Word: sudan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nightmare began in earnest after the Saudi government banished Osama from the kingdom for railing against Riyadh's decision to allow American soldiers on Saudi soil to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. From the new family home in Sudan, while Osama plotted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and the American government, Omar noticed some dangerous new arrivals in their Khartoum neighborhood, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of an Egyptian Islamist movement who would become al-Qaeda's second-in-command. When members of another extremist group raped one of Omar's male friends, al-Zawahiri took justice...
Step by step, Omar found himself stuck on the violent path of his father's choosing. Forced by American pressure to leave Sudan for Afghanistan, Osama settled his family in stone huts high on a mountain in Tora Bora, despite the fact that Najwa was pregnant with her 10th child. Osama sent his sons to al-Qaeda training camps, to the front lines of the Afghan civil war and to attend hours of mind-numbing jihadist indoctrination. Omar and his father narrowly survived a U.S. cruise-missile strike that was launched in retaliation for the al-Qaeda bomb attacks...
...been helped by a love of animals. A constant collector of pets - against his father's wishes - and an avid horseman, Omar's awareness of the madness of al-Qaeda was fueled in part by several acts of animal cruelty by his father's men. When they lived in Sudan, one of the family guards killed Omar's pet monkey by running it over with a truck, explaining that the creature was in fact a Jew turned into a monkey by the hand of God. Later, Omar learned that it was his father who taught the guard that monkeys were...
...Meanwhile, the ground reality has changed. Darfur is no longer the crisis it once was - mortality rates there are far lower than those in south Sudan, which is where advocacy groups say the next major crisis will be. This puts the advocacy groups in a tight spot. They no longer have the cachet and spotlight they once had. (Read "Will Sanctions End the Darfur Killing...
...question now is whether the government of Sudan - and the many fractious rebel groups - will make the right moves and end the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur and prevent renewed fighting between north and south. (See a TIME video on Sudan...