Conflict Stirs Up Confusion On Border of Chad, Sudan

In Koukou Angarana, about 50 miles from the Sudanese border, witnesses said the rebels briefly stopped in the trading town on their way to the capital, killing one police officer and injuring two others. The rebels kidnapped 12 police officers and forestry service workers, local leaders said, and demanded satellite phones from U.N. workers.

The raid stunned the townspeople, who in recent months have been attacked by what they believed were Janjaweed, or militiamen backed by the Sudanese government.

"Were these rebels Chadians? Were they Janjaweed?" said Ibrahum Abdul Majaid, who witnessed the violence. "Maybe they were hired by the Sudanese government."

"There was also a Libyan, perhaps just a mercenary," added Philomena Santoro, who works for INTERSOS, an Italian humanitarian group that provides water and food to the refugee camps in the area. "Then again, maybe some of them were just bandits. We have a lot of that here in the lawless border, too."

The violence in Darfur has displaced more than 2 million civilians and forced nearly 250,000 into Chad. Tens of thousands of people have died in the conflict.

While the Bush administration labeled the atrocities in Darfur a genocide nearly two years ago, no solution has been found to stem the violence, an example of the world's inability to solve such crises, experts and human rights activists said.

The United States has proposed sending several hundred NATO advisers to support an African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Sudan has rejected the idea as a Western invasion of a Muslim country, and some leaders have likened the scenario to the situation in Iraq. On Sunday, Osama bin Laden called for an Islamic holy war in Sudan, saying fighters should rise up against a Western peacekeeping force that would be sent to Darfur to protect African Muslims against government-backed Arab and Muslim fighters.

The U.S. ambassador to Chad, Marc M. Wall, visited this border town Wednesday to reassure the population of the U.S. commitment to protecting them and to deciphering the situation. Chadian military officials told Wall that some of the rebels who drove through the town last week wore Sudanese government uniforms and did not speak French, as Chadians do.

"Information of aid, indirect or direct, by Sudan is troubling to us," Wall told a group of local leaders, adding that the situation was "fragile and dangerous."

Many Chadians helped shelter Sudanese refugees, but the violence has pushed about 60,000 Chadians off their farms.

The devastation and suffering were in full view for Wall as he walked through the sand past a long row of thorn trees where Chadian women and children were living in the open air. Teapots hung from branches, and sweaty infants with blank stares sat in the sand in the hot sun.

"We are so confused. Who is rebel? Who is Janjaweed?" said Halima Mohamed, 25, a displaced Chadian, who was cradling a relative's baby under a tree with other women forced from their village five miles from the Sudanese border. "It's all mixed. Sudan's troubles have come here. We don't know when it will end. I don't feel safe."