Region

WAD MADANI, Sudan — Flames gripped the Sudanese capital on Sunday and paramilitary forces attacked the army headquarters for the second day in a row, witnesses reported, as fighting raged into its six month.

"Clashes are now happening around the army headquarters with various types of weapons," one Khartoum resident, who declined to be named, told AFP.

Other witnesses in southern Khartoum said they heard "huge bangs" as the army targeted bases of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries with artillery.

Witnesses also reported fighting in the city of El Obeid, 350 kilometres south.

Nawal Mohammed, 44, said battles Saturday and Sunday between the regular army and the paramilitaries have been "the most violent since the war began".

Though her family lives at least three kilometres away from the nearest clashes, Mohammed said "doors and windows shook" with the force of explosions, while several buildings in central Khartoum were set alight.

In social media posts verified by AFP, users shared footage of flames devouring landmarks of the Khartoum skyline, including the ministry of justice and the Greater Nile Petroleum Oil Company Tower, a conical building with glass facades that had become an emblem of the city.

Other posts showed buildings, their windows blown out and their walls charred or pockmarked with bullets, smouldering.

"It's distressing to see these institutions destroyed like this," Badr Al Din Babiker, a resident of the capital's east, told AFP.

Since war erupted on April 15 between army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, nearly 7,500 people have been killed, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Civilians and aid workers have warned that the real toll is far higher, as many of those injured or killed never make it to hospitals or morgues.

A committee of volunteer pro-democracy lawyers on Sunday said the fighting in Khartoum since Friday had killed dozens of civilians in "continued disregard for international humanitarian law".

“We are working to determine the number of civilian victims” of “arbitrary shelling”, the group said in a statement.

The war in Sudan has decimated already fragile infrastructure, shuttered 80 per cent of the country’s hospitals and plunged millions into acute hunger.

More than five million people have been displaced, including 2.8 million who have fled the relentless air strikes, artillery fire and street battles in Khartoum’s densely-populated neighbourhoods.

Millions who could not or refused to leave Khartoum remain in the city, where water, food and electricity are rationed.

The violence has also spread to the western region of Darfur, where ethnically-motivated attacks by the RSF and allied militias have triggered renewed investigations by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes.

There has also been fighting in the southern Kordofan region, where witnesses again reported on Sunday artillery fire exchanged between the army and the RSF in the city of El-Obeid.

DERNA, Libya — Shipments of international aid began to arrive in Libya on Saturday, offering a lifeline to thousands despite dwindling hopes of finding more survivors days after deadly flash floods.

Sunday's disaster submerged the port city of Derna, washing thousands of people and homes out to sea after two dams burst under the pressure of torrential rains triggered by a hurricane-strength storm.

Conflicting death tolls have been reported, with the health minister of the eastern-based administration, Othman Abdeljalil, putting the number of lives lost at 3,166.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said "the bodies of 3,958 people have been recovered and identified", with 9,000 more still missing, as it announced 29 tonnes of aid had arrived in the eastern city of Benghazi.

“This is a disaster of epic proportions,” said Ahmed Zouiten, the WHO’s Libya representative.

An AFP correspondent saw two aid-laden planes, one from the United Arab Emirates and another from Iran, land in Benghazi, more than 300 kilometres west of Derna.

The Italian embassy said a ship had arrived off Derna with two helicopters, bulldozers, tents, blankets and pumps.

Tonnes of aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have also arrived in the east, along with a field hospital from France.

Hatem Al Tawahni, medical director of Benghazi Medical Centre, told AFP 15 injured from Derna are now being treated there.

One patient, Eid Kayat Abdel Khalef, was working in Derna when the flood hit. He said 75 people from his hometown of Al Sahrif in Egypt were killed.

“There are people whose fate is completely unknown... we don’t have any information about them,” he added.

A steady stream of vehicles trickled into Derna on a makeshift road as diggers toiled to shift rubble.

In Al Bayda, 100 kilometres west of Derna, people worked to clear roads and homes of mounds of mud.

