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Arab News
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Sudan paramilitaries launch first attack on de facto capital: army
PORT SUDAN: Sudanese paramilitaries on Sunday struck Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, the army said, in the first attack on the seat of the army-aligned government in the country's two-year war. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) 'targeted Osman Digna Air Base, a goods warehouse and some civilian facilities in the city of Port Sudan with suicide drones,' army spokesman Nabil Abdullah said in a statement. He reported no casualties but 'limited damage.' Smoke was seen billowing from Port Sudan's airport. The paramilitaries have expanded the scope and frequency of their drone attacks on army-held areas since losing control of areas including most of the capital Khartoum in March. On Saturday, a source from the army-aligned government reported a rare drone attack on Kassala, on Sudan's eastern border with Eritrea, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the nearest RSF-held territory. In the early days of the war, the government relocated from Khartoum to Port Sudan, which until Sunday's attack had been spared the violence. UN agencies have also moved their offices and staff to Port Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have sought refuge from the war. Since April 2023, the regular army, headed by Sudan's de facto leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, has been battling the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, in a brutal war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 13 million. The conflict has left Africa's third largest country effectively divided. The regular army controls the center, east and north, while the RSF holds sway in nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur and parts of the south. In late February, the RSF and its allies signed a charter in Kenya announcing a plan to establish a rival government to the army-aligned administration.
Arab News
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
A chronicle of collapse and international neglect in Sudan
Two years into a war that has gutted a nation and scattered its people across borders, Sudan has become the scene of the world's largest humanitarian crisis — and perhaps its most ignored. What began as a power struggle between two generals has metastasized into a devastating civil war marked by ethnic massacres and the deliberate destruction of urban centers. As the dust settles over the ruins of Khartoum, and famine tightens its grip on Darfur, one thing is clear: Sudan is bleeding while the world watches in silence. In 2019, the ouster of President Omar Bashir after three decades of autocracy offered Sudan a brief glimmer of hope for the ascent of democracy. Those hopes were extinguished in 2021 when Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, respectively the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, hijacked the transition and seized power for themselves. In April 2023, their uneasy alliance collapsed into open warfare. What followed was not just a military conflict but the systematic unraveling of a country of 46 million people. The statistics read like a catalog of human catastrophe. More than 15 million people have been forcibly displaced, a figure that dwarfs the effects of the civil war in Syria and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than half of Sudan's population, 30.4 million people, now requires humanitarian assistance. At least 25 million are facing a food crisis, with 750,000 on the edge of famine. In a camp outside Al-Fasher, 13 children die every day from hunger and disease. These numbers are not projections or worst-case estimates. They are today's reality, unfolding in real time. The RSF, originally spawned from the Janjaweed militias that ravaged Darfur in the 2000s, has revived its genocidal tactics, with chilling precision. In West Darfur entire towns have been emptied. Men and boys, infants included, have been murdered on ethnic grounds. Women have been systematically targeted, with survivors reporting that their attackers jeered at them, using slurs and threats of forced pregnancies to produce 'enemy' children. The rampant use of gender-based violence has not been incidental; it is a tactical choice, deployed to humiliate, destabilize, and ethnically reengineer. If the RSF has committed war crimes, the SAF has not emerged with a clean reputation either. Its strategy of recapturing territory has relied heavily on scorched-earth tactics. In Khartoum, artillery and airstrikes have reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. The capital's airport is unusable, hospitals have been flattened, and cultural institutions looted. In its efforts to claim control, the army effectively annihilated the very infrastructure that once made Khartoum a functioning metropolis. Now, 80 percent of health facilities in conflict zones are out of service. At least 100 attacks on medical centers have been documented. Sudan's health system, once one of the most developed in the region, has collapsed entirely. Water and electricity infrastructure has disintegrated. In major cities, residents go months without running water, drawing instead from the Nile or shallow wells contaminated by disease. Cholera, malaria, dengue fever, and measles are spreading unchecked. More than 15 million people now have no access to basic healthcare. Mass displacement has emptied towns and cities. Hafed Al-Ghwell The children of Sudan are being raised in this furnace. Nearly every school in the country has shut down. At the peak of the war, 19 million children were out of school. Before the conflict, 7 million were already missing from classrooms. Now, an entire generation has been severed from education and structure, which are key defenses against radicalization, recruitment, and despair. These children have witnessed atrocities, lost parents, and fled burning homes. They are traumatized, uneducated, and unmoored — conditions that will haunt Sudan for decades to come. In Darfur, Kordofan, and other provinces, mass displacement has emptied towns and cities. A slow exodus continues toward Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. The camps for the homeless grow by the day, yet the funding for them shrinks. Last year, the UN requested $2.6 billion in international aid for Sudan. Barely 48 percent of that amount materialized. No peacekeeping forces have been deployed. No airlifts of food or medicine have captured international attention. The silence has been deafening. The global response has been not only inadequate but shamefully indifferent. Sudan is not without geopolitical relevance — it has gold, oil, and access to the Red Sea — but its crisis lacks the immediacy of those that stir the Western conscience. There is no threat to NATO, no terror group making headlines, no ideological foe to defeat. When Russia invades Ukraine or war erupts in Gaza, diplomatic corridors spring to life and resources flow overnight. In Sudan, they trickle. If they arrive at all. International diplomacy has become a theater of impotence. Multiple ceasefire agreements collapse within days. African-led peace plans were ignored, while the UN hosted meetings devoid of Sudanese representatives. A recent summit in London featured 20 foreign ministers but neither of the warring factions. Everyone is talking about Sudan but no one is talking to the men with