20111226
AFP
The Islamist-inspired Justice and Equality Movement -- whose leader was reported on Sunday to have been killed by Sudanese forces -- is a Darfur-based rebel movement with an agenda for national reform.

It was the best equipped and politically savvy of Darfur's rebel groups, but lacked the broad ethnic base of other tribal-based movements, and its recent troop strength remains unclear.

Sudan's army killed JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim during fighting in North Kordofan state near the Darfur border, the official SUNA news agency reported.

JEM officials confirmed he was killed on Friday but said he died in an air strike.

Their movement emerged in the country's western Darfur region in 2003, when rebels from the main Sudan Liberation Movement first rose up. At the time, it reportedly had no more than 100 fighters.

JEM's ideological roots as a national movement lie with the National Islamic Front (NIF) which, under the leadership of Hassan Turabi, backed a bloodless coup that brought President Omar al-Bashir to power in Khartoum in 1989.

Ibrahim initially supported the NIF but became disillusioned with what he saw as its economic neglect of Sudanese regions.

He set up a group of dissidents called "The Seekers of Truth and Justice" and published the "Black Book" in 2000 which detailed Arab domination of Sudanese political power and natural resources.

Exiled to the Netherlands, Ibrahim announced the formation of the Justice and Equality Movement, whose core support was limited to the Kobe sub-branch of the non-Arab Zaghawa group, which straddles western Sudan and eastern Chad.

Its experience with the NIF gave it political experience other Darfur rebel groups lacked.

"JEM's greater political and communications savvy allowed the JEM to punch well above its military weight," the Small Arms Survey said in an earlier report. "But it is a puzzling and sometimes contradictory movement."

Some JEM military leaders broke away in 2004 to form the National Movement for Reform and Development. Another JEM faction led by Mohammed Saleh Harba emerged in 2005.

The JEM's agenda for national reform well beyond Darfur led to its involvement in Sudan's eastern rebellion, which ended with a peace deal between the Eastern Front and Khartoum in 2006.

In the east, JEM rebels acquired a reputation for effective hit-and-run attacks on isolated Sudanese army forces, often attacking under cover of sandstorms that prevented government helicopter gunships from responding.

Sudan accused Chad of supplying and equipping the JEM, including for its unprecedented march on Khartoum in May 2008.

The rebels reached the capital and were repulsed with heavy casualties, but the brazen attack shocked the Khartoum regime.

The JEM also carried its characteristic hit-and-run attacks to foreign oil installations in Kordofan, to the east of Darfur.

Three days before the report of Ibrahim's death, JEM's London-based spokesman announced that the group's forces had moved into North Kordofan and were advancing eastwards towards the capital again, on a mission to topple the Bashir regime.

The International Crisis Group of analysts has said that the JEM's perceived Sudan-wide and Islamist agenda made it suspect among many Darfuris, but it stuck to its demands.

In July, the government signed the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur with the Liberation and Justice Movement, an alliance of rebel splinter factions.

But JEM and factions of the Sudan Liberation Army did not sign.

Instead they, along with the SPLM-North rebel group, ratified documents forming the new Sudanese Revolutionary Front dedicated to "popular uprising and armed rebellion" against the National Congress Party regime in Khartoum.