Washington DC - 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 organizations.

The order made specific mention of chapters in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.

Those chapters "engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests," the order said.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a pan-Islamist organization that was founded in Egypt in 1928 and spread to other countries in the Arab world.

Its founder, Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, believed that reviving Islamic principles in society could enable the Muslim world to resist Western colonialism.

The US designation as a foreign "terrorist" group allows Washington to take punitive measures such as freezing any assets the group might have in the US and denying entry to group members.

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 US president's order.

The Muslim Brotherhood is already outlawed as a terrorist group in some countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. More recently, Jordan banned it in April of this year.

Amman accused the group of manufacturing and stockpiling weapons and planning to destabilize the kingdom.

The Muslim Brotherhood is widely popular in Jordan and has continued to operate there even though the country's top court in 2020 ruled to dissolve the group. Authorities have turned a blind eye to its activities in the past.

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 led Egypt since then, forging a key alliance with Washington in the process.