Washington Designates the Brotherhood's Secretary General — and He Lives in London

On July 23 OFAC designated Mahmoud al-Abyari, the UK-based secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood's General Secretariat, along with three other individuals and three entities — seven listings spanning the UK, Türkiye, Indonesia and Gaza. The action came under Executive Order 13224 rather than EO 14362, with coordination credited to the FBI, DEA and CBP. Treasury says al-Abyari acted for the Egyptian Brotherhood, designated in January, and raised funds for two previously listed Türkiye-based bodies. The tranche also named two "sham charities" in Indonesia and Gaza described as Hamas fronts funding its military wing, and a Türkiye-based money exchange that Treasury says moved hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hamas and ran underground banking for Sweden's Foxtrot network. The Brotherhood remains legal and unproscribed in Britain; the standing UK position is still the 2015 Jenkins review.

Assessment: Designating the General Secretariat is a claim that the Brotherhood is a single transnational corporate structure, not merely a set of national franchises — and Washington is testing that claim on British soil, where no proscription exists. London now hosts a designated global terrorist whose activity is lawful under UK law. The typology named in the action — charitable facade, cross-border collection, hawala and crypto settlement in Türkiye, intersecting European organised crime — is a compliance map for Gulf and European banks. Two corrections to the record we ran yesterday: the July 22 Florida date was a written status report, not a hearing, and no outcome has been reported; and the count of designated national chapters remains four, since al-Abyari was listed as an individual acting for an already-designated chapter.