No end in sight to Sudan war as both sides seek ‘decisive’ win

Sudan has seen a surge in extreme violence in recent weeks as the warring military and paramilitary push for a decisive victory, with no political solution in sight. (AFP/File)
Short Url
Updated 13 November 2024
Follow

No end in sight to Sudan war as both sides seek ‘decisive’ win

  • Rosemary DiCarlo, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs said: “Let me stress that both warring parties bear responsibility for this violence“
  • “All indicators so far show that both sides are committed to military solutions, with no genuine interest in political resolutions,” said Mohamed Osman of HRW

CAIRO: Sudan has seen a surge in extreme violence in recent weeks as the warring military and paramilitary push for a decisive victory, with no political solution in sight.
Fighting between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has intensified since late October, with reports of attacks on civilians including sexual violence against women and girls raising alarm.
The war that erupted in April 2023 has created what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crises, with more than 11 million people forced from their homes.
It has put the country on the brink of famine, and sparked warnings of intensifying violence in a war that has already killed tens of thousands.
“Over the last two weeks, the situation in the country has been marked by some of the most extreme violence since the start of the conflict,” according to Rosemary DiCarlo, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.
“Let me stress that both warring parties bear responsibility for this violence,” she said, adding that both sides “seem convinced they can prevail on the battlefield.”
Since October 20, at least 124 civilians have been killed in central Al-Jazira state and another 135,000 have fled to other states, according to the UN.
With global attention focused on other wars, chiefly in Ukraine and the Middle East, civilians in Sudan are paying a steep price for the escalation.
“All indicators so far show that both sides are committed to military solutions, with no genuine interest in political resolutions or even easing the suffering of civilians,” according to Mohamed Osman of Human Rights Watch.
Amani Al-Taweel, director of the Africa program at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, agreed.
“There is no political solution on the horizon,” she told AFP, adding that both sides were seeking a “decisive military solution.”
The war in Sudan has pitted army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan against his erstwhile ally Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the RSF.
The country is split into zones of control, with the army holding the north and east, and the government based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
The RSF controls much of the capital Khartoum, the Darfur region in the west and parts of Kordofan in the south, while the center is split.
With no mandatory military conscription, the Sudanese army includes Islamist-leaning forces as well as other factions.
The RSF is primarily made up of tribal militias from Darfur’s Arab communities.
According to local reports, the army has about 120,000 troops while the RSF has 100,000.
On the battlefield, Sudan’s air force gives the military an advantage.
Rights groups have accused both sides of committing atrocities.
The UN population agency published on Tuesday horrific accounts of women and girls fleeing the violence, including one who said she was urged to kill herself with a knife rather than be raped.
Successive rounds of talks have been held in Saudi Arabia, but the negotiations have yet to produce a ceasefire.
In August, the Sudanese military opted out of US-brokered negotiations in Switzerland and an African Union-led mediation has also stalled.
“The deadlock in peaceful channels, whether regionally or internationally, is exacerbating the violence,” said Mahmud Zakaria, a professor of political science at Cairo University’s Faculty of African Postgraduate Studies.
Since October, the RSF escalated its attacks in Al-Jazira state, south of Khartoum, following what the military said was the defection of one of its commanders to the army.
Before the war, Al-Jazira was known as Sudan’s breadbasket, hosting Africa’s largest agricultural project, yielding 65 percent of the country’s cotton, according to Zakaria.
Some areas have been scarred by conflict before.
Darfur saw a major war two decades ago, during which the then-government’s allies in the Janjaweed militia faced accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
With roots in the Janjaweed, the RSF became a force in its own right in 2013.
Sudan’s conflict has increasingly drawn in regional powers, prompting the United States to urge all countries to stop arming rival generals.
Former Egyptian deputy foreign minister for African affairs Ali el-Hefny said progress will require global willpower.


Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of war crimes over Gaza displacements

Updated 20 sec ago
Follow

Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of war crimes over Gaza displacements

  • The report is the latest in a series from aid groups warning about the dire humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave
  • Israeli authorities have previously rejected such accusations, say their forces operate in compliance with international law

JERUSALEM: Israeli authorities have caused a forced displacement of Palestinian people in Gaza to an extent that constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Thursday.
The report is the latest in a series from aid groups and international bodies warning about the dire humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave.
“Human Rights Watch found that forced displacement has been widespread, and the evidence shows it has been systematic and part of a state policy. Such acts also constitute crimes against humanity,” the report said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military or foreign ministry but Israeli authorities have previously rejected such accusations, and say their forces operate in compliance with international law.
The law of armed conflict forbids the forcible displacement of civilian populations from occupied territory, unless necessary for the security of civilians or imperative military reasons.
Since then, the Israeli campaign has killed more than 43,500 people, according to Gaza health authorities, and destroyed much of the enclave’s infrastructure, forcing most of the 2.3 million population to move several times.
For the past month, Israeli troops have moved tens of thousands of people from areas in the north of the enclave as they have sought to destroy Hamas forces the military says have been reforming around the towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.
Human Rights Watch said the displacement of Palestinians “is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors,” an action it said would amount to “ethnic cleansing.”
The Israeli military has denied seeking to create permanent buffer zones and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Monday that Palestinians displaced from their homes in northern Gaza would be allowed to return at the end of the war.


Video shows ‘white orb’ UFO off Kuwait coast, US congressional hearing told

Updated 15 min 18 sec ago
Follow

Video shows ‘white orb’ UFO off Kuwait coast, US congressional hearing told

  • High-definition 13-minute clip found on Department of Defense network, journalist says
  • Orb ‘joined by another orb that briefly comes into the frame from the left before rapidly moving again out of the frame’

LONDON: A video clip of a “white orb” UFO off the coast of Kuwait has been discovered on a US government network, a congressional hearing has been told.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the Public news service, said the 13-minute clip was found in US Department of Defense files, based on comments from a source.

The clip of the UFO 20 miles off Kuwait was filmed in high-definition color video and was captured from a helicopter, Sky News reported.

Shellenberger said: “Halfway through the video, the person (source) said, the orb is joined by another orb that briefly comes into the frame from the left before rapidly moving again out of the frame.”

The video was discovered on the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Department of Defense to “transmit classified information.”


Sudan war deaths are likely much higher than recorded, researchers say

Updated 55 min 9 sec ago
Follow

Sudan war deaths are likely much higher than recorded, researchers say

  • The estimate includes some 26,000 people who suffered violent deaths, a higher figure than one currently used by the United Nations

CAIRO/OMDURMAN: More than 61,000 people are estimated to have died in Khartoum state during the first 14 months of Sudan’s war, with evidence suggesting the toll from the devastating conflict is significantly higher than previously recorded, according to a new report by researchers in Britain and Sudan.
The estimate includes some 26,000 people who suffered violent deaths, a higher figure than one currently used by the United Nations for the entire country.
The preprint study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group, released on Wednesday before peer review, suggested that starvation and disease are increasingly becoming the leading causes of death reported across Sudan.
The estimated deaths from all causes in Khartoum state were at a rate 50 percent higher than the national average before the conflict between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces erupted in April 2023, researchers said. The UN says the conflict has driven 11 million people from their homes and unleashed the world’s biggest hunger crisis. Nearly 25 million people — half of Sudan’s population — need aid as famine has taken hold in at least one displacement camp.
But counting the dead has been challenging.
Even in peace time, many deaths are not registered in Sudan, researchers say. As fighting intensified, people were cut off from places that record deaths, including hospitals, morgues and cemeteries. Repeated disruptions to Internet services and telecommunications left millions unable to contact the outside world. The study “tried to capture that invisibility” using a sampling technique known as “capture-recapture”, said lead author Maysoon Dahab, an infectious disease epidemiologist and co-director of the Sudan Research Group.
Originally designed for ecological research, the technique has been used in published studies to estimate the number of people killed during pro-democracy protests in Sudan in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was not possible to carry out full counts, she said.
Using data from at least two independent sources, researchers look for individuals who appear on multiple lists. The less overlap there is between the lists, the higher the chances that deaths have gone unrecorded, information that can be used to estimate the full number of deaths.
In this case, researchers compiled three lists of the dead. One was based on a public survey circulated via social media platforms between November 2023 and June 2024. The second used community activists and other “study ambassadors” to distribute the survey privately within their networks. And the third was compiled from obituaries posted on social media, a common practice in the cities of Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri, which together make up the greater capital.
“Our findings suggest that deaths have largely gone undetected,” the researchers wrote.

