22 Sudanese Soldiers Killed in Abyei Clashes with SPLA

22 soldiers killed in Abyei clashes - Sudan Armed Forces

Sudan Tribune, AP, Wednesday 21 May 2008.

May 21, 2008 (KHARTOUM) —

The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) lost 22 men in clashes with Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the volatile oil rich region of Abyei, local SAF commander said Wednesday, in incidents threatening to reignite the country’s bloody civil war.

Brig. Gen. Muntasser Sabil Adam, commander of national Sudan army troops in Abyei, said that his soldiers repelled the attacking southern forces in a six hour battle Tuesday in which he lost 22 men. The town was now calm, he added, and his men were in control.

No SPLA official was available for comment Wednesday, but on Tuesday, southern official Michael Majak said the northern government is breaching the accord by keeping its forces in the town instead of deploying joint north-south units. Majak had no figures on southern casualties.

The fighting in the flashpoint region of Abyei that lies along the disputed boundary line between the former civil war foes began last week and has killed an undetermined number of people. A majority of the town’s civilians — between 30,000 and 50,000 — have been displaced, according to the U.N.

Tuesday’s fighting, which had broken an earlier ceasefire, was set off by an assault on the town by the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army with tanks and infantry, firing rockets and mortars.

The United Nations has pulled out most of its 250 civilian staff of the town, leaving just the 400 peacekeepers on the ground.

Aid workers, U.N. and Sudanese officials have described the town as devastated, with the market area totally burned down, and the majority of its population displaced.

The north and south ended more than two decades of civil war, that killed 2 million people, with a 2005 peace agreement. The fate of Abyei, an oil rich region coveted by both sides, was left undetermined, however, and a separate protocol for resolving the dispute has not been implemented.

Many of the southern leaders come from Abyei and want to reclaim it while the northern-dominated government covet the area’s oil resources.

The southern leadership accused the northern government of reneging on aspects of the 2005 accord, by refusing to share oil wealth, failing to pull government troops out of South Sudan and remilitarizing contested border zones such as Abyei.

U.S. and U.N. officials on Tuesday condemned the latest fighting.