Hidden front as Iran and Sudan put on a show of force to Israel A SUSPECTED Israeli airstrike against a weapons factory in Khartoum last week points to a possible escalation in a hidden front of the rivalry between Israel and Iran - the arms pipeline through Sudan to Islamic militants on Israel's borders. Consensus has built among Israeli and Arab military analysts that the explosion just after midnight last Wednesday at the Yarmouk factory was indeed an Israeli airstrike, as Sudan has claimed. Israel neither confirms nor denies being behind it. Sudan, in turn, denied on Monday that Iran had any connection to the factory's production. In a show of support for the countries" alliance, two Iranian warships - a helicopter carrier and destroyer that had been conducting anti-piracy patrols off East Africa's coast - docked this week at Sudan's main Red Sea port. The Iranian commanders were holding talks with Sudanese officers in an "exchange of amicable relations," Sudan's military spokesman said. Sudan's foreign ministry dismissed allegations of an Iranian connection to the Yarmouk facility, saying: "Iran does not need to manufacture weapons in Sudan, be it for itself or for its allies." Experts say that Sudan's value to Iran is not in its modest weapon production capabilities, but in its vast desert expanses that provide cover for weapon convoys bound for Gaza through Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. The target may have been 40 shipping containers that satellite images show were stacked in the factory compound days before the explosion. Post-explosion imagery released this weekend by the monitoring group Satellite Sentinel Project show six 52ft-wide craters, all centred at the spot where the containers had been, the blast's epicentre. The group said the craters were consistent with an airstrike and that whatever it hit was a "highly volatile cargo," causing a powerful explosion that destroyed at least two structures in the compound and sent ordnance flying into nearby neighbourhoods. What was in the containers remains unknown. Retired Israeli Brigadier General Shlomo Brom said there was a "strong possibility" that Israel had identified an "imminent threat" within the factory. Brig Gen Brom, a research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the containers might have been part of Iran's efforts to smuggle "a new category of weapons" to Gaza. The weapons could be "something with air defence capability ... or could very well belong to the category of rockets and missiles, but just larger, stronger, and longer range," he said. General Sameh Seif Elyazal, a former Egyptian army general, said his understanding was that a strike was carried out against short-range missiles being assembled in the factory "under Iranian supervision," bound for the Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups. Gen Elyazal said Iranian-made weapons smuggled through Sudan reach Hamas militants in Gaza and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. "Iran wants to put Israel under pressure from the north, through Hezbollah and from the east through Gaza," he said. Iran has long backed Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. But relations with Hamas have been strained after the Palestinian militant group this year cut its ties with Syria - Tehran's biggest Arab ally - over that country's bloody civil war.