Military

DATE=11/09/00

TYPE=CORRESPONDENT REPORT

TITLE=SUDAN / FIGHTING (L-O)

NUMBER=2-269037

BYLINE=KATY SALMON

DATELINE=NAIROBI

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: There has been a major battle between the Sudanese government and rebels for control of a key eastern town. Katy Salmon reports that this is the most serious fighting in eastern Sudan for two-years.

TEXT: Sudan's main rebel alliance captured the town of Kassala, 400-kilometers east of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, shortly before dawn Wednesday.

This followed a day and night of heavy fighting between thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks and artillery, a rebel National Democratic Alliance (N-D-A) spokesman, Yasir Arman said.

But residents of Kassala, which is home to 300-thousand people, say government forces have since regained control of the town.

It is the first time rebels have captured the strategically important town. Kassala lies close to the Eritrea, which provides bases for the Sudanese N-D-A rebels.

The battle for Kassala is the most serious fighting eastern Sudan has seen since the beginning of the Ethiopian-Eritrean border war two-years ago. The war ended in July.

Rebels say the government launched a major offensive, aimed at driving them across the border and into Eritrea, in early October. Rival armies have been battling it out on the arid plains surrounding the town ever since.

The conditions are fierce - daytime temperatures soar to more than 40-degrees Celsius and regular sandstorms can reduce visibility to zero.

The N-D-A links northern Muslim opposition groups with the southern-based Sudanese People's Liberation Army (S-P-L-A), which has fought successive Khartoum based governments for the past 17-years. The S-P-L-A wants autonomy for the mainly Christian and animist southern Sudan.

An estimated two-million people most of them civilians have died in the conflict and the famines it has fueled.

A number of peace initiatives have been launched to try to end one of Africa's longest-running civil wars. Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir held exploratory peace talks with National Democratic Alliance leader Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani in Eritrea in September. The Sudanese People's Liberation Army and the government have also held largely fruitless talks since 1995 through the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a regional grouping of east African states. (SIGNED)

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