BRIEFS

Sudanese Brotherhood and Iran: Ideological alliance under operational pressure

Read time: 15 mins

14.04.2026

On March 16, the United States formally listed the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) and its armed wing, the Al Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, as both a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization and a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the first time a Sudanese political religious movement has received dual designation under American law. The action freezes any US-based assets linked to the group, bans transactions with US persons and entities. Banks, charities, businesses, and individuals affiliated with the SMB could face sanctions and have their access to the international financial system restricted. Washington cited mass executions, ethnically targeted killings, and the receipt of training and material support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the factual basis for the designation.

The measures deliberately target the group’s financial infrastructure, not only its leaders or militiamen. The blocking risk extends to entities owned or controlled by designated actors and to networks acting on their behalf. This places compliance pressure on intermediaries across multiple jurisdictions, reflecting a consolidated US enforcement approach that treats armed wings and organizational ecosystems as a single target when political movements transition into security actors. In Sudan’s war, this designation is meant to make it much more expensive for the militia’s financial networks to operate and to limit their ability to regroup and recover. The SMB isn’t just a business — it’s acting at the same time as a political group, a fighting force on the ground, and a key player in moving things across borders.

That said, the move wasn’t a reaction to some sudden new threat. It was really just the formal recognition of a long-standing relationship between Sudanese Islamists and the Iranian regime that goes back more than 30 years — with roots that run even deeper, all the way back before Sudan even gained independence.

Sudan, Iran, and the long arc of alliance

Sudan’s relationship with Iran took formal shape in 1989, when Omar al Bashir’s military coup, organized in coordination with Hasan Al Turabi’s National Islamic Front (NIF), brought Sudan’s Islamist movement to power. The coup was ideologically self conscious: Its architects viewed the Iranian revolution of 1979 as both a model and a precedent, proof that an Islamist political project could seize and hold a state. This ideological affinity rapidly translated into institutional cooperation. During the 1990s, Iran trained Sudanese security agents and contributed to the establishment of Sudan’s Military Industrial Complex (MIC). The Yarmouk military factory, which produced weapons to meet Sudanese defense requirements, was part owned, staffed, and supported by Iran throughout the 1990s and 2000s. This external input was not incidental to the MIC’s formation, it was constitutive of it, embedding Iranian technical and financial participation at the structural core of Sudan’s security sector.

The relationship survived despite changing pressures from outside. When South Sudan broke away in 2011, Sudan lost more than 70% of its oil production and roughly half its government revenue almost overnight. That left the country in a deep economic crisis and heavily dependent on money from the Gulf. Saudi Arabia made the most of that weakness. In 2013, Riyadh blocked Omar Al Bashir’s plane from taking off, and shortly after, Sudan started getting serious help from the Gulf — fuel supplies, deposits in the central bank, debt relief, and other economic support. In return, Khartoum had to pull away from Tehran. By 2015, Sudan was sending troops to fight alongside the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen against the Houthis. A year later, in 2016, it officially cut ties with Iran.

But the break didn’t last. When the war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the SAF’s desperate need for weapons brought the old partnership with Iran back to life.

Sudan restored diplomatic ties with Iran in July 2024, ending eight years of rupture, and reports confirmed that Iran supplied SAF with weaponry including drones that provided battlefield advantages against the RSF. The Al Baraa Bin Malik Brigade’s public declaration of solidarity with Iran in early 2026, coinciding with the regional escalation of the US-Iran confrontation, was the proximate trigger for the American designation. But the deeper causes were structural, not episodic.

How Brotherhood ideas shaped the Iranian Revolution

The operational relationship between Sudanese Islamism and the Iranian state rests on an ideological foundation that is routinely overlooked in security focused analyses. The assumption that Sunni Islamism and Shia political theology represent hermetically separate traditions, and therefore that their convergence must be explained as opportunism rather than affinity,misreads the intellectual history of both movements.

The evidence for ideological proximity is most clearly documented in the relationship between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian revolutionary circles in the decades before 1979. Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the Brotherhood’s principal ideologue, was not simply an extremist thinker read selectively by Iranian revolutionaries. He was actively translated, circulated, and institutionally championed within the Iranian Islamist circles as a shared intellectual authority. All of Qutb’s major works, including his voluminous Quranic commentary Fī Ẓilāl Al Qurʾān (In the Shade of the Qur’an), were translated into Persian between the 1950s and 1970s as part of what Ayatollah Hādī Khōsrōshāhī termed naḥḍat i tarjama — the “Translation Movement”. The translators were not minor figures. They included Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who translated Qutb’s al Mustaqbal li hadhā al dīn (The Future of This Religion) in 1967, as well as Qutb’s Hadhā al Dīn (This Is the Religion), and his brother Muhammad Khamenei, who translated Qutb’s Khasā’is Al taṣawwur Al Islāmī in 1972.

The preconditions for this reception were established even earlier. In 1954, Navvāb Ṣafavī (1924–1955), founder of the Iranian revolutionary organization Fidā’iyān i Islām (Devotees of Islam), attended a conference on Palestine in Jordan organized under Qutb’s leadership. He subsequently visited Egypt, met the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and returned to Iran an explicit advocate of Brotherhood ideology, reportedly stating that any Shia Muslim who wished to be a true believer should follow the Muslim Brotherhood. Ṣafavī was the first Iranian to use the term ḥukūmat i islāmī (“Islamic government”) in a Shia context, and his program for such a government, published in 1950, bore the direct influence of Hasan Al Banna. The former Supreme Leader Khamenei has stated in his autobiography that he first entered the world of politics under Ṣafavī’s influence.

The doctrinal mechanism that enabled this cross sectarian transmission was Qutb’s treatment of early Islamic political history. His willingness to criticize the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, for nepotism, and to view the rise of the Umayyad dynasty as a corruption of the Islamic project, aligned his historiography with Shia interpretive traditions in ways that reduced sectarian friction and allowed Iranian readers to receive his political theology without confronting an irreconcilable confession barrier. Farsi translators emphasized these convergences explicitly in their prefaces, functioning, as translation theorist Maria Tymoczko has observed of similar postcolonial translation movements, as political and ideological actors rather than merely linguistic ones.

This translation movement was not peripheral to the Iranian Revolution. It functioned, as Qutb’s works more broadly functioned across the Muslim world, as what Tymoczko calls an “invisible means of cultural grounding”, constructing common ideological identities across sectarian lines by presenting Islamism as a total system capable of competing with secular nationalism and socialist ideology. Pre-revolutionary Iran lacked precisely such a modern Islamist discourse, and the vacuum was filled, in significant part, by Qutb’s texts.

The institutional vehicle for this transmission was the Dār al Taqrīb or “Rapprochement” movement, which sought to bridge Sunni and Shia legal schools from the 1930s onward, providing a framework of institutional legitimacy within which Brotherhood affiliated thinkers and Iranian clerics could exchange ideas without formally abandoning their respective sectarian identities.This ecumenical infrastructure transformed what might have remained informal personal relationships into a structured channel of ideological influence.

More than shared history: 3 pillars that keep them together

The ideological relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian revolutionary project was not reducible to personal networks or shared texts. It rested on three structural convergences that gave the relationship its durability and organizational strength as across different national contexts.

The first convergence was the call for Muslim unity. Both the Brotherhood and post revolutionary Iran consistently subordinated sectarian identity to the goal of a unified Islamist political community capable of “confronting” the West and resisting modern governance models. Iran institutionalized this agenda through the Conference on Islamic Unity, established in 1981 at the suggestion of Ayatollah Montazeri and with the approval of Khomeini, held annually during the “Islamic Unity Week” of Rabi al Awwal. The Brotherhood’s own founding texts, particularly Hasan Al Banna’s message on the “caliphate”, framed transnational Islamism as a religious obligation rather than merely a political preference. Both sides treated the nation state and its boundaries as an obstacle to, rather than a vehicle for, Islamist political fulfillment, a convergence with direct operational implications for how both actors approached their transnational networks.

The second convergence was the aspiration toward an Islamist governance model that transcended existing state structures. On the Sunni side, this expressed itself in the Brotherhood’s caliphate rhetoric and, over time, in the proliferation of Brotherhood affiliated movements that sought to govern through the state rather than alongside it. On the Iranian side, it produced the concept of wilayat al faqih (governance of the jurist), the institutional architecture through which Ayatollah Khomeini claimed authority over all Muslims regardless of sect. The structural parallel was noted by observers at the time: The principle of hakemiyya (divine sovereignty on earth), central to Qutb’s political theology and subsequently adopted by terrorist movements globally, finds a close analogue in the Faqih Rule that underpins the Islamic Republic’s self understanding. Both doctrines locate ultimate political legitimacy in a religious vanguard rather than in a popular mandate or territorial sovereignty, and both explicitly reject secular governance as a form of unbelief. When the Brotherhood published a book in 1979 entitled The Islamic Alternative, treating the Islamic Republic of Iran as a model for replication, the convergence was not rhetorical, it was programmatic.

