The Sudanese army has launched repeated air strikes on southern army positions in Unity state, less than a month ahead of the south’s independence, in a bid to seize the state’s oilfields, a southern army spokesman charged on Friday. “SAF aircraft bombed the area of Yau, in Unity state, many times on Thursday,” Philip Aguer told AFP, referring to the north’s Sudanese Armed Forces. “This area is deep inside south Sudan and is a move by Khartoum to control the area and create a de facto border to control our oilfields,” added the spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army of the south. Aguer said the SPLA was on “maximum alert” and strengthening its defensive positions, fearing the start of an invasion to seize the oilfields. A UN spokeswoman, however, denied that the northern army had launched air strikes south of the border. “The place that they bombed was an SPLA assembly area, right on the north-south border. This is one of the disputed territories,” Hua Jiang for the UN mission in Sudan told AFP. A Sudanese army spokesman was not immediately available for comment. Heavy clashes between SAF troops and northern members of the former southern rebel army first erupted in South Kordofan, the adjacent state north of the border, on Sunday. The heavily armed state retains strong links to the south, especially among the indigenous Nuba peoples who fought on the side of the southern rebels, even though their homeland, the Nuba Mountains, is in the north. Earlier on Friday, the governor of South Kordofan, Ahmed Harun, a stalwart of President Omar al-Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party, accused two key figures in the northern branch of the SPLM, the southern army’s political wing, of causing this week’s fighting. Speaking on the state-owned Sudanese Radio, he said Abdelaziz al-Hilu and Yasser Arman “bear responsibility for what has happened in the state.”
