|
The U.S. seizure of an Iranian ship threatens to upend the planned negotiations.
|
|
In a letter, the 11 senators questioned the defense secretary's decision to gut programs intended to protect civilians and said his orders endangered U.S. troops.
|
|
In urging victims to step forward, the secretive panel in charge of investigating charges of misconduct by members of Congress acknowledged limits that could allow offenses to go unaddressed.
|
|
The trend is fueled by their status as political celebrities in a deeply divided country.
|
|
The Strait of Hormuz is closed to shipping traffic after Iran once again shut off access to the key waterway over the weekend in retaliation for the ongoing U.S. blockade on Iranian ports. This comes as the U.S. Navy intercepted and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Sea of Oman on Sunday. Iran said the seizure violated the ceasefire reached earlier this month. Despite the escalation, President Trump announced a U.S. delegation is heading to Pakistan for a new round of peace talks. Iran's Foreign Ministry says Tehran has "no plans" to participate.
There has been a "gradual escalation" in hostilities between the U.S. and Iran since the last round of talks in Islamabad, says Iranian American analyst Vali Nasr, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Iran's leadership is "suspicious that President Trump was really using the talks in Pakistan as a cover for renewing war on Iran and that he was not serious about diplomacy."
|
|
Sudan marked four years since a bloody civil war began between its national army and the powerful Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group. The RSF revolted against the Sudanese Armed Forces after a 2021 military coup left it with diminished political power. The coup itself upended the civilian-led democratic revolution that ousted Sudan's longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Both the RSF and SAF have been accused of major war crimes since the conflict began, reportedly carrying out ethnic cleansing, systemic sexual violence and starvation tactics on the country's civilian population.
"This war is not just fought on the bodies of civilians by happenstance. It's not incidental to the fighting. It is precisely the point. This war is a war of succession between those who want to inherit the military security state," says Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair, "and they're doing so in large part not just by fighting each other, but also by diminishing as much as possible the revolutionary fervor and the calls for civilian democratic rule in Sudan." Khair adds that the burgeoning U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, separated from Sudan by the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea, threatens to deepen the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, as supply chain disruptions make agricultural production even harder and opportunities for resource exploitation incentivize other countries to turn the conflict into even more of a "proxy war."
|
RELATED ARTICLES | | |
|