UNCOUNTED TOLL
Deaths captured in the three lists made up just 5 percent of the estimated total for Khartoum state and 7 percent of those attributed to “intentional injury.” The findings suggest that other war-affected parts of the country could have experienced similar or worse tolls, the study said.
The researchers noted that their estimate of violent deaths in Khartoum state surpassed the 20,178 killings recorded across the country over the same period by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project (ACLED), a US-based crisis monitoring group.
ACLED’s data, which is based on reports from sources including news organizations, human rights groups and local authorities, has been cited by UN officials and other humanitarian workers.
Dahab said the researchers did not have sufficient data to estimate mortality levels in other parts of the country or determine how many deaths in all could be linked to the war.
The study also notes other limitations. The methodology used assumes that every death has an equal chance of showing up in the data, for example. However, well-known individuals and those who suffered violent deaths may have been more likely to be reported, the researchers said.
Paul Spiegel, who heads the Center for Humanitarian Health at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was not involved in the study, said there were issues with all three sources of data that could skew the estimates. But he said the researchers had factored such limitations into their methodology and analysis.
“While it is difficult to know how the various biases in this capture-recapture methodology could affect the overall numbers, it is a novel and important attempt to estimate the number of deaths and bring attention to this horrific war in Sudan,” he said.
An official with the Sudanese American Physicians Association, an organization that offers free health care across the country, said the findings appeared credible.
“The number might even be more,” its program manager, Abdulazim Awadalla, told Reuters, saying weakened immunity from malnutrition was making people more susceptible to infection.
“Simple diseases are killing people,” he said.
The study was funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

“WE BURIED HIM HERE“
Among the war’s many victims was Khalid Sanhouri, a musician whose death in Omdurman’s Mulazmeen neighborhood was announced on social media in July last year.
A neighbor, Mohammed Omar, told Reuters that friends and relatives were unable to get medical care for Sanhouri after he fell ill due to the intensity of the fighting at the time.
“There were no hospitals or pharmacies where we could get medicine, not even markets to buy food,” Omar said.
They couldn’t even reach the nearest graveyard.
“So, we buried him here,” Omar said, pointing to a grave just beyond the bullet-pocked wall surrounding the musician’s home.
Hundreds of graves have popped up next to homes across greater Khartoum since last year, residents say. With the return of the army to some neighborhoods, they have started relocating the bodies to Omdurman’s main cemetery.
There are as many as 50 burials a day there, undertaker Abdin Khidir told Reuters. The cemetery has expanded into an adjoining football field.
Still, the bodies keep coming, Khidir said.
The warring sides have traded blame for the growing toll.
Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Nabil Abdallah referred questions about the study’s estimates to the Ministry of Health but said: “The main cause of all this suffering is the terrorist Rapid Support militia (RSF), which has not hesitated from the first moment to target civilians.”
The health ministry said in a statement to Reuters that it has observed far fewer deaths than the estimates in the study. Its tally of war-related deaths stands at 5,565, it said.
The RSF did not dispute the study’s estimates, blaming the deaths in the capital on “deliberate air strikes on populated areas, in addition to artillery shelling and drone strikes.”
“It is known that the army is the only one with [such weapons],” it said in a statement to Reuters.
The war erupted from a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule. The RSF quickly took over most of the capital and has now spread into at least half the country, though the military regained control of some neighborhoods in Omdurman and Bahri in recent months. Both sides have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, including attacking civilians, a UN fact-finding mission said in September. The war has also produced ethnically driven violence in the western Darfur region blamed largely on the RSF.
However, the new report highlighted the significant and likely growing toll taken by the war’s indirect impacts, including hunger, disease and the collapse of health care.
Sick patients lined the hallways at Al-Shuhada hospital in Bahri, which has seen a spike in cases of malnutrition and diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever.
Fresh fruits, vegetables and meat were hard to come by until the arrival of the army opened up supply routes, said hospital manager Hadeel Malek.
“As we all know, malnutrition leads to weak immunity in general,” she said. “This is one factor ... which led to many deaths, especially among pregnant women and children.”
Both sides deny impeding aid and commercial deliveries.


