Sudan Rebels Battling Islamic Regime Claim to Be 40 Miles From Key Dam

CAIRO — Sudanese rebels claimed Tuesday to have killed hundreds of government troops and pushed to within 40 miles of a key hydroelectric dam in a mushrooming military campaign to topple Sudan’s Islamic regime, long criticized by the United States as a sponsor of global terrorism.

The offensive that began nine days ago has spread quickly along a 400-mile front, raising questions about whether an alliance between Arabic-speaking opposition groups from the north and black African rebels from the south will spark a mass uprising against Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and the country’s unofficial leader, Parliament Speaker Hassan Turabi.

The Khartoum government, shocked by the sudden threat, blames its predicament on an international plot by the United States, Israel, Eritrea and Ethiopia that it says is aimed not only against Sudan but against Islam itself. It has called upon large numbers of volunteers to rush to the fronts in the east and south of the country; last week it launched urgent appeals across the Arab world for help.

But Sudan’s special envoy to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak came away disappointed, with Mubarak calling the fighting an “internal affair,” not a foreign invasion as Khartoum contends.

Adding political pressure Tuesday, Sadek Mahdi, the ousted Sudanese prime minister who recently made a clandestine escape from the capital, called for a popular uprising and encouraged the army and police to defect.

“Your true front is in Khartoum. . . . Your humanitarian, national and faithful duty is to side with the people,” said Mahdi’s statement sent to news agencies in Cairo. “In this way, you will pay penance for the wrongs committed in your name, spare the people’s blood and open the way to peace and to a system of democratic governing.”

The latest fighting brought rebels to within 40 miles of Damazin in eastern Sudan, site of the Roseires Dam, which provides 80% of the electric power for Khartoum, said rebel spokesmen in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.

The claims could not be independently verified.

Rebels in the northeast are said to be continuing their efforts to cut the vital supply road between Khartoum and Port Sudan on the Red Sea.

Fighting was taking place within 300 miles of the capital, the rebels said, and 1,260 government soldiers have been killed, rebel commander John Garang has told reporters.

But Gen. Mohammed Sanoussi, the Sudanese army spokesman in Khartoum, denied that fighting was escalating. He said the situation is calm and called rebel claims vast exaggerations.

The largest country in Africa, Sudan--about four times the size of Texas--is a desperately poor state of 30 million people astride the Nile River and its two branches, the White and Blue Nile. For four decades, black rebels from the south, mainly Christians and followers of traditional African religions, have waged a ragged, little-noted civil war against the Arabic-speaking Muslims of the north.

In recent months, however, a new military alliance has formed between the southern forces, led by Garang and his 14-year-old Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, and Arab dissidents from the north. This new coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, has established its headquarters in neighboring Eritrea. It says it seeks a liberal, democratic government, a secular state and a plebiscite for the southern Sudanese to decide whether to stay in a unified Sudan.

In a Monday interview in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq Al Awsat, Garang denied that he wants to split the country or that his mainly African troops would try to seize Arab Khartoum. Instead, the rebels hope to “provide the right atmosphere” for a popular rising against the government, he said.

The U.S. State Department has labeled Sudan a pariah state, asserting that it sponsors terrorism worldwide. U.S. officials deny that they are behind the anti-government alliance. They also dispute that U.S. military aid, recently awarded to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda, is actually meant to assist Sudanese rebels.

Sudan has been a sanctuary and training base for the wealthy Saudi radical Osama bin Laden and his followers, suspected by the United States of involvement in a number of terrorist operations worldwide. It also gave a home to the longtime fugitive known as Carlos the Jackal, though the Sudanese later turned him over to French authorities.

Egypt accuses Sudan of continuing to shelter three men it believes are responsible for an unsuccessful 1995 assassination attempt against Mubarak in Ethiopia and of giving support to Islamic radicals who have been battling Egyptian authorities since 1992 and have staged periodic attacks on tourists.

Despite Mubarak’s known antipathy toward the Sudanese government, most Arab commentators predicted that he would be sympathetic to Khartoum’s appeal for help in a crisis, out of fear that a rebel victory would partition Sudan and endanger Egypt’s allocation of water from the Nile.

But Mubarak disclosed Sunday that he had turned down the appeal. “How can I support [Sudanese officials] when they are at odds with the Sudanese people and when there are Sudanese in the opposition?” he asked.

Since ousting Mahdi in 1989 in a military coup, the Sudanese government has had strained relations with most of its neighbors. Human Rights Watch/Africa, a U.S.-based watchdog group, has accused the regime of denying basic freedoms and deploying an “ever-present security apparatus,” which the group blames for conducting arbitrary arrests, detentions and torture.

Since last spring, the Swiss-based humanitarian organization Christian Solidarity International says, the government has had a deliberate “scorched earth policy” in southern Sudan, in areas mostly concealed from the outside world. More than 50,000 people have been displaced and many are dying of hunger and disease, said the group, which has appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations agencies to start emergency airdrops of food.