According to Amnesty International, Over 70,000 people are believed to have lost their lives since the Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003. Systematic human rights abuses have occurred, including killing, torture, rape, looting and destroying of property by all parties involved in the conflict, but primarily by the Sudanese government and government-backed Janjawid militia. The Janjawid attacks are reportedly taking on an ethnic dimension, as the civilians who are attacked are mostly black Africans, while the Janawid attackers are mostly Arab.
 
Why has the United States failed to place pressure on the Sudanese government to halt its actions?  To understand why, consider the explanation given by John Prendergast, former National Security Council staffer during President Clinton's second term: "We have not taken adequate measures given the enormity of the crimes because we don't want to directly confront Sudan [on Darfur] when it is cooperating [with us] on terrorism."
 
Ken Silverstein in the April 29 Los Angeles Times, article titled "Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America's War on Terrorism" wrote that the head of Sudan's equivalent of the CIA, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, was Khartoum's liaison with Osama bin Laden when Al Qaeda flourished in Sudan during the 1990s. More recently, members of Congress have charged General Gosh and some of his colleagues in Khartoum with "directing military attacks against civilians in Darfur." General Gosh told the L.A. Times, "We have a strong partnership with the CIA. The information we have provided has been very useful to the United States." Last October, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service confirmed that while Gosh has indeed been among those playing "key roles" in the genocide in Darfur, the Bush administration is "concerned that going after these individuals could disrupt cooperation on counter-terrorism." (Source: Nat Hentoff: Village Voice 5/26/05).