#1 Following he coup that brought the Islamist military to power in 1989, the Islamist intellectual Hasan al-Turabi, steeped in the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed to the Sudan a knot of Islamist leaders. Turabi was a friend and mentor to Osama Bin Laden who settled in Khartoum in 1991. Turabi sponsored the first Popular Arab and Islamic Conference in that year, and the first great meeting of Muslim Islamists attracted little international attention. However, more than a score of Islam's leading intellectuals attended, including Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia, Sheikh Zindani of Yemen, Abbasi Madani of Algeria, Alija Izetbegovic and Mustafa Ceric of Bosnia, Gaidar Jemal of Russia, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, Jordan and Europe. Its purpose seemed innocuous enough and when asked, Turabi stated simply that the mission of his Islamic organization was to promote "our religion and our culture," and defend Muslim values throughout the world. As such it offered a meeting house for likeminded individuals and organizations, many of them "listed" by the U.S. Department of State, Department of Treasury and/or the Department of Homeland Security either as terrorists or as members of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Among the listed organizations that maintained an office in Khartoum were HAMAS, Lebanon’s Hezbollah (Party of God) and a number of other smaller Palestinian organizations. HAMAS was allowed to invest in Sudan and benefited from banking privileges rarely offered to foreigners. It maintained its close relationship with the Sudanese Islamists for more that thirty years. |