A Sudanese paramilitary group accused of killing thousands of unarmed civilians in an ethnically motivated massacre has agreed to a truce.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is facing mounting criticism over apparent war crimes committed by its fighters in the city of El Fasher last month, said it had agreed to a “humanitarian ceasefire” put forward by the quad countries of the US, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Officials involved in ceasefire discussions say the agreement is for a three-month truce across Sudan. However, the development may be viewed by some as an attempt by the RSF to deflect attention from the El Fasher allegations.

Hours before news emerged that the group had agreed to a ceasefire, satellite images appeared to show its recruits hiding bodies in mass graves.

The ceasefire agreement is thought to have involved the RSF’s principal backer, the UAE, which has faced criticism for allegedly supplying weapons and mercenaries used in the capture of El Fasher.

The UAE denies the claims despite evidence being presented in UN reports and elsewhere.

The RSF’s decision to accept the truce is unlikely to end its 30-month war against Sudan’s army. Earlier this week, the military-aligned government indicated it would carry on fighting after an internal meeting on a US ceasefire proposal.

The ceasefire announcement arrived amid more grim updates from Darfur, the vast region of west Sudan where El Fasher is located.

A report from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which is monitoring war crimes in El Fasher, said the RSF appeared to be conducting systematic body disposal, with mass graves being dug in trenches and pits.

The extent of the massacre is not clear, although the activist group Avaaz says its Sudan team believes “tens of thousands of civilians” have been slaughtered in the city.

Prosecutors at the international criminal court said on Monday they were collecting evidence of alleged mass killings, rapes and other crimes in El Fasher. Witnesses have reported RSF fighters going house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults. According to the World Health Organization, gunmen killed at least 460 people at a hospital and abducted doctors and nurses.

Efforts are being made to bring the RSF and army together for talks in Saudi Arabia aimed at a permanent peace deal.

South Africa is launching an investigation into how 17 of its citizens ended up in the war-torn region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

The office of the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said it had received distress calls from 17 men, aged between 20 and 39, who had been “lured to join mercenary forces involved in the Ukraine-Russia war under the pretext of lucrative employment contracts” and were now requesting assistance to return home.

The discovery has drawn attention to the role that foreign fighters are playing in the war as it drags towards its fourth anniversary with a mounting death toll on both sides.

It is not clear which side the men were fighting for, although their presence in Donbas, a region of Ukraine that is largely occupied by Russia, as well as the reference to them having been lured by the promise of financial reward strongly suggests they were enlisted by Russia.

Both sides have enlisted foreign fighters, though Russia has done so on a far larger scale, often relying on coercion and deception.

There have been numerous reports of Russian authorities and murky intermediaries forcing or deceiving African nationals, as well as recruits from Nepal, Syria, and Cuba, into fighting in Ukraine, often after luring them with false promises of lucrative non-military jobs advertised on social media.

In September, the Ukrainian military released a video of a captured Kenyan fighter who said he had been tricked into fighting for Russia.

Last month, the Center for Countering Disinformation, an agency of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, said Russia was launching a mercenary recruitment campaign in south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Russia is also supported by the presence of thousands of North Korean soldiers sent by Pyongyang to aid Moscow’s war effort, the only state-backed foreign forces to have joined the war. Hundreds of North Koreans are estimated to have died in the fighting.

Ukraine has encouraged foreign nationals to enlist in its armed forces, with many volunteers from Europe and the US joining units such as the International Legion. More recently, Ukraine has recruited about 2,000 Colombian nationals as contract soldiers to help fill manpower gaps nearly four years into the war.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst, said: “The role of foreign fighters on both the Ukrainian and Russian side has somewhat increased over the last two years.”

For Ukraine, even an additional influx of foreign fighters would not be able to address its manpower shortage, Gady said, which “remains the biggest impediment in the Ukrainian war effort”.

Jethro Norman, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said the numbers of foreign fighters were “marginal on both sides”. “But symbolically, they punch far above their weight, especially in propaganda and recruitment narratives,” Norman said.

“Early in the war, foreign volunteers carried significant propaganda value, signalling international solidarity with Ukraine. Numbers appear to have declined since, but the idea of foreign fighters continues to feature prominently in social media, recruitment videos and Russian disinformation.”

Chinese social media is awash with recruitment videos for the Russian army, with influencers touting the glamour, riches and masculine kudos that supposedly come with joining the war. Beijing says it does not support its citizens getting involved in the conflict, but it allows the videos to circulate on China’s otherwise tightly controlled internet.

Ukraine denies it recruits mercenaries but says it allows foreign volunteers to become part of its armed forces.

The US is ending temporary deportation protections for South Sudanese nationals, which for more than a decade allowed people from the east African country to stay in the US after escaping conflict.

