Mick Hartley

As Scotland on Sunday report, the janjaweed are back:

They came to the dusty town of Suleia in the Darfur region of Sudan riding horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran.

The militiamen destroyed the town – burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire.

“I have never been so afraid,” she said.

The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese army, were a return to the tactics that terrorised Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict.

Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale – involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where non-Arab rebel troops have been – have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide.

Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur is entering a new and deadly phase – one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

The offensives are aimed at retaking ground gained by a rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, which has been gathering strength and has close ties to the government of neighbouring Chad. […]

In recent weeks, bombs dropped from government planes hit Abu Surouj, Sirba, Suleia and other towns in West Darfur; then came janjaweed militiamen, who killed, raped and burned, helping themselves to livestock and grain, furniture and clothing. In one town, the raiders pried the corrugated metal roof off a school, aid workers said. In another, water pumps were destroyed.

“This is the kind of destruction that makes it hard for people to return,” said Ted Chaiban, the Unicef representative in Sudan. “People need security. They are totally vulnerable.”

In Suleia, only a few hundred residents remained of the 15,000 who lived here. Those left behind were too weak to run and have sought safety near the army camp at the edge of town, sleeping in the open, huddled together for warmth against the frigid night winds.