US-Israeli strikes on Tehran’s Enqelab Square. Photo: Press TV.
By Pavan Kulkarni – Mar 3, 2026
From condemning the violation of Iranian sovereignty to condemning Iran for its retaliatory strikes, the full spectrum of messaging is on offer in the statements by African governments, while the left has unequivocally condemned “imperialist”, “Zionist” aggression.
Concerned that the “military strikes carried out by the United States in coordination with Israeli forces against [Iran] … marks a serious intensification of hostilities in the Middle East,” the African Union (AU) called for “urgent de-escalation.”
Further escalation, it warned, would have “serious implications for energy markets, food security, and economic resilience – particularly in Africa, where conflict and economic pressures remain acute.”
In an apparent retort to the US and Israeli framing of its war on Iran as “preemptive”, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said, “Article 51 of the UN Charter provides for self-defense only when a state has been subjected to an armed invasion. Anticipatory self-defense is not permitted under international law, and self-defense cannot be based on assumption or anticipation.”
However, he was not explicit in naming the US and Israel as aggressors. Algeria’s foreign ministry condemned the war on Iran as a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty of a member state of the United Nations.”
Most others, however, have only issued generic calls for restraint and dialogue, with warnings about the disastrous consequences of this intensifying war, without naming the aggressors.
Nigeria’s foreign ministry, for example, has called “on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and refrain from actions that could intensify hostilities, and prioritize dialogue over confrontation.”
“Reject the international positions that equate the aggressor with the victim”
Unequivocally holding “the Imperialist, Zionist aggressor forces fully responsible for this escalation,” the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) rejected the “international positions that equate the aggressor with the victim under general slogans such as de-escalation, without clearly naming the aggression and its source.”
​“Such false neutrality entrenches a policy of impunity and weakens the international legal order,” it said, adding, “Resistance to aggression and domination is a legitimate right of peoples, and both a national and international duty.”
Israel Views Sudan Conflict Through the Lens of Red Sea Strategy
​Sudan’s warring parties united in condemnation of Iran
Ironically, both the power centers in civil war-torn Sudan, far from equating the aggressor and victim, have flipped these categories on their heads, condemning Iran as the aggressor.
​“The Government of Sudan condemns in the strongest and clearest terms the blatant and illegal Iranian aggression against the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the State of Kuwait, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” read a statement by its Foreign Ministry.
​This de facto government, backed by the Saudis in the ongoing war, is in control of Sudan’s northern and eastern regions. Mention of the UAE, which has also received its fair share of hits from Iran, is conspicuously absent in its statement because the UAE is the main backer of its enemy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which controls the western region and is expanding into central Sudan.
Mohamed Dagalo, chief of the RSF, whose mass atrocities in Darfur may amount to genocide, leads the so-called Sudan Founding Alliance, which has condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf monarchies hosting US assets as “regional and international terrorism”.
Just as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are unified behind the US antagonism to Iran’s sovereignty despite their own mutual rivalries, so are their proxies in Sudan, who have unleashed the world’s humanitarian crisis on its people.
​Its northern neighbor, Egypt, once an anti-imperialist bulwark on the continent, is headed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, US President Donald Trump’s “favorite dictator”, who made a series of phone calls to all the heads of all the targeted Gulf states. He reiterated to them that Egypt regarded the security of these regimes as an “integral part of Arab national security.”
​Many other African governments have also taken a cue from the European Union (EU), which declared Iran’s response as “inexcusable”.
“Unprovoked attacks … by the Epstein leadership of the United States of America and the Zionist settler regime”
In a similar vein, “Kenya strongly condemns the strikes on the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain in the evolving conflict in the Middle East,” said its president, Willian Ruto, who is often condemned domestically as a US lackey.
​His regime seems to have so thoroughly internalized US propaganda that last week, its police, while torturing the general secretary of the Communist Party Marxist – Kenya (CPM-K), Booker Omole, accused him of being the head of a drug cartel. They allegedly insisted that there could not be any other reason for him to protest outside Kenya’s US embassy in solidarity with Venezuela’s abducted president, Nicolás Maduro.
​Nonetheless, the CPM-K has “unequivocally” condemned what it described as “unprovoked attacks … by the Epstein leadership of the United States of America and the Zionist settler regime of Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
​Iran, it added, “has continued to stand as a beacon of fighting American Imperialism and Israeli Zionism in the region and its leadership on the resistance axis has proved that a people united can never be defeated.”
“History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”
​”Once again, history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The imperialist powers, led by Washington and Tel Aviv, are attempting to redraw the map of West Asia to serve their hegemonic interests,” added the Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS), on the frontline of the Southern African country’s anti-monarchist, pro-democracy struggle.
“This is not a conflict about nuclear weapons or regional stability, as the propaganda machines of the West would have us believe. It is a conflict about control, resources, and the suppression of any nation that dares to chart an independent path free from the dictates of Washington and London.”
Pavan Kulkarni
Journalist
