KASS, Sudan – Arab militiamen who have brought terror to western Sudan are being trained at secret camps to launch a campaign of guerrilla warfare if British troops or other foreign “infidels” are deployed on a peacekeeping operation.

The military instruction from Sudanese army officers is part of Khartoum’s clandestine efforts to integrate the Janjaweed militia into paramilitary security forces in Darfur.

Camel-riding fighters have boasted to local people that they are preparing to fight any “invaders” sent to restore order to a region where an estimated 50,000 black Africans have been killed and more than 1 million forced from their homes in a year-long frenzy of ethnic cleansing.

“They say that they will fight the infidels just as the mujahedeen in Iraq are doing. Iraq is their inspiration,” said a resident of Kass, a south Darfur market town surrounded by dozens of abandoned and burnt “ghost” villages after a year of Janjaweed attacks.

The militia have kept a lower profile in recent days as international attention focused on Darfur, but local African tribesmen insist that many of the Arab herders leading camel trains across the scrub and heading into Nyala and Kass for the weekly livestock markets took part in the rampages.

The existence of the Janjaweed training camps in remote corners of Darfur was confirmed by a prominent politician from his own contacts within the regime. Jaffer Monro is a lawmaker for the ruling National Congress in the one-party state, but he took the risk of breaking ranks with the government to condemn events in his home province.

“The Janjaweed are being given proper military training ready for a further escalation in the conflict,” said Mr. Monro, a member of the parliament’s human rights committee, who comes from the Fur tribe. “They are being trained by the government authorities in case foreign troops are sent here.”

Two senior figures from the United Nations peacekeeping operation visited the region last week to assess options as the August 30 Security Council deadline for Khartoum to rein in the Janjaweed or face sanctions approaches.

Prime Minister Blair has said that Britain would consider sending troops to Darfur as part of an international mission to restore security. Khartoum has flatly rejected calls for international intervention, particularly by Western countries, and has repeatedly claimed through the state press that Britain and America are leading efforts to turn Sudan into “another Iraq.”

President el-Bashir, who declared “Long live the mujahedeen” at a meeting of Janjaweed fighters in Nyala in May, intensified the rhetoric in a speech on Thursday. “There is an agenda to seek petrol and gold in the region,” he said.

Mohamed Yacoub, a prominent Arab sheik in south Darfur who was named in local government documents leaked to Human Rights Watch as an important militia chief, delivered his own warning last week.

“Our friendship with the British is very old, but we do not need their interference,” said Mr. Yacoub, 62, the supreme leader of the Tarjum tribe who was dressed in traditional white robes and skullcap when we met in his garden in Nyala. “This is our land and we would fight British troops if they came here. Please pass that message to Mr. Blair.”

He denied that there were any Arab militia. He said that the Janjaweed were bandits taking advantage of the conflict, but he added that some Arab patriots had sided with government forces to fight last year’s rebellion.

It would not be hard to find volunteers to fight Western forces in a country that has already proved a fertile recruiting ground for the Al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, who was based in Sudan before international pressure forced Khartoum to expel him. Thousands of Sudanese went though his training camps in Afghanistan, and some are fighting with the resistance in Iraq.

Western aid and U.N. workers are split over whether the region, where the black African victims are also Muslim, would benefit from an international force. “Sending Western troops would be a disaster. It would be guaranteed to set off some Islamic hotheads,” said one European aid official.

The first of a 300-strong African Union protection force left the Rwandan capital of Kigali yesterday for Darfur. How effective these numbers will be in such a large geographical area is questionable.

The disclosure that the Janjaweed, previously regarded as ill-trained Arab nomad fighters set loose on the majority Darfur population by the government, are now receiving formal military instruction represents an alarming new development. Across Darfur, Janjaweed have been put into the uniforms of the paramilitary Public Defense Force and police in recent weeks as the Arab-dominated authorities attempt to disguise the role of the militia that they created but are now struggling to control.