KHARTOUM, March 11 (Reuters) – Sudan’s army said on Monday
it fought off a rebel advance in a volatile state bordering
South Sudan, but the insurgents said they had made a “tactical
withdrawal” after a successful operation.
The remote border area has been plagued by conflict since
South Sudan broke away from Sudan as an independent country in
July, 2011.
Fighting between Sudanese government forces and rebels, who
sided with the south in a decades-long civil war that led up to
the secession, has forced hundreds of thousands of people to
flee their homes.
Sudan’s armed forces spokesman Al-Sawarmi Khalid Saad said
the army had repulsed an insurgent attack on the Surkum area in
Blue Nile state.
“The armed forces managed to … inflict heavy losses on the
rebels,” in fighting had lasted from late Sunday until Monday
morning, he told Reuters.
Arnu Lodi, a spokesman for the rebel Sudan People’s
Liberation Movement North (SPLM-N), gave a different account.
“We withdrew for tactical reasons,” he said, adding that the
pull-out followed rebel attacks on government camps in the area
on Sunday.
The rebels accuse the Khartoum government of discriminating
against their communities on the border, and have joined an
alliance with insurgents from other areas, vowing to topple
Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir
The two sides often give conflicting accounts of the
fighting in the remote regions, which are extremely difficult to
verify independently because of government restrictions on
access for independent observers.
The violence in Blue Nile state and another border state,
South Kordofan, has strained relations between the two
countries.
Khartoum accuses South Sudan of supporting the rebels, which
Juba denies.
South Sudan ordered its troops out of a buffer zone on the
roughly 2,000-km border on Monday as agreed at African
Union-brokered talks, but diplomats remain cautious and say they
are waiting for concrete signs of movement.
(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Alexander Dziadosz
in Cairo; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
