African Union forces can no longer cope with the dangers in Darfur and need the help of UN troops to prevent further "slaughter", a top AU official in Sudan said on Tuesday.
Sam Ibok, head of the AU team charged with implementing a peace agreement in western Sudan, expressed his concerns after gunmen killed five AU troops in the deadliest single attack against the African force since it deployed in 2004.
The five Senegalese soldiers were guarding a water point near the Sudanese border with Chad when they came under fire on Sunday. Four soldiers were killed in the shooting and the fifth died of his wounds on Monday morning.
"The African Union force cannot cope with the circumstances that it finds itself in, and we have to be honest about it," Ibok told Reuters Television in an interview.
"Anybody who wants us to succeed would need to work to give us the ability to be more effective and that can only be done ... between the United Nations and the African Union." The AU operates an overstretched 7,000-strong force in Darfur. Sudan has rejected the deployment of a larger UN force in the region, where violence has persisted despite a 2006 peace agreement between the government and one rebel faction.
The latest deaths brought to 15 the number of AU personnel killed in Darfur since troops were deployed in late 2004. A senior Nigerian officer working with the mission has been missing since he was kidnapped in December.
"We are not going to carry on like that anymore. We are not going to accept that these forces just be slaughtered like that by people who are not interested in peace in Darfur," said Ibok.
"We are going to try to work with the United Nations so that whoever is behind these things would be brought to trial and would be subject to the relevant international law because it is totally unacceptable."
Darfur is more chaotic by the day, with rebels, government forces, armed groups and tribes operating on multiple front lines, hampering the world's biggest humanitarian effort. Aid officials say it is becoming impossible to tell them apart.
Experts estimate that around 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have fled their homes since the conflict flared in 2003, when rebels took up arms against Khartoum, charging it with neglect. The government says only 9,000 people have died. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir reiterated on Monday his position that the AU had the main security responsibility for Darfur but said a "dialogue" was under way on other issues.
Sudanese officials recently said they were willing to review UN proposals for easing the violence in Darfur but Khartoum has not budged on the main plan to send 22,500 UN soldiers and police to supplement the struggling AU mission.
The AU said the attack on its troops was carried out in territory held by the Sudan Liberation Army, which signed the peace deal with the Sudanese government last year. An SLA spokesman in Khartoum denied his forces had any involvement in the attack.
A shooting attack on a helicopter carrying the AU deputy force commander a day before occurred in a stronghold of an SLA rejectionist faction led by Abdul Wahid.
Tribal clashes, meanwhile, are killing more people than fighting between government forces and Darfur rebels, with hundreds dead since the start of the year.
The violence has also spilled across borders. At least 65 people were killed in a cross-border raid by Sudanese Janjaweed militia who torched two villages in eastern Chad, driving up to 8,000 civilians from their homes, Chadian authorities said on Tuesday. Sudan said it had no role in the weekend attacks.