In a notice published on Wednesday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said conditions in South Sudan no longer met the statutory requirements for temporary protected status. The agency also said that South Sudanese nationals with status through the programme have 60 days to leave the US before facing deportation from January.

“Based on the department’s review, the secretary has determined the situation in South Sudan no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning South Sudanese nationals,” the notice says.

In a statement, USCIS said South Sudanese nationals who use the Customs and Border Protection mobile app to report their departure could receive “a complimentary plane ticket, a $1,000 exit bonus, and potential future opportunities for legal immigration”.

Temporary protected status gives foreign nationals access to work permits and allows them to temporarily live and work legally in the US when their home countries are unsafe to return to.

South Sudan’s designation, which was first authorised in the Barack Obama administration in 2011 due to armed conflict, expired on Monday after many extensions.

The designation had so far been approved for about 232 people from the country.

The termination is the latest effort by the Trump administration to remove the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the US. The government has also ended protections for countries including Cameroon, Haiti and Nepal.

The revocations have raised fears for the safety of the immigrants, with critics saying they may return to dangerous conditions.

South Sudan has faced on-and-off conflict since its independence, that has led to huge numbers of killings and mass displacement.

In 2013, the country descended into a civil war that killed more than 400,000 people and displaced nearly half the country’s population. A peace agreement in 2018 ended the fighting but observers say recent developments, including the arrest and prosecution of vice-president Riek Machar, risk plunging the country into conflict again.

Last week, the UN’s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan warned that a mix of political power struggles, ethnic tensions and local grievances threatened a renewed slide into full-scale fighting.

Ugandans reacted with joy and of hope to the news that Kampala-born Zohran Mamdani had been elected mayor of New York City, amid a stormy democratic and rights environment in east Africa.

Mamdani, who was born in Uganda 34 years ago to a family of Indian origin, on Tuesday defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa to become the city’s first Muslim mayor and the first of south Asian heritage.

He has lived in the US since he was seven years old. In his 20s, under the stage name Young Cardamom, he made music with Ugandan rapper HAB.

Many in Uganda had not heard of Mamdani before the election win or that a Ugandan had become the youngest mayor of New York City in more than a century.

But there was excitement and pride at Makerere University in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, where Mamdani’s father taught until a few years ago.

“Seeing Zohran up there, I feel like I can also make it,” psychology student Anthony Kirabo told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“It makes me feel good and proud of my country because it shows that Uganda can produce some good leaders,” said the 22-year-old, adding that he hoped it might encourage more tourists to come to the east African country.

Mamdani’s win comes at a trying period for democracy in east Africa, where observers describe growing repression and violation of human rights in some countries.

Uganda’s neighbour Tanzania is reeling from bloody election violence last week in which hundreds of people were reported to have been killed in demonstrations against what protesters said was the stifling of the opposition after the exclusion of key candidates from the presidential ballot.

Some hoped Mamdani’s victory would provide a lesson for Ugandan leaders as the country readies itself for a potentially fraught general election in January, with Yoweri Museveni, the president who has ruled the country for 39 years, seeking to extend his grip on power into a seventh term.

Developments in the run-up, including the months-long detention of opposition politician Kizza Besigye, the passage of a bill to try civilians in military court and the abduction of two Kenyan rights activists, have turned the spotlight on what critics deem intolerance and authoritarianism by Museveni’s administration.

Joseph Sendagire, a 28-year-old procurement officer, told AFP he hoped Uganda would “borrow a leaf” from New York City’s mayoral election.

“Uganda should embrace a culture of free and fair elections, allow candidates to compete for whatever post we want in a fair manner, treat them equally, and then at the end of the day, may the best candidate win,” he said.

Robert Kabushenga, a retired media executive who is friendly with the Mamdani family, told the Associated Press that the win offers “a beacon of hope” for embattled activists and others in Uganda. The lesson is that “we should allow young people the opportunity to shape, and participate in, politics in a meaningful way,” he said.

Bobi Wine, Museveni’s main challenger, sent “hearty congratulations” to Mamdani.

“From Uganda, we celebrate and draw strength from your example as we work to build a country where every citizen can realize their grandest dreams regardless of means and background,” the 43-year-old wrote on X.

Joel Ssenyonyi, the leader of the opposition leader in the Ugandan parliament, told the AP he sees Mamdani’s victory as an inspiring political shift but somehow too distant for many Africans at home.

“It’s a big encouragement even to us here in Uganda that it’s possible,” said Ssenyonyi. “But we have a long way to get there.”

Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press contributed reporting

A Libyan general wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity has been arrested in Tripoli.

