The account Halima Sherif gave of her family's ordeal was chillingly familiar in this part of the world. Arab men on horseback rode into her village, shouting racial epithets over the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikov gunfire. | "They shouted 'zurga,'" she said, an Arabic word for black. "They told us they would take our land. They shot many people and burned our houses. We all ran away." |
Scenes like this one have been unfolding in the war-ravaged Darfur region of western Sudan for more than three years, and since the beginning of this year Sudanese Arabs have also been attacking Chadian villages just across Sudan's porous border. But the attacks on Djedidah and nine villages around it in early October took place not in Darfur, or even on Chad's violent border with Sudan. It took place relatively deep inside Chad, about 95 kilometers, or 60 miles, from the border - a huge distance in a place with few roads and where most travel is by horse, donkey or on foot.
Beyond that, the attack was carried out not by Sudanese raiders from across the border but by Chadian Arabs, according to victims of the attack. "They were our neighbors," Sherif said, as she hurried to collect a few goats from the charred remains of her family compound. "We know them. They are Chadian."
The violence in Darfur has been spilling over into Chad since at least early this year, when cross-border attacks by Sudanese bandits and militias chased more than 50,000 Chadians living in villages along the border from their homes.