Region

CAIRO — Egypt announced on Sunday that negotiations had resumed over Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam, after agreeing last month to reach a deal following years of tensions between the two countries.

For years at loggerheads over the issue, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah E l Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had agreed in July to finalise a deal within four months.

The two leaders met on the sidelines of a summit of African leaders from war-torn Sudan's neighbours seeking to end the conflict that has raged there for over four months.

"A new round of negotiations on the Renaissance Dam began Sunday morning in Cairo, with the participation of the Egyptian, Sudanese and Ethiopian delegations," the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation announced.

The massive $4.2 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been at the centre of a regional dispute ever since Ethiopia broke ground on the project in 2011, with Egypt fearing it will slash its share of Nile water.

The current talks aim to reach an agreement that "takes into account the interests and concerns of the three countries", Egyptian irrigation minister Hani Sewilam said, urging "an end to unilateral measures".

Ethiopia announced in June it was launching the fourth filling of the reservoir, despite constant objections by Egypt and at times Sudan, both downstream of Ethiopia on the Nile.

Protracted negotiations over the filling and operation of the dam since 2011 have thus far failed to bring about an agreement between Ethiopia and its downstream neighbours.

Egypt has long viewed the dam as an existential threat, as it relies on the Nile for 97 per cent of its water needs.

The dam is nonetheless central to Ethiopia’s development plans, and in February 2022 Addis Ababa announced that it had begun generating hydroelectric energy for the first time.

AZAZ, Syria — Three members of the United States Congress made a rare visit Sunday to rebel-held territory in northern Syria controlled by pro-Turkish factions, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

The bipartisan delegation comprising Joe Wilson, Victoria Spartz and Dean Phillips entered Syria from Turkey through the Bab Al Salama border crossing, where they were welcomed by a banner reading "Welcome to Free Syria" and revolutionary flags.

The delegation visited a hospital in the city of Azaz in Aleppo province and met orphans of the Syrian civil war, which has killed more than 500,000 people since it erupted in 2011. 

The visit’s “purpose is to see the reality of the liberated areas”, Yasser Al Hajji, spokesperson for the Turkey-backed interim government, told AFP.

However, the delegation’s visit had to be curtailed for security reasons, a member of their escort told AFP.

The extremist group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) controls much of Syria’s last pocket of armed opposition, which includes a significant part of Idlib province as well as bordering territories of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

Other rebel factions, supported by Turkey to varying degrees, also control parts of northern Syria.

“To avoid sparking controversy in the United States, they ultimately did not proceed towards Jindayris in the territories controlled by HTS,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

HTS, which is lead by the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, is classified as a terrorist group by Washington.

“The members of Congress wanted to assess the work of the interim government to study the possibility of delivering humanitarian aid via Bab Al Salama instead of Bab Al Hawa,” which is controlled by HTS, added the Observatory, which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria for its reports.

Under a 2014 agreement, most international aid including food, water and medicine entered from Turkey via the Bab Al Hawa crossing without the authorisation of Damascus.

The United Nations last month failed to reach consensus on extending the mechanism through the Security Council, but subsequently announced that aid deliveries would resume through Bab Al Hawa.

Congressman Wilson had on Friday voiced his support for anti-government protests spreading this month across southern Syria.

On X, formerly Twitter, he posted that the protests against President Bashar Assad’s regime “have inspired the world and demonstrate that Syria has no future and will never stabilise under Assad”. 

The protests in the south erupted late last week after the government ended fuel subsidies, dealing a heavy blow to Syrians already reeling from years of war and economic crisis. 

PORT SUDAN, Sudan — Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan arrived on Sunday in the coastal city of Port Sudan, an official statement said, as the country reels from over four months of war with paramilitaries.

Burhan made his first public foray in months earlier this week, having been cloistered within army headquarters in the capital Khartoum ever since the conflict erupted on April 15.

Armed forces have been fending off an unceasing offensive on the headquarters by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Burhan’s deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

According to a statement from the ruling sovereign council, Burhan was met Sunday by his deputy Malik Agar and other government officials who — like the United Nations — have relocated operations to Port Sudan, which has been spared the fierce fighting that has gripped other parts of the country.

