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Osama: the Sudan years

This article is more than 22 years old
Bin Laden spent five years in the Sudan before being expelled in 1996. The authorities claim he was busy building roads and farming. But what was he really up to?

"Osama who?" says the information minister, when he is asked about the man who spent five years running half of Sudan's industries, and perhaps even a global terrorist network, from an office just round the corner. "Oh... that Osama."

President Bush's "with us or against us" speech made plain the consequences of not siding against Bin Laden, and Sudan has had further to scramble on-side than almost any other country. It is still on America's hitlist of states that sponsor terrorism - and Bin Laden's handprints are all over the place. There is his bullet-scarred house in a Khartoum suburb, his plane sitting at the airport, the companies he owned, the bank accounts...

"He was investing heavily, he was doing the country a lot of good," says Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, the information minister. "But when the Americans told us to extradite him, we did - not that they provided proof of his involvement in terrorism." And not that Mohamed knew him well, you understand. They only met a few times.

Bin Laden first flew to Sudan from Afghanistan in early 1991. Al-Qaida had been formed three years before but, officially at least, the US still considered him a friendly mojahedin. By 1998, less than two years after he was expelled from Sudan, he had become America's most wanted man, thanks to the east Africa embassy bombings. It seems reasonable to conclude that Bin Laden's years in Sudan were crucial for the development of his terrorist network. So what was he up to all that time?

Nothing, say the Sudanese: it was Bin Laden's expulsion from Sudan that tipped him over the edge - which is to say, Sudan never hosted a terrorist. "Being extradited turned Bin Laden into an anti-America terrorist," says Dr Gutbi el-Mahdi, who took over Sudan's intelligence agency shortly afterwards. "Whatever his views when he was here, he was just doing business. We were watching him and he was under control. In Afghanistan, he went completely out of control."

On the surface, at least, Bin Laden was just another rich businessman. And having recently inherited as much as £200m - though estimates vary wildly - Bin Laden was a most welcome addition to a poor country ravaged by civil war. He started several businesses. The biggest were al-Hajira, a construction company, and Wadi al-Aqiq, which farmed hundreds of thousands of acres of sorghum, gum arabic, sesame and sunflowers in the central Gezira province. According to el-Mahdi, Bin Laden's initial investment in Sudan was around £10m, mostly in heavy machinery.

Bin Laden first opened a small office in McNimr street, amongst the crowded ministries of central Khartoum, then moved it to the affluent suburb of Riyadh, where he had a house. But he was more often at Soba, his farm just outside Khartoum, according to a former close business associate, and this was where most of his business was done. The farmhouse was a single-storey mud-building, with no furniture and a rough wooden roof, on the left bank of the Blue Nile. The floor was beaten earth, laid with camel rugs.

"His men all had nice air-conditioned flats in the city," says the associate. "But Bin Laden preferred to live simply with his horses and wives." There were four wives at the time, two or three horses and numerous children. "He was just another Saudi investor," he says. "If there is nothing between you, he is very kind. He smiles a lot. I never considered him dangerous."

According to this associate, Bin Laden's mixed bag of mojahedin employees made indifferent managers, however. The reason he visited Bin Laden so often was to complain about money owed to him, or the mismanagement of the farms he was renting out.

Bin Laden's business with the government, which supplied the vast majority of his contracts, did not go to plan either. Ideologically, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and his mullahs were more to Bin Laden's liking than the Saudis for whom his father had built roads; but they were much worse at paying their bills. After completing 200 miles of road north from Khartoum to Adbara, and another 100 miles on towards Port Sudan, the government reneged on Bin Laden's £20m fee, instead giving him a majority share in a tannery, worth £5m. The road was never completed.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government, which had declared a jihad against the country's Christian rebels, was augmenting the army with Islamist militias, press-ganged from Khartoum's sandy streets and souks. Bin Laden is rumoured to have been funding them heavily. But he was not training men himself - or for the government, according to the business associate. "Khartoum's a small town and everyone would have known," he says. Wisa al-Mahdi used to visit one of Bin Laden's two Saudi wives, Om-Hamza, a lecturer in Koranic law, from Medina, who would sometimes preach to local housewives. Others are scared to give their names when they talk about the Bin Ladens, but Al-Mahdi, the wife of Hassan Turabi, architect of Sudan's Islamic revolution and Bin Laden's friend, is happy to reminisce - her husband has just been imprisoned. "Osama was an ordinary Muslim, a good family man," she insists. "Definitely, he wasn't training people to kill."

