For rebels in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, every day is a struggle. With the hopes of their beleaguered people on their shoulders, they roam some of the world's least hospitable terrain, avoiding attacks by Sudanese helicopters and protecting villagers from raids by the government-backed janjaweed militia.

But, increasingly, the rebels are at risk of becoming the key stumbling block to peace, say analysts.

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Now, with the patience of the international community wearing thin, Darfur's disparate rebels are meeting in South Sudan in hopes of forming a common agenda for Oct. 27 peace talks in Tripoli, Libya. But even if they do come up with a unified position before heading into the UN-sponsored talks, observers say that getting rebel leaders to agree on who should represent them will be much more difficult.

"The rebels need to get their act together," says Alex de Waal, a Darfur expert at Harvard University, adding that the Sudanese government "is loving every minute of this."

African Union and United Nations officials are looking into reports of a new massacre in Darfur, in which witnesses said that Sudanese government troops and their allied militias killed more than 30 civilians, slitting the throats of several men praying at a mosque and shooting a 5-year-old boy in the back as he tried to run away.

According to several residents of Muhagiriya, a small town in southern Darfur, two columns of uniformed government troops, along with dozens of militiamen not in uniform, surrounded the town around noon on Oct. 8 and stormed the market.

Let's be clear: if this is true, what we're witnessing here is the systematic execution of civilians by their own government. Pretty remarkable, totally horrifying, and not okay in the least.

We're supposed to have 20,000 troops and 6,000 policemen. As of now, we don't even know the troop contributors. To be able to perform the task that is expected of us, that is what is my biggest challenge now. The resolution itself stated that by the end of August we would know all the troop contributors, and now we are at almost the end of September, and we don't know. So you see the whole program is running behind schedule.

On his lack of authority:

Right now, I don't have control over the AU troops. When my [AU-UN] troops arrive, then we'll resolve most of these problems. We are committed to staying, and I hope other countries will still allow their troops to come.

On unreasonable expectations:

I have had telephone calls from different organizations and individuals congratulating me that I now have 20,000 troops. Unfortunately, as you and I know now, we don't even know the troop contributors, so how can we talk about what those troops will do? Those people who are calling me will see nothing happening on the ground and feel disappointed. That is why I have already cautioned people not to expect too much because there is not much happening on the ground.

On what's ahead for him and his mission:

I accepted the job because I wanted to give it my best, and I can only give it my best and be judged by the world depending on the resources available to me. And the resources are not forthcoming.

Sure, the joint African Union/United Nations force seems like a great idea, but without follow-through and resource commitment, it could even be more destructive that not going in to Darfur before. I'm like a broken record on the idea that all a plan and 35 cents gets you is a copy of the Washington Post. It's true in American politics, it's true in African politics, it's true for the people living and dying in Darfur. But we all too often announce a plan, think we've done actually done something, and then move on.

It stinks when it happens in the U.S., to be sure. But it looks like it's on track to happen in Darfur, and the price of that is going to be the suffering of way too many people.

But interesting to me is the question of why the rebels would be meeting in teeny weeny Eritrea. I mean, it's a country no bigger than Tennessee. It seems, though, that Eritrea has ambitions of playing a dominent role in northeast Africa:

Eritrea is a little country with big ambitions. Since its independence in 1993, it has projected an aggressive foreign policy, shaping events in the Horn of Africa, though it has only five million people and is one of the poorest countries on earth.

In the past few months, Eritrea has opened its doors to rebel commanders from its neighbors, especially Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, which is part of the reason American officials are alarmed. The State Department says Eritrea has been shipping arms to Islamist fighters in Somalia, an allegation that the Eritrean government denies. At the same time, American diplomats have been quietly working with the Eritreans to push Darfur's ever expanding galaxy of rebel groups to peace talks scheduled for the end of October in Libya.

The Eritreans have a decent track record, American officials say, when it comes to Sudan. Last year, the president of Eritrea, Isaias Afewerki, brokered a peace deal between the Sudanese government and rebels in a separate conflict in eastern Sudan that had ground on for 15 years and that cost thousands of lives.

African Union officials said Eritrea wields even more influence in Darfur, because of its longstanding contacts with the rebel groups there.

The Eritreans "have control over some of these movements," said Sam Ibok, a senior adviser of the African Union. "And the Eritreans have played a constructive role."

A sob rose from the crowd of mourners Friday as white ambulances entered Nigeria's main military cemetery, carrying the bodies of seven soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Darfur.

Nigeria, the biggest troop contributor to African peacekeeping missions, suffered the heaviest losses when Darfur rebels overran an African Union post in North Darfur last weekend. In all, seven Nigerians and one peacekeeper each from Botswana, Senegal and Mali were killed.

Nigerians, including those mourning Friday, said the attack would not bury hope that they and other Africans can bring peace to the world's poorest continent with missions like the one in Sudan's Darfur.

''Anywhere you have war, you will have losses,'' said Matthew Edoh, whose uncle, Lance Corp. Danjuma Madaki, was among the seven Nigerians brought home for burial Friday. ''But if you can go for peace, even if you sacrifice yourself, you must go. We are all fellow human beings.''

Before being flown back to Nigeria for burial, they were honored with a parade in Sudan:

Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi, Force Commander of the AU-UN hybrid force in Sudan, Gen Martin Luther Agwai, Nigerian Ambassador to Sudan, Ambassador Salihu Ahmed-Sambo, and his Malian counterpart led other military and civilian leaders to pay tributes to the fallen heroes. Kicking the tributes, the Nigerian contingent Commander, Col. James Oladipo was chocked with emotion.

