| abstract | - 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.
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