Tehran has opened an African front. The same IRGC pipeline that arms Hezbollah and the Houthis now runs through Khartoum, and the world is calling it a civil war.
A few weeks ago, FBI agents arrested Shamim Mafi, a 44-year-old Iranian national and US permanent resident, at Los Angeles International Airport as she attempted to board a flight to Istanbul. Two days later, as CBS News reported, prosecutors in the US District Court for the Central District of California charged her with conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by brokering over $70 million in Iranian weapons to Sudan’s Ministry of Defense, including Mohajer-6 armed drones, 55,000 bomb fuses procured through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and millions of rounds of ammunition, routed through an Omani shell company, Atlas International Business LLC.
Readers of this column already know the architecture. I argued in March that the IRGC arming Sudan’s army is the same IRGC arming Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and the Houthis firing at Eilat. What is new is the courtroom. The Mafi complaint is the first time the pipeline appears in US legal filings, with a registered company in Oman, a price tag in the tens of millions, a defendant facing twenty years, and an Iranian intelligence officer at the other end of the phone. The pipeline is no longer a designation in a State Department file. It is now evidence in a federal indictment.
The Generals Israel Once Thought Were Allies, And Then Forgot
On October 25, 2021, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan arrested Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and dissolved the civilian institutions that were weeks away from rotating control of the Sovereign Council to a civilian leader. Burhan was then the Israeli foreign ministry’s favorite Sudanese general, the man who shook hands with Benjamin Netanyahu in Entebbe in 2020 and signed Sudan onto the Abraham Accords framework. Five years later, his army fights alongside a US-designated terrorist organization and pays Tehran for drones. The diplomatic bet did not survive.
That should not surprise. Carnegie scholars call Sudan “a laboratory of coups,” noting roughly 20 coup attempts since independence and military rule for 52 of 65 years. Three democratic openings, in 1958, 1969, and 1989, ended in tanks. The fourth, in 2021, ended the same way.
The Real Reason There Is a War
The polite version blames the April 15, 2023 outbreak on personality. The honest version is structural. A Carnegie Endowment analysis found that more than 80 percent of Sudan’s state resources sit in the hands of security and paramilitary forces, with the Sudanese Armed Forces alone controlling roughly 250 companies in defense, banking, gold mining, sesame, livestock, construction, and transport.
A parallel investigation by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, reported by Al Jazeera, identified 408 commercial entities controlled by Sudan’s security elites, including Omdurman National Bank, in which military front charities held 86 percent of the shares.
Prime Minister Hamdok called this arrangement “unacceptable” in December 2020. Ten months later he was under arrest. The December 2022 Framework Agreement, signed after fourteen months of civilian protest and at least 125 demonstrators killed, would have forced the generals to divest, integrate the Rapid Support Forces into a unified army, and accept civilian command. The final signing was scheduled for April 1, 2023. War broke out on April 15. The Bashir-era Islamist deep state inside the SAF, terrified of prosecution and divestment, helped engineer the escalation.
Into that vacuum walked Tehran. I wrote last month that Secretary Rubio’s designation of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood drew a direct operational line from the IRGC in Sudan to the IRGC firing on Israeli cities. The Mafi case is the financial mechanism behind that line. A registered Omani company. A seventy-million-dollar contract. Sixty-two bidirectional calls between the defendant’s phone and an Iranian intelligence officer. The architecture I described in March now has a paper trail.
Why This Should Land Differently in Israel
For Israeli readers, the question is no longer whether Iran is in Sudan. That question is closed. The question is whether Jerusalem’s posture toward Khartoum has been calibrated against the institution Burhan actually leads. The Abraham Accords framework treated a coup-prone officer corps as a strategic partner. Five years later, that same officer corps is fighting alongside the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade and paying Tehran for Mohajer-6 drones. The bet did not survive contact with the institution it was made on. There is no version of Israeli regional strategy in which a Brotherhood-influenced, IRGC-supplied military government in Khartoum is a tolerable outcome.
What Jerusalem and Its Partners Should Demand
First, treat the Sudanese officer corps as an institution, not a Rolodex. Burhan was not a one-off; he is the product of a recruitment pipeline that, as Operation Broken Silence has documented, produced six successful coups and at least fourteen failed ones since 1956. Any future Israeli or American outreach must run through civilian-led structures.
Second, push allies to dismantle the military’s commercial empire. European, Gulf, and African Union sanctions should target the 250 SAF companies and the parallel RSF network, not just individuals.
Third, treat the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood designation as the floor, not the ceiling. Israel’s diplomatic weight in Washington, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh should be applied to convert that single designation into a coordinated campaign against the financial, logistical, and recruitment networks of the SMB and the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade.
Fourth, condition future reconstruction aid on three benchmarks: institutional security sector reform, divestment of the military’s commercial holdings, and exclusion of Bashir-era Islamist networks from any transitional architecture. Without conditionality, aid only buys a pause before the next coup.
The Distance Is Shorter Than It Looks
On the morning of October 25, 2021, a Sudanese general arrested a prime minister to stop a country from becoming a democracy. A few weeks ago, a federal court in Los Angeles told the world who has been arming him. The line between those two mornings runs straight through Tehran. The question is no longer where the weapons came from. It is what Jerusalem does about the institution that bought them.
Monim Haroon is a Sudanese-born advocacy specialist based in Israel. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Business Administration from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completing an M.A. in Public Policy & Governance (honors) at the same institution. Former CEO of an African student organization in Israel and former advocacy manager at HIAS Israel.