In Darfur, Terror From the Air
Sudan Intensifies Use of Helicopter Gunships and Bombs, Driving More Villagers From Their Homes
Yagoub Mustafa, flanked by family members, holds his daughter at a refugee camp near El Fasher, Sudan. They fled their village after an air attack in July and walked four days to the camp.
(Photos By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Saturday, September 9, 2006
EL FASHER, Sudan, Sept. 8 -- Yagoub Mustafa, 45, could not easily mimic the "whoop whoop whoop, boom! boom! boom!" of two helicopter gunships that fired rockets into the huts in his Darfur village. He tried to make the noises, but they were not loud enough, or terrifying enough.
But the horror he experienced that July afternoon, while he crouched low under a tree with his sobbing sons, daughters and nephews pressed against him, was more easily expressed: Mustafa thought they all were going to die, he said. And as he offered soothing words to the children, he begged for rescue in a silent prayer.
Please God help us. We need your mercy.
Three years into a war in the Darfur region of western Sudan, thousands of villagers have been victimized by government troops and proxy militiamen who killed, raped and looted. Now the government is intensifying an air war featuring Soviet-era Antonov planes jury-rigged into bombers and Mi-24 helicopter gunships turned against mud-and-thatch huts. New waves of shellshocked villagers have left their homes and trekked for days to bulging relief camps.
For Mustafa, whose eyes are set deeply into a face the color of aged teak, the air attack did what years of sporadic raids by government-backed Janjaweed militiamen had failed to do. They made him leave his home in Bellala Gorf, about 45 miles northwest of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.
"They came very low," Mustafa said, his voice low and rumbly from decades of breathing hot desert dust. "I was afraid. I just hid."
The war started when rebels in this impoverished and neglected region attacked government installations in Darfur in 2003. The government responded by sending in regular army troops, employing air power and arming a militia, called the Janjaweed, whose fighters traveled by horse and camel and attacked rebels and civilians.
A peace deal was reached in May in Nigeria, but two of the three main rebel groups refused to sign. The government is sending thousands of troops and police officers to Darfur in what U.N. officials have called a violation of the peace plan.
In the past two months, the government also has resumed air attacks against civilians in areas where the rebels remain popular.
"Hundreds are still dying amid ongoing violence, and thousands are being forcibly displaced," said a statement issued Friday in Geneva by Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. "If things do not improve, we are heading for a major catastrophe."
There is little evidence that things are about to improve in Darfur.
A 7,000-member African Union mission here, a limited but crucial buffer against the government forces, is due to depart by the end of the month, though discussions continue about a possible extension. The U.N. Security Council approved a plan last week to send in a U.N. force three times the size of the African Union mission, but Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has rejected it.
