The Secular General Meets the Religious Fanatics : Somalia: Aidid is looking to the leaders of Iran and Sudan to arm and train his militia. The fundamentalists eagerly comply to humiliate the U.S.

After U.S. gunships destroyed the villa of Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid last June, various books and manuals on urban guerrilla warfare were found in the ruins. Written in sever al languages, they drew on the experiences of Chinese, Cuban, North Vietnamese and Palestinian revolutionaries. The books contained advice on hit-and-run tactics and instructions on how to construct home-made explosives. U.S. intelligence, however, has discovered a far more significant supporter and instructor.

The fundamentalist regime in Tehran has become a strong backer of the elusive Somali general. But Iran is playing its Aidid card with caution. To conceal its involvement, Iran is using the African nation of Sudan as its subcontractor.

While the U.S. media was trying to downplay Aidid’s political and military significance by calling him a “warlord” and a “clan leader,” the general was consolidating his power in Mogadishu, the capital, and in the provinces. According to Western intelligence sources, Aidid enjoys the support of tens of thousands of Somalis who now resent the presence of U.N.--particularly American--soldiers on their soil.

He is said to have a militia numbering at least 1,000 trained soldiers equipped with rifles, machine guns, trucks, vans, rocket-propelled grenades, remote-controlled mines, antiaircraft guns and maybe antiaircraft shoulder missiles. Some of their arsenal was collected during the civil war that destroyed Somalia’s infrastructure and brought it to bankruptcy and famine. But today, U.S. officials say Aidid receives most of his weapons and logistical support from Sudan. The shipments are sent by sea and by land, via neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya. Most of Aidid’s fighters were trained in Sudan by Iranian officers.

For the secular general who studied at a Soviet military academy in the late ‘60s, there is nothing religious or ideological in his alliance with Sudan and Iran; it is a marriage of convenience. But for the Iranians and Sudanese, the Somali general is another tool in their strategy to damage U.S. interests in the region and inflict humiliation upon the remaining superpower.

According to intelligence sources, Sudan has turned into a safe haven for Iranian-inspired and -supported terrorist groups. Based on U.S. spy-satellite images and information obtained from other intelligence sources, U.S. and Israeli agencies have detected the presence of hundreds of fighters of different nationalities in 10 training camps around Khartoum, the capital, and Port Sudan. State Department officials say the Sudanese government permits such terrorists as Abu Nidal, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas, Islamic Jihad groups and other African Islamic radicals to operate on its soil. Their purpose is to undermine the new Israeli-Palestinian accord, topple pro-U.S. governments in the region and turn their respective countries into Islamic republics.

But Sudan has not confined its support to groups that threaten its African and Middle Eastern neighbors. It has started spreading its state-sponsored violence to the West. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyption religious leader linked to the men charged in the February bombing of the World Trade Center, emigrated to the United States, in 1990, from Sudan.

Equipped with such information and with much more evidence his department has yet to release, Secretary of State Warren Christopher recently cited Sudan as a state that sponsors terrorism. Accordingly, it is now ineligible to receive U.S. military and civilian aid.

What made Sudan, one of the poorest nations in the world, abandon its traditionally pro-Western orientation and embark on the road to terrorism? Why did it agree to become a hothouse for fundamentalist zealots?

The answer begins in June, 1989, when Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir overthrew the civilian government in Khartoum. The Sudan he took over was plagued by famine, headed by a corrupt bureaucracy and engaged in a 30-year civil war with its largely Christian south. Bashir promised “food, cleanup and peace.” But like other dictators before him, he could not deliver. To consolidate his shaky grip on power, Bashir allied himself with Hassan Turabi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

For 20 years, Turabi, considered the guiding spirit of the Islamization of Sudan, preached, in writings and sermons, that Sudan must be transformed into a bastion of Islam. He formed the National Islamic Front, a political tool now providing popular support for Bashir’s regime. In November, 1991, Turabi persuaded his government to impose the Shari’ah, the Islamic law, as the law of the land. When relations with their neighbors deteriorated and as the civil war intensified, the Bashir-Turabi team turned to Iran for help.

Although representing two brands of Islam--Iran is mostly Shiite, Sudan Sunni--the leaders of Tehran and Khartoum share two fundamental values: a desire to spread Islam and a hatred of Western culture. A month after the introduction of the Shari’ah laws, Iran’s president, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, visited Khartoum and signed several agreements for economic, military and ideological cooperation. Since then, Iran has become Sudan’s major provider of oil, credit, medicines, food and military hardware. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have assisted Turabi in forming his own militia. Because of its increasingly heavy dependence on Iran’s support, the Bashir government, in effect, is an Iranian satellite. Sudan gives the Iranians a strategic foothold in Africa and a second anchor in the Middle East.

Indeed, the Iranians have used Sudan not just as a training ground for several Arab terrorist groups and Muslim fundamentalists but also as a launching pad to spread their propaganda and revolutionary zeal. Sudanese-based Iranian religious intervention has been detected among Somali, Kenyan, Ugandan and Nigerian Muslims.

Yet, “it would be self-deluding” warned Immanuel Sivan, a leading Israeli authority on fundamentalist Islam, “to blame only the Iranians and Sudanese for the spread of strong religious sentiments in and outside the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalism is rooted in historical traditions and inspired by social injustice, poverty and political impotence.” The same can be said of Aidid. It would be wrong for U.S. officials to believe that the general is a local gangster with scant political support.