Also on Sunday, “rockets fell on houses, killing five people”, a medical source told AFP from the capital Khartoum, where witnesses also reported air strikes.

Burhan has been the de facto leader of Sudan since October 2021, when he — in collaboration with Daglo — led a coup that ousted civilian leaders from government and derailed a fragile transition to civilian rule.

Videos of Burhan’s first foray outside army headquarters were posted Thursday, with captions indicating he was at the Wadi Seidna air base north of Khartoum.

More footage was posted by the army on Friday, showing Burhan greeting troops, assuring them of impending “victory” and visiting an army hospital in the city of Atbara, 300 kilometres northeast of Khartoum.

While the capital’s airport has been out of service since the conflict began, the airport in Port Sudan has remained operational for evacuation and relief flights, fuelling speculation of an overseas trip for the army chief.

Local journalists, who have flocked to the coastal city to track the army chief’s movements, have floated the possibility that he is travelling to Cairo — traditionally Burhan’s closest foreign ally — or Jeddah, the site of ceasefire negotiations previously brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Conservative estimates from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project show that nearly 5,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

The real figure is thought to be much higher, with many victims unable to reach health services, entire cities cut off from the world and both sides refusing to report their fatalities.

More than 4.6 million people have been displaced by the fighting across both borders and within Sudan, where six million people are “one step away from famine”, according to the UN.

WAD MADANI, Sudan — Sudan's army chief General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan was seen on Thursday outside his headquarters for the first time since fighting erupted more than four months ago with paramilitaries, army videos showed.

Some of the footage filmed before dawn and posted on the army's Facebook page showed Burhan speaking to soldiers, with the caption indicating that he was at the Wadi Seidna air base north of Khartoum.

In separate daytime images posted later, he is seen surrounded by civilians in the capital's twin-city of Omdurman.

AFP could not verify the footage or images but the agency's fact-checking department was able to determine that they had never been posted online before and therefore could very well have been taken on Thursday.

Images of Burhan have rarely been released since fighting erupted on April 15 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

Previous images showed Burhan inside the army headquarters in Khartoum, over which both sides have waged fierce battles to control.

The latest footage comes as fighting rages around a key military base in the capital's south.

The army has put out several statements and videos saying it has repelled RSF attacks since Sunday against Al Shajara base but the paramilitaries claim they have taken control of much of it since Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, the RSF said 2,500 fighters from a movement led by former rebel leader Malak Agar, recently named by Burhan as his deputy to replace Daglo, had pledged allegiance to the paramilitaries.

The war between the rival generals has killed thousands and devastated infrastructure in already impoverished Sudan, and has been concentrated mostly in Khartoum and the war-scarred Darfur region.

Conservative estimates from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project say that nearly 5,000 people have been killed since then. But the battles have prevented the recovery of the bodies of many others thought to have been killed.

According to United Nations figures, in the four months since the fighting broke out, more than 4.6 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

GHAJAR — Straddling the frontier between Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the picturesque village of Ghajar has become a lightning rod for tensions between the hostile forces on either side.

The latest tit-for-tat exchange saw Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and the chief of Lebanon’s powerful Hizbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, vow to send the other’s country “back to the Stone Age” if the other escalates violence.

On the sleepy streets of Ghajar, home to manicured flower beds and ice cream trucks, an invisible boundary is intended to keep the two sides apart.

“The Blue Line is in the air,” resident Abu Youssef Hussein Tawfiq Khatib told AFP, referring to the United Nations demarcation line drawn when Israeli troops withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000.

“You see that the town is open, there are no borders or anything,” added the 79-year-old, wearing a traditional white headdress near the village mosque.

But weeks earlier, Israelis erected a controversial fence topped with barbed wire on the Lebanese side of the Blue Line.

The move followed cross-border fire in April that was the heaviest since a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. That and other incidents have sparked fears of renewed conflict.

Any miscalculation could have devastating consequences. The month-long 2006 war killed 1,200 people in Lebanon — mostly civilians — and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

With the neighbouring countries still technically at war, Lebanon condemned the Ghajar fence as a unilateral Israeli “annexation” of the northern part of the village.

On July 6, an anti-tank missile was launched from Lebanese territory towards the new barrier, prompting retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces.

