Miniter's Notebook

Most readers of this site will know most of the facts in this piece, but there are few noteworthy surprises: the connections between Saddam Hussein and the radical Islamist thinker and that the express purpose of the infamous Popular and Islamic Conferences in Khartoum—which included every murder-minded Muslim terror group in the world and every major Arab intelligence service—was to weld together the Islamists and the seemingly secular Arab Nationalists. This pokes a pretty big hole in the idea that Salafis like Osama bin Laden and secular socialists like Saddam Hussein would never form alliances of convenience. I have never met Turabi on my various visits to Sudan (though I tried to see him when he was under house arrest), but I did talk to a number of his friends and former associates. Gutbi, who when I met him in 2002 was the head of Sudan's intelligence services, said that Turabi was bored of bin Laden because he could only talk about two subjects, jihad and horses. So Turabi's extensive help for bin Laden was nothing personal, just business. For whatever that it worth. Gutbi did not mention what Turabi thought of Iraq, but he personally hated it. He and his wife were followed constantly by the secret police and he, as Sudan's ambassador, was forbidden to leave Baghdad. Turabi's son used to go to horse races with bin Laden, who plugged his ears when the horns sounded because music is "un-Islamic." Neither Turabi nor his son covered their ears. Sure, they were radicals who believed that killing infidels just gives them another chance to convert to Allah, but sometimes a horse race is just a horse race. Other friends of Turabi fill in other details. The onetime Peace and Development Minister (the man in charge of the two things that Sudan doesn't have much of) is a charming man named Ghazi. He points out that Turabi changed after a sudden beating in a Canadian airport; after that, his thoughts were more erratic and less connected. This was the reason that Turabi was pushed out of power in 1996; he could no longer be trusted to follow government policy and was endlessly scheming against his onetime student, President Bashir. (Anyway, any serious consideration of Turabi needs to take account of this beating and of the feminist views of his wife). Another friend of Turabi's said that he is more fond of revolution than rule; that is why he fomented the crisis in Darfur that has killed and displaced millions. The role of Turabi and perhaps al Qaeda in causing the misery in Darfur is also largely unexplored. Thomas Joscelyn's piece in the Standard would have been improved if he offered a fuller picture of the master of terrorism.