Brokering Peace in Sudan by Major Patrick Christian, US Army. Special Warfare Magazine, March-April 2006.

In August 2004, the author found himself in just such a role when he deployed to the Darfur region of Sudan as part of a small joint-special operations advisory team dispatched there by the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Horn of Africa. The team, deployed from Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, consisted of a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander, a Marine recon major, and the author, then an Army Special Forces major. The team was tasked to work as advisers to the African Union’s 12 military-observer teams, or MILOBS, which were attempting to document cease-fire violations among the multiple parties in Sudan’s civil war. The mission was simple: to keep the MILOBS collecting information on the conflict, as well as to stay positioned between the warring parties as advisers without getting killed in the process. The mission originated when the United States partnered with the European Union, or EU, in an effort to avoid a full-scale civil war in Sudan. The coalition focus is on funding and supporting the newly formed African Union, or AU, in a role designed to mediate between the Government of Sudan, or GoS (which is primarily in the control of the Northern Arab Sudanese), and the armed rebel groups in the Darfur region. The government-supported militias were created when the GoS armed a large number of Arab nomadic civilians, known as the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed have since begun attempting to clear the African Muslim tribes out of Darfur in a form of political/cultural cleansing...