Daud Bolad

With the failure of Bolad's insurrection and the coming to power of Idriss Déby in Chad, and resulting lowering of Libyan involvement in the region, much of Darfur subsided into a state of generalized insecurity that never reached the status of actual peace. The Black Book, a 2000 publication by Darfuri dissidents, lists Bolad as a "martyr".

Daud Yahya Ibrahim Bolad (Jan 1952- January 1992) was a Sudanese politician and rebel leader.

Bolad was captured alive and taken to Khartoum, where he was tortured to death in January 1992. Even worse, he was captured with his diary in which he had recorded every member of the underground resistance cells he had set up in Darfur. Many of these plotters disappeared into jails or disappeared entirely. Others were released after renouncing rebellion, though in the knowledge that they would continue to be watched by security forces. One history sums up the result, "The Darfurian resistance was set back by ten years." Darfurian dissidents drew a harsh lesson from this, becoming even more distrustful of the SPLA.

Frustrated and disillusioned, Bolad went to Chad in 1989 seeking the support of President Hissène Habré in starting a rebel movement in Darfur, but was rejected. He then went to Ethiopia to meet John Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which had been prosecuting the Second Sudanese Civil War in the south since 1983. Other prominent leftist Darfuri politicians, such as Ahmad Diraige, felt that the SPLA would use Darfur for its own purposes and refused to involve themselves. Bolad joined the SPLA in 1990 and received military training in South Kurdufan. He was made the political commissar of a SPLA military expedition into Darfur that began in November 1991 and proved disastrous.

He had further second thoughts about the Islamist movement in 1988 after al-Turabi silenced all criticism of the Libyan-backed violence in Darfur. He was briefly associated with the Sudan Socialist Union, the party of Nimeiry, and continued to drift to the political left. He was described as "obsessive and driven, meticulously and energetically building up his political network".

He came from the Fur people of the Darfur region of the country. In the early 1970s, Bolad was nominated by the Islamist National Islamic Front to be the president of the Khartoum University Students Union (KUSU). He became the first KUSU president who was not from the Arab tribes along the Nile who dominate national politics. The position was seen as placing Bolad on the fast track to national political leadership as part of the 'western strategy' of Hassan al Turabi to gain the votes of Darfur and Kurdufan. Bolad's deputy and bodyguard at this time was Tayeb Ibrahim, nicknamed 'al Sikha' after the rebar with which he attacked student demonstrators. However, Bolad was arrested in 1971 by the police of then-President Jaafar Nimeiry for his high-profile militant activity and severely tortured.