Darfur: Muslims Killing Muslims

Pastorius sent the following story via email. He asks "If it's true, why is it being ignored by our media even more than they are already ignoring the murdering of Sudanese Christians?"

Before leaving the village, the attackers, driving over 3,000 stolen animals before them, tore up Korans found in the mosque and set the building on fire.

Barely a week later, the horsemen returned with soldiers from the regular Sudanese Army and in a four-day rampage killed 80 more people, including women and children. "The soldiers stayed on the edge of the village," said a 37-year-old man. "But they saw everything."

In the village of Sandikoro, soldiers and horsemen tore up Korans and defecated on them before burning the mosque, with its imam inside. In Kondoli, they killed another imam, Abrahim Durra, as well as a second imam and the muezzin.

Jane at Armies of Liberation also links to this article (originally on Lebanon's Daily Star).

My initial reaction was that I think the reason they are doing it is probably summed up by this line, "Theirs is not the shrill, extremist Islam of the fundamentalist generals who seized power in Sudan in 1989, but a quiet, tolerant Islam that has characterized Sudan for most of its recent history and that still characterizes most of its citizens - Arab or African." Like all fascists, Islamofascists are just as angry at unenthusiastic members of their own group as at outside enemies. The point is control and supremacy and any sort of oposing view is dangerous. I am not sure why the media has failed to notice this. It seems that it would be safer for them to condemn Sudan if it is targeting its fellow muslims because that wouldn't allow people to get the idea that Christians deserve fair treatment.

A search for "Darfur Muslim" on CNN.com produces the following lone story:

In Darfur, unlike in the broader Sudanese civil war, the conflict is not religious but ethnic: Sudan's Muslim government, made up mostly of Arabs, is accused of backing Arab militias there, who, according to many observers, are trying to push black Muslim tribes out.

A similar search on Reuters produced no results.

The Economist has the following on its subscription site:

Confusingly, Sudan is the scene of two separate but related civil wars. One, between north and south, has been flaring up and down for half a century. The other, in Darfur, started only in February last year. The older war pits an Islamist government in the north against southerners who are mostly pagan or Christian. Darfur's conflict is Muslim against Muslim. In any event, the prime source of Sudan's horrors is political. Since independence in 1956, Sudan has been ruled by a small and undemocratic elite of mostly Arab Muslims. In the hope of crushing the long-standing rebellion by infidel southerners, they have routinely bombed villages, encouraged their militiamen to enslave southerners and deliberately fostered famine. Perhaps 2m people, mostly civilians, have died.