Authors: Jason Burke
In May 1990, after talking about it for years, the Yemen Arab Republic and the People’s Democratic Republic of the Yemen merged, bringing together the Islamic, conservative and nominally capitalist north and the secular, Marxist south. Events in the Yemen were watched carefully by regional powers. Saudi Arabia felt threatened by the unification and began to work to fragment the country. Wahhabi organizations in the Gulf saw an opportunity to propagate their brand of Islam, which had been introduced to the country by returning Afghan veterans, and began pouring in missionaries.
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In a sense, bin Laden, just a thousand miles to the northwest in Jeddah, was part of this effort. On at least one occasion in the early 1990s he contacted a Yemeni exile living in Saudi Arabia and offered him a substantial sum of money if he would return home and live as ‘a good Muslim’ and it is likely that he saw the Yemen as a base from which the peninsula could be ‘purified’.
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He also began sending money and representatives to Yemeni Islamic militants in the north. His contacts with al-Fadhli were invaluable. This pattern, of exploiting personal connections to tap into opportunities provided by local contingencies, was to become well established over the coming decade.
Few in the West took any real interest in the convoluted internal politics of the Yemen until bombs went off outside the two most expensive hotels in Aden in December 1992, killing a tourist and a hotel worker. The attack appeared to be directed at the hundreds of US servicemen transiting the country on their way to launch the ill-fated Operation Restore Hope, part of a United Nations effort to prevent
millions of people dying of starvation in Somalia. The blasts focused attention on the small coastal state rather suddenly.
In fact, though bin Laden is often alleged to have been behind the bombs, it is far more likely that Tariq al-Fadhli organized the attacks.
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Extensive investigations undertaken by the authoritative American author and journalist Peter Bergen indicate that bin Laden’s involvement went no further than the supply of funds to al-Fadhli’s group around this time. This would fit in with the emerging bin Laden
modus operandi
of instigating and facilitating, rather than directly funding, militancy and terror.
By 1991, bin Laden was under a form of house arrest in Jeddah.
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He was increasingly unhappy and felt very strongly that his duty was to flee the Arabian peninsula as long as American troops were ‘occupying the land of the two holy places’. In this he was following the Mohammedan Paradigm, aiming to retreat so as to better struggle in the future. Bin Laden persuaded a brother to convince the deputy interior minister, Ahmed bin Abdelaziz, to release his passport on the basis that he needed to travel to Pakistan to sort out some financial arrangements in person. He promised to return to Saudi Arabia. This, of course, was a subterfuge. The first thing he did on arriving in Peshawar was write to his brother apologizing for misleading him and admitting that he had no intention of going back to his homeland. After around three months in Peshawar, where he appears to have attempted to broker an agreement between Hekmatyar and Massoud, he flew to Sudan, probably from the airstrip at Jalalabad which was then under the control of Maulvi Younis Khalis, to whom he was close.
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According to both Jamal Isma’il, a journalist who interviewed bin Laden several times during this period, and a comprehensive investigation undertaken post-11 September by the respected London newspaper
al-Quds al-Arabi
, bin Laden arrived in the African state in 1992, moving into a large villa in a suburb of Khartoum.
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Flight
The house was a plain, two-storey, stucco villa in a quiet and affluent quarter, well away from the bustle of the centre of Khartoum. It had no fridge, no air-conditioning and nothing but carpets on the floor. There were many visitors and they ate sitting in rows on the hard floors with their host. Five times a day he would lead all of them a few hundred yards down the dusty streets to the nearby mosque.
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Bin Laden was not without friends in Khartoum. A large group of associates, primarily from Islamic Jihad, had moved to the city at least a year before he arrived. According to Jamal al-Fadl, the prosecution witness at the African bombings trial, ‘al-Qaeda’ had begun their shift from Pakistan to the Sudan almost 18 months before bin Laden reached the country. In late 1990, while bin Laden was in Saudi Arabia, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Islamic Jihad, had given al-Fadl $250,000 and sent him to buy a farm to the north of Khartoum. The advantages of locating in Sudan were obvious. The huge border with Egypt is entirely unguarded and, with Khartoum hostile to Cairo, the regime was considered likely to support militant activities against Mubarak’s government. By the time bin Laden arrived, Islamic Jihad were already training in explosives and weapons drills. Hundreds of other Afghan veterans, unaffiliated either to Islamic Jihad or to bin Laden, had preceded him too. Activists in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been in touch with Sudanese Islamists since the mid 1980s. With many facing arrest and incarceration in their own countries, Sudan was a popular destination. Most were not involved in any specific groups but were effectively freelancers.
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The new Islamist regime in Khartoum, which had taken power in
1989, had sought out Islamic Jihad and bin Laden to invite them to their country in 1990. Al-Fadl told the court that they were so keen to have bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and their associates that they sent a deputation to Peshawar to convince them to make the move.
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This is an early example of how bin Laden and other radicals profited from developments within the Islamic movement that were entirely independent of their own activities. In the Yemen, bin Laden had been able to exploit the existence of radical groups to further his own anti-Saudi agenda. In Afghanistan, he was able to do the same with the Taliban. It is important to recognize that the groups in the Yemen and Afghanistan, and the regime in the Sudan, have roots in local contingencies that pre-date bin Laden and, should he be removed from the scene, will still need to be dealt with if radical Islam is to be countered.
Indeed, political Islamism in Sudan dates back to when a branch of Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood was founded there in 1944.