Osama Almasri Najim, the former chief of Libya’s judicial police, was arrested over allegations of torturing prisoners, leading to the death of one, at Tripoli’s main prison, Libya’s prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday.

The Italian government came under fire in January after Najim was arrested in the northern city of Turin on the ICC warrant only to be released two days later and flown back to Tripoli on an Italian air force plane.

In a statement, Libya’s prosecutors’ office said that as it had pursued the ICC’s allegations, it had gathered additional information about “human rights violations against inmates at Tripoli’s main prison, who reported being subjected to torture and cruel, degrading treatment”.

Najim had been questioned about the alleged abuse against 10 prisoners and the death of one, the statement said. The arrest was made “given that sufficient evidence was established to support the charges”, the statement added.

Najim is wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as alleged rape and murder.

He was arrested in Turin after attending a football match before being released and repatriated. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said he had been quickly repatriated because he was considered a risk to Italy’s national security.

Critics accused her administration of pandering to Libya because of its reliance on the north African country to stem the flow of migration towards Italy’s southern shores.

The ICC said Italy had failed in its obligations under the Rome statute, the court’s founding treaty, to execute the warrant and surrender Najim while he was on Italian territory.

The case prompted Rome prosecutors to investigate Meloni and three other government officials on suspicion of aiding and abetting a crime and embezzlement of public funds over use of the air force jet, although they were later cleared.

In May, Libya accepted the authority of the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes in the country despite not being party to the Rome statute.

Italian opposition parties reacted swiftly to news of Najim’s arrest, with the former prime minister and leader of the Five Star Movement Giuseppe Conte saying it was “a humiliation for the Meloni government”.

Elly Schlein, leader of the Democratic party, said: “The Libyan authorities ordered Almasri’s arrest on charges of torture and murder … the same criminal that [the Italian government] freed and escorted home on a government flight. This is a disgrace at an international level for which our government must apologise to Italians.”

Antonella Forattini, a Democratic party politician, said it was “a stain on our institutions and Italy’s image around the world”. She added: “Libya is now demonstrating that it is ahead of our country in defending justice and legality.”

The case put the spotlight on a controversial pact between Italy and Libya, signed in 2017 and renewed every three years. The deal, approved by the European Council, involves Italy funding and equipping the Libyan coastguard to prevent boats of refugees leaving the north African country. Humanitarian groups have criticised it for pushing people back to detention camps, where they face torture and other abuses.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres has said the war in Sudan is spiralling out of control as he called for a halt to the fighting and an end to the violence.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which are reportedly backed by the United Arab Emirates, seized El Fasher in Darfur last week after a near 18-month siege. Some of its soldiers have posted videos of civilians being shot, including in the town’s maternity hospital.

The two-year civil war between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the RSF has created what the UN has described as one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. More than 150,000 people have been killed and more than 14 million displaced from their homes.

Prosecutors at the international criminal court said on Monday that they were collecting evidence of alleged mass killings, rape and other crimes in El Fasher.

Guterres urged the warring parties to “come to the negotiating table, bring an end to this nightmare of violence - now”.

“The horrifying crisis in Sudan ... is spiralling out of control,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the World Summit for Social Development in Qatar.

“El Fasher and the surrounding areas in North Darfur have been an epicentre of suffering, hunger, violence and displacement,” he said.

“And since the Rapid Support Forces entered El Fasher last weekend, the situation is growing worse by the day,. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped by this siege. People are dying of malnutrition, disease and violence.”

His call at the Doha conference came as the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) based in Port Sudan discussed whether to support a US-proposed truce, or to insist any ceasefire be dependent on the RSF withdrawing from Sudan’s cities, including El Fasher.

The fall of El Fasher gives the RSF control of all five state capitals in Darfur, raising fears that Sudan could effectively be partitioned along an east-west axis, but the Sudanese ambassador to the UK, Babikir Elamin, said there was little support for partition in Darfur itself.

He said the priority was not a ceasefire, but action to end the massacres in El Fasher.

The US has been trying since September to persuade the two sides to back a peace plan agreed by Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia that would start with a three-month humanitarian pause, followed by a permanent ceasefire that would trigger a nine-month transition to a civilian-led government.

Washington is hoping that with the two-year civil war finally attracting greater worldwide attention, the publicity may force the warring parties and their external supporters to relent on their maximalist positions.

Initial signs from a lengthy SAF security and defence council meeting, however, are that there is strong resistance to the US plan developed by Donald Trump’s envoy to Africa, Massad Boulos.

Some SAF sources, admitting they were under new pressure from Egypt to accept a ceasefire, countered with a call for the RSF to be confined to camps outside cities. It is not clear how such RSF withdrawals could be enforced.

