BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian opposition activists are criticizing the Sudanese head of the Arab League monitoring mission to Syria for serving as a senior official with the "oppressive regime" of President Omar al-Bashir, who is under an international arrest warrant on charges of committing genocide in Darfur.

Lt. Gen. Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, is a longtime loyalist of al-Bashir and once served as his head of Sudanese military intelligence.

Amnesty International said under al-Dabi’s command, military intelligence in the early 1990s "was responsible for the arbitrary arrest and detention, enforced disappearance, and torture or other ill-treatment of numerous people in Sudan."