But the idea that Bin Laden was nothing more than a wealthy tycoon with business problems and a generous Islamic patron during his years in the Sudan is heavily undermined by the testimony of a former al-Qaida member from the embassy bombings trial in February. Jamal Ahmed Fadl, a 38-year-old Sudanese man, worked as a general fixer for Bin Laden in Khartoum before running off with £70,000 in 1994. He says the business was all a front for al-Qaida. He describes a web of worldwide Islamist terrorism groups, with al-Qaida doling out guns, money and expertise at its centre.

Fadl says he personally smuggled four crates of explosives to Yemeni rebels. They were taken from a stockpile at Bin Laden's farm in Soba, and trucked to Port Sudan, where an army intelligence officer helped transfer them into an army truck. At midnight, the truck was taken to an al-Qaida boat moored at the army dock. Fadl also describes delivering $100,000 in $100 bills to an opponent of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman. He says he led a caravan of 50 camels loaded with Kalashnikovs to Egypt. And he details al-Qaida's assistance to Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, Chechnya, Turkey, Eritrea, Tajikistan, the Philippines and Lebanon.

According to Fadl, and others in Khartoum, the Gulf war in 1991 put the US in Bin Laden's sights just as he was moving to Sudan. Shortly afterwards, at one of the weekly al-Qaida meetings in Soba, he issued a fatwah against the US for desecrating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Two years later, he issued another, at the same place and time, sunset on Thursday, to mark the arrival of American peacekeepers in Somalia. Southern Sudan would be next, Bin Laden told his men - not entirely unreasonable given America's military support for the rebels there.

There are other stories that contradict the idea that Bin Laden led a quiet life in the Sudan. In 1995, four activists from an ultra-extreme Egyptian group which considers Islam so corrupt that it would be best to start again, opened fire in a mosque in Omdurman, killing 12 people. Afterwards, they jumped into a Toyota pickup and went hunting for Bin Laden - whom they judged offensively liberal. According to former neighbours, the Toyota screamed to a stop outside Bin Laden's offices, opposite his house, and even before getting out the occupants opened fire. Shots were returned immediately, from the offices and from the roof of the house. Within minutes, one man lay dead in the street, two or three in the offices, and three in the pickup. The fourth attacker was hanged.

By early 1996, America was demanding that Sudan expel all its suspected terrorists, including most of the Afghanistan veterans. Bin Laden was high on that list, but principally as a well-known employer of Islamist misfits. Once his businesses were broken up, the US authorities assumed that he would disappear. "There was an awareness that he was tagged a dangerous figure; but we didn't have a handle on him as I recall," says Donald Petterson, the American ambassador to Sudan throughout most of Bin Laden's stay. Khartoum offered to hand Bin Laden over to Saudi Arabia, or, potentially straight to America, says el-Mahdi, the spy chief. "If America had had something against him we would have looked at extraditing him to America, but they had not."

But, fearing an extremist backlash, and having nothing to charge Bin Laden with, Saudi Arabia wanted no part in the deal. "Ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia," the CIA finally instructed General Elfatih Erwa, who was leading Sudan's negotiatiors. "We said, 'He will go to Afghanistan,'" says Erwa. "But they said, 'Let him.'"

The government promptly seized Bin Laden's businesses; Bin Laden chartered a plane for Kabul. He got away safely, but at the most conservative estimate, his losses totalled £30m. "He has nothing like the money you all think," says one of the country's richest men. "Losing a few tens of millions here nearly finished him off," el-Mahdi concurs. "I would say that by the time he went to Afghanistan he was totally broke - he didn't have anything."

Several Sudanese banks have had foreign assets frozen since September 11. But businessmen, as well as ministers, say that whether Bin Laden still has major investments in Sudan depends, as his former associate puts it, on whether "the government decides to give them back or not".

That does not look likely. Sudan is doing its brutal best to stamp out potential Bin Laden support. More than 50 of Turabi's supporters have been arrested since September 11 after protesting against his arbitrary detention and the country's perceived appeasement of America. "It would have been better for Osama and for Sudan if he had never left," says al-Mahdi, Turabi's wife. But it doesn't look like he'll be back.

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