MUKJAR, Sudan — Uncovered by a restless wind, skulls and bones poke above the thin dirt in this corner of Darfur, lying surrounded by half-buried, rotting clothes.

A short, bearded man named Ibrahim, 42, scratches through the sand. He is quiet and serious, close to tears. There are other, bigger grave sites elsewhere, he says, but the bones he is looking at are those of 25 people who he is sure are his friends and fellow villagers.

Some of them were dragged from the prison where he was held and were axed to death, he says.

Ibrahim is showing the burial ground to an Associated Press reporter and photographer, the first Western journalists to visit this remote town in more than a year. The western Sudan region is about to enter a new phase in its four-year-old conflict — one that villagers fear may encourage more killing.

Sudan’s government recently agreed to let in 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers, a fraction of the 22,000 mandated by the Security Council last August. The deployment could still take months and villagers here fear the government will want to get rid of all witnesses to atrocities before peacekeepers move in.

“We need them to come as fast as possible, because we’re all in danger,” said Ibrahim.

Aid workers and U.N. personnel say the burial site is one of three dozen mass graves around Mukjar, a town at the center of the Darfur calamity, holding evidence at the heart of the international community’s case against Sudanese leaders for war atrocities.

Ibrahim and others interviewed insisted their full names be withheld because they fear reprisals. It is difficult to independently verify their accounts, but they cited dates and victims’ names and drew maps of grave sites. Ibrahim named nine of the people buried in the grave he showed to the AP.

Some of what the witnesses say matches up with what a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, has documented: at least 51 cases of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Mukjar area — mass executions, torture and rapes of civilians.

The prosecutor says most of the killings were done by the Sudanese army and the janjaweed, Arab militiamen backed by the Sudanese government. Their war on Darfur rebels, which turned against all black African villagers, has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 200,000 dead and 2.5 million made homeless.