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| THE JANJAWEED In the summer of 2003, Darfuri refugees slipping across the border into neighboring Chad gave horrifying accounts of a scorched-earth campaign in Darfur. Villages and granaries were being burned to the ground, and families were being annihilated, brutally gunned down as they tried to flee. The refugees described the perpetrators: Arab militia members riding on horseback. The Janjaweed, "devils on horseback," have destroyed more than 400 villages and raped and killed thousands upon thousands of Darfuris. The communities of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes have been the Janjaweed's main targets. The Janjaweed aren't the Khartoum government's first use of militias to suppress resistance. In the late 1980s, the government mobilized militias from the cattle-herding Arabs of southern Darfur to kill tens of thousands of Sudan People's Liberation Army sympathizers. In 1992, it used militias to quash a rebellion in the Nuba Mountains, and in the late 1990s, it used militias in southern Sudan to remove any obstacles to oil drilling. Musa Hilal, sheikh of the Um Jalloul tribe, has a history of instigating fights against the Fur; now the U.S. State Department suspects him of being the top Janjaweed commander and believes he runs a training camp in his hometown of Mistiriyah. Hilal received money and arms from Khartoum to put down the rebellion in Darfur because the government could not rely on the soldiers from Darfur, who fill much of the Sudan army's lower ranks, to fight the rebels. |