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PORT SUDAN, Sudan — Artillery shelling and air strikes killed at least 56 people across greater Khartoum on Saturday, according to a medical source and Sudanese activists.

Sudan's regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023 that has intensified this month as the army fights to take all of the capital Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North.

RSF shelling killed 54 people at a busy market in Omdurman on Saturday, overwhelming the city's Al Nao Hospital, a medical source told AFP.

"The shells hit in the middle of the vegetable market, that's why the victims and the wounded are so many," one survivor told AFP.

Across the Nile in Khartoum, two civilians were killed and dozens wounded in an air strike on an RSF-controlled area, the local Emergency Response Room (ERR) said.

Although the RSF has used drones in attacks including on Saturday, the fighter jets of the regular armed forces maintain a monopoly on air strikes.

The ERR is one of hundreds of volunteer committees across Sudan coordinating emergency care.

In addition to killing tens of thousands of people, the war has uprooted more than 12 million and forced most health facilities out of service.

A volunteer at Al Nao Hospital told AFP it faced dire shortages of "shrouds, blood donors and stretchers to transport the wounded".

The hospital is one of the last medical facilities operating in Omdurman and has been repeatedly attacked.

After months of stalemate in greater Khartoum, the army retook several bases in Khartoum last month, including its pre-war headquarters, pushing the RSF increasingly into the city's outskirts.

Witnesses said Saturday's bombardment of Omdurman came from the city's western outskirts, where the RSF remains in control.

A resident of a southern neighbourhood reported rocket and artillery fire on the city's streets.

Counter-offensive

Saturday's bombardment came a day after RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo vowed to retake the capital from the army.

"We expelled them [from Khartoum] before, and we will expel them again," he told troops in a rare video address.

Greater Khartoum has been a key battleground in nearly 22 months of fighting between the army and the RSF, and has been reduced to a shell of its former self.

An investigation by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that 26,000 people were killed in the capital alone between April 2023 and June 2024.

Entire neighbourhoods have been taken over by fighters as at least 3.6 million civilians have fled, according to United Nations figures.

Those unable or unwilling to leave have reported frequent artillery fire on residential areas, and widespread hunger in besieged neighbourhoods blockaded by opposing forces.

At least 106,000 people are estimated to be suffering from famine in Khartoum, according to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, with a further 3.2 million experiencing crisis levels of hunger.

Nationwide, famine has been declared in five areas -- most of them in the mainly RSF-controlled western region of Darfur -- and is expected to take hold of five more by May.

Before leaving office, the Joe Biden administration sanctioned Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, accusing the army of attacking schools, markets and hospitals and using starvation as a weapon of war.

That designation came a week after Washington sanctioned the RSF commander for his role in "gross violations of human rights" in Darfur, where the State Department said his forces had "committed genocide" against non-Arab minority groups.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Gunmen in Syria have shot dead 10 people in a "massacre" in a village from ousted president Bashar Assad's Alawite minority, a war monitor said on Saturday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "10 citizens in Arzah village in the northern Hama countryside that is inhabited by citizens of the Alawite sect" were killed in Friday's attack.

The Britain-based monitor, which has a large network of sources on the ground in Syria, said gunmen "rapped on the doors of houses in the village and shot at people using handguns equipped with silencers" before fleeing.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said a child and an elderly woman were among the victims.

He said the gunmen "were Sunni Muslims, and the attacks bear all the hallmarks of sectarian killings".

Syrian newspaper Al-Watan, quoting a security source in Hama, said security forces "are surrounding the Arzah area to hunt the criminals" behind the killings.

It said "former officers and soldiers" were among those who died in the attack.

Despite reassurances from Syria's new rulers who toppled Assad in early December, members of the Alawite community -- a branch of Shiite Islam -- fear reprisals because of the minority's link to the Assad clan.

Earlier on Friday, the new authorities announced the arrest of Assad's cousin Atif Najib, accused of orchestrating a crackdown in Daraa, where the 2011 Syrian uprising began.

The nationwide uprising was brutally crushed by Assad, spiralling into a civil war that has killed more than half a million people.

DAMASCUS — In less than two months, Syria's Ahmed Al Sharaa has risen from rebel leader to interim president, after his group led a lightning offensive that toppled Bashar Assad.

Sharaa was appointed Wednesday to lead Syria for an unspecified transitional period, and has been tasked with forming an interim legislature after the dissolution of the Assad era parliament and the suspension of the 2012 constitution.

The former fighter has abandoned his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, trimmed his beard and donned a suit and tie to receive foreign dignitaries since ousting Assad from power on December 8.

The tall, sharp-eyed Sharaa has held a succession of interviews with foreign journalists, presenting himself as a patriot who wants to rebuild and reunite Syria, devastated and divided after almost 14 years of civil war.

Syria's new authorities also announced on Wednesday the dissolution of armed factions, including Sharaa's own Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), which is rooted in the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.

Since breaking ties with Al Qaeda in 2016, Sharaa has sought to portray himself as a more moderate leader, and HTS has toned down its rhetoric, vowing to protect Syria's religious and ethnic minorities.

But Sharaa has yet to calm misgivings among some analysts and Western governments that still class HTS as a terrorist organisation.

'Pragmatic'

"He is a pragmatic radical," Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam, told AFP.