‘Atmosphere of alert’ 

Despite the cross-border exchanges, Ghajar resident Nahlah Saeed insisted that right now “here’s safe — Israel’s safe”.

“In the future, I don’t know. I know that I live well, happily,” said Saeed, 63, sitting in the shade outside a house.

According to municipal figures, the village is home to around 3,000 people, who took Israeli citizenship after Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 War and then occupied it in 1981 in a move never recognised by the international community.

Village spokesman Bilal Khatib said residents had the “right to build a fence around our own homes”.

“The council built the barrier and stopped the soil being swept away, protecting these homes. A second reason was that we had, more than once, wild animals entering the village,” he told AFP in his office.

Under the scorching sun, UN peacekeepers patrol the northern side of the new fence, which is metres high and looks over Lebanese homes in the village of Wazzani.

On both sides of the Blue Line, local officials told AFP about title deeds and pointed to maps which they said prove their ownership of the disputed land.

Wazzani mayor Ahmad Al Mohammed said he has “adapted to the atmosphere of alert”.

“In recent years, there was Israeli bombardment, which took a human, material and livestock toll. But people don’t leave the village, because they must be tied to their source of livelihood,” he told an AFP journalist in south Lebanon.

Lebanese authorities consider the expansion of Ghajar, with its pastel-coloured homes spreading to the north in recent decades, as an infringement on their land.

On the outskirts of Wazzani, shepherd Imad Al Mohammed rode a horse as he took his flock out to pasture.

“When the Lebanese lands in the vicinity of Ghajar are recovered, the pasture lands will increase and I’ll take the sheep there,” he told the AFP correspondent, pointing across to homes now behind the Israeli fence.

‘Peace before everything’ 

The UN is mediating the fence affair and acts as an intermediary in talks over the Blue Line, at which refreshments must be served separately to the opposing sides by the Italian contingent.

“Despite all the tensions in the area, there is still a commitment from the parties, or no appetite for a conflict,” said Andrea Tenenti, spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Under international agreements backed by the two governments, “Israel is obliged to withdraw from the northern part of the village of Ghajar”, Tenenti said.

Lebanon, meanwhile, is obliged to remove a tent that was erected across the Blue Line northeast of Ghajar earlier this year.

An Israeli security official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak publicly, said the “rogue terrorist army” Hizbollah was behind the tent and UN mediation on the matter was underway.

“Nobody wants this to escalate, right, so he [Nasrallah] is also trying to keep it under the threshold. We’re keeping it under the threshold,” the official said.

He cited Israeli forces using non-lethal weapons to push back Hizbollah members who approached the border around 40 kilometres southwest of Ghajar, wounding three fighters.

Standing within view of the valley, Khatib, the elderly Ghajar resident, underlined the importance of “peace before everything”.

“That’s it, and everyone has the rights that belong to them. I take the land that belongs to me, and he takes the land that belongs to him,” he said.

ADRÉ, Chad — After hiding at home for weeks, Sudanese refugees evaded militias in Darfur and fled on foot to neighbouring Chad with children on their backs and safety their destination.

Now at Aura camp in Adre, eastern Chad, bordering Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur, they shelter in tents supplied by international aid groups.

After four months of a bloody power struggle between Sudan’s army and its former ally the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), these refugees are among the nearly 430,000 people — mostly Sudanese women and children — who have managed to cross the border into Chad.

Hawa Mousa, 30, sits on the earthen floor of the tent, her newborn resting in her lap.

She tells AFP of one day in June when the fighting in West Darfur state was raging. Its governor had been assassinated, and the people feared summary execution by Arab militiamen allied to the RSF.

Mousa and her children slipped away in the middle of the night.

“I was still pregnant then,” she said. “I tied my youngest to my back and took the eldest by the hand.”

An ethnic conflict is again stalking Darfur.

In 2003, the then-government of Omar Al Bashir in Khartoum unleashed the feared Janjaweed — forerunners of the RSF — on ethnic minority rebels and civilians suspected of supporting them.

That conflict killed more than 300,000 people and displaced 2.5 million, the United Nations estimates.

The International Criminal Court charged Bashir and others with war crimes but only one suspect, who surrendered, is on trial.

Now, Arab militias are once more hunting civilians simply because they are non-Arab, according to survivors.