Speaking in London, Elamin called on Washington to designate the RSF a terrorist organisation by the US and for a ban on all arms sales to the UAE.

The UAE denies supplying weapons to the RSF.

“The RSF are now openly and publicly vowing to commit yet further crimes in cities and parts of the country. They have named the cities, the communities and the ethnic groups they are targeting,” Elamin said.

“Parts of the country that have never witnessed violence are now threatened. They are proudly making videos of themselves murdering innocent civilians. Some of them admit they have lost count of the number of people they have killed.”

He pointed out that as the SAF leadership had been exploring the potential US peace plan, the RSF were attacking El Fasher.

“What is the reason for getting engaged in talks while they are still committing these kind of atrocities,” he said. “Before we can discuss the kind of proposal, the international community should show some kind of seriousness in dealing with these atrocities that are still taking place in El Fasher.

“The priority now must be to stop the atrocities and this kind of genocide.”

A British teenager whose parents left him in Ghana, fearing he was at risk from “gang culture” in the UK, should stay there until at least the end of his GCSE exams, a judge sitting at London’s high court has ruled.

The boy took legal action against his parents, seeking a court order that would force his return, after they enrolled him in a boarding school and arranged for him to live with extended family in Ghana without telling him.

But after the boy’s parents told the court they did not want him to return until after his exams and did not believe they could keep him safe in England, his legal efforts to force an immediate return failed.

His parents were born in Ghana but he was born in England and “regards himself as an outsider” in the West African country, a social worker told the wardship proceedings.

In a judgment published on Tuesday, Mrs Justice Theis ruled that while the boy, who can be identified only as ‘S’ for legal reasons, had been “tricked”, she concluded he “should remain living in Ghana with the aim of setting out a roadmap and taking the necessary steps for ‘S’ to return here after completing his GCSEs.”

He had travelled from his home in England to visit relatives in Ghana in March 2024 with his parents and a sibling, but his family returned in April without him. His mother and father had become “increasingly concerned” for his safety in the year prior, fearing he was “becoming involved in the gang culture which was prevalent in the area”.

Videos, photos and messages, which made them fear he was involved in theft, fraud and possessing knives, had been found on his phone by his parents, while his mother had found a kitchen knife hidden at the home.

The judge said since his parents did not want him to return home soon, the risk of relationship breakdown would be “very high” if he did, with the likelihood he would be exposed to “the very serious risks” they had tried to protect him from.

Before being taken to Ghana, the boy had become “secretive and dishonest about his whereabouts and possessions,” with his parents struggling to manage “deteriorating behaviour” that was “influenced by peer pressure”.

His mother still “considers him at risk of serious physical harm or death” if he returns, her barrister, Michael Gration, KC told a hearing last month.

In her judgment, Mrs Justice Theis said while there was “very real concern” about the effect of him remaining in a country where he felt abandoned, he had “more of an understanding of why his parents took the steps they did”.

She added that while she was “acutely aware” the conclusion did not accord with his wishes and “how that will feel for him”, he had the “talent, ability and intelligence to make this work” and the family shared the “common aim” for him to return eventually.

In a statement, the boy’s father, who has been visiting him in Ghana, said: ‘I love [S] very much. However, I do not believe I can ensure [his] safety if he remains in England.

“This is not a reflection of a lack of love or care but rather a realistic assessment of the risks involved. Ghana is currently the safest and most suitable place for him.”

The United Arab Emirates’ diplomatic machine is for the first time admitting to mistakes in its Sudan policy after suffering reputational damage over its support for the Rapid Support Forces, the Sudanese paramilitary group that has carried out mass killings in El Fasher since it captured the city late last month.

Speaking in Bahrain on Sunday, Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s senior diplomatic envoy, said the UAE and others had been wrong not to impose sanctions on the instigators of the 2021 coup – jointly led by the RSF and the army – that overthrew Sudan’s transitional civilian government.

“We all made a mistake when the two generals who are fighting the civil war today overthrew the civilian government,” Gargash said. “That was, looking back, a critical mistake. We should have put our foot down collectively. We did not call it a coup.”

It is a striking reversal. The UAE had actively undermined the idea of a strong civilian democratic government in Sudan in the aftermath of the popular uprising that led to the downfall of the 30-year, Islamist-aligned dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.

Throughout 2019, “in the interests of a stable transition”, the UAE and Saudi Arabia tried to enhance the role of the military and marginalise civilian rule, including by promoting the idea that the RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, should be in charge of economic policy.

In a piece of bailout diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis quickly agreed a $3bn loan to the transitional military council that initially tried to succeed Bashir. In late 2019, when the civilian side of the government had the upper hand, further payouts from the loan were stopped.