"In 2014, he was at the height of his radicalism," Pierret said, referring to the period of the war when he sought to compete with the Daesh group.

"Since then, he has moderated his rhetoric."

Born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia, Sharaa is from a well-to-do Syrian family and was raised in Mazzeh, an upscale district of Damascus.

In 2021, he told US broadcaster PBS that his nom de guerre was a reference to his family's roots in the Golan Heights. He said his grandfather was among those forced to flee the territory after its capture by Israel in 1967.

According to the Middle East Eye news website, it was after the September 11, 2001 attacks that he was first drawn to jihadist thinking.

"It was as a result of this admiration for the 9/11 attackers that the first signs of jihadism began to surface in Jolani's life, as he began attending secretive sermons and panel discussions in marginalised suburbs of Damascus," the website said.

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he left Syria to take part in the fight.

He joined Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, and was subsequently detained for five years, preventing him from rising through the ranks of the organisation.

Realist or opportunist?

In March 2011, when the revolt against Assad's rule erupted in Syria, he returned home and founded Al Nusra Front, Syria's branch of Al Qaeda.

In 2013, he refused to swear allegiance to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, who would go on to become the emir of the Daesh group, and instead pledged his loyalty to Al Qaeda's Ayman Al Zawahiri.

A realist in his partisans' eyes, an opportunist to his adversaries, Sharaa said in May 2015 that he, unlike Daesh, had no intention of launching attacks against the West.

He also proclaimed that should Assad be defeated, there would be no revenge attacks against the Alawite minority that the president's clan stems from.

He cut ties with Al-Qaeda, claiming to do so in order to deprive the West of reasons to attack his organisation.

According to Pierret, he has since sought to chart a path towards becoming a credible statesman.

In January 2017, Sharaa imposed a merger with HTS on rival Islamist groups in north-western Syria, thereby taking control of swathes of Idlib province that had been cleared of government troops.

In areas under its grip, HTS developed a civil administration and established a semblance of a state in Idlib province, while crushing its rebel rivals.

Throughout this process, HTS faced accusations from residents and human rights groups of brutal abuses against those who dared dissent, which the United Nations has classed as war crimes.

DAMASCUS — Syria's new leaders said Wednesday they had discussed "transitional justice" with the first Russian official delegation to visit Damascus since the toppling of long-term Moscow ally Bashar al-Assad. 

The visit came with Russia keen to secure the fate of two military bases in Syria and after Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that Moscow had suffered a strategic "defeat" in the Middle East following Assad's ouster.

"The new administration... stressed that restoring relations must address past mistakes, respect the will of the Syrian people and serve their interests," Syria's new government said in a statement.

The talks aimed to deliver "justice for the victims of the brutal war waged by the Assad regime", it added.

The Russian delegation included deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who is also Putin's special envoy on the Middle East and Africa, as well as Alexander Lavrentyev, the president's special envoy on Syria, Russia's RIA Novosti agency reported Tuesday.

It said it was "the first visit by Russian officials to Damascus" since Assad fled in December in the face of a lightning rebel advance across the country.

Moscow was one of Assad's key backers, intervening in Syria's civil war in 2015 in his favour. 

Assad and his family fled to Russia after being overthrown by Turkish-backed rebels formerly affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Russia is now seeking to secure the fate of its naval base in Tartus and its air base at Khmeimim ,  both on Syria's Mediterranean coast and Moscow's only military outposts outside the former Soviet Union,  with the new Syrian authorities.

A report by RT Arabic, a Russian state-controlled channel, said the delegation would meet Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and other officials. 

Sharaa leads an Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham [HTS] that is banned in Russia as a "terrorist" organisation.

The organisation is rooted in Al-Qaeda's Syria branch but has more recently adopted a more moderate tone.

RT Arabic reported that Bogdanov described the visit as aimed at strengthening historic ties based on shared interests, and underlined Russia's hopes for Syrian unity and independence.

RAMALLAH, Palestine — The Palestinian health ministry said on Wednesday that Israeli forces killed two people in separate overnight raids in the occupied West Bank, including one in Jenin, where the Israeli military is conducting a major offensive.

The Ramallah-based ministry said in a statement that a 25-year-old man it identified as Osama Abu Al Hija was killed late on Tuesday in Jenin "as a result of an Israeli air strike".

The Israeli military launched an intensive military assault in the Jenin area, now in its eighth day to root out Palestinian militant groups.

The Israeli military on Monday said it had "eliminated over 15 terrorists" and arrested 40 wanted individuals during the offensive.

Abu Al Hija is the 16th person killed during the operation which has caused many residents of Jenin refugee camp, the focus of the operation, to flee the area after the army urged citizens to evacuate last week.

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, the ministry of health also announced that a 23-year-old Palestinian man it identified as Ayman Naji was killed in the northern city of Tulkarem "after being shot" by Israeli forces.

The army told AFP it was looking into the details of both deaths.

Tulkarem, Jenin and their refugee camps are known as bastions of Palestinian militant groups, whose factions present themselves as a more effective alternative to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority in the fight against Israel.

Before the current Israeli operation, Jenin's refugee camp was the site of a long operation by the Palestinian Authority's security forces attempting to root out Palestinian militants affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.

Violence has soared throughout the West Bank since the war between Hamas and Israel broke out in Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 863 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

At least 29 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the territory over the same period, according to official Israeli figures.