Conflict and arms

Analysts say US and Israeli attacks failed to weaken rebels and are only pushing the country to the brink of famine Late last month, a suspected US airstrike levelled four homes on the fringes of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, killing at least 11 people. A video posted by an eyewitness shows a frightened man carrying a young child on his back as they run through the darkness, warning people away, before the roar of a jet and the white flash of a blast. Local people quickly circulated notifications of funerals for the many killed in the airstrike on the outlying Thaqban neighbourhood, listing the whole families that had died in an instant. Continue reading...

Thousands have been displaced and conservation work halted as series of killings jeopardises decades of work in Niassa, one of Africa’s biggest protected areas One of Africa’s largest protected areas has been shaken by a series of attacks by Islamic State-linked extremists, which have left at least 10 people dead. Conservationists in Niassa reserve, Mozambique, say decades of work to rebuild populations of lions, elephants and other keystone species are being jeopardised, as conservation operations grind to a halt. Continue reading...

Terrified civilians are watching a fragile peace crumble as politicians are arrested and deadly bombings increase Night had already fallen on Juba, the capital of South Sudan, at about 7pm on 24 March, when an orange glow lit up the sky. It didn’t take long before news spread that the government had carried out an airstrike. For weeks, clashes had taken place in remote parts of the country between the army of the president, Salva Kiir, and opposition forces, but never that close to the capital. The target – an opposition base in Wunaliet, 15km west of the city – was consumed in flames. Just hours before the airstrike, Nicholas Haysom, the head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (Unmiss), had warned that the political and security situation in the country had deteriorated. “We are left with no other conclusion but to assess that South Sudan is teetering on the edge of a relapse into civil war,” he told a press briefing. Continue reading...

After years of civil war and precarious peace, Covid-19 and the Beirut explosions of 2020 once again plunged Lebanon into crisis. But photographer Rania Matar has found inspiration for her project Where Do I Go? in the country’s women. ‘Instead of focusing on destruction, I chose to focus on their majestic presence, their creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience,’ she says Continue reading...

On 11 April Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries attacked the country’s largest displacement camp. The extent of the brutality remains unclear, but some accounts are now emerging Once they had massed on the perimeter of Sudan’s Zamzam camp, the Rapid Support Forces began the onslaught – shelling, firing from anti-aircraft guns mounted on pickup trucks and storming into the camp chanting racial slurs as they fired on their victims. An estimated 700,000 people had sought refuge in Zamzam, Sudan’s largest displacement camp, but last weekend they were forced to seek cover and plot the best escape route. Most had fled these fighters before. Continue reading...

Amid the ruins and with fuel scarce, the animals provide vital transport for the injured as well as goods and belongings It felt like an “earthquake from the sky” when an Israeli airstrike hit the clinic Dr Saif Alden had left just minutes earlier. Alden had been treating animals hurt and abandoned amid Gaza’s destruction. They survived but the equipment and medication the mobile clinic needed to function was destroyed. Still, the team saw it as a setback, not a defeat. Alden has spent the month since the airstrike traversing Gaza to scavenge the tools needed to resume operations. Continue reading...

As crucial London peace talks set to begin, report seen by the Guardian raises questions over ‘multiple’ flights into bases in Chad Pressure is mounting on the United Arab Emirates over its presence at a crucial conference in London aimed at stopping the war in Sudan after a leaked confidential UN report raised fresh questions over the UAE’s role in the devastating conflict. The UAE has been accused of secretly supplying weapons to Sudanese paramilitaries via neighbouring Chad, a charge it has steadfastly denied. Continue reading...

Families of those living in the vast displacement camp wait for news from Darfur amid reports of hundreds killed by paramilitary RSF Sudan’s information blackout has left relatives of those in Sudan’s Zamzam camp for those displaced by the war struggling for news of their safety after it was overrun by militiamen at the weekend. As leaders across the globe prepared to meet for peace talks in London to pressure the backers of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army to agree a ceasefire, the RSF launched a deadly assault, seizing Zamzam after weeks of tightening its siege. Continue reading...

