American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

by Steven Emerson

  Soon Sudan was hosting an entire spectrum of radical Islamic groups that would plague both the Middle East and the West and foster political unrest around the world. As low-cost, low-tech weapons became more accessible, Sudan-based terrorists found it easier to export death and destruction worldwide, including to the most technically advanced nations.

  To pick a random list, Sudan-based terrorists instigated:

  Suicide bombings in Israel

  The attempted assassination of the president of Egypt

  A brutal military campaign of near-genocidal proportions against the black non-Muslim tribal minorities in southern Sudan

  Attacks on American forces in Somalia

  Unparalleled get-togethers of the world’s most militant Islamic terrorist leaders

  Training camps for weapons and explosives

  Training camps for Iranian Revolutionary Guards—who in turn trained street militias called the Popular Defense Forces, who carry out vigilante violence

  Use of the Sudanese diplomatic pouch to transport explosives

  Support of terrorist attacks in Ethiopia

  Support for, advance knowledge of, and critical involvement with the second series of planned terrorist attacks in Manhattan following the original World Trade Center bombing

  Although Iran sponsored more terrorism than Sudan during this period, Dr. al-Turabi’s regime was more focused than any other on supporting the global Muslim Brotherhood. His Popular Arab Islamic Conferences—three in all—were unprecedented gatherings that featured a global panorama of the Islamic movement, including delegations from the Middle East, Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Kenya, and the United States.

  There were plenty of critics of Sudan in the international community. In response, apologists for Dr. al-Turabi liked to claim that Sudan was singled out only because of its Islamic identity. In August 1994, for example, The Atlantic Monthly published “Turabi’s Law,” an article by William Langewiesche that exposed in chilling detail the totalitarian religious code that was being imposed by the Sudanese government. In a letter to the editor two months later, Ibrahim Hooper, director of communications of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attacked the article for making “many negative assertions about Islam, Shariah, Sudan and Hassan al-Turabi.” Hooper denied the existence of Sudanese secret police and criticized the article for “merely rehashed Western clichés about ‘fundamentalism’ and Islamic radicalism [while] ignor[ing] non-Islamic causes of Sudan’s turmoil.”4

  There were non-Muslim apologists as well. In 1993, when Sudan was placed on the State Department’s list of countries supporting terrorism, Jimmy Carter expressed his disdain for the decision. “They declared that Sudan was a terrorist training center, I think without proof,” said the former president. “In fact, when I later asked an assistant secretary of state he said they did not have proof, but there were strong allegations…. I think there is too much of an inclination in this country to look at Muslims as inherently terrorist or inherently against the West…. I don’t see that when I meet with these people.”5

  The urbane, British-and-French-educated Hassan al-Turabi, with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, obviously made a strong impression on the former president. Yet if it is wrong to consider all Muslims terrorists, so is it wrong to assume that all Muslim militants carry automatic weapons, wear scruffy beards, and shout “Death to America.” Many are highly sophisticated Westernized intellectuals. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, has argued that it is precisely the Westernized intellectuals in Muslim countries who are most susceptible to anti-Americanism and Islamic militancy. The posture seems to represent, in part, a recoil from the stresses of trying to assimilate to another culture.

  As a semi-Westernized intellectual, Dr. al-Turabi is skillful in telling other Westerners what they want to hear. Speaking in the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi, Dr. al-Turabi defended Islam by arguing, “We have a heritage and a wealth of culture but their [the West’s] life has been culturally empty. Even their music is now more like loud noise than serious music. They no longer know or read books. They are content with just watching television and switching from one channel to another.”6 Many Westerners would obviously agree—although they wouldn’t necessarily resort to terrorism as a consequence. At other times, Dr. al-Turabi has been more blunt: “The enemy is America,” he told The London Daily Telegraph on August 15, 1995. “If we are challenged economically we will develop our own country, we are very rich; if we are challenged culturally we will develop our own culture; if we are challenged militarily, we will have to fight back.”

  It was not long before Sudan was doing just that. Evidence produced at the trial of the Day of Terror bombings, plus information obtained by federal law-enforcement agents, shows that top officials of the Sudanese regime not only knew in advance of the foiled “Day of Terror” but actively facilitated the plot. Taped conversations linked the defendants with members of the Sudanese government. In those tapes, Siddiq Ali, a translator for the blind sheikh and the Sudanese ringleader of the Day of Terror, openly proclaimed that “our relation is very, very, very, very strong with the Sudanese government, and with the Islamic leaderships of Sudan, thanks to God that I have a direct contact with the Islamic leaders themselves.”7 In the same conversation, Ali stated that his ties were so close to Sudanese officials in the United States that he could walk right into the office of the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, the Sudanese consul, and the vice consul.

  “When we hit the United Nations, it will teach the world, the world, not only America a lesson,” Siddiq Ali declared in discussing the plan to blow up U.N. headquarters. Ali told fellow conspirators he could obtain critical help from Sudanese U.N. diplomats in securing credentials, license plates, and ID cards. This would enable them to drive an explosives-laden Lincoln Town Car right into the parking garage adjacent to U.N. headquarters. Sudanese officials were aware of the plan, Ali stated.

