واشنطن بوست: هجوم ام درمان كشف عن ضعف في الجيش والأمن السوداني!!!

Quote: KHARTOUM, Sudan -- A week after Darfur rebels launched an audacious attack on this sand-swept capital, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir presided over a macabre exhibit aimed at crushing any doubt as to which side won. With state TV cameras set up across a dusty field, he surveyed a row of battered and bullet-holed Hilux trucks that government forces had seized from the rebels. Bashir raised an ivory-tipped baton, and hundreds of security forces cheered, waving shoes, T-shirts and other clothes allegedly stripped off the doomed fighters. Then he strolled past a 200-yard-long photo gallery, a grotesque display of burned and dismembered bodies, allegedly those of the rebels. Each image was underlined with the same caption in Arabic: "summary of failure." "I am sure of my military," said a retired general viewing the exhibit. "See all of these people? They are cheering!" In reality, though, the rebel assault has unnerved Bashir's government, which has waged a brutal campaign against rebels and civilians in Sudan's western Darfur region, a conflict that had never before reached the capital. According to Sudanese officials, Western diplomats and others here, the unprecedented, if rather bumbling, assault by Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement -- which involved a 350-mile trek through wide-open desert -- exposed weaknesses in the vaunted military and security forces, which apparently knew for days of the rebels' advance but did not stop it. As a result, an unease has settled over Khartoum, a normally peaceful city along the Nile where five-star hotels coexist with street-side tea sellers, and security forces now cluster at the foot of bridges, checking passing cars. Some Sudanese officials and the elite who support them are even acknowledging a rare feeling in their circles -- uncertainty. "Maybe there is a gap," said Rabie Atti, an official with the ruling National Congress Party. "Maybe there is a weakness, a deficiency somewhere." On May 10, a Saturday, the rebel column of 300 machine gun-mounted trucks and about 3,000 exhausted and hungry fighters reached the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman and began firing into the air. Though the rebels were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Sudanese military, a nearby barracks of soldiers remained unengaged for at least an hour, according to several sources. Atti said the soldiers were "on standby," but others said they either refused to fight or were ordered not to. In any case, the rebels -- some of whom appeared to be preteens, witnesses said -- rolled into town with so little resistance that they had time to stop for water, bananas and honey, and some even prayed at a mosque. "They were tired," said Anwar Bushra, a merchant who witnessed the attack. "They were asking people where can they find food." In a city with no shortage of men in camouflage, residents greeted the fighters with more confusion than glee, Bushra said. The fighters seemed disoriented as they asked people on the street for directions to the presidential palace and other targets, witnesses said. They did not shoot at civilians but blasted holes into two banks, a Pepsi billboard, a clock tower and a building painted with an image of Mickey Mouse. Even so, they reached within about 200 yards of the state-run broadcasting station, and to the foot of a bridge leading into the heart of Khartoum. They were repelled not by the military but by Bashir's loyal security forces. Witnesses said the sound of machine-gun fire lasted until 3 a.m. that Sunday. "This was a huge embarrassment" for the government, a senior Western diplomat said on the condition of anonymity. "It's clear that this was a conspiracy with many strands." One of those strands is the internal support the rebels apparently had within the Sudanese military, which includes many soldiers from Darfur and officers whose loyalties may lie with the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, Khalil Ibrahim, a former government insider who broke with Bashir in 1999. In the days leading up to the attack, the government, aware of the rebel advance, began purging the military, according to a U.S. source in the region who was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly. At least 18 colonels and one general were arrested, the source said. Another factor was Chad. According to Sudanese officials and the Western diplomat, the coup attempt was financed with at least $50 million worth of weapons and equipment from the neighboring country, whose president, Idriss Déby, is from the same politically powerful tribe as Ibrahim. Déby accused Bashir of backing Chadian rebels in an almost identical attempt to oust him in February, and according to the diplomat, he soon after convened a meeting of Darfur rebels to plan for retaliation. Only the Justice and Equality Movement signed up. Within the increasingly fragmented Darfur rebel movement, Ibrahim's faction is the strongest militarily but probably the least popular among the millions who have suffered in the five-year-old conflict, which some experts estimate has left as many as 450,000 people dead, though the government says that number is exaggerated. "They want power -- they don't care for people," said Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights activist in Khartoum, referring to Ibrahim's group. A doctor well known around Khartoum, Ibrahim supported the coup that brought Bashir to power in 1989 and was a leader of the brutal government militias that fought a civil war in southern Sudan. After Ibrahim broke with Bashir in 1999, he headed to the bush, where his movement became associated with the "Black Book" detailing how government elites were monopolizing power at the expense of areas such as Darfur. The book eventually became a rallying point for the rebellion there. Ibrahim "is Trotsky to Bashir's Lenin," the Western diplomat said. "And what the ruling party fears most is division from within, because that is how they came to power." Since the attack, Sudanese security forces have conducted sweeps around Omdurman, home to a large number of Darfurians from Ibrahim's Zaghawa tribe. Fearing an indiscriminate crackdown, many Zaghawa families have fled the city, people here said. Hundreds of people have been arrested, according to Human Rights Watch, and there are unconfirmed reports that others have been beaten or executed. Atti said about 100 rebels and 100 to 150 government troops and civilians were killed in the fighting. While the implications of the attack on resolving the Darfur conflict remain unclear, Bashir is enjoying a kind of fleeting public relations victory, as the United States, the United Nations and other international players have condemned the rebel attack. Some analysts say Bashir may have deliberately allowed the rebels to reach the city in an attempt to discredit them. "JEM posed no threat," one Western official said on the condition of anonymity. "This was the regime's plan: to lure one of the last remaining Darfur rebel groups, crush it and also diminish the cause of the Darfuris as victims. Now they're seen as the aggressors." As the sun set on the exhibition celebrating the rebels' defeat, Bashir left the field, and perhaps several thousand Sudanese were allowed in. They milled around the wrecked trucks and stared at the posters of carnage. "They were not rebels," said one man. "They were gangsters." The exhibition will remain on display indefinitely