In Lebanon today, the debate is not only about politics but about the very nature of the state itself. The question many Lebanese are asking is both simple and dramatic: how can a state fully reclaim its sovereignty if a political force maintains a military arsenal independent from public institutions and effectively holds the power to decide war and peace outside them?
This is not only a Lebanese issue. For decades, Iran has built, in several countries of the region, a network of allied armed actors. Hezbollah in Lebanon represents the most well-known case: a political model based on the fusion of ideology, military power, and regional influence.
The mechanism is as simple as it is dangerous: an ideological organization maintains an independent armed force within the state, but subordinates its political choices to a broader regional project. Over time, the state no longer acts as a sovereign subject but rather becomes a battlefield within a conflict that surpasses it. The paradox is that this model—often associated with Shiite movements in the Levant—has manifested itself in an even more dramatic form in Sudan, where an ideological armed force, supported by external ties, ultimately seized the state itself, dragging it into a devastating spiral of regional and international complications.
The revolution of December 2018 was not merely a popular uprising against the regime of Omar al-Bashir. It was a historic attempt to bring Sudan out of the international isolation produced by decades of rule by political Islam. For more than thirty years, the country had become a hub where transnational ideological, financial, and organizational networks converged—networks capable of connecting movements of political Islam, armed groups, and funding circuits extending from the Middle East to Africa.
However, the Sudanese Islamic Movement—the Sudanese expression of the Muslim Brotherhood—used its cadres entrenched within the military and security institutions to overturn the revolutionary process in 2021. When it failed to fully do so, it helped fuel the war that erupted in April 2023. Since then, a troubling question has reemerged: will the Muslim Brotherhood once again succeed in seizing the Sudanese state and using it as a link in a network of influence connecting Iran to the movements of political Islam across the region?
To understand this, one must return to the 1990s. During that period, Khartoum became a nerve center for the activities of transnational Islamist movements. After the 1989 coup through which the Muslim Brotherhood seized power, Sudan became a meeting point for financial and organizational networks linked to international jihadism. In 1991, the Arab and Islamic Popular Congress was created, bringing together the various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region along with leading figures of jihadism, such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In that context, Hezbollah was also present through its leadership, all in close coordination with the Iranian regime.
That convergence helped transform Sudan—seized by the Muslim Brotherhood—into a platform for international terrorism. During those years occurred Algeria’s so-called “black decade,” the attempted assassination of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995, the attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Aden in 2000. During that phase, Khartoum provided logistical cover and political support to a vast network of Islamist groups with a highly destabilizing impact. It is no coincidence that the United States placed Sudan on its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993. That designation was lifted only in 2020, after the fall of the Islamist regime. Yet following the backlash after the revolution, the risk of relapse has resurfaced. One signal of this is the case of businessman Abdel Basset Hamza, identified by the U.S. administration as a financier of terrorist activities and the subject, in January 2024, of a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.
For this reason, years after Bashir’s fall, the same fears are now returning with force. Several journalistic analyses indicate that cadres of the Islamic Movement removed by the 2019 revolution have reorganized themselves by taking advantage of the war, infiltrating the Sudanese Armed Forces and the security and intelligence apparatus, strengthening their influence within state institutions, and simultaneously promoting the creation of autonomous armed factions clearly defined by ideological affiliation. The question therefore becomes unavoidable: is the ongoing war becoming an opportunity for the return of the political and financial networks that ruled Sudan and destabilized regional and international security for decades?
The issue, however, is not only Sudanese. Sudan occupies a decisive geopolitical position on the Red Sea, one of the world’s most strategic maritime corridors. A significant share of international trade between Asia and Europe passes near its territory. Consequently, any shift of Sudan toward a regional axis linked to Iran and the international network of the Muslim Brotherhood would not be a simple internal change: it would have consequences far beyond Sudan’s borders.
Over the past decades, Iran has built a regional network of armed actors stretching from Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. The Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has played a decisive role in developing these networks and supporting its allies, including Hezbollah. If in the 1990s Sudanese territory was used as a corridor for the transfer of weapons toward the Middle East, Sudan’s geography could once again play a crucial role today in consolidating a destabilizing regional network.
This is not merely a theoretical hypothesis. Some signals in this direction have already clearly emerged. In a widely circulated video, Islamist leader Naji Abdullah declared that Sudanese Islamist fighters would be ready to fight alongside Iran in the ongoing war. For his part, Gibril Ibrahim, the finance minister of the authority appointed by the Armed Forces, argued that the war against Sudan and Iran is part of an American project to redefine the Middle East, calling on the peoples of the region to draw inspiration from the Sudanese model of “resistance.”
This is not mere rhetoric. These statements reflect a political model now well known in the region: armed ideological movements that see themselves as part of a supranational and regional project rather than as actors operating within a state. It is the same model that, over the past decades, has transformed Lebanon into an arena of regional conflicts in which the Lebanese have found themselves involved without ever choosing them.
The Lebanese lesson, in this sense, is clear: when an armed formation places itself above the state, the entire country becomes hostage to the consequences of regional conflicts. The Lebanese have repeatedly seen their territory become a battlefield because of decisions taken outside official institutions. The question now facing Sudan is even more serious: what happens when it is not just part of the state that is seized, but its entire structure? In truth, we already know the answer. It would be a fatal mistake to watch the same script unfold while expecting a different outcome.
The return of Muslim Brotherhood control over the Sudanese state, together with the reactivation of financial networks linked to armed movements—including those previously associated with support for terrorist groups in the region—would return Sudan to the international isolation from which the revolution had sought to free it. The country has already paid an extremely high price when it became part of proxy wars and rivalries among regional axes. Such a development would only worsen the tensions already present in a region that cannot afford new epicenters of extremism and terrorism.
The future of Sudan, as well as the defense of its unity and sovereignty, therefore requires a consensus around a few essential principles: immediately ending the war through a credible political process that leads to a civilian and democratic transition; rebuilding institutions that represent the Sudanese people rather than an ideological project; building a national, professional, and genuinely state-based army, separated from politics and the economy and subordinate to civilian authority; protecting the independence of Sudan’s national decision-making by preventing the country from being turned into a platform for regional rivalries; and confronting, without ambiguity, all projects of terrorism and extremism that threaten the stability of Sudan and the entire region.
But the real question today is not only how the war in Sudan will end. The decisive question is what kind of Sudan will emerge from this war.
Will it be the Sudan that millions of people dreamed of in the streets of Khartoum in 2019: a civil state, sovereign and independent in its choices? Or will it once again become what it was in the 1990s: a link in a network stretching from Khartoum to Tehran?
The answer will not determine only Sudan’s future. It may also define, for years to come, the balance of security across the Middle East and the Red Sea.
