A Wide-Open Battle For Power in Darfur

"One of the men got on the seat of the truck and asked, 'What is this?' " said Osman, who escaped unharmed with his colleague as the bandits made off with one truck. "I explained, 'It is a hand brake.' "

On a road leading south from here, carjackings are so frequent that World Food Program officials recently discussed using a helicopter to reach a camp of 50,000 displaced people that is a 30-minute drive away. Along a 30-mile stretch of road farther south are no fewer than 15 checkpoints manned by various militia or rebel factions. Heading west, Osman has been a victim four times.

The Wild West style of banditry is not happening only along the roads.

In recent weeks, a group of disgruntled militiamen -- the notorious Janjaweed -- rode into El Fasher on horseback and attempted to rob the National Bank of Sudan, complaining that the government had not paid them.

During the first four months of this year, 51 humanitarian compounds in towns across Darfur were raided by armed men, compared with 23 during the same period last year, according to the United Nations.

Relief groups in El Fasher are topping walls with razor wire and taking other precautions. Oxfam workers have resorted to using banged-up rental trucks, taxis and even donkey carts to deliver supplies, hoping to make themselves less enticing to potential bandits.

The insecurity has not yet reduced the impact of the relief effort. Rates of infant mortality and malnutrition have dropped significantly since 2006, for instance. But in the nearby Abu Shouk camp, where tents have been replaced by mud-brick houses and walls spiked with broken glass to deter break-ins, people have noticed that humanitarian workers visit less regularly.

"They used to check on us every week," said Tigani Nur Adam, a teacher who has lived in the camp for five years. "Now, it's not so often."

Of the seven Oxfam locations in Darfur, four are accessible to workers only by air, said Alun McDonald, a spokesman for the group who recently survived an assault on his compound.

"The conflict has become so much more complex," he said. "There were three rebel groups, and now I don't think anyone knows how many there are. . . . The lines of who's who are much more blurred."

It is a marked change from the beginning of the conflict in 2003, when the Sudanese government unleashed a brutal campaign to crush rebels who had taken up arms under the banner of ending decades of discrimination by a government of Arab elites.

Of the 450,000 deaths some experts estimate have been caused by the conflict, most occurred during the first two years, which produced the iconic images of Darfur: government planes bombing villages and allied militias rampaging on horseback, burning huts, raping women and killing civilians.