JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: The United States is imposing sanctions on Sudan's state-owned oil company, meaning Americans who do business with it could face criminal penalties. Meanwhile, as CNN's Catherine Bond reports, oil itself is raising the stakes in that nation's 17-year-old civil war.</s>CATHERINE BOND, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Southern Sudanese rebel fighters in an area of Sudan not far from government oil fields the rebels say they want to capture. "We are fighting mainly for the oil," says this rebel commander, "because we need our own development for southern people." Last year, this and other oil fields began producing oil worth about a million U.S. dollars a day to Sudan's Islamic government. But located in an area where Sudan's mostly Arab north meets is African south, the oil fields are controversial, because while international oil companies, including Canada's largest, develop them, in recent months, thousands more people, like these southerners, have fled the area. The results, critics say, of a deliberate policy by Sudan's government to depopulate it. "The fighting is because of oil," says this displaced woman. The Arabs want to take it from us, but its ours. We need it, and we want to help ourselves. We want to live like human beings. But in places where people have found sanctuary, even the basics for human dignity are absent. And it's very dangerous. In this crater, an unexploded bomb, apparently dropped by a government aircraft onto this rebel-held village. There's little food, so displaced women and children eat wild greens. This relief flight from neighboring Kenya, the first to land here for five months, defied a government threat to shoot down aid flights, bringing a delivery of so called survival kits, containing among other things, fish hooks, cooking pots and mosquito netting. The necessity, in this oil-rich area, ironic. Catherine Bond, CNN, Nairobi.
Oil Raising Stakes in Sudan's 17-Year Old Civil War