guns. Sudan's descent is not only a moral failure, it is a strategic one. A collapsed Sudan could ignite a chain reaction across an already brittle region: more refugees, more arms trafficking, more radicalization. The longer the war drags on, the more it will cost to repair, not only in dollars but in social cohesion, institutional viability, and human potential. Rebuilding a hospital is hard. Rebuilding trust between neighbors who participated in mutual atrocities could very well prove impossible. And yet, still, no meaningful international mobilization has occurred. No coalition has emerged to enforce peace or protect civilians. Western capitals issue statements and impose boutique sanctions on individuals. There is outrage, but it is performative devoid of any follow-through, devoid of resolve. What does this say about the international order? About lofty commitments to 'never again?' If a nation of 46 million people can implode amid ethnic cleansing and famine, with hardly a diplomatic ripple, what principles are we defending? Sudan is not invisible. It has been forgotten by choice. • Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell
Arab News
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Sudan's war-ravaged Khartoum tiptoes back to life after recapture by army
KHARTOUM: In war-ravaged Khartoum donkey carts clatter over worn asphalt, the smell of tomatoes wafts from newly reopened stalls and pedestrians dodge burnt-out cars left by two years of is slowly, cautiously returning to the Sudanese capital, weeks after the army recaptured the city from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who had held it since soon after fighting erupted in April Maqbool Essa Mohamed was laying out his wares in the large market in the southern neighborhood of Kalakla.'People feel safe again,' he said. 'Business is moving and there's security.'Just weeks ago this market was deserted – shops shuttered, streets silent and snipers perched on a lightning offensive in March, the army recaptured the city center, including the presidential palace and the airport, and the RSF was shed back into the western outskirts of greater the RSF remain within artillery range of the city center, as they demonstrated twice this week with a bombardment of the army's General Command headquarters last Saturday followed by shelling of the presidential palace on April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 13 greater Khartoum alone, more than 3.5 million people have fled their homes, leaving entire neighborhoods the next six months, the UN expects more than two million displaced people to return to the capital if security conditions a neighborhood on the road to Jebel Awliya – once an RSF bastion – suffered heavily during the location close to a military base made it a prime target, with RSF fighters encircling the area and cutting off food and water for the civilians trapped July 2023 activists called it 'uninhabitable.'But now women can be seen on the roadside brewing tea – a common sight before the war – as a man dragging his suitcase stands beside a minibus, newly arrived in the war-torn transport has yet to return to normal as fragile security conditions and crumbling infrastructure impede buses packed to capacity, weary commuters climb atop vehicles, preferring the risky ride over an indefinite wait for the next bus – which may not come for January, the army began advancing in the greater Khartoum area and by late March had wrested back control of both Khartoum and the industrial city of Khartoum North just across the Blue amid the wreckage of the presidential palace, army chief Burhan declared: 'Khartoum is free.'The paramilitaries are now confined to the southern and western outskirts of Omdurman, the third of the three cities that make up greater sides in the conflict have been accused of war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians and indiscriminately bombing residential RSF in particular has been notorious for systematic sexual violence, ethnic cleansing and rampant looting.'They left nothing,' said Mohamed Al-Mahdi, a longtime resident. 'They destroyed the country and took our property.'Today, Mahdi steers his bicycle through the recovering market, where vehicles, animal carts and pedestrians jostle for space under the wary eye of the this month, Sudan's state news agency reported that the army-backed government plans to restore the water supply to the area – a basic necessity still out of reach for for vendor Serelkhitm Shibti, the costs of the war are not about lost income or damaged infrastructure.'What pains me is every drop of blood that fell in this land, not the money I lost,' he said.
Leaders
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Leaders
Sudan Sovereign Council Appoints Acting Prime Minister
Sudan's Transitional Sovereign Council on Wednesday announced a minor reshuffle in the Sudanese government, particularly in the ministries of cabinet affairs, foreign affairs and education. In a statement, the Council said that the Chairman of the Sudanese Transitional Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, appointed Dafallah Al-Haj Ali as the country's Minister of Cabinet Affairs and Acting Prime Minister. Ali is a veteran diplomat who once served as Sudan's representative to the UN and was most recently the country's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, according to Agence France Presse (AFP). Moreover, Al-Burhan appointed Omar Seddik as Sudan's Foreign Minister. Seddik is a current ambassador and took part in the negotiations between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Jeddah last year. Al-Burhan also approved the appointment of Al-Tohami Al-Zain Hajar as the Education Minister. This move comes as the SAF recaptured most parts of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, in March, after two years of fighting against the RSF. The devastating conflict has divided the country in two, with the SAF controlling the center, north and east, and the RSF holding almost all of the western Darfur region and parts of the south. In February, Al-Burhan said he would form a technocratic wartime government to help 'complete what remains of our military objectives, which is liberating Sudan from these rebels.' Earlier in April, the RSF announced it would form a parallel government, a move that has sparked international concerns that the country could remain split. During the London Conference on Sudan in mid-April, Saudi Arabia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Waleed Al-Khuraiji, condemned attempts to form parallel governments as 'illegitimate,' warning they risk derailing peace efforts and deepening divisions. He insisted solutions must respect Sudan's sovereignty and involve only its legitimate institutions. Short link : Post Views: 42
Jordan News
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Jordan News
Al-Burhan Arrives in Cairo to Discuss Strengthening Bilateral Cooperation with Egypt - Jordan News
Sudanese Sovereign Council Chairman, General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, arrived today, Monday, in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is set to meet with Al-Burhan to discuss ways to enhance bilateral cooperation and support efforts to restore stability and development in Sudan, according to a statement by Egyptian Presidential Spokesman Ambassador Mohamed El-Shenawy. اضافة اعلان The spokesperson added that the meeting will also include consultations on a number of regional issues.
