Washington's Selective Sanctions Leave the Brotherhood Network Intact

Spread the Word

Opinion by Dr Sadek Al-Salemi. The views expressed are the author’s own.

On 23 July the United States Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mahmoud Al-Ebiary, a senior figure in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who serves as secretary-general of the group’s General Secretariat and lives in London. Treasury listed him alongside two other individuals and three entities, and said the network had raised and moved funds for Hamas using charitable associations, commercial companies and intermediary bodies as cover. The action was taken under Executive Order 13224, Washington’s principal counterterrorism authority, and according to the department it builds on earlier measures announced in January and March of this year.

The technical consequences are not trivial. Assets falling under United States jurisdiction are frozen. American citizens and companies are barred from any dealing with those listed. Foreign financial institutions that process significant transactions on their behalf expose themselves to secondary sanctions and, potentially, to exclusion from the American banking system. On paper this is a heavy instrument. The more interesting question is not how heavy it is, but where Washington has chosen to point it — and, far more tellingly, where it has not.

The July listing follows a pattern set earlier in the year. On 13 January the State Department designated the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, the most severe label available, which makes providing material support a criminal offence, and listed its leader, Muhammad Fawzi Taqoush, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. On the same day Treasury designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for supporting Hamas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the measures as the opening actions of a sustained effort. On 9 March the State Department designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood — the Sudanese Islamic Movement together with its armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade — and announced its intention to add a Foreign Terrorist Organisation listing with effect from 16 March, citing mass executions of civilians and the obstruction of efforts to end Sudan’s war.

What these decisions share is as revealing as what they say. Not one of them reaches the international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood as an entity. Each targets a named national chapter or a named individual. With the exception of Sudan, each rests principally on the charge of channelling support to Hamas rather than on any broader judgement about the movement’s conduct. The architecture is narrow by design, and the great majority of the organisation’s branches and leaders remain entirely untouched.

I do not read that narrowness as an accident of bureaucratic caution. Sanctioning particular branches and particular men while leaving the wider structure intact suggests to me that the United States and its European partners still find the organisation useful — that in a number of theatres the Brotherhood’s interests and Western interests continue to overlap, and that the instrument is therefore being calibrated rather than abolished. Britain, which hosts a substantial share of the movement’s exiled leadership including Al-Ebiary himself, has shown no appetite for a comprehensive ban.

The most instructive case sits inside Israel. Ra’am, the United Arab List led by Mansour Abbas, emerged from the southern branch of the Islamic Movement, the current within Palestinian society in Israel historically closest to Brotherhood thought. It campaigns freely, faces no designation of any kind, and in June 2021 became the first Arab party in Israel’s history to enter a governing coalition. That coalition, assembled under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, stretched from Labor and Meretz on the left to Yamina, New Hope and Yisrael Beiteinu on the right, and its survival depended on Abbas’s votes.

The electoral consequences for Arab representation were severe. In March 2020 the Joint List — Hadash, Ta’al, Balad and Ra’am running together — won 15 seats, the best result Arab parties had ever achieved in the Knesset. By the election of November 2022 the alliance had collapsed. Ra’am stood separately and took five seats; Hadash-Ta’al took five; Balad fell below the electoral threshold for the first time since 1996 and took none. Combined Arab representation dropped from 15 seats to 10 — a third of the bloc gone in a single cycle.

Responsibility for that collapse is contested, and honesty requires saying so. Low turnout and Balad’s decision to run alone both played their part, and Ra’am’s defenders argue that its participation in government delivered real budgets and infrastructure to Negev Bedouin communities that decades of boycott had never produced. My own reading is different. Whatever was gained in appropriations was purchased by shattering a political structure that had taken decades to assemble, and by lending Arab legitimacy to governing arrangements that continued to advance policies hostile to the very citizens Ra’am claims to represent.

The movement’s conduct on foreign questions has been equally striking. On 31 July 2025, while Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza were at their height and international agencies were warning of famine, the Islamic Movement in Israel organised a demonstration outside the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv, demanding that Cairo open the Rafah crossing and accusing Egypt of complicity in the starvation of the Strip. The protest formed part of a wider wave targeting Egyptian missions in several countries. The choice of address is what I find impossible to ignore: the siege was Israel’s, and the pressure was aimed at Cairo.

Syria offers a second illustration, and a more consequential one. The Brotherhood is the intellectual frame from which Syria’s Islamist formations emerged and the umbrella under which many of them operated, yet it has attracted no designation there. Movement has run entirely in the opposite direction. In November 2025 the United Nations Security Council removed Ahmad al-Sharaa, now Syria’s president, and his interior minister Anas Khattab from its sanctions list. In July 2025 the State Department revoked the Foreign Terrorist Organisation designation of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra. In February 2026 the Security Council delisted the organisation altogether, lifting asset freezes, travel bans and the arms embargo.

Nor has the new government in Damascus proved assertive where Syrian territory is concerned. Israeli forces seized the demilitarised buffer zone established under the 1974 disengagement agreement after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, took the Syrian slopes and summit of Jabal al-Sheikh — Mount Hermon — and have since built a network of fixed positions well beyond the 1974 line. Israel’s defence minister has said plainly that the army intends to remain there. From al-Sharaa’s government the response has been notably muted.

The most revealing episode, however, has been President Trump’s repeated suggestion that Damascus could dismantle Hezbollah’s military capability in Lebanon more effectively than Israel could. In fairness, al-Sharaa publicly declined, saying his government had no intention of launching such an operation and would support Beirut’s own efforts by non-military means. But the fact that the proposal was made at all, and made openly, tells its own story about how the movement’s political heirs are now perceived in Washington: as an instrument that might usefully be pointed at a target when the occasion arises.

That is the thread running through all of it. The selectivity of the sanctions regime, the survival of the international organisation, the immunity enjoyed by the movement’s Israeli and Syrian expressions, and the hospitality extended to its leadership in London all point the same way. Washington and its allies are not attempting to uproot the Muslim Brotherhood. They are managing it — pruning the branches that have become politically embarrassing while leaving the trunk standing. Until the designations reach the international organisation itself, and until Britain closes the offices from which much of it is directed, the campaign announced in January is better read as a message than as a policy.

For the countries where the Brotherhood operates, the cost of that arrangement is not abstract. It is measured in fractured parliaments, in hollowed-out civic coalitions, in wars that outlast every attempt to settle them, and in populations who discover far too late that the movement claiming to speak for their faith has in fact been speaking for someone else’s interests.