In Darfur's Death Grip

Villagers Tell of Three Days of Brutality and Killing As Sudanese Troops, Allies Step Up Attacks in Region

EL FASHER, Sudan, Sept. 5 -- Adouma Ahmed Khames, 35, had no illusions of heroism that July morning. When gunmen appeared by the hundreds in his village, riding on camels and horses and in sleek Toyota trucks, he dived for cover under a rotting, stinking pile of grass, he said.

By the time he climbed out, night had fallen and the village, in Sudan's western Darfur region, was full of dead young men, dispatched in their own huts with bullets to their heads. Khames counted 58 bodies from the rampage, which he and other witnesses said was carried out by a former rebel faction, along with Sudanese troops and government-allied militiamen called Janjaweed.

Over the next several hours, he and his wife, Kaldoum Adam Ahmed, 32 and nearly due to deliver their sixth child, helped dig mass graves to bury their friends, neighbors and relatives. Then as dawn approached, Khames returned to his hiding place -- the grass gathered months earlier to feed the family's donkeys -- and burrowed under in hopes of living another day.

He did, remaining in hiding long enough to see his village -- called Deker -- looted and to learn of at least four rapes.

"They destroyed everything," said Khames, who has a coffee-colored, triangular face that comes to a point at his goatee. Deprivation had shrunk his body to the point that a copper ring on his left hand dangled from a bony finger.

According to witnesses and an Amnesty International report, the killing spread across three days and devastated Deker and several other villages, as well as the town of Korma, about 45 miles northwest of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.

The incident, in the first week of July, is among dozens reportedly involving civilian casualties as the three-year-old war in Darfur has moved into a newly lethal phase since the signing of a peace deal in May. Under the agreement between Sudan's government and one of three Darfur rebel groups, the government is sending about 30,000 troops and police officers to Darfur, where they are joining forces with the rebel group that signed the peace deal.

These new forces, armed with expanded weapons stocks and backed by government planes making bombing runs, are augmenting the Janjaweed militias that already were raping, looting and killing their way through Darfur, a vast, arid region the size of Texas. Since the fighting began in 2003, war and disease have killed as many as 450,000 people in Darfur and driven more than 2 million from their homes.

The exact number of dead in the early July attacks near Korma is impossible to determine, though those who have visited the area report several mass graves. Amnesty International, which said the United Nations also investigated the attacks, put the number of dead at 72, mostly males, including 11 students and a teacher at a school in the village of Dalil.

Among the dead, Khames said, were two of his nephews in their twenties and a cousin, 75, who had three wives and 22 children. All died in Deker, where several hundred people once lived, a few miles from Korma.

Other older villagers in Deker were not spared violence either. Hamid Ibrahim, who appeared to be at least in his sixties, displayed a dark slash across his right shoulder where he said three men beat him with sticks. He made it to al-Salam refugee camp on a donkey, after riding for three days. Few residents of any age are left in Deker.

"Everybody has gone away," Ibrahim said.