‘Confusion and chaos’ 

A volunteer in Al Bayda who is originally from Derna said many people had told her of the “confusion and chaos” of relief efforts in the flood-stricken port city.

“I have also lost a lot of loved ones there,” said Rahab Shneib.

“Despite the ongoing efforts of many humanitarian organisations to bring comfort to the heart, it is important to note that many people have remarked on the lack of organisation.”

Derna resident Mohammad Al Dawali said: “In this city, every single family has been affected.”

Seir Mohammed Seir, a member of the security forces, said more than 1,500 families had been saved, along with a three-month-old girl.

“Her entire family died, she was the only one who survived.”

The floods were caused by hurricane-strength Storm Daniel, compounded by poor infrastructure in Libya which was plunged into turmoil after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime president Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

The Islamic Relief aid organisation warned of a “second humanitarian crisis”, pointing to the “growing risk of water-borne diseases and shortages of food, shelter and medicine”.

But the Red Cross and the WHO pointed out that contrary to widespread belief, the bodies of victims of natural disasters rarely pose a health threat.

The spokesman for the eastern-based Libyan National Army, Ahmed Al Mesmari, said the floods had affected “over 1.2 million people”.

The United Nations has launched an appeal for more than $71 million to assist hundreds of thousands in need.

“We don’t know the extent of the problem,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday, as he called for coordination between Libya’s two rival administrations — the UN-backed, internationally recognised government in Tripoli, and one based in the disaster-hit east.

Civilian access blocked 

The head of the eastern-based government, Oussama Hamad, announced new measures would be imposed from Saturday, closing the disaster zone off from civilians.

After opening a probe, Libya’s prosecutor general Al Seddik Al Sur said the two dams at the origin of the disaster had been cracked since 1998.

But repairs begun by a Turkish company in 2010 were suspended after a few months when the 2011 revolution flared, and the work never resumed, the prosecutor said, vowing to deal firmly with those responsible.

The scale of the devastation has prompted shows of solidarity, as volunteers in Tripoli gathered aid for the flood victims in the east.

Libyan Red Crescent teams were “still searching for possible survivors and clearing bodies from the rubble in the most damaged areas” of Derna, its spokesman Tawfik Shoukri said on Friday.

Other teams were trying to deliver much-needed aid to families in the eastern part of Derna, which had been spared the worst of the flooding but was cut off by road, he added.

The International Organisation for Migration, meanwhile, said “over 38,640” people had been left homeless in eastern Libya, 30,000 of them in Derna alone.

Climate experts have linked the disaster to the impacts of a heating planet, combined with Libya’s decaying infrastructure.

“A puzzle of dysfunction, incompetence, carelessness, neglect and corruption is slowly emerging behind the catastrophe in Derna,” said Wolfram Lacher, Libya specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

PARIS — Iranian authorities on Saturday prevented the family of Mahsa Amini from holding a ceremony to commemorate the first anniversary of her death, confining her father under "house arrest", as sporadic protests erupted nationwide despite heavy security, rights groups said.

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, died a few days after her arrest by religious police for allegedly violating the strict dress code for women in force since shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Her family says she died from a blow to the head but this is disputed by Iranian authorities.

Anger over her death rapidly expanded into weeks of taboo-breaking protests which saw women tearing off their mandatory headscarves in an open challenge to the Islamic republic's system of government under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Mahsa Amimi's father Amjad was detained early Saturday a he left the family home in the western town of Saqez, and then released after being warned not to hold a memorial service at her graveside, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), 1500tasvir monitor and Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said.

"Amjad Amini is under house arrest... Security forces are preventing him from visiting his daughter's grave," said IHR.

Official news agency IRNA denied the reports of the father's brief detention, and later said security forces had foiled an assassination attempt against him.

Amjad Amini was already summoned by intelligence officials last week after his announcement he planned to hold a memorial ceremony. One of Amini's uncles, Safa Aeli, was detained in Saqez on September 5 and remains in custody.

Rights groups said security forces had blocked access to the cemetery in Saqez where Amini is buried and Kurdish-focused group Hengaw said a young man named Fardin Jafari was in a critical condition in hospital after being shot in the head near the cemetery. It was not immediately possible to confirm the report.

