American special forces teams have been sent to Sudan to hunt down Saudi Arabian terrorists who have re-established secret al-Qa'eda training camps in remote mountain ranges in the north-eastern quarter of the country. The terrorists, who are thought to take orders from Saudi Arabia's most wanted man, Saleh Awfi, have taken refuge in at least three locations in the Jebel Kurush mountains, which run parallel to the Red Sea coast of Africa's biggest country. An American Delta Force officer, who recently spent a week in Sudan tracking the terrorists, said the camps are used to train new recruits to wage jihad, or holy war, against the West and its allies. The trainees are instructed how to handle weapons and build and transport bombs. The officer said it was proving difficult to pin the terrorists down. 'We have a read on the rat-lines and the wider camp areas, but these are shifting camps in a very spread out part of the country. Our job is to tie them down tighter and tighter. They are moving pretty easily from their base points to the Red Sea coast, and then back and forth to Saudi. The Saudis are pretty annoyed about it.'
Awfi, according to the Saudi Arabian government, is a former prison officer and a veteran of al-Qa'eda training camps in Sudan in the early 1990s. He is believed to have moved on to Afghanistan before turning up in Iraq before the war last year. Now back in his homeland, he emerged as the local al-Qa'eda leader earlier this summer. Riyadh has launched a nationwide crackdown on terrorist cells after an amnesty expired last month but Awfi has evaded capture, even though he is believed to live in a safe house in the Riyadh area.
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Western diplomats in Saudi Arabia said that the new Sudanese camps, which were established in the last nine months, have become a vital staging ground for al-Qa'eda. 'There is significant traffic from these camps to the peninsula across the Red Sea,' one said. 'There is no real Sudanese government or army control over the mountains. The terrorists slip through the cracks, up into the hills where they can train, rest and build up the spirit of jihad. With things getting hot over here, they can get organised over there.' Sudan has resisted western and Saudi Arabian pressure for it to deploy an army battalion in the Jebel Kurush, to flush out the al-Qa'eda presence. It has, however, allowed small teams of American soldiers to pass into the country as part of official visits, such as last month's trip by Colin Powell. A team of five special forces soldiers broke off from the Powell entourage for a week-long mission in the Kurush mountains, where aerial surveillance had established a list of villages where suspicious activity had been detected. American forces are hunting a series of groups linked to al-Qa'eda across North Africa. Special anti-terrorist operations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa are undertaken by marines based in Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. |