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US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to begin the process of designating certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group, as foreign terrorist organisations.
The order made specific mention of chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.
Those chapters “engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilisation campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests”, the order said.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a pan-Islamist organisation founded in Egypt in 1928 that later spread across the Arab world. Its founder, Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, argued that reviving Islamic principles in society could enable the Muslim world to resist Western colonialism.
A US designation as a foreign terrorist group allows Washington to take punitive measures such as freezing any assets the group might have in the United States and denying entry to group members.
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It is now up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to complete the process of outlawing the branches named in the president’s order.
The Muslim Brotherhood is already outlawed as a terrorist group in some countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Jordan banned it in April of this year, accusing the group of manufacturing and stockpiling weapons and planning to destabilise the kingdom.
The Brotherhood remains widely popular in Jordan and continued to operate even after the country’s top court ruled to dissolve the group in 2020. Authorities have frequently turned a blind eye to its activities.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned since 2013, after the overthrow of its leader and then-president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a military coup led by then military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi has ruled Egypt since, forging a key alliance with Washington.
In May of this year, French President Emmanuel Macron ordered his government to draft proposals to counter the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the spread of political Islam in France.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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