The protests sparked by Amini’s death lost momentum after several months in the face of a crackdown that saw security forces kill 551 protesters, according to IHR, and arrest more than 22,000, according to Amnesty International.

Iranian authorities say dozens of security personnel were also killed in what they describe as “riots” incited by foreign governments and hostile media.

Seven men have been executed after being convicted in protest-related cases.

Campaigners say the authorities have renewed their crackdown in the runup to the anniversary, putting pressure on relatives of those killed in the protests in a bid to stop them speaking out.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said family members of at least 36 people killed or executed in the crackdown had been interrogated, arrested, prosecuted or sentenced to prison over the past month with authorities imposing a “chokehold on dissent”.

With additional security forces sent to the area, Hengaw said people in western Iran were expressing discontent through a general strike, with shops closed in a dozen towns and cities including Saqez.

One of Iran’s most high-profile prisoners Narges Mohammadi, a prize-winning rights activist, and three other women prisoners meanwhile burned their headscarves in the courtyard of Tehran’s Evin prison to mark the anniversary, Mohammadi’s Instagram account said.

The New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran said a fire broke out at Qarchak prison for women outside Tehran when security forces quelled a protest by inmates.

Witnesses in Tehran said there was a heavy security presence, with anti-riot police and security vehicles on the main streets and squares.

Persian-language channels based outside Iran, including Iran International, broadcast footage of residents shouting “Death to the dictator” and the main protest slogan of “Woman, Life, Freedom” from apartment blocks in Tehran and its satellite city of Karaj overnight.

Monitor 1500tasvir posted footage of dozens of people staging a daylight protest on Saturday on a street in the Gohardasht district of Karaj shouting “we will take Iran back!” and other slogans.

Similar gatherings were reported in the central city of Isfahan and the southern city of Shiraz. Hengaw published images of fires being lit on roads in the western city of Sanandaj and said security forces fired on protesters in Mahabad to the north.

Under the slogan “Say her name!”, Iranian emigres were holding commemorative rallies from Sydney to Toronto, with thousands in Place de la Bastille in central Paris chanting protest slogans and waving pre-revolutionary flags.

SANAA — Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels are to fly to Riyadh for the first publicly announced visit since a Saudi-led military coalition opened hostilities in 2015, government and diplomatic sources said on Thursday.

The Houthis' visit, expected within the coming days, will raise hopes of a breakthrough in the quagmire conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead through direct and indirect causes such as famine.

It comes five months after Saudi officials held talks in Sanaa, and as a UN-brokered ceasefire continues to largely hold despite officially lapsing in October.

"There are preparations for a Houthi delegation to visit Riyadh within the next 72 hours," a Yemeni government official familiar with the situation told AFP.

A Western diplomat in Yemen confirmed the visit, saying it could take place on Thursday or within the next two days. Saudi officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ali Al Qhoom, a member of the Houthis' political council, also announced the visit on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Yemen was plunged into war when the Huthis seized control of the capital Sanaa in September 2014, prompting the Saudi-led intervention the following March.

The ensuing fighting has forced millions from their homes, causing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises in a country already pummelled by decades of conflict and upheaval.

The six-month ceasefire that expired last October is still mostly holding but moves towards peace have been slow since the Saudi delegation visited Sanaa in April.

A delegation from Oman, which plays the role of mediator, arrived in Sanaa on Thursday, Yemeni government officials said — days after Saudi de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman met Oman's sultan en route from the G-20 summit in India.

Qhoom, from the Houthis’ political council, said the rebels’ delegation would fly to Saudi Arabia on an Omani plane.

“Optimism exists regarding the mediation and the Omani efforts to achieve peace in Yemen,” he posted on X.

The head of the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies think tank, Majed Al Madhaji, told AFP that the Houthi visit “is like moving the relationship between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia from the back rooms to the living room”.

By organising talks in Riyadh, both sides are “legitimising this relationship and giving it an additional impetus”.

