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Al Qaeda eyes new Darfur battleground with West

By Lamia Radi

Al Qaeda leader is ‘seeking to widen the front of resistance to the crusade against the Muslim world’

AL QAEDA is seeking to exploit Western plans for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur to open up a new battleground in its holy war, analysts said Monday after Osama bin Laden called for preparations for a prolonged conflict in the restive Sudanese region.

“Bin Laden did not discuss the question of Darfur in the past, but the current situation imposes such an intervention as the problem is deteriorating rapidly,” said the director of the London-based Islamic Observatory, Yasser al-Serri.

Serri, whose organisation defends Islamist movements, said the growing likelihood of “foreign interference” in Darfur had spurred the new focus on the region from the Al Qaeda leader in his latest audiotape aired Sunday.

“He wanted to warn of foreign attempts to find a foothold in Sudan,” Serri told AFP, referring to US-led pressure for a NATO-backed UN force to replace overstretched African Union troops in the vast desert region the size of France.

Serri said bin Laden also still held a grudge against Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, whose Islamist-backed military government sheltered the Al Qaeda leader until 1996 when he was forced to flee, eventually finding refuge in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

“He believes the Khartoum government betrayed his confidence by expelling him under US pressure,” the London-based analyst said.

Egyptian Islamist lawyer Mountasser al-Zayyat said the Al Qaeda leader was “seeking to widen the front of resistance to the crusade against the Muslim world.

“He wants to turn Darfur into a front for jihad (holy struggle) ... profiting from any development taking place in the Muslim world,” Zayyat told AFP.

In the latest audiotape, the Western world’s most wanted man had called upon supporters to prepare for a prolonged war against “crusader thieves” in Darfur.

He said that Muslims “should get to know the territory and the tribes of Darfur and its surroundings” in readiness for the conflict.

The launch of an uprising by ethnic minority rebels in Darfur three years ago prompted a scorched earth response from the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum in which up to 300,000 people have died and more than two million fled their homes.

But unlike in southern Sudan, where the population is largely Christian or animist, in Darfur the population overwhelmingly shares the same Muslim faith as Sudanese Arabs and both sides - government and rebels alike - were quick to reject the Al Qaeda leader’s bid to get involved.

“We categorically reject these declarations,” said Ahmed Hussein of the Justice and Equality Movement, one of the two Darfur rebel groups.

“His words are completely disconnected from the reality in Darfur. Bin Laden is still preaching the theory of an American-Zionist conspiracy when the real problem comes from Khartoum, which is a Muslim government killing other Muslims,” Hussein told AFP.

The Sudanese government was equally quick to distance itself from its onetime guest, despite its own Islamist leanings and its strong opposition to the replacement of the existing AU force in Darfur with UN peacekeepers.

“Sudan has nothing to do with such statements,” foreign ministry spokesman Jamal Mohammed Ibrahim told AFP. Darfur is an “internal problem that we are trying to resolve under the auspices of the African Union.” AFP

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