  When Siddiq Ali began to conspire to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who was scheduled to visit New York City that spring, the Sudanese mission in New York provided him with acutely sensitive information about how to pierce President Mubarak’s security detail as it drove him from Kennedy Airport to his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. In a chilling conversation taped by Emad Salem, Ali told his coconspirators the exact route of Mubarak’s U.S. Secret Service detail, even specifying the precise car in the police motorcade in which the president would be riding. Asked by Emad Salem where he got this information, Ali responded, “I get it from the highest level…from people inside the [Sudanese] Embassy…. My contact is the ambassador, brother.”

  Siddiq Ali was not the only Sudanese connection to the terrorist plot. Another defendant was Mohammed Saleh, a Yonkers gasoline-station operator who was to provide the fuel for the explosive device. According to information obtained by federal investigators, Saleh was a Hamas operative in charge of training terrorist recruits in Sudan. He had also bought terrorist tools, including guns and night-vision goggles, which were ultimately smuggled to Hamas squads in the West Bank. Mr. Saleh’s home in the Bronx was a safe house for terrorists visiting the United States, including Jordanian militant and recruiter of Hamas terrorists, Ahmed Noufal.

  Eventually, relations between the United States and Sudan chilled. Two Sudanese diplomats in New York were expelled in 1986; nevertheless, in early 1997, a Sudanese intelligence officer who once worked in Washington, D.C., sought entry to the United States under false documentation. His mission was to expand the Sudanese terrorist network on behalf of the National Islamic Front. Working secretly at night out of the Washington offices of the America Muslim Council for almost a year, this operative was able to establish close ties between Islamic groups in the United States and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. This information was revealed to me by a former AMC official, who was genuinely repelled by the fact that an American Muslim group would work hand-in-hand with such a brutal r
egime.

  By far the most damaging result of Sudan’s sponsorship of terrorism was the rise of Osama bin Laden, who came into his own during the years he spent there. Bin Laden sponsored the arrival of nearly 2,000 mujahideen from Afghanistan, who lived under his care. Bin Laden also became extremely active in terrorist activities around the world. In the late 1990s trial of the African embassy bombings, former bin Laden lieutenant Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a Sudanese who absconded with some of bin Laden’s money in 1994, said that he personally smuggled four crates of explosives from bin Laden’s farm at Soba to rebels in Yemen. Al-Fadl also claimed to have led a camel caravan loaded with Kalashnikovs to Egypt. Utilizing both his money and his construction expertise, bin Laden helped Sudan’s ruling NIF build what was at that point the world’s largest complex of terrorist training camps. Among the sites were:

  The al-Khalafiyya area, roughly twenty-five miles north of Khartoum, where Algerian Islamic Salvation Army and Armed Islamic Group members trained

  The Akhil al-Awliya, on the banks of the Blue Nile south of Khartoum, where at any one time upwards of five hundred Palestinians, Syrians, and Jordanians actively trained

  Al Mrihat, north of Umm Durman, where Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jama‘at Islamiyya, and the Vanguards trained

  Mukhayyamat al-Mazari, northwest of Khartoum, which served as an equal-opportunity training center for all nationalities, including Libyans, Tunisians, Palestinians, Syrians, Saudis, Lebanese, and Algerians. Even several Americans were known to have passed through.

  Bin Laden’s years in Sudan overlapped with many other terrorists’ residencies, and helped him turn al Qaeda into a global umbrella organization. Among his Sudanese compatriots were the conspirators who failed in a brazen attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on June 26, 1995, in Addis Ababa. These well-equipped killers—who possessed rocket grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles, explosives, and automatic weapons—failed only because of the tardiness of Mubarak’s motorcade. Credit was claimed by al-Gama‘at al-Islamiyya, whose members were trained in the Sudan. Dr. al-Turabi personally blocked their subsequent extradition. In September 1995, the Organization of African Unity condemned Sudan for supporting the attack and called upon the regime to turn over three suspects. Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin also charged that Sudan was using diplomatic cover to smuggle weapons and explosives into Ethiopia.

  Al-Gama‘at al-Islamiyya was hardly the only group there, however. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant cadre that specializes in dismembering and mutilating its victims, used Sudan as a base. Dr. al-Turabi gave diplomatic passports to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders such as Sheikh Abdel Aziz Odeh and Fathi Shikaki, who was killed in Malta in October 1995—to be replaced by Ramadan Abdullah Shallah of the University of South Florida. Employing Iranian funds, al-Turabi was able to help the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to return to Israel, where it carried out extensive terror operations. Hamas, Algerian Islamic Salvation Army fighters, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and al-Gama‘at al-Islamiyya also relied on Sudan. By 1995, half the 3,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent to Khartoum had come from Lebanon. Of these, more that 1,000 were Lebanese Hizballah.

