According to testimony of al Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl on February 20, 2001, “Bin Laden set up an extraordinary range of companies in Sudan, where al-Qaeda was almost literally Holy War, Inc. The first business was Wadi al-Aqiq, a trading company that had dispensation to ship anything it wanted. Other enterprises followed: another trading company, Ladin International Company; Al-Hijra Construction, which built roads and bridges and employed more than six hundred people; and the Al-Themar agricultural company, which had four thousand employees working at its one-million-acre Al-Damazine farms.”
– Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., Pages 82-83