The Sudan Years

Chapter 4 explores the years after 1991, when Bin Laden was given sanctuary in Sudan. Five years later he and his followers were expelled. The Sudan years were an exceptionally busy period of building alliances and laying the groundwork for attacks on U.S. embassies and military installations in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nairobi, and Tanzania. At the same time, Bin Laden was supporting militants across the Muslim world and funding military instructors in training camps in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. He was also seeking out terrorist expertise wherever he could find it. One of those places was Iran, which for a period became a sleeping partner in Bin Laden’s terrorism business. Above all, he was working to integrate Arab and North African exiled militants into a coherent, global organization. From Sudan, Bin Laden assisted his Egyptian allies in their terrorist campaign in Egypt, funded experimentation with the use of liquids bombs to blow up international commercial airliners, made plans to set up a base in the Balkans for Al Qaeda, set up a business office in London, and initiated preparations for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.