Sudan plane bombs town on Chad border-witnesses
By Matthew Green
TINE, Sudan/Chad border, Jan 26 (Reuters) – A Sudanese plane bombed a border settlement on Monday in the latest in an intensifying series of attacks on villages forcing thousands of refugees to flood into neighbouring Chad, witnesses said.
The drone of engines heralded the arrival of a military plane circling high above this dust-blown settlement of mud houses and conical thatched huts before it dropped its payload on a house in the Sudanese section of the town, which straddles the unmarked border.
Witnesses said there were very unlikely to be casualties as Tine’s bomb-shattered Sudanese district is a ghost town. It was unclear what the bomber was targeting, although a couple of rebels were seen in the near-deserted expanse of shack homes.
The attack was part of a war between government and rebels raging in western Sudan that has escalated sharply since December, in contrast to progress made at peace talks to end a separate, 20-year civil war in the country’s south.
The two main rebel groups launched a revolt in western Darfur last February, accusing the government of sidelining the poor area. Fighting has intensified since peace talks with one group collapsed last month, and thousands have been uprooted.
Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Sudanese armed forces sources have said they do not want to comment on the troubles in Darfur to minimise media coverage of the conflict.
Monday’s attack, visible from the Chadian section of the town, was about 500 metres (yards) from the frontier and about three km (two miles) from a field hospital where doctors from international aid organisations tend to the victims of previous attacks.
Aid workers said it was a Sudanese government plane and that local officials had told them it had violated Chadian airspace.
“The local officials said it was a Sudanese plane,” one of the aid workers said in Tine, which hosts about 5,000 Sudanese refugees. “They were complaining because it flew over their airspace to turn around before the bombing raid.”
LOUD EXPLOSIONS
As the plane began its bombing run this correspondent, part of a multimedia team of Reuters journalists, crouched down to take cover in a rocky gully.
There were three or four loud explosions as the bomb crashed into a house, sending a thick cloud of black smoke pouring up into the air.
The plane, thousands of feet high, circled around and then about five or six minutes later there was another series of explosions a little bit further away, but still in the town.
“They want to damage and kill, this is what they are doing daily,” said the general coordinator of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, Abu Bakr Hamid al-Nur, who also witnessed the attack.
“This is happening to the little children, women and old men.”
Rebels say Sudanese warplanes are bombing 15 to 25 villages a day in a sharp escalation of the war in the past month.
Thousands more refugees fleeing attacks by government forces in western Sudan have poured across the border since mid-January, joining the hunt for food and water in a region where survival is perilous at the best of times.
Aid workers say they are battling to overcome logistical problems posed by the harsh terrain to move refugees away from shelters of sticks and cloth on the border to camps where they can provide food and water.
In the streets on Monday only one old woman, and a couple of rebels wearing turbans and flowing robes and carrying assault rifles, could be seen making their way past empty buildings.