As foreign powers sign business deals and deepen diplomatic ties in Africa, one foreign player operates mostly behind the scenes: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“The IRGC, the regime’s military-intelligence empire, has spent forty years constructing a shadow network across Africa, embedding itself in local conflicts, recruiting ideological loyalists, arming insurgent movements, and turning entire regions into extensions of Tehran’s strategic project,” according to a blog post by Iranian-born journalist Shabnam Assadollahi.
The group’s many efforts include ideological indoctrination in northern Nigeria, arms smuggling in Sudan and terror plots elsewhere.
The seeds of IRGC influence in Nigeria can be traced back to cleric Ibrahim al-Zakzaky. He formed the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) after visiting Iran in 1980 and adopting Shia Islam, long a minority practice in Nigeria and on the continent. As al-Zakzaky built a following, he promoted education exchanges that led to students attending Al-Mustafa University, which has been linked to the Quds Force, a special unit of the IRGC in charge of external operations, according to The Africa Report.
As of 2025, Al-Mustafa University had locations in at least 17 nations across the continent, from Senegal to Tanzania to South Africa, and throughout the Sahel, according to the website Les clés du Moyen-Orient.
“By expanding the network of Al-Mustafa University in the countries of the African continent, Iran aimed to play an important role in shaping Iranian policies in Africa, to achieve interests and goals that serve Iran at the geostrategic level, most notably exporting the revolution, penetrating African society, its elites and institutions, spreading Shiism, and recruiting fighters for the Revolutionary Guard,” according to the abstract of an article in Qira’at Afriqiyah Magazine.
Assadollahi wrote that the IRGC used al-Zakzaky “as the nucleus for building a Hezbollah-style organisational structure in Nigeria,” adding that the IMN uses the same template as the terrorist group, including a cleric with “supreme authority,” religious activism that conceals a paramilitary wing and the recruitment of disaffected young people.
The IRGC’s interaction with Hezbollah in Africa is widely documented. The terrorist proxy is known to leverage West Africa’s large Lebanese diaspora for financing and smuggling to support terrorism, “and the continent has become a major hub for the group’s fundraising and black-market activities,” according to “Charting Iran’s Influence in Africa,” a 2025 paper by
Alexander Brown, Charlotte Krausz and Rob Gioia for the American Foreign Policy Council.
“The Shi’a militia is known to be deeply enmeshed in the continental drug trade, and approximately 30 percent of the profits from cocaine transiting the continent and destined for Western nations can be tied back to Hezbollah,” the paper says. “Additionally, Hezbollah has been linked to arms trafficking in Africa.”
In the greater Sahel region, the vacuum caused by terrorists and coups have allowed IRGC forces to embed themselves through arms dealers, local militias and Shiite minority groups. The Nigeria-based IMN operates a number of propaganda outlets, including news magazines in English and Hausa and a Hausa-language radio station called al-Shuhada, which translates as “the martyrs,” according to a report by the nonprofit United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI).
Iran also operates Hausa TV, believed to be the first Iranian media outlet to focus on Africa. Most Hausa speakers live in southern Niger and northern Nigeria, but there also are Hausa populations in parts of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Sudan and Togo.
The IMN has been instrumental in spreading its pro-Iranian ideology into the wider Sahel and West Africa region, “giving Iran a nascent doctrinal presence in these countries,” according to UANI.
Across the continent, Sudan became the IRGC’s logistical counterweight to its ideological foothold in Nigeria, Assadollahi wrote. The group started establishing weapons factories, training centers, and “arms and personnel corridors running through Port Sudan” during Omar al-Bashir’s regime in the early 1990s.
“The IRGC used Sudan as the main route for weapons destined for Sinai, Gaza, and beyond. Israeli strikes on Sudanese convoys in 2009, 2012, and 2014 confirmed the scale of these shipments,” Assadollahi wrote, adding that the corridor is still used.
In 1994, IRGC operatives went to Sudan to train Islamist militants from all over the continent. Sudan’s government permitted weapons to be shipped through the country to the terrorist group Hamas, another Iranian proxy.
Farther along the Red Sea coast, IRGC naval forces have used Eritrean ports for covert docking, intelligence gathering and logistical support for Yemen-based operations, Assadollahi wrote. Yemen is home to the Iranian proxy Houthi rebels, who have used Iranian support to attack commercial shipping traveling through the vital Red Sea corridor, which includes two notable chokepoints — the Suez Canal in the north and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the south.
Quds Force personnel in Eritrea supported al-Shabaab in its terrorist insurgency against Somalia’s central government in the mid-2000s, according to UANI. The IRGC and its Quds Force also see neighboring Ethiopia as a place to provide logistical support to East African networks and as a gateway to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea coast, Assadollahi wrote. IRGC personnel have used cultural centers there for ideological operations.
“In summary, Iran is placing its bets on the African continent, taking advantage of the political and security vacuum that has emerged due to the severe erosion of Western influence across African countries,” according to a May 2025 article by Danny Citrinowicz for the Institute for National Security Studies. “Iran is gaining significantly from these ties — economically, diplomatically, and even operationally.”