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As in Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere, though the Brotherhood was quick to gain a foothold in the middle classes, their brand of Islam remained confined to the limited educated and intellectual circles in the country until the 1960s. Islam in Sudan was instead dominated by mystical brotherhoods led by local religious figures with the supernatural gift of blessing, called
baraka
, who bear comparison with the pirs and
syeds
of Afghanistan. In Sudan, as elsewhere, leftists and Nasserites in universities and trade unions hindered the Brotherhood’s expansion.
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Hassan al-Turabi, the leading figure of modern Sudanese Islam, is the quintessential self-made political Islamist. He has a traditional Qur’anic education, a degree in law from the University of Khartoum, a master’s from the University of London and a doctorate from the Sorbonne, Paris. Like Islamists in Afghanistan he copied the organization for his own party from his main leftist rival, the Sudanese Communist Party, and focused his efforts on students, the product of a burgeoning educational sector. By 1965, his party was winning 40 per cent of votes in student elections against the leftists’ 45 per cent. Al-Turabi’s appeal to undergraduates was boosted by his promise to allow women, suitably veiled, to play a full role in public life. He was also assisted by the Saudis and the other Gulf states. As elsewhere in
Africa, huge amounts of Gulf money were poured into the training of local preachers in conservative Wahhabi-Salafist strands of Islam in a bid to counter the appeal of both Christian missionaries and the mystic brotherhoods in Sudan. Al-Turabi’s focus on young students in the universities meant that successive administrations, desperate for trained, educated people, were forced to rely more and more on al-Turabi’s cadres. Consequently, by the late 1980s, many senior positions in the bureaucracy and the military were occupied by people loyal to or at least heavily influenced by him. In June 1989, a
coup d’état
mounted by General Omar Hassan al-Bashir was supported by Islamist army officers and the ulema who had been promised the introduction of Shariat law.
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Al-Turabi was the power behind the throne and was keen to develop Sudan as a rival to Riyadh as leader of the Sunni Islamic world. He thus supported Saddam Hussein in 1990, organized a series of international conferences of Islamic militant activists in Khartoum and invited the veterans of the Afghan war to set up bases in his country. Al-Turabi appears to have hoped that bin Laden, in addition to being able to subsidize major development projects in Sudan, would also put up the funds for the twenty-three new training camps for militants and government militia that he wanted to build.
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Bin Laden, possibly naïvely, obliged and, within two years of his arrival in the country, had spent tens of millions of dollars building a highway across the desert from Khartoum to Port Sudan, contributing to a new airport for Khartoum and keeping al-Turabi’s administration financially afloat during a series of foreign exchange crises that threatened to leave the country without fuel.
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Most of bin Laden’s time in Sudan appears to have been devoted to setting up and running a sprawling and less than successful business empire. He took visiting businessmen to see his experiments with different types of tree, ran dozens of trading companies and a millionacre farm where the military instruction of ‘Arab Afghan’ veterans and the cultivation of peanuts took place simultaneously. Other firms produced honey and sweets. There was an investment company, a tannery, a bakery and a furniture-making company.
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There were also plenty of committees, lots of ludicrous schemes that went nowhere and frequent disputes among bin Laden’s staff over pay. A barely
serviceable plane was bought for $230,000 and then written off.
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Scores of bank accounts were set up across the world. Several were in bin Laden’s own name. This can be seen as either an astonishing lapse of security or an indication that bin Laden genuinely saw himself as nothing more than a devout and legitimate businessman who financed Islamic activism. Many such men existed in his homeland and elsewhere in the Gulf. Another clue to bin Laden’s thinking, perhaps hinting at a more militant position, might be in the name of the construction company that he set up as a joint venture with the Sudanese government: ‘al-Hijra’.
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Amongst the sesame seed farms and the experimental arboriculture one can also begin to make out the very indistinct form of what would later become bin Laden’s primary role in modern Islamic militancy: using the resources at his disposal to help realize the ‘jihadi’ ambitions of young men throughout the Islamic world. There is substantial trial testimony from (prosecution) witnesses that corroborates reports that large numbers of militants were training in Sudan at this time. Many, though by no means all, were under the aegis of bin Laden and Islamic Jihad. Algerian GIA, Lebanese Hizbollah and Palestinian Hamas also had a presence in Sudan in the early 1990s along with Eritrean, Ethiopian and other African radical dissident groups.
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Nothing emphasizes the sense of a broad and diverse movement, in which bin Laden was nothing more than a marginal player, more than the list of guests at one of al-Turabi’s ‘International Islamic’ Conferences. Some of the groups used facilities run by the Sudanese government or ‘arms-length’ organizations, others used camps run by people like bin Laden.
The number of different groups in Sudan allowed bin Laden and his associates to start building, or often reinforcing, contacts. The Jamaat-e-Jihad of Eritrea and the Abu Ali group in Jordan were both given grants of $100,000. Fighters were also dispatched to Chechnya via an office set up in Azerbaijan. Two men, an Egyptian and a Sudanese, visited training camps run by Hizbollah, a Shia group, in the Lebanon, al-Fadl said he was told, and returned with videos showing how bombs large enough to destroy entire buildings could be constructed. Libyans and Algerians close to bin Laden and al-Zawahiri set up contacts with their own domestic groups. Al-Fadl also said, though
he admitted it was only hearsay, that groups of fighters had been sent to Tajikistan and the Philippines. Bin Laden does seem to have been considering attacks on Western interests, even if he appears to have been incapable of actually executing them. In 1993, Ali Mohammed, the Egyptian Jihad activist who had been in Peshawar training militants in surveillance in 1991, turned up in Khartoum. He travelled to Nairobi and took pictures of the US embassy there. He brought them back and showed them to bin Laden, who apparently pointed to where a suicide bomb might go.
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