The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [93]
Saudi intelligence guessed that between fifteen and twenty-five thousand Saudi youths trained in Afghanistan, although other estimates are far lower. Those who came back to the Kingdom were taken directly to jail for two or three days of interrogation. Some countries simply refused to let the fighters return. They became a stateless, vagrant mob of religious mercenaries. Many of them took root in Pakistan, marrying local women and learning to speak Urdu. Some went to fight in Kashmir, Kosovo, Bosnia, or Chechnya. The cinders of the Afghan conflagration were drifting across the globe, and soon much of the Muslim world would be aflame.
For those free-floating but ideologically charged veterans, a new home awaited them. In June 1989, at the same time that the jihad was ending in Afghanistan, Islamists staged a military coup d’état against the civilian, democratic government of Sudan. The leader of the coup was Brigadier General Omar Hasan al-Bashir, but the prime mover was Hasan al-Turabi, one of Africa’s most complex, original, charismatic, and devious characters.
Like bin Laden and Zawahiri, Turabi attributed the failures of the Arab world to the fact that its governments were insufficiently Islamic and too dependent on the West. But unlike those other men, Turabi was a Quranic scholar who was well acquainted with Europe and the United States. A Sudanese student in 1960, he wandered across America, staying with ordinary families—“even with Red Indians and farmers”—an adventure that would inform his piercing critique of secularism and capitalism. He had gained his master’s degree in law from the London School of Economics in 1961 and a doctorate in law from the Sorbonne in Paris three years later.
Turabi envisioned the creation of an international Muslim community—the ummah—headquartered in Sudan, which would then spill into other countries, carrying the Islamist revolution in an ever-widening circle. Sudan, until then a cultural backwater in the Muslim world, would be the intellectual center of this reformation and Turabi its spiritual guide. In order to carry out this plan, he opened the doors of his country to any Muslim, regardless of nationality, no questions asked. Naturally, the people who responded to his invitation tended to be those who were welcome nowhere else.
The government of Sudan began its courtship of bin Laden by sending him a letter of invitation in 1990, and followed it up by dispatching several members of the Sudanese intelligence service to meet with him. Essentially, he was being offered an entire country in which to operate freely. At the end of that year, bin Laden sent four trusted associates to investigate the business opportunities that the Sudanese government had promised. Turabi dazzled these representatives with his erudition, and they brought back an enthusiastic report. “What you are trying to do, it is Sudan!” they told bin Laden. “There are people with minds, with professions! You’re not mixing with the goats.”
Soon, another bin Laden emissary appeared in Khartoum with a bundle of cash. Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese member of al-Qaeda, rented a number of houses and bought several large parcels of land that would be used for training. Al-Jihad was already in Sudan, and Zawahiri personally gave Fadl $250,000 to buy a farm north of the capital. The neighbors began complaining about the sound of explosions coming from the untilled fields.
As an additional inducement, the Saudi Binladin Group got the contract to build an airport in Port Sudan, which brought Osama frequently into the country to oversee the construction. He finally moved to Khartoum in 1992, flying from Afghanistan with his four wives and—at that point—seventeen children. He also brought bulldozers and other heavy equipment, announcing his intention to build a three-hundred-kilometer road in eastern Sudan as a gift to the nation. The leader of Sudan greeted him with garlands of flowers.
TWO MEN WITH SUCH SIMILAR DREAMS as bin Laden and Turabi could scarcely