Are Iranian Drones in Sudan a Problem for Israel? |
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........