Jonas Horner, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote that the loss of the loan not only critically undermined the civilian government but also led directly to the coup in 2021, followed by the civil war that broke out between the army and the RSF in 2023.

“The fate of the transitional government would likely have been dramatically different had the Gulf backed them with the billions they had pledged to the military,” Horner wrote.

Finger of blame

Four years on from the coup, the Gargash admission is a sign that in public at least the UAE acknowledges that its Sudan policy has gone wrong and that it must distance itself from the RSF, the force it so nurtured.

That the Emiratis covertly armed the RSF is clear from evidence compiled by the UN, independent experts and reporters, even though the UAE denies it. In January, the Biden administration pointed the finger of blame when it imposed sanctions on Hemedti and seven UAE-based companies funding him.

Sudanese civilian groups warned for more than 18 months that the RSF would commit ethnically targeted mass killings if it took El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. That placed a special obligation on the UAE, the country with the greatest ability to restrain Hemedti. Although the UAE has condemned the atrocities in El Fasher, it also put the blame for what happened on the army’s failure to compromise.

The UAE’s response to international criticism is to insist that it is being traduced and that it is the victim of a disinformation campaign fuelled by Islamists inside the Sudanese army and by leftwing NGOs long opposed to the Gulf state.

It insists it wants a transition back to a civilian-led Sudanese government, and says both the RSF and the army have disqualified themselves from shaping Sudan’s future.

Figures such as the UAE foreign affairs minister, Lana Nusseibeh, say the country is not the primary sponsor of the war but rather a neutral party seeking to mediate a return to the civilian, Islamist-free rule that started with the 2019 uprising and ended with the 2021 coup.

Yasmine Ahmed, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, said a minimum test of the UAE’s sincerity about breaking with the RSF would be pro-active cooperation with the UN expert panel policing the arms embargo on Sudan.

As Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive US special envoys on Sudan, puts it: “What we see is a complete and total denial by the UAE authorities they have any role or involvement whatsoever in this conflict. Until we can agree on a basic set of facts about what is happening and who is driving it, it is going to be very difficult to resolve.”

What happens next will also depend on whether the UAE thinks that the RSF – and its tainting brutality – are still indispensable to its two keys goals in Sudan: accessing resources and deterring the influence of Islamism, the belief that Islam is innately political and that it should influence political systems. The UAE in particular regards the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to security in the region.

Natural resources

The UAE is just one of the Gulf states to have been drawn to Sudan’s natural resources for decades. Jaafar Nimeiri, Sudan’s president from 1969 to 1985, promised that in return for Gulf investment Sudan could become the breadbasket of the Arab world, as well as a source of a badly needed and sometimes highly educated workforce.

Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all responded, each arriving with different political agendas. Saudi Arabia and the UAE both made multibillion-dollar agricultural investments in Sudan to secure food for their populations, first under Nimieri and then through the authoritarian rule of Bashir, who seized power in 1989 and worked in alliance with Islamists.

The fact that Bashir came to be heavily sanctioned by the US proved little constraint as the Gulf states poured money into Sudan. “For these young, wealthy monarchies – which import upwards of 80% of all the food they consume – securing access to Sudan’s agriculture, livestock and mineral resources is a virtually existential concern,” said Horner, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Sudan’s strategic location on the Red Sea made it highly attractive place for the UAE to build ports, and in December 2022 the state-owned Abu Dhabi Ports Group and Invictus Investment signed a $6bn deal to invest in the Abu Amama port, 125 miles north of Port Sudan. The contract has since been cancelled by Sudan’s de factor leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, but the UAE will be keen to revive the scheme under any successor.

Emirati banks hold stakes in Bank of Khartoum, the largest commercial bank in Sudan, whose digital platform facilitates money transfers for millions of displaced Sudanese and public institutions. However, it is Sudan’s gold reserves that are of particular importance, not just to the RSF and the army, which operate as businesses as much as fighting forces, but also to the UAE.

Gold represents about 49% of Sudan’s exports. In February, the state-owned Sudan Mineral Resources Company said gold production in army-controlled areas reached 74 tonnes in 2024, up from 41.8 tonnes in 2022. The Central Bank of Sudan reported that in 2024 almost 97% of official gold exports (from army-held areas) went to the UAE, earning $1.52bn.

Official exports are a drop in the ocean, however. An estimated 90% of Sudan’s gold production, amounting to approximately $13.4bn in illicit trade, is smuggled out of the country, often passing through transit routes in Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan before reaching the UAE.

In a report last month for Chatham House, Ahmed Soliman and Dr Suliman Baldo wrote: “The UAE continues to benefit from Sudan’s conflict gold, as the enforcement of restrictions on artisanal gold imports from countries where there is war or where gold is controlled by armed groups remains limited.”

