Dismantling Iran’s Regime means Peace in Sudan |
On March 1, an Iranian ballistic missile struck a residential neighborhood in Beit Shemesh, a few minutes from where I live, killing nine people, among them three teenage siblings, and wounding over forty others. On March 8, while I was speaking on a call with my sister in Nyala, South Darfur, I heard a heavy explosion in the background; the call cut off. A few hours later, she called back to tell me that a drone had struck a market just meters from her home. Arab News reported that a Sudanese Army drone strike killed eleven people and wounded twenty. According to available reports, the drone used in Nyala was almost certainly Iranian-made. These two events, separated by seven days and thousands of kilometers, are not coincidental. They are products of the same regime, the same military infrastructure, and the same strategic doctrine of exported violence that has destabilized the Middle East and beyond for nearly five decades.
As a Sudanese who has witnessed the burden of war firsthand, I hold a deep-seated conviction that war represents the gravest calamity that can befall any nation, and I am fundamentally opposed to it as a mechanism for resolving political conflicts. Yet the evidence compels me to say what I believe: Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against the Iranian regime, represents the most consequential opportunity in a generation to break the cycle of Iranian-exported violence. Eliminating this regime is not merely a military objective; it is the precondition for peace across multiple theaters of conflict, Sudan chief among them.
The Iran-Sudan alliance is foundational, not opportunistic. When Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, Iran became his first major external patron. Up to two thousand IRGC soldiers were deployed to train Sudanese military and paramilitary forces. By 1997, the two countries had signed over thirty bilateral agreements spanning military training, intelligence, and weapons development. Sudan served as a logistical corridor for Iranian arms transfers to Hamas and Hezbollah, a role confirmed by Israeli airstrikes on weapons convoys inside Sudanese territory during the 2000s. The IRGC reportedly operated weapons factories on Sudanese soil, and Iran’s navy used Port Sudan for Red Sea power projection. Tehran did not merely support Bashir’s dictatorship; it co-built the security apparatus that oppressed the Sudanese people for three decades.
When Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023, Iran moved swiftly to reassert itself. Tehran supplied Mohajer-6 combat drones, the same model supplied to Russia for use in Ukraine, to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Flight-tracking data documented repeated IRGC-affiliated cargo flights into Port Sudan. In February 2025, Iran formally announced its support for the SAF and signed a joint consultation agreement. Satellite imagery revealed an underground tunnel complex under SAF control, allegedly built with IRGC assistance and modeled on Iranian missile bases. Tehran’s objective is transparent: a permanent naval foothold on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, completing an arc of Iranian power projection from Lebanon through Yemen to the African continent.
Secretary Rubio’s designation earlier this month codifies what analysts have long understood. The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, comprising the Sudanese Islamic Movement and its armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, has contributed upwards of twenty thousand fighters to Sudan’s war, many trained and equipped directly by the IRGC. These fighters, the State Department stated, have conducted mass executions and summarily killed civilians based on race and ethnicity. The designation explicitly identifies Iran as the enabling force, calling it “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” This is a welcome and overdue decision. It confirms that the IRGC’s terrorist infrastructure extends well beyond the Middle East’s familiar flashpoints deep into the African continent and draws a direct operational line between the same IRGC arming militias in Sudan and the same IRGC launching ballistic missiles at Israeli cities.
This is why Operation Epic Fury matters far beyond Iran’s borders. The degradation of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, the neutralization of its supreme leadership, and the dismantling of the IRGC’s capacity to arm proxy forces carry direct implications for Sudan. The SAF’s Islamist hardliners, now formally designated as terrorists, depend on Iranian patronage for weapons, drone technology, and training. Without that support, the military calculus sustaining a war that has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced fourteen million shifts fundamentally. A negotiated settlement, rendered impossible while Iranian backing encouraged the pursuit of total military victory, becomes a realistic prospect for the first time since April 2023.
The broader regional calculus is equally significant. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Islamist war machine in Sudan all draw operational capability from the same source. Removing that central node does not guarantee overnight peace, but it eliminates the single greatest engine of conflict, sectarianism, and terrorism that the Middle East has known for nearly five decades.
I do not celebrate war. I mourn every life lost, Iranian, Sudanese, Israeli, and American. But there is a critical distinction between war waged for conquest and war waged to dismantle a regime whose organizing principle is the subjugation of others. The Islamic Republic has, for forty-seven years, exported revolution, repression, and death. It has weaponized religion, exploited sectarian divisions, and turned entire countries, from Syria to Sudan, into theaters of its imperial ambition. When a regime responds to its own citizens’ peaceful protests with bullets, and to its neighbors’ sovereignty with drones and ballistic missiles, the refusal to act becomes complicity. That point has long since been reached. For the people of Iran, for the people of Sudan, and for all those across this region who have paid the price of Tehran’s aggression, the dismantling of this regime is not an act of war. It is the precondition for peace.