The head the Sudanese opposition party Al Ummah, Sadeq Al Mahdi, said on Tuesday that he had met with US officials from the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department to discuss the situation in Sudan.
Mahdi, a former prime minister ousted in 1989 by incumbent President Omar Bashir, said there was a desire for change in Sudan that “amounts to a rethinking of the Islamic assertion, similar to what Iran is going through,” the official Kuwaiti news agency (KUNA) quoted him as saying.
Mahdi’s remarks came at a press conference in Washington attended by several Sudanese and African officials, said the agency.
He expressed hope that the movement from war to peace and from dictatorship to democracy, as seen in many parts in Africa, would soon reach Sudan.
"We believe now that all the parties to the conflict have already signed documents which spell [out] specifically the terms for a peace agreement, specifically terms for democratic transformation, specifically terms for some kind of mechanism to ensure that what is agreed will be implemented," Mahdi said.
Meanwhile, the opposition leader noted that “any outside intervention to aid one side will only invite other interventions to counter it, leading to a greater tragedy.”
He told the meeting that his ideas were positively received by American officials.
Since 1983, Sudan has been wracked by a civil war pitting the Arab Muslim north against the mainly Christian and animist south.
On Monday, the Arab African state retracted its decision to halt attacks on rebels in the south and said it would "resume air strikes" in the south of the country "to defend itself in the face of continued aggression" by rebels.
The Sudanese government had decided on May 25 to suspend its airstrikes in the south, which has been torn over the past three months by fighting between John Garang's Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and government forces.
"The government will not stay with its arms crossed in the face of continued aggression (by the rebels) and will retaliate adequately, including by resorting to air strikes," the statement said – Albawaba.com
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