Khartoum, capital of Sudan was considered one of the safest African capital cities but the recent spurt of Islamic terrorism is threatening to interrupt its law and order scenario. The growing resentment among the Muslim youths of the country over the western countries, especially U.S.A. and Britain over the strife in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the bombing strikes in Somalia where the U.S. forces helped the Ethiopian forces to topple an Islamic regime in 2006 have created new generation Sudanese extremist groups.
John Granville, a USAID official and former Peace Corps volunteer was a victim of the extremist ire, when he, along with his Sudanese driver, was shot dead by suspected Islamic extremists on New Year’s eve. In August last year, a suspected bomb plot aiming at blowing up the British and U.S. embassies was broken by the Sudanese police only after the conspirators accidentally blew up their own apartment. In a controversial case last year, a British schoolteacher was briefly jailed for allowing her students to name a class teddy bear after Prophet Muhammad. Over the past six months, the Sudanese police had arrested over 40 suspected militants who are mostly students and fresh university graduates. The extremists are claiming to have links with the Al Qaeda. The Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir’s government has faced criticisms from the domestic as well as foreign hardliners for allowing the UN peacekeepers to oversee the situation in Darfur in western Sudan. Bashir had tried to appease the hardliners by insisting that only troops from the African and Muslim countries be sent to Darfur. Bashir had also invited criticism from the hardliners for sharing counter-terrorism intelligence with the U.S. for the last seven years.
Despite recent efforts by the Bashir government to curb Islamic extremism in Sudan, history tells us that Islamic terrorism had been aided and sponsored by the Sudanese administration to meet its own needs. During the 1990s, Osama Bin Laden had one of the largest Al Qaeda training bases in Sudan. In exchange for mass weaponry and money, the Sudanese government allowed Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to work freely in the country. As a part of its scorch earth campaign against the inhabitants of Darfur, the Sudanese government had employed a nomadic Islamic militia, the Janjaweed to rape, pillage and burn villages in Darfur. It is the irony of fate that the Islamic extremists who had been harbored by the government are now trying to strengthen their hold over the entire region.
Source: LA Times