The third convergence was expansionism. Khomeini’s doctrine of exporting the revolution was not a tactical posture; it was a foundational principle, confirmed publicly on the first anniversary of the revolution in February 1980 when he stated explicitly that Iran is working to export its revolution to different parts of the world, because it is an Islamic revolution. The Brotherhood’s own organizational logic was similarly transnational: The International Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose General Secretariat in Egypt initiated contact with the Islamic Republic immediately after the revolution and congratulated Iran on its victory, was structured precisely to operate across national boundaries. Sudan’s NIF, as a member of this international network, inherited both the expansionist orientation and the operational relationship with Tehran that accompanied it. Turabi’s 1991 Popular Arab and Islamic Conference in Khartoum, which brought together figures ranging from Hamas to Al Qaeda, was the most visible expression of how Sudanese Islamism translated this dual inheritance into a concrete regional strategy.

How Khartoum became the node

Sudan’s Islamist movement did not develop in isolation from these currents. The NIF and its successor formations were shaped by Brotherhood networks that had maintained organizational and financial ties to Egypt since the 1950s, and by ideological exposure to the same Qutbian texts that circulated across the Arab world and regions of Iranian influence globally. Al Turabi, the intellectual architect of Sudan’s Islamist state, was himself a product of Brotherhood affiliated student networks and pursued explicitly pan Islamic coalition building, reaching simultaneously toward Sunni Islamist movements and, after 1989, toward Tehran. His 1991 hosting of the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference in Khartoum, which brought together figures from across the extremist spectrum including Osama Bin Laden, was a deliberate effort to position Sudan as the organizational hub of a transnational Islamist project that transcended both sectarian and national boundaries.

The SMB’s relationship with Iran, therefore, reflects an organizational continuity rooted in a shared ideological inheritance, not simply a tactical alignment driven by wartime necessity. The IRGC training of Sudanese security agents in the early 1990s, the Yarmouk factory partnership, and the current drone supply relationship to SAF are each expressions of a political logic that was established when Sudanese Islamism was constituted. The logic that the Iranian state represents a proven institutional model for the realization of Islamist political goals, and that ideological affinities between Sunni Brotherhood networks and the Shia revolutionary state are real, durable, and operationally exploitable.

Furthermore, the Al Baraa Bin Malik Brigade’s public solidarity statement with Iran in early 2026 exemplified the tension this logic now generates. SAF commander Abdel Fattah al Burhan explicitly warned against open support for Tehran, aware that the costs of visible alignment with the Iranian side in an active US-Iran confrontation would extend well beyond diplomacy. But the brigade’s statement was not an anomaly, it was a disclosure of a commitment that has structured Sudanese Islamist politics for more than three decades.

Designation is the beginning, not the end

The US designation of the SMB and the Al Baraa Bin Malik Brigade is a necessary instrument of pressure, one that imposes real costs on a movement that has functioned for decades as both a political actor and an armed facilitation network. Freezing assets, restricting financial access, and raising compliance exposure for intermediaries collectively target the operational infrastructure that sustains the SMB’s dual role. The designation signals, clearly and formally, that the international community will not treat armed Brotherhood networks as legitimate political actors simply because they operate within a recognized state structure.

The designation’s value is greatest, however, when understood as the opening move in a sustained enforcement campaign rather than a self-executing solution. The SMB is not a monolithic organization. It encompasses factions with different levels of operational involvement with Iran, different degrees of exposure to the designation’s legal reach, and different calculations about the cost of continued alignment with Tehran under wartime conditions. SAF commander Abdel Fattah Al Burhan’s explicit warning against open support for Iran, issued in direct response to the Al Baraa Brigade’s solidarity statement, reflects precisely this internal differentiation. The designation creates leverage over those calculations. Whether that leverage is applied consistently and strategically will determine how much organizational ground the SMB actually loses.

SAF’s dependence on Brotherhood affiliated militias as ground forces is the central variable. Any tolerance of, or cooperation with, designated entities raises SAF’s own sanctions exposure, placing the military command in the position of having to choose between operational necessity and international legality. That pressure, if sustained, creates a genuine incentive for SAF leadership to politically sideline Islamist hardliners and distance the military command from networks that now carry formal terrorism designations. The designation thus gives Sudanese main political entities both a justification and an international audience for restructuring his relationship with the Islamist base, if they choose to use it.

