"The numbers of killed from SPLM are 1,200," Sudan's military commander Kamal Marouf told thousands of troops in the area, from which Southern forces said they had withdrawn on the weekend.
The toll is impossible to verify, but an AFP correspondent who accompanied Marouf said the putrid bodies of dead South Sudanese soldiers lay beneath trees scattered among the oil fields.
He said the number of bodies was so large they were "uncountable."
They bore the South Sudanese flag on their uniforms, and some had fallen inside the area's main town.
No civilians were visible, only Sudanese soldiers camped or on patrol.
Khartoum has not said how many of its own soldiers died in the operation.
During its 10-day occupation of Heglig, South Sudan's army said 19 of its soldiers were killed and that 240 Sudanese troops bit the dust.
Early in the occupation one Southern soldier in Bentiu, capital of the South's Unity State, said: "There are so many bodies at the front line, so many dead" that it is impossible to bury them or bring them back.
"Our talks with them were with guns and bullets," said President Omar al-Bashir
Head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president-for-life. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its secessesion, and attempted to
ArabizeDarfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
, who arrived in the region wearing a military uniform to address celebrating troops on Monday.
The AFP correspondent saw one captured tank bearing a South Sudanese flag, and another damaged tank which could not be identified.
In Heglig town itself, televisions and computers lay damaged in the street.
Sudan did not allow journalists or other observers into the Heglig area during the standoff with the South, and no foreign news hounds were permitted on Monday's visit which lasted about four hours.
South Sudan said it completed a tactical withdrawal from the Heglig region on Sunday, a move that followed intense international diplomacy to pull the two sides back from the brink of a wider war.
Khartoum claimed to have defeated the South and forced it out.