We know that the government of Sudan responds to civil war by targeting innocent civilians—a strategy based on its weakness as well as its evil. This is the strategy the Khartoum regime used in southern Sudan until the international community pressured it into a 2005 peace accord. It’s what the regime is doing now in Sudan’s western area, Darfur.

So it’s not surprising that, after one of Darfur’s rebel groups attacked targets on the outskirts of Khartoum two weeks ago, the regime has responded by rounding up civilians from Darfuri ethnic groups living in Khartoum, killing some, torturing others, and hiding many God knows where.

We shouldn’t be surprised, but we should be on the ball. This escalation of the civil war in Sudan—in which rebels from a rural province reached the fringes of the capital city, gaining a public relations coup—only emphasizes that we need a real, substantive peace process, involving civilians as well as the different Darfuri rebel groups. Rather than the drive-by diplomacy of the past few years, this process must follow in Darfur the successful model we used to get the peace agreement in south Sudan: a full-court press of economic and political pressure from a united international community. (For more on what it takes to bring Khartoum to heel, check out Sojourners’ interview with Enough Project co-founder Gayle Smith earlier this year).

Instead, we’re letting even the agreement in the South slip through our fingers: Khartoum has repeatedly and openly broken its 2005 commitments about the oil-rich region of Abyei, and has instead been arming ethnically targeted militias there. Recently, the situation has escalated into fighting between Sudan’s army and the SPLA in the oil-rich region of Abyei, fighting that has driven at least 30,000 people from their homes, according to a U.N. bulletin this Wednesday.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.