Pro-Saudi columnist accuses Sudan of harboring units from Iran Revolutionary Guard

May 19, 2010 (WASHINGTON) – A Saudi columnist today lashed out at the Sudanese government accusing it of hosting members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard along with secret weapon manufacturing factories.

This week Sudanese authorities arrested Islamist opposition leader Hassan Al-Turabi and closed down his party’s newspaper after publishing a report alleging that Iran had constructed a weapon factory in the country aiming at supplying Islamic insurgents in Somalia and Yemeni Shiite rebels as well as Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas.

The Sudanese ministry of information said the publication of this report comes as the international community considers new sanctions against Iran over the nuclear file and tries to create a link between Sudan and Iran.

Today the managing director of the Dubai based Al-Arabiya TV Abdel-Rahman Al-Rashid suggested that the report in the newspaper is true.

“If [President Omer Hassan] Al-Bashir thinks that others do not know the truth of his dealings with the Iranians, the Revolutionary Guard camps, and their arms plant and their covert activity using Khartoum to infiltrate the states of the [Arabian] Peninsula and Egypt, he [Bashir] is wrong” Al-Rashid wrote today in the London based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

“The presence of the [Iran] Revolutionary Guards in the Sudan no longer a secret, although Al-Bashir’s insistence on trying to conceal it is a bizarre thing,” said Al-Rashid who is close to the Saudi Royal family and government in Riyadh.

“What made al-Bashir get alarmed and angry that Turabi’s….broadcast news of cooperation between the regime of Bashir and the regime of Iran, with scary”. he added.

Last December, a source told Sudan Tribune that Saudi Arabia summoned Al-Bashir to protest the flow of Iranian-made weapons through Sudan to Yemeni Shi’ite rebels on their borders.

Yemen’s government has been fighting the rebels on and off since 2004. The conflict intensified last summer when Sana’a launched Operation Scorched Earth to quash the latest upsurge in violence.

Saudi Arabia stepped into the fray in November when rebels seized some Saudi territory, prompting Riyadh to wage an offensive against them. The Sudanese head of state reiterated his support to Saudi military action against the Yemeni rebels.

Last year, Israeli warplanes reportedly attacked a convoy inside Sudan suspected of ferrying arms to Gaza during Israel’s offensive against Hamas. Israel never formally admitted responsibility but Sudan said later it believed the Jewish state carried out the airstrike.

(ST)