THE Sudanese rebel leader, Lieut Col John Garang, said yesterday his forces killed 300 government troops in a battle south of the key eastern town of Damazin.
Speaking by satellite telephone from near Kurmuk on the Ethiopian border, Lieut Garang said the battle took place on Sunday at Abu Shanena, which he said was about 60 km south of the strongly defended regional capital.
The Presidential Guard and the People's Defence Forces suffered huge casualties. According to the body count it was not less than 300 government troops killed," said Lieut Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
He said the Abu Shanena battle was different from a simultaneous battle at Keili further south, in which the rebels say they killed about 150 government troops.
The army in Khartoum has denied there was a battle at Keili and there has been no independent confirmation of either battle.
Lieut Garang, whose forces attacked in eastern Sudan nine days ago, said an objective on the north-eastern front was to cut communications between Khartoum and Port Sudan, the country's only big port. "In terms of that objective we have been quite successful. We are working on it."
From the front facing Damazin, 480 km south-east of the capital, he said Abu Shanena was now the frontline. A rebel spokesman in Cairo said the rebels had advanced 10 km overnight but Lieut Garang said they had not moved significantly since the Abu Shanena battle.
The SPLA, a mainly southern group which has fought the army since 1983, is now working with the northern opposition to Sudan's Islamist government. They attacked along the Ethiopian border on January 12th in their first big combined offensive against the military government which overthrew democratically elected leaders in a military coup in 1989.
They say they have taken the border towns of Kurmuk and Qeissan and a string of garrisons in Blue Nile province, north and south of the Blue Nile river, and further north around Kassala, close to the Eritrean border.
Lieut Garang reiterated that the rebel strategy was to overthrow the government through military operations in the east and south and political action in Khartoum, where they hope for the kind of popular uprising which ended previous periods of military rule.
But the army has reinforced Damazin, the site of a hydro-electricity plant which supplies Khartoum with most of its power, and the rebels seem to have lost some momentum.
"There are lots of (Sudanese army) troop movements, from all over Sudan, by truck and by train." Lieut Garang said. "But we have enough capacity to maintain what we have taken in Blue Nile, where we control a large area.
"In the Kassala area our strategy is different. There we are not fighting to hold ground, but to cut off Port Sudan, which is the lifeline to Khartoum."
Pressed on the time scale for the campaign, the rebel leader said he had been fighting for years: "It's a process and I cannot put a time lag on it.
Sudan's newspapers focused on government efforts to mobilise against what it says is an Ethiopian and Eritrean invasion - which all other parties, and neighbouring Egypt, deny.