The UAE’s conduit is Hemedti, with whom they forged a special relationship when he agreed to send RSF troops to Yemen in support of Emirati and Saudi forces fighting the Houthis. He owns many of the mines in Darfur through his family firm Algunade.

Politics, as well as profit, also drive the Emirati interest. As with its parallel interventions in eastern Libya and south Yemen, the UAE wants to contest the Islamism with which Bashir was allied.

Collective pressure

Now that its support for the RSF seems so perilous reputationally, there is an onus on the UAE to contribute to a resolution of the crisis.

The US hopes the solution lies in Sudan’s two key external players, the UAE and Egypt, which backs the army and wants keep the conflict within Sudan’s border, finally agreeing they will collectively press their proxies into a ceasefire. The statement agreed by the US, Saudi, Egypt and UAE – four countries engaged in mediation efforts collectively known as the Quad – on 12 September was a breakthrough in that regard in that it set out a course for a three-month humanitarian truce, leading to a permanent ceasefire, and within nine months the establishment of an independent, civilian-led government with broad-based legitimacy and accountability.

It added: “Sudan’s future governance is for the Sudanese people to decide through an inclusive and transparent transition process, not controlled by any warring party.”

One other passage in the joint statement protected UAE interests: “Sudan’s future cannot be dictated by violent extremist groups part of, or evidently linked to, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose destabilising influence has fuelled violence and instability across the region.”

Talks on these proposals in Washington – so far excluding Sudanese civilians – have not yet borne fruit, suggesting it may yet require more senior US officials to engage before the protagonists of Sudan’s civil war and their supporters accept that further fighting offers only more misery.

Nigeria-set drama My Father’s Shadow is the leading contender at this year’s British independent film awards (Bifas), after it scooped 12 nominations, including best British independent film, best director for Akinola Davies Jr, and best screenplay for Davies’s brother Wale. The film came out ahead of Pillion, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s coming-of-age relationship story, which got 10 nominations, and biopic I Swear, which got nine.

My Father’s Shadow, which stars Sope Dirisu and is Davies’s debut feature as a director, premiered at the Cannes film festival to admiring reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives”. The film is yet to be released in the UK, but has already come out in Nigeria.

Pillion, likewise, had a successful premiere at Cannes in May, with Bradshaw calling it “an intensely English story of romance, devotion and loss from first-time feature director Harry Lighton, who has created something funny and touching and alarming – like a cross between Alan Bennett and Tom of Finland with perhaps a tiny smidgen of what could be called a BDSM Wallace and Gromit”. Due for UK release later in November, it is up for best British independent film, best director for Lighton and best lead performance for Harry Melling.

I Swear is already in cinemas, having been released in October. A life story of Tourette syndrome activist John Davidson, the film is likewise up for best British indepependent film, best director for Kirk Jones, and best lead performance for Robert Aramayo.

The nominations also include, for the first time, an award for cinema of the year, which is voted on by the public. The contenders include the Depot in Lewes, the Magic Lantern in Tywyn, Montrose Playhouse, Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast and the Watershed in Bristol.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London on 30 November.

More than 36,000 people have fled Sudan’s Kordofan region east of Darfur since Saturday, the UN’s migration agency has said, a week after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces took control of the city of El Fasher.

The strategic central area between the country’s Darfur provinces and the Khartoum-Riverine region that includes the capital to the east, has in recent weeks become the latest battleground in the two-year civil war between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the paramilitary group.

An estimated 36,825 people fled five localities in North Kordofan state between 26 October – the day El Fasher fell to RSF – and 31 October, the International Organization for Migration said late on Sunday.

The people, most on foot, headed to Tawila, a town west of El Fasher that is sheltering more than 652,000 displaced people, the UN said.

Residents of North Kordofan on Monday reported a heavy surge in both RSF and army presence across towns and villages in the state.

Both forces are vying for El Obeid, the North Kordofan state capital and a key logistics and command hub that links Darfur to Khartoum, which also hosts an airport.

“Today, all our forces have converged on the Bara front here,” an RSF member said in a video shared by the RSF late on Sunday, referring to a city north of El Obeid. RSF claimed control of Bara last week.

Suleiman Babiker, a resident of Um Smeima, west of El Obeid, told Agence France-Presse that the number of RSF vehicles had increased since the group’s capture of El Fasher. “We stopped going to our farms, afraid of clashes,” he said.

Another resident, requesting anonymity for security reasons, also said “there has been a big increase in army vehicles and weapons west and south of El Obeid” over the past two weeks.

Martha Pobee, assistant UN secretary general for Africa, raised the alarm last week about “large-scale atrocities” and “ethnically motivated reprisals” by RSF in Bara.