“On the political level, it is an advanced step to end Saudi Arabia’s direct role in Yemen and for the Houthis to acknowledge its role as a mediator,” in addition to being one of the parties to the conflict, he added.

Moves towards peace in Yemen have accelerated since heavyweight regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran announced a surprise rapprochement in March, seven years after they broke off ties.

The Houthi demands include payment of their civil servants’ salaries by the displaced Yemeni government, and the launch of new destinations from Sanaa airport, which was closed until last year when commercial flights resumed to Jordan and Egypt.

Underlining Yemen’s problems, UN agencies and 91 international and Yemeni non-governmental organisations on Thursday said 21.6 million people — 75 per cent of the population — needed humanitarian assistance, calling for more funding.

WASHINGTON — For the United States, dealing with Iran's clerical leaders has never been for the faint of heart. But a year after massive protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, Tehran has become even more toxic for Washington.

President Joe Biden's Republican critics have savaged him for agreeing, nearly on the anniversary of the uprising, to a deal that will unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue to bring home five Americans who had been imprisoned.

Officials and diplomats say the US administration sees little alternative to engagement, with new talks possible on Iran's contested nuclear programme, but few expect Biden to invest political capital to reach any substantive new agreement with the hostile state and arch-foe of Israel.

Biden himself, in remarks caught on camera at a campaign rally, said that the 2015 nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — clinched by Barack Obama, trashed by Donald Trump and which the Biden administration spent months negotiating to restore — was "dead".

"Iran has always been a politically polarizing topic in the United States," especially since the JCPOA, said Holly Dagres, an expert on Iran at the Atlantic Council.

"But two events, Tehran arming Russia with armed drones for its war in Ukraine and the ongoing anti-establishment protests after the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, have made the topic of Iran politically toxic," she said.

"It doesn't mean that diplomacy — such as the current hostage deal — isn't possible, but a landmark agreement like a new JCPOA will be a very tough, if not impossible, sale for both sides of the US political aisle, given the events of the past year," she said.

A Washington-based diplomat said: "The last thing Biden wants to be doing is campaigning next year on Iran."

Tougher than 

Obama stance 

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, died on September 16, 2022 after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of the strict dress code imposed on women by the clerical leadership.

Amini's death triggered months of nationwide protests in which hundreds of people were killed, marking one of the biggest threats to the Islamic republic founded after the fall of the Western-oriented shah in 1979.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has publicly suggested that a restored nuclear deal was on the table last September before protests broke out.

The Biden administration spoke out forcefully in support of the women-led protests and took actions including sanctions on the notorious morality police.

It was a marked difference from the subdued response by Obama to Iran’s 2009 protests following contested elections — a stance later regretted by the former president, who said his motivation was not to let Tehran brand homegrown demonstrators as Western stooges.

But Biden, in last year’s taped remarks to Iranian diaspora members, said he would not declare the JCPOA dead officially, hinting that it was still useful to keep it on paper, and the United States has been muted on Iran enriching uranium above levels allowed under the 2015 deal.

“Clearly what the Biden team wants is just to prevent the Iran issue from becoming a crisis,” said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.

“President Biden and his team have their hands full, with Ukraine, with China,” he said.

He said Biden has essentially settled on a current “unspoken deal” of less rigorous sanctions enforcement in return for Iran taking a less confrontational approach.

Unlike previous administrations, “nobody from what I can tell in the Biden administration harbors illusions of some type of major change in Iran,” Vatanka said.

No choice but talks? 

Vatanka said that the protests caused a pause in Biden’s approach until it was clear there was no clear alternative in Iran.

Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, which seeks to resolve conflict, said the protests made engagement last year “completely toxic” both for the Biden administration and Europeans.

But he believed the Biden administration would pursue more talks, possibly in the coming weeks, with diplomacy seen as the most effective way to deal with Tehran, even if a major deal is unrealistic.

“At the end of the day, this was a murderous regime in 2015 as well,” when the JCPOA was reached, Vaez said.

“A regime that has blinded hundreds of protesters with rubber bullets cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons,” he said, and for Biden, “they have no option other than engagement”.