Sudan Claims Terrorist Ties in Advance of Possible UN Intervention

March 11, 2006

In service of its resistance against international intervention, the Sudanese government in Khartoum is working to mobilize students to create new Islamic radical fundamentalist and terrorist organizations. It has also reasserted ties to Al Qaeda and threatened terrorist attacks. Such threats come amid continued rapes and killings of civilians in Darfur. As the Sudanese government continues to resist international intervention, its forces continue to commit atrocities.

The government recently produced two extremist groups to substantiate Interior Minister Elzubier Bashir Taha’s warning that Darfur “will be a grave” for foreign troops. The regime has also threatened to involve Al Qaeda in a campaign against UN peacekeepers. This warning is an explicit admission that the Sudanese government, which sheltered Osama bin Laden for six years, continues to have a working relationship with Al Qaeda.

Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy urges the international community to take this threat of Al Qaeda participation seriously, and should investigate the nature of Sudan’s link with Al Qaeda. Also, rather than be intimidated by that link, the international community should see it as reflecting only greater need to deploy Western troops to Darfur.

Damanga Coalition believes that Sudan is forestalling international peacekeeping in a blatant attempt to avoid accountability for crimes against humanity. The Khartoum government is concerned that an intervention would be followed by prosecution before the International Criminal Court, an eventuality that it is determined to avoid.