West Sudan rebel says cuts off Gov’t routes

CAIRO, Feb 11 (Reuters) – A western Sudanese rebel leader said on Wednesday a combined operation cut key communications routes between government-held towns, after Khartoum said it controlled the situation in Darfur.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said government forces controlled the situation on Monday when he offered a one-month amnesty to rebels, who took up arms a year ago accusing Khartoum of marginalizing the arid area.

The government also told a Geneva-based peace group it would not attend talks with the rebels in the Swiss city this weekend.

Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said about 12,000 rebel troops from his group and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) had cut routes connecting el-Fasher, Geneina and Nyala, the regional capitals, and the route out of the area to the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

“We cut all the routes in Darfur…The government cannot move at all in the region of Darfur,” Ibrahim told Reuters from Paris, adding that he had spoken with his commanders in Darfur. He said conflict would continue as long as the government did not address grievances such as marginalization.

Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment. SLA officials, which earlier dismissed Bashir’s comments saying rebels had control of large parts of Darfur, were also unavailable.

Independent verification is difficult to obtain in the remote region, where the United Nations says a million people have been displaced by the conflict. Thousands have fled across the border into Chad.

Earlier this week, a U.N. official said aid access to the region had improved in the last two weeks, while the government said it had opened up “corridors” to ease aid distribution.
Western Sudan has long been prone to tensions between Arab nomads and African farmers over water and grazing, but the conflict has recently taken on a more military dimension.

As fighting has surged in the west, the Sudanese government has been holding talks with another rebel group to end a 20-year-old civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country.