[Al Arabiya Latest] Charming and media-savvy, Yassir Arman, a secular Muslim from North Sudan, was selected early Friday by his ex-rebel group to challenge Omar al-Bashir in April's presidential election, the first multi-party poll since 1986.During Sudan's 22-year civil war between the mainly Muslim north and largely Christian and animist south, which killed two million people, thousands of southerners served as backup troops for the north while northerners campaigned for the southern rebellion.
Arman, in his late forties, was one of the latter.
A native of Gezira, Sudan's agricultural heartland along the Nile, he studied law in the 1980s at Cairo University in Khartoum, where he was an active member of the communist movement.
At the time, he was close to the southern rebels who wanted the advent of a "New Sudan" with the country's society based on civic rather than ethnic or religious grounds.
In 1986, Arman was accused of murdering an Islamist and left the capital Khartoum. He read news bulletins for southern rebel radio and kept a keen interest in the media.