She warned of patterns echoing those in Darfur, where RSF fighters have been accused of mass killings, sexual violence and abductions against non-Arab ethnic groups after the fall of El Fasher.

Pope Leo on Sunday appealed for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors in Sudan, saying attacks on civilians and hindrances to humanitarian aid “are causing unacceptable suffering”.

Sudan’s ambassador to Egypt, Imadeldin Mustafa Adawi, on Sunday accused RSF of carrying out war crimes in El Fasher. He said the Sudanese government would not negotiate with the paramilitary group and urged the international community to designate it as a terrorist organisation.

For months, militiamen on the perimeters of El Fasher have asked those few who managed to escape the besieged Sudanese city whether Mohamed Khamis Douda was still inside. They shared videos threatening to kill him, which, as they hoped, made their way to the activist.

Even as the hunger and fear of living under siege and bombardment made him desperate to leave, Douda remained inside El Fasher, constantly working to let the outside world know what was happening to the people there. Then, on Sunday 26 October, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces overran the city and it was too late. His friends and family have confirmed to the Guardian that Douda has been killed.

As the official spokesperson for Zamzam, the displacement camp in Sudan’s Darfur region, Douda found himself at the centre of the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe. Injured during the RSF’s massacre there in April in which hundreds of civilians were killed, he had to be carried to the relative safety of nearby El Fasher.

Since then, Douda had been in regular contact with the Guardian, describing daily survival in a place that for months has seemed doomed to fall to the RSF.

In the lead up to the assault on Sunday, the RSF had squeezed El Fasher’s inhabitants by throttling supplies of food, water and medicine, and building earthen barriers tocontrol who moved in and out.

These are some of the accounts Douda shared with the Guardian:

Monday 4 August

I awake each morning tired from the efforts of the previous day. Our first struggle is the merciless hunger and the second is the constant artillery shelling.

Even the glow of a cigarette can alert the drones that fly overhead, so once we finish our meals there is nothing to do but sit in silence, listening to the sound of the buzzing drone and the explosions.

This is our daily life, we live in hope that this nightmare will one day end.

In the months leading to El Fasher’s fall, Douda said it felt as if he was being followed by drones. Many nights were spent inside a crude bomb shelter made from a metal container buried in the ground. He spent the nights in silence and darkness, afraid of the drones and explosions he could hear around him.

Each day started with the search for food. The goal was always to try to find some millet or sorghum flour but as food dwindled, he inevitably had to rely on ombaz – a residue left over from the production of crushing peanuts for oil production. It was usually fed to animals but in El Fasher people were grinding it down and boiling it into an aseeda – the Sudanese staple food usually made from grains such as sorghum or wheat. By the end, Douda said people were eating cattle hides because even the ombaz had run out.

He balanced his struggle for survival with trying to support those around him. With friends he helped to deliver food or water and he documented rights abuses while also organising burials for the dead. He believed it was this that attracted the ire of the RSF, when he shared information about Colombian mercenaries fighting on the peripheries of El Fasher.

Monday 11 August

I awoke to the sounds of explosions in the northern part of the city, near the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people. Then I heard a roar from the south-east. I looked up and saw two drones.

I rushed to nearby homes and told them to take shelter. We spent the day in silence, listening to the shelling and machine guns for more than six hours before finally the good news came that the RSF had been expelled. There are 60 martyrs and 100 injured.

I went with my friend Ahmed to visit the wounded – there were countless women and children hit by stray bullets. We helped the teams supporting them and organising the burials for the dead.

On our way home I suggested to my friend that we leave the city. He went silent, then showed me videos on his phone of young men being tortured by the RSF between El Fasher and the Tawila area after they had tried to leave El Fasher.

“Then it’s better for us to stay here until the end,” I said.

Douda’s phone often went silent for long periods, but each time he would return with the latest updates from the city. In September, it seemed El Fasher was going to fall when the RSF carried out a heavy attack on the Abu Shouk and Daraja Oula areas, including the killing of dozens while they prayed in a mosque.

When he came back online, Douda said people could no longer move and tried to spend their days inside their makeshift bomb shelters but the unbearable heat made it difficult to remain there.

Wednesday 24 September

I cannot leave the house any more, even to get some food. The people who ran the community kitchens, to feed people, they cannot leave either. Whenever someone moves, the drones attack.

I spend all my time thinking about how I can escape the city but as much as I try, I cannot work out how. I hear that the RSF are trying to find me because I speak out against them. When they find people leaving the city they show them my picture and ask if I am still here.

Every day, the RSF gets closer and they are ready to kill everyone in El Fasher. The world needs to act quickly.

Despite Douda’s regular updates through Facebook and directly to media, nothing changed.

