An interview with former Sudanese minister Khalid Yousif this week shed new light on the long-standing partnership between Iran’s government and Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood-aligned factions within Sudan’s military. The former, Mr Yousif says, has steadily supplied the latter with arms throughout the Sudanese civil war, which is now in its fourth year.
Mr Yousif added that Sudanese Islamists had replicated elements of Iran’s security model, including structures resembling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its volunteer paramilitary outfit, the Basij.
Last week, a US permanent resident was arrested in Los Angeles, accused of brokering the sale of Iranian drones, bombs and ammunition to Sudan’s army. In 2024, western officials told Bloomberg that Iran was supplying Khartoum with Muhajir 6 drones, a staple of Tehran’s UAV fleet also deployed by Iran-backed militants in Iraq.
Such relationships sometimes surprise observers outside the Middle East and North Africa, who are perhaps too often in the habit of viewing the region through an overly sectarian lens. Iran’s version of revolutionary theocracy is ideologically incompatible with the Brotherhood’s own doctrines. But a long history of Iranian ties with groups such as Al Qaeda and Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, gives the lie to such shallow thinking.
In 2004, a US enquiry into the 9/11 attacks by an independent, bipartisan commission found senior Al Qaeda figures received explosives training in Iran. “The relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to co-operation in terrorist operations,” the report said.
The ties with Hamas in Gaza are well-documented, as are others with Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tehran’s support for violent factions in troubled countries such as Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen has never been about supporting resistance groups. When ideological pretences are stripped away, what matters most to Iran’s government – and particularly the IRGC – is power, expansionism and hegemony in the region. The form of imperialism to which Tehran aspires is value-free, transactional, power-projecting and chaos-inducing.
It is worth asking, moreover, what this mission has achieved. No countries that have been taken under Tehran’s wing have ended up more stable or more prosperous for it. A survey of the countries allied with Tehran, such as it is, reveals only poverty and desperation.
Iran has also been damaged badly in recent years. Senior leaders have been assassinated and armed proxies have been decimated by US and Israeli attacks. The land bridge that once connected Iran to Lebanon via Syria and Iraq is no more. However, as Mr Yousif’s comments about Iranian actions make clear, countries need to remain alert to the threat of Tehran’s adventurism, be it in Sudan or elsewhere.
