KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - Sudanese government forces lost 22 men in clashes with former southern rebels in the volatile oil-rich region of Abyei, a local army commander said Wednesday, in incidents that threaten to re-ignite the country's bloody civil war. Brig. Gen. Muntasser Sabil Adam, commander of government forces in Abyei, said his soldiers pushed back the attacking southern forces in a six-hour battle Tuesday in which he lost 22 men. The town was now calm and his men were in control, he said.It is not clear how many people have been killed since fighting broke out last week between Sudan's Arab-dominated army and the Sudan People's Liberation Army, an ethnic African militia, in Abyei, which lies along the disputed boundary line between north and south Sudan. The area remains contested despite a 2005 peace accord that ended a 21-year civil war, which left an estimated 2 million people dead.
No SPLA official was available for comment Wednesday, but on Tuesday, southern official Michael Majak said the northern government is breaching the accord by keeping its forces in the town instead of deploying joint north-south units. Majak had no figures on southern casualties.
Many of the southern leaders come from Abyei and want to reclaim it, but the northern-dominated government wants to hang onto the area's oil resources.
Tuesday's fighting, which had broken an earlier cease-fire, began when the SPLA attacked the town with tanks and infantry, firing rockets and mortars.
A majority of the civilians in the town and nearby villages - between 30,000 and 50,000 - have been displaced, according to the United Nations. The U.N. has pulled most of its 250 civilian staff from the town, leaving only its 400 peacekeepers on the ground. Aid workers, U.N. and Sudanese officials have described the town as devastated, with the market area burned to the ground and the majority of its population displaced.
The fate of Abyei was left undetermined after the north and south ended the civil war with a peace agreement in 2005 and a separate protocol for resolving the dispute has not been implemented. The southern leadership accused the northern government of reneging on aspects of the 2005 accord by refusing to share oil wealth, failing to pull government troops out of South Sudan and remilitarizing contested border zones such as Abyei.