Khartoum hosted Osama bin Laden, convened the pan-Islamist conferences and exported a revivalist ideology to its neighbors. It was not the only source of extremism in Africa, but it was a decisive early node. Understanding it explains patterns that later resurfaced in Somalia and Kenya.
On June 30, 1989, a military coup led by Colonel Omar al-Bashir overthrew Sudan’s elected government. The coup was engineered in close coordination with the National Islamic Front (NIF), an Islamist political movement founded in 1976 and led by Hassan al-Turabi, a lawyer and Islamic scholar affiliated with the broader Muslim Brotherhood tradition. The result was one of only two twentieth-century cases of an Islamist revival movement actually seizing state power the other being Iran after 1979.
Turabi and the NIF pursued what has been described as a “top-down” strategy of Islamization: placing loyalists throughout the government, judiciary, and security services, and gradually reshaping Sudanese law and society along explicitly Islamist lines, including the enforcement of hudud punishments. Turabi became, in the words of Human Rights Watch, “the power behind the throne” through much of the 1990s, even as Bashir formally held the presidency.
Crucially, Turabi did not see his project as confined to Sudan. He envisioned Khartoum as a launching point for a broader, transnational Islamist revival and he had both the ideological ambition and the state apparatus to pursue it.
Khartoum as a Gathering Point for Global Jihad
In April 1991, Turabi convened the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Khartoum, an initiative explicitly designed to unite Islamist and mujahideen networks in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 1991 Gulf War, and to offer an alternative to the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference. The conference drew a striking roster of attendees, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, along with representatives connected to Somali factions an early sign of how Sudan was positioning itself as a crossroads for militant movements from across the Arab and African worlds.
That same year, bin Laden himself relocated to Sudan after leaving Saudi Arabia, where he had fallen out with the monarchy over its reliance on U.S. troops during the Gulf War. Over the next five years, bin Laden built a business empire in Sudan spanning construction, agriculture, and trade ventures that also functioned as financial infrastructure for al-Qaeda. By 1994, he had established training camps in the country, hosting fighters, many of them “Arab Afghan” veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, who would go on to play roles in militant movements across multiple continents. It was during this Sudanese period that al-Qaeda began to formulate its broader campaign against U.S. interests, and operatives linked to bin Laden’s camps were later tied to attacks including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996 under sustained U.S., Saudi, and Egyptian pressure, relocating to Afghanistan under Taliban protection but the networks and relationships built during his Sudan years, along with the training and financial infrastructure he had developed, endured well beyond his departure. A smaller, lesser-known regional offshoot, later referred to as “al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Two Niles,” traced its roots directly to this period.
Spillover into East Africa
Sudan’s significance extended beyond hosting foreign militants it also helped seed a new wave of religious revivalism among East African Muslim communities more broadly. Prior to the late 1980s, leftist and nationalist currents, alongside traditional Sufi orders, had dominated Muslim political life across much of East Africa. Sudan’s NIF-led state offered an alternative model: an explicitly Islamist government willing to fund, train, and ideologically support like-minded movements in neighboring countries. Analysts researching the origins of Salafi-jihadism in the region point to 1990s Sudan as the epicenter of this shift, a period in which new revivalist currents took hold that would later feed into more radical offshoots, including groups active in Somalia and Kenya.
An Important Node, Not the Sole Source
It’s worth being precise about the claim, since it’s easy to overstate. Sudan in the 1990s was a genuinely important hub, a place where financing, training, and transnational networking for militancy converged in ways that had lasting downstream effects on Somalia’s al-Shabaab and other movements. But scholars generally treat it as one significant node in a wider web of factors driving extremism across the region, rather than as the singular point of origin. Other major currents fed into the same phenomenon largely independently of Sudan: Saudi-funded Wahhabi and Salafi proselytization networks (of the kind that separately took root in Nigeria through figures like Abubakar Gumi), the returning fighters and ideology of the Afghan jihad more broadly, and local political, economic, and governance grievances that militant groups have exploited in each country where they’ve taken hold, from Nigeria to Somalia to Mali.
Legacy
Sudan’s overt role as a state sponsor of transnational jihadist activity declined sharply after bin Laden’s 1996 expulsion, as international sanctions and diplomatic isolation pushed Khartoum toward a more cautious foreign posture, and Turabi himself was marginalized within Sudanese politics by the end of the decade, eventually splitting from Bashir’s ruling party in 1999. Yet the decade in which Sudan served as a hub hosting bin Laden, convening pan-Islamist conferences, and exporting revivalist ideology to its neighbors left a durable imprint on the trajectory of militancy across the Horn of Africa and beyond, one that outlasted the specific government that enabled it.
Sources consulted: International Crisis Group; Hudson Institute; Wikipedia; Council on Foreign Relations; Al Jazeera; Britannica; FBI; EBSCO Research Starters; Asharq Al-Awsat.