Sudan Jihad Update from the Christian Science Monitor: “Government attacks intensify in Darfur”
NAIROBI, KENYA – Three years after rebels from the farming tribes of Darfur rose up against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, Sudan, the region is staring into the abyss once again.
Government planes have embarked on a wave of indiscriminate bombings in Darfur, killing civilians in Sudan’s war-torn western region, according to human rights campaigners.
Witness statements collected by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International detail deaths and injuries to women and children as Russian-made Antonov planes deliver their deadly payload. “Government forces are bombing villages with blatant disregard for civilian lives,” says Peter Takirambudde, HRW’s Africa director.
The fresh government onslaught against rebel-held villages is being played out against a backdrop of diplomatic uncertainty, as Khartoum rejects outside peacekeeping efforts amid its push to establish full sovereignty over the area.
This week, Khartoum threatened to evict a cash-strapped, weak African Union (AU) monitoring force when its mandate expires Sept. 30.
Government figures also continued to voice strident opposition to the deployment of a proposed force of more than 20,000 UN peacekeepers – seen by many analysts as the only way to rein in combatants in a war that has killed more than 200,000 people and forced some 2.5 million to flee to squalid aid camps.
On the subject of “strident opposition,” Sudanese jihadists have threatened to fight the Khartoum government if it accepts UN peacekeepers, the presence of which Ayman al-Zawahiri has termed a colonialist move “to prepare to occupy and divide [Sudan].”
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John Prendergast, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group who has just returned to the US from Darfur, said the reported attacks were merely the “first moves on the chessboard,” as the government massed troops in Darfur.
“They are embarked on their usual strategy of cutting the umbilical cord of the rebellion by destroying the civilian population, a strategy which is unchanged since 2003 and 2004,” he says.
Residents of El Fasher, the regional capital of North Darfur, report the daily arrival of planes delivering troops and arms. HRW reports that one woman was killed and seven children injured near Kulkul, when a bomb was rolled from the back of an Antonov cargo plane. Amnesty International has accounts of government planes bombing Kulkul to prepare for ground troops and their Janjaweed allies.
For now, 7,000 AU soldiers are charged with protecting civilians and aid workers. They have struggled to stamp their authority on an area the size of France.
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Last week, the UN Security Council voted to take over and expand the peacekeeping effort. But the plan has been rejected repeatedly by the Sudanese government.
Sudan’s president, Omar Al-Bashir, has vowed to fight off UN troops himself, and warned that Sudan would take on international soldiers “as Hizbullah beat Israeli forces.” His ministers have also stepped up pressure on the AU, warning that AU troops can stay beyond September only if they drop plans to hand over their operation to the UN.