"Negroes" in the Middle East

Via Avery Tooley, comes this quote from a South African paper's interview with an Iraqi insurgent:

Black soldiers are a particular target. "To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation," Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism prevalent in much of the Middle East. "Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes."

Sounds plausible to me. In law school, I became friends with an LLM student who was about 40 years old, and who was a Sudanese Christian. He had lived for several years in Saudi Arabia before emigrating to America. He said that out of 7 years in America, he could think of 2 or 3 incidents where he thought that someone he met had a racist attitude, but that he had experienced that many incidents every day in Saudi Arabia. The way he described it was this (a close paraphrase from memory): "In Saudi Arabia, they didn't like me because I am African, but they just barely tolerated me as long as they thought that I was Muslim. But when anyone found out that I was a Christian, I was lower than dirt."