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 نيويورك تايمز تنفرد بمقابلة اسرى الجيش السوداني في تشاد!!
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IRIBA, Chad, Oct. 16 — Ibrahim Atoum Rahal said he had joined the Sudanese Army out of necessity. He had no job and no prospect of getting one, and the military offered a regular paycheck.
But when he was shipped to the front along the border with Chad to fight the rebels in Darfur a month ago, he said, his heart was not in the fight. When the rebels attacked Oct. 7, catching the soldiers as they lolled in the afternoon heat in the middle of the Ramadan fasting season, Mr. Rahal, a 26-year-old private, threw down his Kalashnikov rifle and ran.
“I have no interest in fighting this war,” Mr. Rahal said in an interview from his hospital bed in this provincial town, his right leg shattered by a rebel bullet. “I just want to go home.”
Mr. Rahal is one of about 130 Sudanese soldiers who, through an unusual series of events after a battle between non-Arab rebels resisting the Arab-led government, have ended up being both helped and held in this Chadian town a few dozen miles from the Sudanese border, given a refuge from the war but kept in prison.
Interviews with these soldiers provided a rare glimpse into the hidden world of Sudan’s secretive military, showing a corps of men who are poorly armed, unenthusiastic about their mission and more than willing to surrender rather than stand and fight.
“We don’t have the courage to defeat them,” said John Yotoma, a 38-year-old Sudanese corporal who lay shivering in a hospital tent here, bullet wounds in his arm and groin. “We didn’t have enough ammunition. We just ran away.”
For months Sudan has been building up troops in Darfur, adding thousands of men in key garrison towns, preparing for an assault on the non-Arab rebel groups that refused in May to sign an agreement to end the war.
One rebel faction signed, but others have vowed to continue fighting the government and its allied tribal militias, whose brutal counterinsurgency has been called genocide by the Bush administration and many others.
The Sudanese government has vowed to crush the remaining rebel factions, and has forcefully rejected a Security Council resolution authorizing a United Nations peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and police officers in Darfur to replace an overmatched and under-equipped African Union force.
In August, Sudan made a counterproposal, saying it would use its own troops to quell the uprising. That position was quickly rejected by much of the world, and raised fears that the government was prepared to unleash a brutal assault that could rival or surpass the bloody battles that had killed at least 250,000 people, many from war-related hunger and disease, and had pushed 2.5 million from their homes.
But so far, the Sudanese Army seems to have faced mostly humiliating defeat, as it did in the Oct. 7 attack near Kariari, a village on the border. The International Crisis Group, an independent conflict-prevention organization, also says that the government has been taking major losses in the recent fighting.
It is virtually impossible for journalists to speak to soldiers inside Sudan. They are not allowed to give interviews, and foreign journalists who photograph or film them are subject to arrest on serious charges, including espionage.
Yet the Sudanese soldiers here in Iriba, safely across the border in Chad, seemed eager to tell their stories and gripe about the tough life they faced on the front, their doubts about the legitimacy of their government’s fight against the rebels in Darfur and their low morale.
They described the brutal assault by the rebels on Oct. 7 as one that caught them by surprise.
The attack began around 3 p.m. Listless from fasting for Ramadan, most soldiers were napping or busy preparing the meal that at sundown would break the ritual fast. Mr. Rahal said he was cooking some soup when he heard the first gunfire, and saw more than 100 pickup trucks with heavy weapons barreling toward the camp.
He grabbed his rifle, taking a position in a nearby trench. He fought for about 20 minutes, he said, until he emptied his gun’s magazine. The soldiers had been running low on ammunition for some time, Mr. Rahal and other soldiers said, and they had asked their commanding officer to request more munitions. But during their monthlong stint at the front, the bullets never arrived.
When Mr. Rahal found himself facing fire with an empty gun, he decided to flee.
“I just dropped it and ran away,” he said.
But he didn’t get far before he felt a stab in his right calf, then a searing bolt of pain up his thigh. He dropped to the ground and lay still, hoping no one would come to finish him off. When it seemed the coast was clear, he tried to stand up, but couldn’t.
“I had so much pain in my leg I could not walk,” he said.
So he crawled. Using his forearms, he pulled himself west, toward the border. Just before dark he was picked up by some Chadian soldiers, he said, who brought him to the Chadian border town of Bahai, then shipped him to the hospital in Iriba.
About 40 soldiers were taken to the hospital for treatment, and 90 more were taken to the local jail, where they were placed in a guarded courtyard. Their status is unclear. They have been visited by Red Cross officials, but they are not prisoners of war or illegal migrants. Unsure of their fate, they while away their days in prison playing cards and talking.
“Can’t you see how bored we are?” said Moussa Mahmoud Yassin, a 42-year-old soldier from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. “We have nothing to do.”
Like most of the soldiers here, he said he did not intend to go back to the military, and thought the war in Darfur was pointless.
“We all just want to go home to our families,” he said.
The battle was a rout for the rebels, the soldiers here said, with the Sudanese Army taking heavy casualties. No one had time to count the bodies, but of the 750 Sudanese troops that were attacked, as many as half were killed, according to Sudanese soldiers here.
The attitudes and general despondence of the Sudanese troops held here underscores why Sudan, despite its large military, well supplied by arms bought from China with Sudan’s growing oil wealth, has relied primarily on brutal Arab militias to carry out its grim counterinsurgency campaign against the rebels in Darfur.
It was a strategy Sudan perfected in its 20-year civil war in the south, where it used Arab tribal militias as a paramilitary force. The militias terrorized southern Sudan, razing villages, raping women and kidnapping children. The militias in Darfur, known as the janjaweed, have carried out a similar campaign.
Many of the Sudanese soldiers said they hoped that the United Nations would send a peacekeeping force to Darfur soon, contradicting their government’s staunch position against such a force, arguing that any foreign troops would be seen as occupiers bent on re-colonizing Sudan.
“We wish the U.N. would come and take over,” said Waleed Mugammed, a 23-year-old private from Khartoum. “I don’t want to go back to Darfur.”
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Wasil Ali
Tragie Mustafa
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست