Sudan and Jamaat ul-Fuqra

Regular readers of Gates of Vienna are familiar with Jamaat ul-Fuqra, the terrorist organization headed by the Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani. JF has compounds scattered across the USA and Canada, mainly in rural areas. It has been implicated in criminal activities and terrorist attacks, particularly against Hindu targets.

The Politics of CP has done the most thorough investigations of JF to be found on the web; I recommend a visit to CP’s blog to check out his archives.

His most recent exposé concerns the connection between Sheikh Gilani and the Islamists of Sudan, particularly the former strongman Hassan al-Turabi. During the 1990s Al-Turabi arranged a concordance among different Islamic extremist groups in Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan, both Sunni and Shi’ite.

And, according to CP, at least one Sufi was involved:

[Sheikh Gilani] attended a December 1993 meeting in Sudan that included members of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

[…]

Source: Yes, reps from al-Qaida, Tahir ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiyba, all of them. And, Jamil al-Amin was there as well, former H. Rap Brown.

Do you think Sheikh Gilani was in Khartoum just to enjoy the climate and savor the local cuisine? Perhaps.

But, in any case, he repaid the hospitality of his hosts some years later:

It seems that on December 16, 2002, Dr. Malik Hussein, a Member of the Sudanese Parliament, visited the Muslims of the Americas (MOA) village known as Holy Islamville in York, SC. According to an MOA website [iqou-moa.org], he was there to visit the Baitun Noor shrine [baitunnoor.org] and witness the “miracle” that has occurred there.

[…]

Some additional background on Dr. Malik Hussein — he is president of the Sudanese Data Bank, and a member of the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union, where he chairs the Committee on Agriculture. In 2000, Hussein ran for the presidency of Sudan representing the Independent Democrats (he received about 1.6% of the vote).

[…]

Here we have an associate of Turabi traveling from Sudan to one of Gilani’s camps in the U.S. and then visiting Gilani in Pakistan. Could Hussein be a go-between for the two terror masters?

The camp in South Carolina is known to have harbored several Fuqra operatives linked to criminal and terrorist activities (see here). Is it possible that this was not just a religious pilgrimage? Could this trip have been cover for something else, say a courier operation? Fuqra members have always operated covertly. According to my source, most of the members of the Muslims of the Americas, at least the younger & newer members, are generally unaware of Fuqra’s real history and of its secretive activities. The ones that do know deny everything.

Why was this man in the United States? I find it a little difficult to believe that a foreign member of parliament (with ties to terrorists) travels from Khartoum to a town in rural South Carolina 6,800 miles away just to see a light projected on the wall of a mobile home trailer.

There’s a lot more information in CP’s post, some of it quite chilling. Don’t read it and expect to be reassured about the innocuous intentions of Jamaat ul-Fuqra.