Darfur Rebels reach Khartoum - Khartoum is in Flames PICS

[qardasay]

KHARTOUM, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Sudan's official SUNA news agency reported on Sunday that more than 300 rebels had been arrested and60 vehicles seized or destructed following a fighting between rebel forces and army troops in northwestern Khartoum.

Among those captured, 170 with their full arms have been seized at the Umbada quarter, according to SUNA.

The Sudanese Armed Forces also destroyed 30 trucks belonging to the rebels who were running away from the fighting site, SUNA said, adding that some 20 trucks were seized in the village of Umm Gaffal and three trucks and 12 Kalashnikovs rifles were seized in the Umbada quarter.

The army troops would continue the mopping-up and chasing operations against the remnants of the defeated rebel groups allover the Sudanese capital and the neighboring areas, SUNA said.

The Sudanese government announced on Saturday evening that the army and the police had crushed the attempt of the rebels to infiltrate into the capital and carry out sabotage activities there, killing and capturing a number of the infiltrators.

This was the first time for rebels in Darfur to enter Khartoum and launch attacks there since bloody conflicts erupted in the western Sudanese region neighboring Chad in February, 2003.

Editor: Mu Xuequan

[qardasay]

Scarce natural resources are a cause of fightings among the people of the largely nomadic north of Darfur and the farmers who inhabit the south. The president of the country, Omar al-Bashir, an Arabic speaking black African, with affiliation to the north, has backed a mercenary group, the Janjaweed, to flush out, by many controversial means, the rebels who operate from the midst of southern farmers . This conflict has often been erroneously characterized as one between races (Arabs versus blacks), when in fact both sides of the conflict are represented by blacks, with the people of the north being mainly nomads and Arabic speaking, and the people of the south being farmers and non-Arabic speaking.Darfur, an area about the size of France, has three ethnic zones. The northern includes Arab and non-Arab, mainly Zaghawa, camel nomads. The central zone is inhabited largely by non-Arab sedentary farmers such as the Fur, Masalit and others, cultivating millet. In the south there are Arabic-speaking cattle nomads, the Baqqara.

All are Muslim, and no part of Darfur was ever ethnically homogeneous. For example, once a successful Fur farmer had a certain number of cattle, he would "become" Baqqara, and in a few generations his descendants would have an "authentic" Arab genealogy.

One of the root causes of the present crisis goes back to the 1980s, when prolonged droughts accelerated the desertification of northern and central Darfur and led to pressure on water and grazing resources as the camel nomads were forced to move southwards. Conflicts over wells that in earlier times had been settled with spears or mediation became much more intractable in an era awash with guns.

The situation disintegrated with the decision of the prime minister in the mid-1980s, Sadiq al-Mahdi, to give arms to the Arabic-speaking cattle nomads, the Baqqara, of southern Darfur, ostensibly to defend themselves against the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army, or SPLA. No one was surprised when they started to turn the guns on their northern neighbors, the Fur, Masalit and others. The SPLA exacerbated the situation by trying to open a front in southern Darfur. It was at this point that the Arab tribal militias, first called Murahilin, now Janjaweed, began to get out of control.

[Gedo_Boy]

I wonder if the People's Army has 'observers' riding along the Sudanese Army.