A Woodland Hills woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport Saturday night on suspicion of helping Iran funnel weapons to its proxies in Africa, propping up one of the world’s deadliest conflicts.
Shamim Mafi, 44, brokered the sale of “drones, bombs, bomb fuses, and millions of rounds of ammunition” between Iran and the Sudanese Armed Forces, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court just hours before her arrest at the airport, where she’d been set to board a flight to Turkey.
Photo of an “M-6” drone.
(United States District Court)
The Sudanese military is locked in a bloody civil war that is estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people and displaced millions more since 2023, making it the deadliest of the ongoing proxy fights among Persian Gulf countries.
Mafi is the third Angeleno from the city’s vast Iranian diaspora to be collared by federal authorities in three weeks.
Mafi first emigrated from Iran to Istanbul in 2013 before resettling in Los Angeles, where she ensconced herself in a tony Woodland Hills townhouse in the heart of L.A.’s Iranian community between trips to Iran, Turkey and Oman, court records show. She got her green card in 2016 and quickly began working for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, using an Omani shell company to move weapons and cash between the government and its proxies, federal authorities allege.
The criminal complaint says Mafi leveraged her contacts within the government to settle a property dispute over an inheritance from her late father and to get her son out of his mandatory military service.
In July of 2024, as fighting raged in Khartoum, a Sudanese weapons broker WhatsApped Mafi to contract a shipment of Qods Mohajer-6 drones — the same ones Iran has long supplied Russia in its war in Ukraine, according to the complaint. At least some of the weapons Mafi sold to the military arrived in Sudan from China.
A video still shows the opening of a large crate containing $100 bills.
(United States District Court)
Subsequent exchanges frequently referenced the complexity of moving cash to evade U.S. sanctions. A portion of the money was delivered in crates of $100 bills, while other transfers were made through hawalas, informal money-exchange systems that operate throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa, and still others through banks in Dubai.
“I[t] should be in small amounts,” Mafi instructed one of her Sudanese contacts over WhatsApp while brokering a payment in 2024, according to court documents. “In turkey we can just accept in exchange. And it should be in cash.”
Documents obtained by the FBI and detailed in the criminal complaint name Mafi’s shell company as the exporter of the drones, and the Sudanese Ministry of Defense as their buyer.
Records also show meetings between the Angeleno and her Sudanese contacts in Iran. One critical rendezvous hit a snag after Sudanese officials arrived in Tehran and were waiting to be picked up from the airport to inspect bomb fuses: Mafi couldn’t accompany them, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps informed her, because it did not permit women in its facility.
The dealmaker was forced to send a man in her place, court records show.
Social media posts show Mafi posing with assault rifles and other military hardware at the offices of an arms supplier in Turkey, between candid shots from a Dubai med-spa and glamorous snaps by the beach in Los Angeles.
According to the complaint, she helped the same Turkish company secure a spot at last year’s SHOT Show, a defense industry trade show in Las Vegas.
She is expected to appear in federal court in downtown on Monday. If convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison.
