After British annexation, in the 1920s, the Ereigat had few camels of their own.

Some got jobs at the colonial police stables, and their sons in turn went to school and joined the police and Army. One of these boys, Abdalla Safi el Nur, rose to become an Air Force general and was Governor of Northern Darfur at the time when the Janjawiid mutated from a tribal militia tolerated by the Sudan Government into brigades organized under Government Military Intelligence.

Another scion of the Ereigat became an army general and, now retired, heads Sudan's parliamentary defence committee. Meanwhile, the Baggara Rizeigat (the southern cattle-owning branch), who are far more numerous and powerful, are themselves divided. Though several are leading lights in the Arab Gathering, the paramount chief, Nazir Saeed Madibu, is trying to steer a neutral course.

This is far from the whole story of the origins of the Janjawiid; but it is a means to understanding who is fighting on one side of this war and why, and for recognizing that extreme violence is the choice of a small minority. Such is the poor state of basic documentation of Darfur that these facts have not been narrated. Unfortunately, this is still the case. Prunier's account makes not a single mention of these key figures, Ahmat Acyl, Hilal Abdalla and his son, Musa, nor of the Koreish and its manifestos, nor indeed of the Abbala Rizeigat and the Um Jalul.

The history of the Darfur rebels, the eventual enemies of the Janjawiid, is equally important and also little documented. They spring from convergent resistance movements based among Darfur's three largest non-Arab groups -the Fur, the Zaghawa and the Masalit.

Multiple versions exist of the origins of the two main rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), not least among the members of the two groups themselves. All concur that the SLA has sympathies with the Southern Sudan-based Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), and took both arms and advice from the latter in 2003, but that it emerged independently of the SPLA two years earlier from an alliance of Fur militiamen and Zaghawa desert fighters. The SPLA's late leader, John Garang, who was made Sudan's First Vice-President five weeks ago and has since died in a helicopter crash, fought for a secular, pluralist and united Sudan dominated by Sudan's non-Arabs -an alliance of Southerners and the marginalized groups in the North -though many in his movement have made the case for a separate Southern state.

Until 2003 -when SPLA members helped to write the SLA manifesto -the main SPLA role had been to train Masalit volunteers, who crossed from Sudan into Eritrea.

A couple of battalions of these Darfurian rebels were transferred to Southern Sudan, from where they planned to return home to bolster local self-defence units.

Thwarted by the Government, many deserted and went back home in 2001. The SPLA then lost interest in Darfur, while the local rebellion quietly gathered force.