million. About US$160 million came from unidentified sources, probably largely from Egypt and Libya, and as purchases from other Western suppliers financed by Arab countries. Various Middle East and Gulf countries, particularly Iran and Libya but also Egypt, provided more than US$2 billion in “economic aid” in the 1970s, much of which Khartoum used to buy weapons. Additionally, each of Sudan’s neighbors provided weapons and/or sanctuary to various anti-Khartoum rebel groups and militias. Since the early 1990s, at least 34 countries have exported ammunition, light arms, and small arms to Sudan. In more recent years, reliable sources have suggested that there were between 1.9 and 3.2 million small arms in Sudan. About one-fifth of these weapons were held by the Sudanese government and/or pro-Khartoum militias. Sudan constituted one of Africa’s major consumers of weapons in the early 2000s. As was the case in earlier decades, Sudan continued to rely on an array of suppliers, among them Belarus, China, Egypt, Iran, Romania, Russia, Poland, and South Africa, for ammunition, armored vehicles, helicopters, howitzers, infantry fighting vehicles, attack and fighter aircraft, multiple rocket launchers, main battle tanks, and transport aircraft. Additionally, China supervised arms assembly and assisted in the construction of weapons factories. Sudan manufactured at least a small amount of ammunition for light weapons in the early 1960s, but the country’s capacity to produce arms greatly expanded with the opening of the GIAD industrial city south of Khartoum in October 2000. Under the auspices of the Military Industry Corporation within the Ministry of Defense, engineering and industrial enterprises produced or imported a range of equipment and technology for ground and air forces. Although information was limited, in the early 2000s this equipment included heavy and light artillery, antitank and antiaircraft guns, machine guns and small arms, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, as well as ammunition for these weapons; the country also had acquired the ability to assemble and maintain aircraft, including fighter and cargo airplanes and helicopters. The SPLM/A, under the late John Garang’s leadership, regularly accused the SAF of using chemical weapons in South Sudan, but these allegations were never substantiated. The same was true of the U.S. charge in 1998 that the Al-Shifa Pharmaceuticals Industries factory in Khartoum North was developing chemical weapons or precursor chemicals, a claim that led to the United States bombing of the plant. Similarly, news reports in 2004 that Sudanese and Syrian troops had