Sudan Called Crossroads for Islamic Militants, Guerrillas

On a dusty back street of this remote African capital, miles from Jerusalem, the office of Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine calls for holy war against Israel and resistance against America.

“I believe if the United States continues in this manner, it will lose more and more. This is only the beginning. You can expect more, because the Islamic world is very angry,” Abu Abdullah, Islamic Jihad’s envoy in Khartoum, says of the recent bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

A few streets away, in a room where a slow overhead fan keeps a lonely vigil against the merciless afternoon heat, a representative of Hamas, the leading Palestinian Islamic militant organization, sits beneath a poster depicting a map of Israel ripped from the heart of Palestine.

“We believe that the Zionist colonization in Palestine is endangering Palestine and the Arab world, and it is our duty to combat it,” Mounir Sayed says. “We are here in Sudan to make our work because the question of Palestine concerns not only the Palestinians. It concerns all Muslims.”

Though both groups consider themselves legitimate political organizations waging an Islamic struggle against Israel, the United States considers them terrorist groups and wants to know why they are doing business in Khartoum.

The recent arrest of five Sudanese among the suspects accused in a wide-ranging plot to blow up the United Nations and other key targets in the United States has added new urgency to the debate over whether Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalist regime is waging a quiet war of terror against its Arab neighbors and America.

Sudan’s Islamic leaders make no secret of their disdain for secular regimes in neighboring Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia, which they perceive as selling out the interests of their own citizens to serve distant masters in the West.

But they laugh at the idea that an impoverished nation like Sudan--combatting famine, civil war and economic crisis in the heart of Africa--could act as anything more than a powerful model for the world’s Muslims.

“The Sudanese don’t have a tradition of terrorism at all in their history, not in this century or the last one,” said Hassan Turabi, the urbane, Sorbonne-educated leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front. “Never an assassination in Sudan, much less a background in violence as the U.S. has.”

Nonetheless, the sweltering streets of Khartoum often provide an unlikely meeting place for some of the world’s most notorious Islamic renegades.

Members of the shadowy Abu Nidal organization and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah have been seen in Khartoum, as has the outlaw Somali militia leader Mohammed Farah Aidid. The militant Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, whose followers have been accused in the recent New York bombing cases, received his visa to travel to the United States from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. Rachid Ghanouchi, leader of the outlawed An Nahda Islamic movement in Tunisia, formerly traveled on a Sudanese diplomatic passport.

Sources in the Sudanese capital say Khartoum has become a way station of sorts for former Arab moujahedeen with the Islamic resistance in Afghanistan, young fighters whose military training and vigorous Islamic ideology have prompted their own governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria to deny them entry upon their return because of fears they will join violent underground Islamic opposition movements at home.

Sudan has become a meeting point for many of these so-called Afghans and other Islamic opposition figures because, unlike most other Arab countries, it does not require visas for any Arab.

“We are sure that a lot of people are coming here as a transit station from Afghanistan to any other place, or from (Arab countries) to other places, maybe like New York,” said one source who has studied the movement. “This transition period takes a long time. At the end of this period, these people go out with another name, another nationality, another passport.”

Many investigators say a key figure is Osama ibn Laden, a wealthy Saudi businessman with ties to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. For years, he recruited young Arabs to join the Afghanistan resistance, and now he has offices in Khartoum. Former Afghanistan fighters in Kuwait have described him as a “spiritual leader” of the moujahedeen.

Ibn Laden is working on a number of investment and construction projects in Sudan, including construction of a new highway from Khartoum to Atbara, an airport at Port Sudan and establishment of the North Bank of Khartoum.

Rose al Youssef, the Egyptian weekly magazine, said Ibn Laden has recently contributed $1 million to help relocate former Afghanistan fighters after Western governments demanded their ejection from Pakistan and helped transfer at least 480 to Sudan in May.

Neighboring governments such as Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria fear that these “Afghans” are being trained to conduct militant operations against what are perceived as corrupt Arab regimes; the support of private Saudi financiers for these individuals was said to be a key subject of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s shuttle trip to Persian Gulf capitals last spring.

There has been no evidence to suggest that Ibn Laden or the Sudanese government have been involved in any training activities. Indeed, most of the young “Afghans” were aided by the United States when it was battling Soviet influence in Afghanistan.

And Sudan says that while as many as 2,000 Palestinians have sought refuge in Sudan--many of them flooded in after Kuwait ejected most of its Palestinian population at the end of the Gulf War--the number of non-Sudanese former “Afghans” is relatively small.

“If he’s an Arab, he can come to Sudan, he does not need a visa. Nobody will ask him, ‘Where did you come from, and what were you doing before you came here?’ ” Turabi said. “But believe me, I would have known if many people were thrown out of Pakistan and they took refuge here in Sudan. I’m not saying that not a single person came in. But I’m quite sure that not two dozen ex-Afghan moujahedeen who are not Sudanese have come back to Sudan.”