  Until he arrived in Sudan, Osama bin Laden’s greatest accomplishment had been his financial backing of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who was now formulating plots to bomb a series of American aircraft flying from the Far East. In Sudan, bin Laden began assembling a worldwide network of front companies, Islamic charities, nongovernmental organizations, and recruitment centers that would help carry out attacks against American, Egyptian, Israeli, Saudi, and European targets. In the process, bin Laden helped the Sudanese build an airport in Port Sudan, an ocean port, and a network of north-to-south roads. In return, the NIF gave their guest monopolistic control over Sudanese agricultural exports and exclusive purchase rights over large domains of farmland.

  In the early 1990s, bin Laden sponsored his first effort against the United States—Muslim militias that attacked the U.S. servicemen sent to Somalia to protect civilians. The result was a stunning defeat for the United States, which included the gruesome spectacle of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The encounter emboldened bin Laden, who said later he was surprised how quickly the American government was willing to retreat.

  Next, U.S. authorities believe—but do not have “smoking gun” evidence—that the Saudi expatriate directed twin attacks against barracks housing U.S. servicemen on the Arabian peninsula in November 1995 and June 1996. More than a dozen American were killed and scores more wounded. In May 1996, Dr. al-Turabi finally yielded to diplomatic pressure from the United States and other countries and deported bin Laden. The wealthy Saudi refugee was offered the chance to renounce his jihad and return to Saudi Arabia. Instead, he went back to Afghanistan, where the Taliban had now overrun much of the northern region of the country. There, bin Laden began plotting terrorist acts that would one day announce his declaration of war to every American.

  In the fall of 1996, Osama bin Laden issued a 60-page fatwa, soon dubbed the “Ladenese Epistle.” It constituted a formal declaration of war against the United States. “Clearly, after Belief, there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the Holy Land,” bin Laden wrote. “Due to the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, i.e., using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy. In other words to initiate a guerrilla warfare, where the sons of the nation, and not the military forces, take part in it.”8

  The Epistle is a remarkable document. It revealed a hitherto unexpressed articulateness in bin Laden. In fact, it was so brilliant that bin Laden was forced to defend himself from public charges in the Islamic community that he had used a ghost-writer. Predictably, the Epistle dripped with rage against “crusaders” (the Christian West) and Jews, invoking incendiary citations from Islamic militant theology that mandated a war to avenge the “attack on Islam.” Obviously approaching paranoia, bin Laden raged against the United States for nearly every adverse event ever suffered by the Muslim Ummah (nation)—even though the Ummah predates the founding of the United States by nearly a millennium.

  Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war was virtually ignored by the American media, an omission not unnoticed by bin Laden himself. To correct this oversight, he began giving interviews to Arab and Western journalists from his hideout in Afghanistan. In each interview he was careful to repeat his avowed threats to attack the United States. Then, on February 23, 1998, he issued a new fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans and Jews everywhere in the world. This time his declarations were noticed by the CIA, which sent a memorandum to Congress warning that bin Laden was authorizing terrorist attacks on Americans throughout the world. Inside the government, there was growing awareness that bin Laden was a very dangerous person, ready to unleash death and destruction wherever he could. The only question was when and where.

  Most of what was known about Osama bin Laden at that point appeared in the investigations of a New York grand jury. In 1996, when bin Laden operatives Ramzi Yousef and Wali Khan Amin Shah were convicted in the trial of the first World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb American airliners in the Philippines, Shah soon began cooperating with the grand jury investigating the “Day of Terror” case. Other bin Laden followers had defected after arrests in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but this was the first significant breakthrough.

  Through foreign intelligence channels, timely analysis of electronic intelligence overseas, and the information gleaned from Shah and other informants, federal officials’ worst fears were confirmed: Osama bin Laden intended to strike at the United States in a series of bomb attacks, although the identity of the targets could not be determined. Unfortunately, the evidence tying bin Laden to other terrorist schemes was circumstantial. His connections to the bombing of American servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 wer
e even weaker. The 1997 arrest in Saudi Arabia of Hani al-Sayegh, suspected of participating in the 1996 attack on U.S. troops in that country, provided prosecutors with one link. But the case quickly fell apart when al-Sayegh recanted his confession and withdrew his guilty plea. It was in June of 1997, as a result of mounting evidence of the strength of al Qaeda and other groups, that I stated in an interview that America should “get ready for twenty World Trade Center bombings.”9

  By the spring of 1998, federal officials finally felt confident in pursuing an indictment against him. But this left one huge question—how could bin Laden be arrested? The decision about whether to use American forces in a raid to arrest bin Laden could only be decided at the presidential level. Within the government, some argued that spilling American blood to arrest bin Laden would be a Pyrrhic victory—particularly if he were subsequently acquitted in the legal process. The case against him certainly wasn’t foolproof. Still, many argued that a commando-style arrest should be pursued.

  Then on the morning of August 7, 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed nine minutes apart by members of al Qaeda, who drove trucks filled with explosives into them. It was hardly the most successful operation of Osama bin Laden’s organization. No Americans died in the Tanzania bombing, but eleven Tanzanians did. In Nairobi, 201 Kenyans and twelve Americans were killed in the explosion.