Sudan’s Islamic Movement has disclosed that 2,434 of its members have been killed in the country’s war, while an internal review shows that its campaign to mobilise fighters through the so-called Popular Resistance has fallen far short of its stated target.
Minutes from an internal workshop held in Khartoum showed that the movement had planned to establish training camps and prepare one million volunteers across Sudan, but the number currently participating in combat formations and military operations does not exceed 100,000.
The figures amount to a rare internal acknowledgement of both the scale of the movement’s battlefield losses and the limited conversion of its mass mobilisation campaign into active fighting forces.
The workshop, organised to assess regulations governing the Popular Resistance, was obtained by Ain al-Haqiqa and subsequently reported by Alrakoba.
The latest casualty figure represents a sharp increase from an earlier leaked Islamic Movement performance report covering the first year of the war.
That report, covering April 2023 to April 2024, recorded 505 dead among the movement’s members. It also said the movement had overseen 2,275 mobilisation camps involving 653,106 recruits, but only 73,912 had participated in combat operations.
The new figure of 2,434 dead is nearly five times the number acknowledged in that earlier internal assessment.
Despite the extensive mobilisation infrastructure, the latest workshop records show that active participation remains below 100,000 fighters — less than one-tenth of the one-million-volunteer target discussed by organisers.
The workshop reviewed a 19-article regulation governing the Popular Resistance, issued under Article 36 of Sudan’s 2013 Reserve Forces Act, as amended in 2019, and under a decision by the army commander-in-chief.
The regulations define a volunteer as a Sudanese citizen joining voluntarily and require recruits to be at least 18 years old, medically fit, of good conduct and without convictions for offences involving dishonesty.
However, workshop participants reportedly spent considerable time discussing the minimum-age requirement and acknowledged that some of those killed in the fighting had been under the age of 18.
The records also show the extent to which forces linked to the Islamic Movement have operated alongside the Sudanese army and other allied formations.
According to the workshop, Islamic Movement forces fought alongside the army and the former Operations Authority in 47 combat formations and military columns, including operations around the Engineers Corps, Armoured Corps and Ammunition Corps, as well as in Gezira and Sennar states and within the Sayyad mobile force.
The movement said 2,434 of its members had been killed, including senior figures whose names were subsequently given to combat formations.
Among those named were Fawzi al-Mutasil Billah, Mohammed Younis, Mohammed Ali, al-Numan, Bahr, al-Tayeb and Khalid.
The workshop said representatives of the movement had visited the families of those killed “house by house”.
It also acknowledged particularly heavy casualties within the Sayyad formation, saying hundreds of fighters had been killed there alone.
The admission is notable because battlefield casualty figures among forces aligned with the army and the Islamic Movement have rarely been disclosed publicly.
Islamist networks have played a significant role in supporting the army during the war, supplying fighters and helping organise civilian mobilisation. Reuters reported in 2025 that Islamist groups had contributed thousands of fighters and trained tens of thousands of civilians, although the army denied coordinating with political organisations.
The 2,434 figure should therefore be treated as the Islamic Movement’s disclosed internal casualty count rather than an independently established total for all Islamist-linked or Popular Resistance forces fighting alongside the army.
The casualty figures and workshop records could not be independently verified.