Diplomats in Khartoum say an overnight curfew and tight restrictions on travel have made independent verification impossible. A Western government said one of its envoys unsuccessfully sought to visit farmland recently acquired by Ibn Laden on the Nile River south of Khartoum, an area where a group of Palestinians are believed to be living.

Ibn Laden is “taking people as farmers and he’s keeping them on farms and they’re not allowed to deal with civilian life until he sends them here or there,” another envoy said. “If you ask about it, you are told, ‘This is a farm, and these are farme”

Ibn Laden could not be reached. But other business people in Khartoum said his investments in Sudan have been sound and seem geared not toward ideology but future profit. “There are a lot of people investing here--Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis--and, to me, I think the motive is commercial, not religious,” one Arab banker said.

Ibn Laden’s land is not the only area that Western officials have questions about. A European envoy said there have been unsuccessful attempts to investigate a military camp in central Sudan. “We’ve tracked several Iranian visitors going there,” the envoy said.

Sudan says allegations by Egypt and other neighboring countries that Sudan is operating terrorist camps may be the result of confusion over the country’s numerous training sites for its Popular Defense Forces. The popular Islamic militias are modeled after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and provide basic military and religious training for college students, civil servants and anyone else who wants to undergo a rigorous 45-day training in the scorching Sudanese desert, officials say.

Western officials now concede that the outcry over training camps may have been overblown and they admit that Sudan does not have any apparent financial resources to support international terrorism.

But, one envoy said, “the truth is, it doesn’t cost a lot to support terrorism. If they go out and talk to fundamentalists and agree that maybe these people would like to take a trip to Sudan and while they’re in Sudan they learn how to make a bomb and then go back and set it off, that doesn’t take a lot of money.”

The financial paper trail in Sudan has been one of the most difficult to track, and one of the biggest questions is how the economy of Sudan has not collapsed.

Almost 90% of Sudan’s $1 billion a year in foreign development aid was cut off after the takeover of the government by the regime of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and the subsequent violations of human rights. Meantime, inflation here in recent months has neared an annual rate of 300%.

The government has attempted to boost agricultural production and implemented economic reforms even stronger than many recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

But the simple reality is that imports exceed outside revenues by a huge margin; no one can explain how Sudan is covering the gap.

“The economy of this place does not make sense,” said one foreign envoy. “. . . I’m convinced there are financial flows of a very significant scale coming from outside.” Much of that, analysts suggest, could be from Sudanese outside the country sending money home to their families.

But diplomats here say they believe that foreign Islamic sympathizers are probably channeling large sums to Sudan’s National Islamic Front for use in public aid and development projects. “On what scale, I’m not sure,” one envoy said. “It doesn’t have to be a colossal amount.”

Sudan says the latest accusations against the five Sudanese men in New York show racism and anti-Islamic hysteria more than evidence against Sudan, which claims to have no knowledge of the five suspects.

“Why was there no protection for Omar Abdul Rahman?” Turabi asked. “In the press, nobody said it’s unfair to arrest this man, this blind man, just jail him. Why do you (Americans) just reject his green card like that and throw him out of the country? . . . You want to champion the cause of human rights all over the world, and you would do such a thing?”

Mohammed Amin Khalifa, Speaker of the appointed Parliament, said Sudanese officials believe the evidence against the suspects has been fabricated by an informant, an Egyptian who they believe is working for the Cairo government, one of Sudan’s staunchest opponents.

They believe that Egypt--whose officials as recently as last week suggested Sudanese-Iranian links to the New York terrorism incidents and terrorist activities in Egypt--is trying to convince America that Sudan is supporting terrorism to improve Cairo’s regional standing.

“We Sudanese are a very peaceful society,” Khalifa said, adding that the allegation of his nation’s involvement in the New York terrorism “was fabricated by a retired Egyptian officer. It is connected with the CIA. They just want Sudan to be involved in such crimes.”

In a courtyard in an affluent suburb of Khartoum, the father of one of the men accused in the U.N. bombing plot sipped tea and said he was at a loss to explain the American accusations.

“I never expected my son to think of doing such thing, and my feeling is that these boys have been entrapped by someone for some reason,” said Mahmoud Abdelghani, whose son, Fadil Abdelghani, and nephew are among the five Sudanese charged in the case. The nephew was named in the charges as Amir, with no last name, and elsewhere as Amir Abdelghani and Abdou Zaid.

Abdelghani said his son had returned to Sudan on March 12 to help him work at the family grocery for about three months and spent all of his days at the store. He did not meet with anyone in the evenings, he said; he was too tired. He returned to the United States in mid-June.

“Here . . . never have people heard that even political opponents have assassinated each other,” Abdelghani said. “Here people quarrel with words, not knives. My son and his cousin had no experience of any kind in dealing with weapons. He never even joined the army. Moreover he had no chance even to talk about Omar Abdul Rahman. We are very busy in our business. We don’t have time to talk about sheiks, or religious differences.”

He sighed. His son, he said, “was very pleased in America. The proof for this was he was trying to get the American nationality. He wanted to become an American.”