Wounded on the way 

A quarter of Sudan’s 48-million population lived in Darfur, an area the size of France, before the fighting erupted on April 15.

Some of the refugees have now become homeless for a second time after suffering a similar fate in the earlier conflict.

With fears that history is repeating itself, the International Criminal Court is again probing alleged war crimes.

Most of the Aura refugees fled from El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state where the United Nations has said more than 1,000 people were killed in a few days, attacks which could amount to crimes against humanity.

But that toll is probably far higher, because even more than elsewhere in Sudan, communication links have been cut and news is slow to emerge.

Bodies have been abandoned and left in the streets of now-deserted communities to decompose in the heat.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other watchdogs have reported beatings, summary executions, looting and homes and businesses burned to the ground.

“We were told of a route out, but despite that four of us were wounded. We wandered barefoot round El Geneina for seven days,” said Souad Ibrahim, 41, speaking through tears as she sat on the sand outside a blue tent.

“We had no water and no food. Even though I was seven months pregnant, I had to carry my four-year-old boy on my back and my girl who is six followed on foot” for the 35-kilometre walk to Adre, she said.

‘Janjaweed 

attacked them’ 

The journey is particularly dangerous for women, who in addition to militia attacks and stray gunfire also fear rape, a violent tactic used for decades in Sudan.

“Human Rights Watch documented 78 victims, or survivors, of rape between April 24 and June 26” in El Geneina and on the road to Chad, HRW said.

It said the attackers would target women who were of Massalit ethnicity, the non-Arab majority in El Geneina.

Fleeing the awful prospect of rape in their home town also exposed women to other dangers outside El Geneina.

“My wife and children left before me to head for Chad,” Adam Haroun told AFP, having now rejoined his family.

“Janjaweed attacked them on the way when they were in a wadi and a bullet hit my wife in the leg,” the 39-year-old said.

“Now an aid group is looking after her in a clinic.”

Haroun and his family are now safe in Chad across the border from Darfur, but others have not been able to escape.

The fighting is now concentrated around Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state and Sudan’s second-largest city.

From Nyala, the nearest safe haven is across the border in South Sudan. And that’s a distance of 200 kilometres.

RIYADH — Fierce storms closed schools Wednesday in Saudi Arabia’s Mecca region, home to Islam’s holiest site, the Grand Mosque, which was lashed by heavy rains and wind overnight, witnesses said.

As pilgrims tried to circumambulate the Kaaba, the giant black cube towards which all Muslims pray, a bolt of lightning struck the iconic Fairmont Mecca Clock Royal Tower hotel, illuminating the night sky late Tuesday.

The storm brought gale force winds exceeding 80 kilometres per hour, Hussein Al Qahtani, spokesman for the National Centre for Meteorology, told AFP.

The conditions were similar to a 2015 storm that felled a crane at the Grand Mosque, killing more than 100 people and injuring hundreds more, Qahtani said.

No casualties were reported in Tuesday’s storm.

Mecca resident Abu Mayyada told AFP he was out buying cigarettes and petrol when “everything went black in front of me” as the worst of the storm hit.

“Suddenly I lost control over the vehicle. I couldn’t see anything so I started listening to the Koran on the radio. I didn’t understand what was happening,” he said.

The Mecca neighbourhood of Al Kakkiyah recorded 45 millimetres of rain within 24 hours, the meteorology centre shared in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Footage shared with AFP by Mecca residents showed pilgrims outside the Grand Mosque who were toppled over by the wind, which also sent crowd barriers sliding across the rain-slicked floor.

“The scene was very scary,” said Mecca resident Mohammed, who was grocery shopping at the height of the storm.

“Everything happened within a few minutes, when it started raining in a crazy way.”

Another resident, Yusuf, said August usually brought strong winds to Mecca but that Tuesday’s storm was “the worst” he could remember.

Flash flooding had mostly dissipated by Wednesday morning, said the residents, who gave only their first names for fear of reprisals.

Nevertheless the Mecca regional government said on X that schools would be closed in parts of Mecca, with classes conducted on an e-learning platform, “in the interest of everyone’s safety”.

The meteorology centre warned of further storms on Wednesday bringing rain, wind and thunder to the Mecca region and elsewhere in western Saudi Arabia.