Strike hits south Beirut after Israel evacuation warning

Updated 14 November 2024
Follow

Strike hits south Beirut after Israel evacuation warning

  • Israel carried out two strikes on Ghobeiry and a large one on Shouaifat Al-Omrousiya
  • Repeated Israeli air strikes on south Beirut have led to a mass exodus of civilians

BEIRUT: Air strikes hit the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Thursday after an Israeli warning to evacuate parts of the Hezbollah bastion, AFPTV images showed.
A plume of grey smoke rose over the area after the latest strike since Israel sharply intensified its campaign against the Iran-backed militant group in September.
Shortly before the strike, Israel had issued a warning to residents to evacuate their homes.
“You are located near Hezbollah facilities and interests against which the (Israeli military) will operate in the near future,” army spokesman Avichay Adraee said.
His post on X included a map identifying buildings in the Shouaifat Al-Omrousiya and Ghobeiry areas.
Israel carried out two strikes on Ghobeiry and a large one on Shouaifat Al-Omrousiya, which lies on the southern outskirts of Beirut, the state-run National News Agency reported.
Repeated Israeli air strikes on south Beirut have led to a mass exodus of civilians, although some return during the day to check on their homes and businesses.
NNA also reported heavy Israeli bombardment of the southern town of Bint Jbeil on Thursday.
Several blocks of flats in the town barely three kilometers (two miles) from the Israeli border were destroyed by air strikes or shelling, it said.


Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of war crimes over Gaza displacements

Updated 14 November 2024
Follow

Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of war crimes over Gaza displacements

  • The law of armed conflict forbids the forcible displacement of civilian populations from occupied territory, unless necessary for the security of civilians or imperative military reasons

JERUSALEM: Israeli authorities have caused a forced displacement of Palestinian people in Gaza to an extent that constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Thursday.
The report is the latest in a series from aid groups and international bodies warning about the dire humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave.
“Human Rights Watch found that forced displacement has been widespread, and the evidence shows it has been systematic and part of a state policy. Such acts also constitute crimes against humanity,” the report said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military or foreign ministry but Israeli authorities have previously rejected such accusations, and say their forces operate in compliance with international law.
The law of armed conflict forbids the forcible displacement of civilian populations from occupied territory, unless necessary for the security of civilians or imperative military reasons.
Since then, the Israeli campaign has killed more than 43,500 people, according to Gaza health authorities, and destroyed much of the enclave’s infrastructure, forcing most of the 2.3 million population to move several times.
For the past month, Israeli troops have moved tens of thousands of people from areas in the north of the enclave as they have sought to destroy Hamas forces the military says have been reforming around the towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.
Human Rights Watch said the displacement of Palestinians “is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors,” an action it said would amount to “ethnic cleansing.”
The Israeli military has denied seeking to create permanent buffer zones and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Monday that Palestinians displaced from their homes in northern Gaza would be allowed to return at the end of the war.