Today's Costliest Civil War.

• Author: Connell, Dan
• Position: Sudan

My Trek with the Rebels of Sudan

I was lucky. I was supposed to fly from northeastern Kenya to guerrilla-held areas of central Sudan on February 8, but the flight was delayed for forty-eight hours because the relief supplies we were going to take with us did not arrive in time. That morning, government planes bombed a school in the very village I was planning to visit. Fourteen children were killed instantly; along with their teacher. A dozen more were injured. Two required amputations.

Now I am jammed into an aging, twin-engine British Andover with nineteen seated passengers and five tons of ramshackle cargo, none of which is tied down. Eight unarmed rebels from the Sudan People's Liberation Movement are perched atop the jumble of bales and crates. They ding to metal joints in the plane's unlined shell as we jounce along the rutted runway to start our journey.

This is the first clandestine relief trip to the Nuba Mountains in more than a month. And it's the first ever to a newly constructed airstrip in Kawda. Sudan's Islamist military regime does its best to destroy each rebel landing site once it is discovered.

I'm traveling with a freelance charter company that ferries supplies for the Nuba Relief, Rehabilitation, and Development Organization--a shoestring operation run by local volunteers--and for a handful of European agencies that smuggle aid to the war victims over the government's strenuous objections.

The flight lasts two-and-a-half hours as we zigzag past a string of besieged government garrisons, staying just beyond or below their radar until we reach the steep ridges and serpentine valleys of the Nuba Mountains. Kawda looks deserted when the pilot circles to gauge the condition of the airstrip. That morning, rebel soldiers combed it for land mines and swept it clean of windblown debris.

Huge clouds of gritty brown dust billow around us as we touch down. Minutes later, we are surrounded by hundreds of people who materialize out of the desert scrub to greet us. Some have come to carry items of cargo to remote villages and rebel outposts in exchange for a bar of soap or an article of used clothing.

The austere economy in rebel-held areas operates on a barter system. When food runs out, people eat bark and wild plants. When clothing wears out, they go naked.

There are plenty of guns in Nuba. What there is precious little of is salt, clothing, medicine, and other basic commodities. This is what we carry.

The government's strategy is to force the Nubans out of their self-governing mountain redoubt and into "peace camps"--strategic hamlets where religious, cultural, and political reeducation are the price of relief. Since fighting began in this area fifteen years ago, nearly half of Nuba's estimated one million people have fled, many during a war-induced famine in the early 1990s. This led the London-based human rights group Justice Africa (formerly known as African Rights) to charge the Khartoum regime with genocide.

Nuba is only one front in an increasingly complex civil war that has raged intermittently since the former British colony's independence in 1956. What started as a conflict between the Arabized, Islamic north and the non-Muslim, African south has become a contest between a fundamentalist Islamic movement that now controls the country's center and a diverse alliance of peoples and political groups that challenge it from all directions. Estimates of the number who have died from war- and famine-related causes since fighting resumed in 1983 run as high as two million.

What is at stake is the country's identity--whether it is to be strictly...