Khartoum, Sudan – Sudan dismissed Osama bin Laden’s renewed calls for “jihad” in its troubled Darfur region, saying on Monday that it will not harbor terrorists or allow foreign interference in the country.
But outside experts said the chaos in Sudan – already spilling over to troubled neighbors such as Chad – is exactly the kind of situation al-Qaeda has successfully exploited in the past and might again.
In a tape issuing more threats against the West on Sunday, bin Laden urged followers to go to Sudan to fight a proposed U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur.
Muslims must “get ready to conduct a long war against the crusader plunderers in western Sudan,” he said in the audiotape, broadcast on Arab TV.
The call made headlines in most of Sudan’s newspapers Monday, but Khartoum’s leadership seemed eager to dissociate itself from bin Laden, who was based in the country through much of the 1990s but thrown out in 1996.
“We are not concerned with such statements, or any other statement that comes from foreign quarters about the crisis in Darfur,” Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jamal Eldin Mohammad Ibrahim said in the newspaper Al Sahafa.
However, experts said that although Khartoum was trying to distance itself from al-Qaeda’s leader, his words might play into the government’s hands.
Sudan’s government has opposed the idea of shifting the peacekeeping mission in Darfur to the U.N. from the current African Union force, noted John Pendergast of the International Crisis Group in Washington.
Bin Laden’s statement “greatly serves their interest in Darfur” and would “give a good pretext to those who are bent on preventing that from happening,” he said.