After dysentery killed their mother and the civil war came to their home in Omdurman, Haroun and his young siblings were forced to set off on an epic quest to reach El Geneina They were huddled together on the bare floor of an abandoned house – four orphans who had travelled nearly 1,000 miles after having to flee from their home in the city when Sudan’s brutal civil war erupted. Having escaped ferocious fighting around Omdurman, twin city of the capital, Khartoum, they had arrived in Darfur, the sprawling region in western Sudan that has become synonymous with ethnic cleansing, massacres of civilians and widespread gang-rape and sexual violence during the ongoing conflict between Sudan’s armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Continue reading...

Death of well-known Khartoum businessman Alwaleed Abdeen days after his release from an RSF camp prompts wave of mourning In the last video of Alwaleed Abdeen, taken in the school turned prison in which he had been held for six months, he was so emaciated that friends could barely recognise him – even when he spoke his name to the camera held by his rescuers. Lying on a dirty floor as he spoke, the 35-year-old’s bones were visible through his skin after months of detention and torture at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, which controlled most of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum until late March. Continue reading...

US and Europe criticised by head of Norwegian Refugee Council for ‘neglect’ of people living ‘subhuman’ existence World leaders should be ashamed of their neglect of people whose lives were “hanging by a thread” at a time of surging violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the international charity leader Jan Egeland has said. In a stinging attack on aid cuts and the “nationalistic winds” blowing across Europe and the US, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s head told the Guardian how people were living out in the open, in overcrowded, unsanitary displacement encampments around the city of Goma, where 1.2 million people have had to flee from their homes as the M23 rebels advanced through the DRC’s North and South Kivu provinces. Continue reading...

Only a few statues remain, with thousands of priceless artefacts from Nubian and Kushite kingdoms missing Videos of Sudan’s national museum showing empty rooms, piles of rubble and broken artefacts posted on social media after the Sudanese army recaptured the area from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in recent days show the extent of looting of the country’s antiquities. Fears of looting in the museum were first raised in June 2023 and a year later satellite images emerged of trucks loaded with artefacts leaving the building, according to museum officials. But last week, as the RSF were driven out of Khartoum after two years of war, the full extent of the theft became apparent. Continue reading...

The country’s drawn out conflict has seen children recruited as soldiers on all sides. At the age of 18, Anina is a seasoned fighter with a feared reputation in her all-male resistance unit Photographs by Valeria Mongelli Anina is, in many ways, a typical teenager. She loves her boyfriend, cartoons and football – she supports Manchester City. Until recently, TikTok dancing brightened her days. “Any kind of dancing,” she says. When the Guardian met her she was about to turn 18 and was on crutches, her ankle twisted during a scramble to escape a Myanmar military airstrike. A soldier of the Chin militia, the four years of civil war against the ruling junta have consumed much of Anina’s adolescence. Continue reading...

Tigray’s interim leader flees as rival faction seizes control, while Ethiopian tanks and troops move to border of Eritrea Aregawi was building a tour-guiding business when war struck Ethiopia’s Tigray region in 2020. He spent the next two years fighting on the frontline. Now he is among those who fear Tigray is on the brink of conflict once more. “We don’t want to become a battleground, but it seems like war is near, maybe even inevitable,” he said. Continue reading...

Children particularly vulnerable to unexploded war remnants scattered throughout country as more than a million people return More than 200 people, including women and children, have been killed in Syria in incidents involving war remnants in the three months since the fall of the Assad regime, as bomb disposal experts warn that “no area in Syria is safe”. The number of casualties has risen as approximately 1.2 million people return to their former homes and lands after being displaced by the country’s brutal civil war. Continue reading...

An investigation into the DRC’s use of hundreds of hired Romanian fighters reveals how a disorganised operation with untrained recruits became a deadly ‘circus’ In January, after the two-year siege of the Congolese city of Goma ended with victory for the M23 rebels and Rwandan troops, an ill-assorted group of nearly 300 white mercenaries were lined up to have their humiliating defeat televised. “You must not joke with us,” barked Willy Ngoma, the M23’s military spokesperson, at one man he’d ordered to sit on the ground with his hands clasped behind his head. Continue reading...