Darfur: War without end

If Mohammed Izadein had met Elsadiq Elzein Rokero last year, he would have tried to kill him. Today, he calls him "brother".

Sitting on a straw mat in a simple mud hut in the village of Sabun, deep in the heart of the Jebel Marra, a fertile mountainous region in the centre of Darfur, Mr Izadein recounts how the two men - one Arab, one Fur - have become unlikely allies against the Sudanese government.

Mr Rokero, a Fur, is a general in the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). Mr Izadein, an Arab from the Talba tribe in the Kass region of south Darfur, was a janjaweed fighter, attacking villages in SLA territory. "Now, this man is my brother," Mr Izadein says, reaching out an arm towards Mr Rokero.

It is an alliance that symbolises the changes taking place in Darfur's four-year- long conflict - a war that has claimed the lives of at least 200,000 people and forced nearly three million from their homes. What began as a rebellion by three non-Arab tribes against perceived marginalisation by the Arab-dominated Khartoum government has escalated into a complex multi-layered conflict.

Mr Izadein signed a peace agreement with the SLA in Jebel Marra at the end of last year. He claims he now leads a group of 3,000 former janjaweed fighters from 12 different Arab tribes who have switched sides and taken up arms against the government they once served.

There are Arabs fighting alongside the rebels and Africans siding with the government. Arab tribes are fighting other Arab tribes - some are even fighting themselves. Desertification has increased tensions, between everybody, as tribes fight to gain control over precious water points.

If it was ever as simple to describe the conflict as a "genocide" of black Africans by an Arab government - and few analysts in Sudan believe it was - it certainly is not now.

Sudan's government is arming any group that is prepared to attack anyone connected with the rebels, be they African or Arab. In some cases they have even armed both sides of the same mini-conflict. It is less about ethnic cleansing and more about power. Khartoum, argue some analysts, may not even want the war to end. "This government has always had a crisis," said Dr Madawi Ibrahim, a Darfurian expert with close ties to the rebel movement. "You keep people busy with a crisis."

President Omar al-Bashir's regime has more than one eye on the general elections due to be held in Sudan in 2009. The government hopes an election victory would give the dictatorship a seal of legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. It would also ensure that Sudan's booming oil revenues remain in the hands of the ruling elite.

The divide-and-rule policy in Darfur has intensified following the signing of last year's peace agreement. The factions of the SLA which backed the peace deal have been rewarded with weapons and power.

"It is not only divide and rule - it is divide and destroy," said Hamid Ali Nur, a Darfur expert. "The government is continuing to create this conflict by giving money and arms to different groups."

Keeping those weapons under government control is becoming more difficult. One humanitarian official in Darfur said: "The government has created something they cannot control. They have been handing out weapons all over the place." Mr Izadein happily shows off his three rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) given to him by government officials. He is now preparing to use them against government troops.

"We have been deceived by the government," he said. "We have been lied to. Now we will fight with our SLA brothers." For more than three years, Mr Izadein's tribe fought alongside the Sudanese government.

"I feel very sorry for what happened," he said. "When SLA attacked El Fasher in 2003 (the attack that started the rebellion) the government came to us and told us the SLA is targeting us and we have to protect ourselves and our animals." Two government officials, one of whom Western diplomatic officials confirmed works for Sudanese military intelligence, met with the leaders of eight tribes in a village called Gardud in Jebel Marra. Mr Izadein's tribe was given 300 Kalashnikovs and told to attack villages where SLA fighters supposedly lived.

"We were working together, the janjaweed and the government. First the fighters on horseback went into the village. If we found any SLA then the government would come in with their big weapons. If not, we were allowed to take what we want - we could burn it if we wanted."

On one occasion, Mr Izadein and his men prepared to attack the village of Leiba. After two days of continuous bombing by Sudanese planes, the janjaweed entered the village. "It was all empty," he said. "So we burned it down." The turning point, Mr Izadein said, came after one of the tribal leaders went to Khartoum to ask the government for compensation for their dead. "We had many deaths but the government refused to help. That's when we began to realise we had been deceived."

Mr Izadein's tale will be familiar to the Arab tribes which fought against rebels in South Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s. As in Darfur, the government armed Arab militias to quell a rebellion. But those militia eventually joined the rebels, forcing the government to seek a peace agreement.

Failure to compensate tribes who lost fighters - and the realisation they were being used - was one of the issues that caused the militias to switch.

In Jebel Marra, an area controlled by the faction of the SLA lead by Abdul Wahid Mohammed al-Nur, nomadic Arab tribes which did not take up arms have signed peace agreements, allowing them to bring their cattle to markets and enabling commercial traffic to travel through their territory.

Haroun Abdul Rahman Abdullah, the sheikh in Gimero, a village of roughly 1,000 people in the Kirwo area of Jebel Marra, signed a peace deal with the SLA in December. "My people don't receive any assistance from the government. We have had no development. For all Darfurian people it is the same. Arabs are suffering too."