Is chaos in Darfur a prelude to al Qaeda takeover?

Al Qaeda's MO has been to take advantage of the chaos created by warring Muslim factions, attach themselves to a winner, who will "restore order" with and Islamist government and allow them to operate and train for operations where they want to spread their disease.

This is what they did in Afghanistan and what they were in the process of doing in Somalia until Ethiopia stepped in to spoil their party. While bin Laden left Sudan over a decade ago, he has often spoken out against a UN peace mission in the area. Now the Arab thugs who were practicing genocide against the black tribes of Darfur are fighting over the spoils like wild animals. The red on red action has broken into open warfare according to the NY Times.

Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against each other in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

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This is just the type of troubled waters in which al Qaeda likes to dabble. The west needs to keep a close on on developments in this area and devote some intelligence resources to it.