Thirty-two soldiers and 20 rebels were killed in a foiled rebel attempt to capture an airport in a western Sudanese regional capital, the government-owned al-Anbaa newspaper reported on Saturday. Friday’s fighting between the military and the recently emerged rebel movement in the Darfur region destroyed several planes and inflicted heavy damage at the airport in al-Fashir, the paper cited senior officials as saying. “The attackers … seized the residential area near the airport and with the support of fifth columnists, attacked the airport … firing indiscriminately at fuel depots and four planes,” which were destroyed, the paper quoted armed forces spokesman Mohamed Bashir Suleiman as saying. “The town of al-Fashir is now secure and life is beginning to return to normal in the town after the armed forces managed to contain the situation,” he said. Al-Fashir, the largest town in the Darfur region, is some 800 km (500 miles) south-west of Khartoum and is the capital of Northern Darfur state. Darfur’s Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), which has been fighting government forces in the remote region that borders Chad since early February, had said on Friday that it had managed to capture al-Fashir, a claim the government denied. Full Story
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