Rebels and opposition group join forces in Darfur

CAIRO, May 18 (AFP) — The main rebel group in Sudan’s west Darfur region, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), said Tuesday it had joined forces with the Sudanese Federal Alliance, an opposition group active in the region where civil war has brought 10,000 deaths and displaced a million people.

Mohammed Mersal, director of the SLM’s secretary general Mani Arkoi Minaui’s office, told AFP by phone that the decision to link up had been taken during an overnight meeting of the two groups.

Mersal said SLM president Abdel Wahed Mohammed Ahmed Nour signed the accord. Nour threatened on Monday to take fighting to other parts of Sudan if the government failed to include the Darfur rebellion in peace negotiations.

The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Khartoum government have been holding peace negotiations to end a long-running rebellion in the south of the country.

“We will enlarge the zone of our military operations which will take in Kordofan (central Sudan), Khartoum and the east,” Nour said in an interview published in the Arabic language al-Hayat.

Alliance vice-president Sherif Hariri signed the accord which Mersal said aimed to “unite the population of Darfur”.

On May 7, the United Nations described Darfur as a region gripped by a “reign of terror”, where pro-government forces are committing massive human rights violations that may amount to crimes against humanity.

The fighting pits the SLM and the smaller Movement for Justice and Equality against government soldiers and armed Arab militias, the Janjawid, the primary targets of accusations of massacring the black, non-Arab people of Darfur.

The Alliance is an influential force in Darfur and its president Ibrahim Dreij comes from one of the region’s main tribes, the Fur.