A senior leader in Sudan’s pro-democracy camp has accused SAF chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of seeking Israel’s help to stay in power and of projecting a misleading image of himself to the outside world.
Khalid Omar Yousif, a leading figure in the “Samood” Democratic Civilian Alliance of revolutionary forces, said in a statement shared on social media that “the only true narrative about Burhan is his relentless drive to cling to power at any cost.”
In a Facebook post, Yousif said Burhan was “seeking refuge in Israel in order to remain in office.” He was responding to Burhan’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which the general cast himself as a leader working for peace and cited Sudan’s 2021 decision to join the Abraham Accords.
Yousif described this as “an attempt to appeal to Israel to secure his survival in power,” even as, he argued, Burhan “embraces fighting units that openly declare their intention to target Israel.”
He accused Burhan of “marketing himself abroad as a moderate leader committed to democratic transition while, at home, he allies with extremist groups from different ideological currents.” Yousif said this reflected a “contradictory discourse” in which Burhan “speaks about democracy in English to foreign audiences while courting the former regime in Arabic.”
The Samood leader further charged that Burhan had “taken part in three coups against the democratic transition”: the violent dispersal of the sit-in in 2019, the 25 October 2021 coup, and the current war, which Yousif said “is directed primarily against civilians.”
Yousif also accused the SAF chief of encouraging his supporters to spread a narrative that Sudan is under “external aggression” from the United Arab Emirates and Israel, while Burhan himself “refrains from publicly adopting this story” in order to preserve his ties with those countries.
He described Burhan’s camp as “an alliance full of contradictions, united by neither a common message nor a shared vision,” and said the general’s position remained “trapped in the present of war, with no ability to move toward any future” — a situation Yousif warned was “a dangerous recipe for plunging the country into endless chaos.”
Yousif concluded by referring to Burhan’s call in his article to “tell the truth as it is,” asking: “But when will he choose to tell it, even once?”
