A heated split has emerged inside Sudan’s SAF-Islamist alliance over whether to send International Criminal Court fugitive Ahmed Haroun back to Khartoum’s Kober Prison, sources said Thursday.
At a closed-door meeting Tuesday at the Arkwit resort, 205 kilometers west of Port Sudan, hard-line Islamist leader Ali Karti told senior SAF officials that Haroun’s return would happen “only over the Islamic Movement’s dead body,” the sources said. Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan did not attend.
The standoff follows an appeal by Maj. Gen. Tayeb Ahmed Omar, the prisons chief, who last month invited inmates who fled during last year’s fighting to “voluntarily” come back now that repairs at Kober are finished. No prisoners have responded.
Haroun, a former governor wanted by the ICC for Darfur war crimes, escaped Kober on April 25, 2023. In an audio message at the time, he said guards and regular troops helped him flee and that he would surrender once conditions “return to normal.”
Karti’s outburst underscores deep rifts between Islamist factions aligned with General al-Burhan’s SAF. Some security officials accuse Karti of shielding Haroun, while his camp charges rivals with using the issue to weaken the movement.