What the designation cannot do is dissolve the underlying ideological relationship between Sudanese Islamism and the Iranian revolutionary project. That relationship runs from the Dār al Taqrīb movement through the Translation Movement to the NIF’s formation and the current arms pipeline. It is a product of intellectual history as much as geopolitical calculation — built over decades through shared texts, organizational networks, and doctrinal convergences that predate any bilateral security arrangement. Sustaining the pressure that the designation initiates, and translating it into durable structural change inside Sudan’s security architecture, requires a complementary strategy that addresses the ideological and institutional roots of the relationship, not only its financial expressions.

If Brotherhood wins in Sudan, the Red Sea loses

The consequences of an unconstrained SMB operating in coordination with Iran extend well beyond Sudan’s borders. The strategic geography makes this clear. Sudan’s Red Sea coastline sits at the junction of global maritime traffic, Horn of Africa land corridors, and the Sahel’s ungoverned spaces. An SMB that retains organizational coherence, Iranian logistical backing, and operational freedom inside Sudan does not merely represent a domestic governance problem. It constitutes a facilitation node that connects Iranian regional ambitions to transnational extremist infrastructure at a moment when both are actively seeking to expand.

Iran has long sought a naval presence at Port Sudan. The partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the escalation of the US-Iran confrontation in early 2026 has dramatically elevated the strategic value of Red Sea access. Competing regional powers have courted Khartoum for port access and basing rights, reflecting intensifying competition for this corridor. Against this backdrop, an SMB that remains operationally linked to Tehran provides Iran with exactly the ground level political leverage it needs to sustain and expand its foothold along the Red Sea frontier, regardless of formal diplomatic positions taken by SAF’s leadership.

The terrorist dimension adds a second, compounding risk. As of November 2025, both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Daesh were already actively narrativizing Sudan’s war as a doctrinal mobilization opportunity. AQAP’s communiqué framed the conflict as part of a continuous assault on the Islamic ummah, calling on extremists across the region to treat it as a shared obligation. An AQAP video titled “Sudan: The Islamic Nation’s Forgotten Wound” described Sudan’s humanitarian collapse as proof that democracy and international institutions were incapable of protecting Muslim populations, and presented armed “jihad” as the only credible response. Meanwhile, Daesh’s weekly newsletter al Al Naba, in issue 519, went further: it explicitly urged youth in Egypt and Libya to shed nationalist loyalties and use Sudan as an “open, turbulent arena” to prepare for operations — with explicit references to projecting force southward into what it described as the “Christian south”, encompassing South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the wider Horn of Africa region.

This extremist narrative architecture is not propaganda noise. It is target audience construction. Al Naba’s framing of Sudan as a staging ground accessible from neighboring states — and its identification of cross-border movement as the embryonic stage of a new operational base — maps onto a geography that an SMB-Iran axis actively makes more permeable. An SMB with operational freedom in Sudan provides the logistical and political infrastructure that transnational extremist actors require: Safe movement corridors, document facilitation, financial intermediation, and ideological legitimation within local communities. The convergence of state backed Iranian support and non state jihadist recruitment in the same operational space is not hypothetical. It is the documented pattern of how ungoverned or weakly governed theaters have been exploited in Libya, Yemen, and the Sahel.

The Horn of Africa dimension deserves particular attention. Al Naba’s call to treat Sudan as a hinge theater from which attacks can radiate into the Christian south reflects a strategic logic that reaches through eastern Sudan into Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the Bab Al Mandeb strait — the chokepoint through which approximately 12% of global trade passes. Houthi reactivation of Red Sea shipping attacks following the onset of the US-Iran confrontation on February 28 has already demonstrated how Iranian proxy action can convert this corridor into a sustained interdiction zone. An SMB that remains embedded in SAF’s command structure while maintaining operational links to Tehran gives Iran the capacity to sustain this pressure from two axes, naval proxy action from the Yemen side and ground based facilitation from the Sudanese side, in ways that compound the threat to regional maritime security beyond what either axis could produce independently.

The risk calculus is, therefore, not simply about what the SMB does inside Sudan. It is about what Sudan becomes as an operating environment if the Muslim Brotherhood retains organizational freedom and Iranian backing simultaneously. A sanctioned but structurally intact SMB, operating inside a weakened state that cannot enforce designation compliance, is the condition under which both Iranian strategic ambitions and transnational extremist expansion become most viable. Preventing that outcome requires a level of sustained enforcement pressure, on financial flows, arms pipelines, and cross-border facilitation, that the designation alone does not guarantee.