Israel Matzav

Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace

In the entire history of humankind, this one has to rank right up there as one of the most boneheaded articles ever written. The subject, as you may have figured out from the picture, was Osama Bin Laden. The date was December 6, 1993. The newspaper was London's Daily Independent. And the columnist who wrote once of the least prescient articles in history was none other than Robert Fisk.

Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high esteem. The Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab fighters back to Sudan from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum has suggested that some of the 'Afghans' whom this Saudi entrepreneur flew to Sudan are now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Mr Bin Laden is well aware of this. 'The rubbish of the media and the embassies,' he calls it. 'I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job.'

And 'this job' is certainly an ambitious one: a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200km (745 miles) on the old road, now shortened to 800km by the new Bin Laden route that will turn the coastal run from the capital into a mere day's journey. Into a country that is despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war almost as much as it is condemned by the United States, Mr Bin Laden has brought the very construction equipment that he used only five years ago to build the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan.

Read the whole thing. Fiskie has yet to find a terrorist whose butt he wouldn't kiss.

Labels: al-Qaeda, Islamic terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, Robert Fisk

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:44 PM