fear most: enforceable guarantees, collective oversight, and a political pathway that blocks their return to power through back doors.
More dangerously, Islamist media platforms deliberately distort public awareness by portraying their exclusion from the post-war transition as an externally imposed decision by the Quad. This is a blatant falsification of history. The Sudanese people delivered their final verdict in the December Revolution, seven years ago, when they overthrew the Islamist regime and rejected its return to power long before the Quad even existed. The Quad did not exclude Islamists; it merely respected a clear and sovereign popular choice.
Why do Islamists favour bilateral negotiations?
Sudan’s recent experience offers a clear answer. Islamists have always preferred fragile bilateral tracks because they:
- Weaken international guarantees.
- Allow commitments to be reinterpreted or diluted later.
- Enable responsibility to be fragmented when violations occur.
Engaging with a collective framework that monitors, documents, and enforces compliance is far more costly than dealing with one or two actors behind closed doors. This is why bypassing the Quad is not a pursuit of peace, but an attempt to revive a negotiable, penetrable model of engagement.
At the heart of the Quad roadmap lies not the political signature itself, but the hybrid monitoring mechanism that follows it: field observers, satellite imagery, drones, and economic oversight linking military compliance to trade and resource monitoring. This system closes the door to denial and makes every violation visible and costly. It is therefore unsurprising that Islamists are desperate to empty any agreement of these enforcement tools.
A message to the Quad: cohesion first, expansion, not fragmentation
Faced with Islamist attempts to dismantle the Quad and divert it into bilateral tracks with Port Sudan authorities, the Quad must act decisively against Islamist preferences. This requires a clear political statement reaffirming the Quad as the sole reference framework for the truce and ceasefire, and rejecting any attempts to bypass it through selective bilateralism.
At the same time, Quad cohesion should not mean isolation. On the contrary, the framework can and should be strengthened by expanding its international support base, bilaterally by engaging actors such as the UK, France, Qatar, and South Africa, and multilaterally through deeper coordination with the African Union, IGAD, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Arab League.
December’s defeated and April’s war-mongers
Ultimately, the obstruction of the truce and ceasefire cannot be separated from the destructive role played by the arsonists of war and the losers of the December Revolution. They oppose the Quad not because it has failed, but because it succeeds where their project collapses: it imposes collective guarantees, credible monitoring, and a political pathway that prevents the recycling of Islamists into power.
Those who lost power through popular will must not be allowed to punish an entire nation by prolonging the war or sabotaging peace out of resentment. Peace in Sudan will not be achieved without breaking this Islamist veto and enforcing a clear equation: compliance or isolation, statehood or chaos, future or final collapse.
Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
