In the shade of a thorn tree on a plain of cracked earth and yellow
grass, Brigadier General Namiri Murrad lays out how the rebels of South
Sudan plan to unite and overthrow President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and
his Islamist regime in Khartoum. “Right now, our work is to clean our
house,” he tells TIME in the embattled region of South Kordofan on April
6, flanked by four captured tanks and pickups that are mounted with
heavy machine guns and missile launchers. “The Darfuris are going to
clean their house, and the rebels of Blue Nile will clean their house.
Then we will move together on Khartoum, and we will finish them. I
cannot say when. But I can tell you it’s easier this time — Khartoum is
running. They realize they are fighting for the wrong reason. They do
not have heart. We are fighting with our hearts. It will be easy to
finish them.”
There are reasons to share Namiri’s optimism. Slipping into territory
held by Nuba insurgents in South Kordofan, a region of Sudan that
borders the newly independent nation of South Sudan, it becomes apparent
that a major rebel advance is under way. In the past two months, Nuba
fighters from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army–North (SPLA–N) have
notched a string of strategic victories, capturing the border town of
Jau, the former northern administrative center of Trogi, and pushing
back government troops in pitched battles involving thousands of
fighters at Korongo, Tess and El Dar. Rebel commanders talk of killing
hundreds, even thousands, of Sudanese troops, leaving the plains strewn
with bodies — a boast given credence by the number of graves of
government soldiers that now mark the sites of recent battles.
Crucially, the fleeing northern soldiers have left behind an armory
of weapons: several tons of shells, mortars and mines; thousands of
AK-47s and millions of rounds; artillery and anti-aircraft guns; and 127
pickup trucks in Jau alone, plus four tanks. Major General Izzat Kuku,
Namiri’s boss and the acting commander of all Nuba forces, estimates
that his soldiers control 80% of the Nuba Mountains, the tribe’s
ancestral homeland. In effect, just the two largest cities remain in
government hands — Talodi and Kalugli — and an attack on Talodi appears
imminent. Namiri says that up to 1,800 troops from Khartoum’s Sudan
Armed Forces (SAF) are surrounded by 3,000 of his fighters, plus two
more separate forces of between 2,000 and 3,000 SPLA troops. “This is
the time of our work,” says Namiri. “This is fighting, and it can always
go either way, but I don’t think it will take one week to finish it.”
The implications of the Nuba rebel push are big. Last July, South
Sudan split from the regime in Khartoum after more than half a century
of war, in which more than 2 million people died. But the new border
between North and South left three rebel provinces — Darfur, Blue Nile
and South Kordofan, in which the Nuba Mountains are located — in the
North. As South Sudan’s independence approached, the northern regime,
apparently fearing further loss of power in a concurrent election,
launched an offensive on rebels in the Nuba Mountains, who were then
observing a cease-fire and even cooperating with the government in joint
military units. Khartoum’s security forces first tried to disarm Nuban
fighters, then went house to house allegedly arresting and killing Nuban
political leaders and activists before ordering an all-out assault on
the rebel territory.
TIME sneaked into South Kordofan last June and gathered testimony
from more than 30 people on how northern troops were pounding Nuban
villages and columns of fleeing refugees with Russian-made Antonov
bombers and fighter planes, plus attack helicopters and artillery.
Returning this month, TIME obtained an audio recording of a speech by
South Kordofan Governor Ahmed Haroun, broadcast on government radio in
October and November, in which he exhorts his troops, “I salute the
Antonov, the gunships, the MiGs and artillery, supporting you by bombing
villages. When you go on your mission, if you find them, kill them,
sweep them away, eat them. Do not bring me any prisoners of war. We have
no quarter for them.” When TIME relayed a summary of its reporting in
June to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the International
Criminal Court (ICC), he noted that the court had already issued arrest
warrants for al-Bashir and Haroun for allegations of similar conduct in
Darfur. Jehanne Henry, Sudan specialist at Human Rights Watch, adds, “It
certainly appears war crimes are being committed. The government is not
discriminating at all between military and civilian. It seems to have
decided to take them all out.”
If the Nuba rebels are pushing Khartoum’s forces out of South
Kordofan, that should allow for an influx of humanitarian relief, which
will be desperately needed in the coming months, since Khartoum’s
bombings have prevented many villagers from farming. But if the
insurgents’ advance in South Kordofan leads to a united rebel offensive
against Khartoum and an attempt to bring down al-Bashir’s regime, that
will have global significance. Sudan’s rebels would then be attempting
to accomplish what the ICC, decades of sanctions, high-volume celebrity
advocacy, endless human-rights investigations and even, in 1998, a U.S.
bombing of Khartoum have failed to do: reform, tame or even topple one
of the world’s pariah states. Chief among its crimes: hosting Osama bin
Laden for five years in the 1990s, enriching the center of the country
at the expense of its peripheries and trying to impose by force an
Arab-dominated, Islamist uniformity on a population whose patchwork of
faiths, languages and ethnicities were the definition of heterogeneity.
That, Namiri and Izzat say, is the rebel plan. On Nov. 12, 2011, the
Nuba SPLA–N formed an alliance with rebels from Sudan’s two other
southern states — including SPLA–N fighters in Blue Nile, to the east,
and fighters from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in Darfur, to
the west. They called the united force the Sudan Revolutionary Front
(SRF). One of its leaders, Yasir Arman, declared that “all Sudan is a
theater for [its] operations, including Khartoum.” Izzat tells TIME the
SRF has contacts with opposition groups in Khartoum that “may organize
people in an uprising — though this will not happen unless we get there
and they have people to protect them.”
Izzat, Namiri and several other rebel commanders interviewed by TIME
insist that support from their former comrades in South Sudan is limited
to advice, food and fuel supplies, medical treatment and diplomatic
support. This is not, they insist, a South Sudanese proxy war against
its old enemy, pointing out that the South is still overtly fighting
Khartoum’s troops at several places along its border. Moreover, the
sheer amount of weaponry the Nuba rebels have captured from Khartoum’s
troops — seen by TIME — would seem to suggest that, at least for now,
they have no need of more lethal outside support.
Khartoum is a long way away from the Nuba Mountains, and rebels, like
the politicians they hope to become, have a habit of overstating their
chances of victory. Though several hundred JEM fighters helped the Nuba
rebels take Jau, it’s far from clear that the dynamics of the new
alliance would survive the test of war. Perhaps most important, fighting
the Sudanese army in its own territory is a very different proposition
than fighting it in areas it has never truly ruled and where it lacks
popular support. Nevertheless, after decades of fighting, the rebels are
confident the momentum is with them. “They made the wrong calculation
when they attacked us,” says Izzat. “A northern conscript soldier who
has done two weeks or a month of training cannot defeat a guerrilla
force that’s been fighting for 27 years. One soldier of ours can defeat a
platoon of theirs. We will all go together to Khartoum. If not this
year, then next year or the year after.”
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