Daud Bolad Daud Yahya Ibrahim Bolad ( ? - January 1992 ) was a Sudanese politician and rebel leader . 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 . After graduation Tayeb ' Sikha ' rose up through the political establishment , while Bolad did not . The racial discrimination of the national political elite kept him from progressing , a charge he would make openly against the Muslim Brotherhood . Bolad would later write , " even when I go to the mosque to pray , even there , in the presence of God , for them I am still a slave [ " abd " ] and they will assign me a place related to my race . " Bolad returned to Darfur and became a small businessman . He had further second thoughts about the Islamist movement in 1988 after al Turabi silenced all criticism of the Libyan - backed violence in Darfur . ( " See History of 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 " . 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 . SPLA military expedition . The given reason for the expedition was to spark a Darfuri guerilla movement and spread the civil war to the west , as had been done in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile . SPLA chronicler Douglas Johnson suggests that the expedition may have been seen by the SPLA leadership as a diversionary tactic to create a rift in the north , like that created in the south by the splitting of the SPLA - Nasir faction under Riek Machar and Lam Akol . Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam , one of the major supporters of the SPLA , had recently been overthrown by the Ethiopian People ' s Revolutionary Democratic Front . SPLA - Torit ( the faction led by Garang ) was thus fully engaged in fighting SPLA - Nasir in the south and could not send help to Bolad ' s force once it ran into difficulty . There had been little advance preparation done in Darfur and Abd - el - Aziz al - Hilew , who had been named military commander of the expedition , did not receive enough equipment . The force was composed of Dinka fighters , who were perceived as foreigners in Darfur and the Mahdist networks , who were the only organized opposition to the government in Darfur , resented the insertion of a political competitor . The force intended to reach sanctuary in the Marrah Mountains but had to cross an arid expanse controlled by Baggara Arabs in the dry season , in which the only sources of water were the village boreholes that were both few and well - known . Bolad ' s presence was soon reported by the police , with at least one source indicating that he was reported by the Mahdists . A force composed of regular army and a horse - mounted militia composed of Beni Halba Arabs quickly tracked and overwhelmed Bolad ' s force . The military governor of Darfur who directed the force was Tayeb Ibrahim ' Sikha ' , Bolad ' s old bodyguard and now both a physician and army colonel . There is no record of their meeting . The Beni Halba district town of Idd al Ghanam ( " Well of Goats " ) was renamed Idd al Fursan ( " Well of Horsemen " ) in celebration of the victory and dozens of Fur villages who had not taken part in defeating Bolad were burned in reprisal . 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 . 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 " " , a 2000 publication by Darfuri dissidents , lists Bolad as a " martyr " .