With his voice shaky but still echoing through the afternoon humid weather, Col. Oladipo read out the curriculum vitae of the seven soldiers, sometimes pausing, removing his handkerchief to wipe his face intermittently. As he saluted and sat down at his front row seat, he leaned on his two hands, wiping his face. For the major part of the ceremony, he held his chin in his left hand.

Col. Oladipo later told The Guardian: "It is bad to loose one soldier. It is too terrible to loose seven, in one swoop. It's enough to make anybody emotional. None of these soldiers hesitated when their nation called upon them to resign the pleasures of life and leave their families, kith and kin to serve in a land strange to all of them. But believing that every man should live in peace and they could fall in this noble cause, they determined at the hazards of their lives to answer their nation and humanity in Darfur. They resigned to hope their unknown chance of going back home to meet their loved ones."

The names of the soldiers:

79NA/30253 Lance Corporal Danjuma Madaki, 96NA/14/13956 Lance Corporal Usman Saleh, 97NA/45/5447 Private Duniya Audu, 98NA/47/4877 Private Samuel Orokpo, 01NA/50/927 Private Bala Mohammed, 02NA/52/2292 Private John Dogara and 03NA/54/5426 Trooper Toyin Alao.

Two Sudanese rebel groups are suspected of being behind the attack, a source close to the investigation in Sudan said Tuesday.

"It could be a combined attack by the Sudan Liberation Movement SLM-Unity of Abdhallah Yahia and another group which recently split from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The source declined to say what the suspicions were based on.

Who was behind the attacks? Given the history of conflict in Darfur, the mind immediately jumps to the government in Khartoum. But the reporting from the region is fuzzy this morning and it looks like there may be a chance that rebel forces were behind it.

While Darfur has never been a strictly black and white situation, things now have turned into a big mess of gray. There are no longer the perpetrators and the victims; there are now a wide variety of players who have changing loyalties and motives and tactics. And that happened while the world watched. From the New York Times:

Haskanita is embroiled in a three-sided war among two formidable rebel groups and the government. United Nations officials said that the area has become so dangerous that most aid organizations have pulled out.

Recently, Haskanita has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the region. Aid workers said those battles killed more than 300 people, including several dozen mowed down by government helicopter gunships. The government denied killing any civilians.

On top of that, the two main rebel groups in Haskanita, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, have splintered and begun fighting among themselves, driving thousands of civilians from their homes. Many had set up tents around the small African Union base, where the peacekeepers were handing out food and medicine.

Spanking new French president Nicholas Sarkozy had some success today convincing the U.N. Security Council to agree to a plan to send E.U. troops in to both Chad and the country with the world's most obvious name, the Central African Republic. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have of course fled to Chad and CAR while trying to escape the violence in Darfur. These hundreds of thousands of refugees aren't, of course, included in the numbers of Darfurs' dead, but in a sense their lives have ended because of the fighting there. At least, their lives as they knew them.

And what's happened of late has been that instability of Darfur is spreading beyond Sudan's borders:

Life in the eastern Chad city of Goz Beida was calm before last fall's clashes, says Mr. Ali. But now the influx of Chadian refugees – and the arrival of more than 25 different relief groups – have quadrupled the population, straining already scarce supplies of water, firewood, and grazing land for animals that the refugees brought with them.

Scores of smaller towns in the area are facing a similar situation, including the market town of Kerfi, which has seen its population triple. The rains have filled riverbeds called wadis that are dry for most of the year, and food aid to Kerfi ran out in July. The next shipment won't get through until next month.

The U.N. Security Council signed off on the plan today:

The new force would attempt to block fighters from Sudan from crossing into a corner of the Central African Republic, according to the 10-page French-drafted resolution approved by a 15 to 0 vote.

EU defense ministers meet on Friday in Portugal to give a final go-ahead for the deployment of up to 4,000 troops by the end of the year beginning next month. The United Nations would field up to 300 police, 50 military liaison officers and civilian personnel.

(Photo by mknobil.)

Washington -- Measurable progress is being made on resolving conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan by the United States and international partners that have been working to arrange talks among the warring parties, a U.S. diplomat says.

A Darfur cease-fire, brokered in part by the Libyan government, is working, and the number of deaths is lower than it was in 2006, U.S. Special Envoy Andrew Natsios said recently during a meeting of Africa specialists at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

"I am more optimistic now than I've been in a long time," Natsios said. "But it is a guarded optimism. Much hard work still needs to be done" to convince rebel leaders to resolve their differences so they can approach peace talks with a unified set of proposals as well as ensure Sudanese compliance with the U.N. proposal to deploy 24,000 peacekeepers to Darfur in a joint African Union (AU)-United Nations force.

Darfur also will be on the agenda of the upcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, which will be followed by peace talks between Sudanese government and rebel leaders in Tripoli, hosted by the Libyan government October 27, Natsios said.

At the U.N. General Assembly meeting, Natsios said, one of the major topics of discussion will be "how we as the international community continue to use our leverage and influence to keep the Darfur peace talks on track."

Together with international partners, Natsios said, "we are discussing measures, including sanctions, to discourage anyone on any side from taking actions that will jeopardize the [Tripoli] talks. This includes the government of Sudan," as well as rebel groups.

Since violence first sparked in Darfur in 2003, more than 200,000 lives have been lost and 2.5 million people displaced in fighting between government-backed forces called the Janjaweed and rebel movements contending for power.

Read the whole thing here.