Within a day of last Sunday’s attack, news began to come in of arrests such as that of Al Jazeera’s Muammar Ibrahim, and the killing of Siham Hassan, a former MP who had helped to feed people through El Fasher’s community kitchens.

Campaign group Avaaz immediately raised concern that the RSF were hunting down activists and searching phones for any sign of communication with the media or human rights groups.

“This is the loss of an entire generation of Sudanese activists and Sudanese youth, who not only led the revolution [of 2019] and lived the values of peace, justice and freedom,” says Shayna Lewis, at Preventing and Ending Mass Atrocities. “That generation is being strategically wiped out with reports of lists that the RSF have of civil society members.”

Lewis describes Douda as a hero who gave his life to highlight atrocities in Zamzam and El Fasher.

“I can’t overstate how much of a loss Mohamed’s death is for the wider community of civil society, for Sudan as a country, losing one of the true heroes of the war.”

Armed groups of JNIM fighters have blocked key routes used by fuel tankers, disrupting supply lines to the capital Bamako and other regions across Mali.

The al-Qaida-linked jihadist group Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) is gradually converging on Mali’s capital, Bamako, with increasing attacks in recent weeks, including on army-backed convoys.

Should the city fall, the west African country would be on its way to becoming an Islamist republic with strict interpretations of sharia law.

That would fulfil a jihadist mandate following in the steps of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or Syria, where the former rebel Ahmed al-Sharaa, previously known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is now head of state. In areas under its control, JNIM is already enforcing dress codes and punishments via courts that, as Human Rights Watch noted in a 2024 report, did not adhere to fair trial standards.

On Tuesday the US state department issued its second advisory in a week to its citizens in Mali, urging all US citizens to “depart immediately using commercial aviation”, citing infrastructural problems and the “unpredictability of Bamako’s [the capital] security situation”. On Wednesday, Australia, Germany and Italy also urged their citizens to leave as soon as possible.

Observers within and outside Mali say things could escalate faster and that the US’s warnings are the latest indication that the country is on the brink of a third successful coup in five years and the sixth since independence from France in September 1960.

“I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but the country is collapsing before our eyes,” a former Malian minister who now lives in exile told the Guardian anonymously. “I would not be shocked if another overthrow happens within the next few days.

“Before 31 December, a coup will happen in the Sahel,” the former official continued. “Mali will go first and then you’ll have the same domino effect that we’ve seen between 2020 and 2023, with all of these countries falling one after the other.”

Mali is grappling with a two-week fuel scarcity due to blockades targeting trucks from neighbouring Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal, by JNIM. Drivers and soldiers have either been kidnapped or killed – or in some cases, both.

Landlocked Mali relies mostly on imports to keep its stuttering economy running. In the absence of the fuel trucks, life has come to a standstill in most of Bamako.

Long queues in gas stations are a common sight now, and in many parts of the city, there is no electricity. Shops and supermarkets are closed, as many people stay indoors, unable to find transport and prices of food items keep rising. Schools have also been shut down tentatively, until 9 November.

Analysts such as Ulf Laessing, the Bamako-based head of the Sahel programme at the German thinkthank Konrad Adenauer Foundation, say next week could be pivotal in the lifespan of the current junta.

“I think next week will be really bad, because then the existing stocks everybody’s living off will be gone,” he said. “It’s hard to see a way out. It’s just difficult to see how they can resupply the capital in sufficient quantities.”

Several analysts approached by the Guardian declined to comment on the matter, saying the regime’s sensitivity about comments deemed to not be strongly in its favour, is at an all-time high.

An Islamic state

“So far nobody is demonstrating against the government because I think they know if they brought down this government, then the next one would be an Islamist one so it can also kind of strengthen the regime’s resolve a bit,” said Laessing.

In June 2020, civil society, religious groups and opposition parties formed a protest coalition known as the June 5 Movement – Rally of Patriotic Forces (M5-RFP) that spearheaded large-scale protests against the democratically elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, citing corruption and worsening security.

Among the M5-RFP’s most visible figures was Mahmoud Dicko, an influential and controversial imam who first came to national spotlight with his role in the 1991 coup of the then president Moussa Traoré. The cleric’s mobilisation played a key role in forcing the collapse of the Keïta government.

During one meeting where the regional bloc Ecowas, or the Economic Community of West African States, mediated between the state and M5-RFP, Keïta dropped a shocker. “I was part of the meeting when he told Ecowas leaders that Imam Dicko wants Mali to become an Islamic country under sharia law,” the former minister said. “When he said that, hell broke loose.”

Within two months, soldiers led by Assimi Goïta, a young captain, took over government, replacing parliament with the National Transitional Council (NTC). A second coup within a year led to Goïta being sworn in as head of state.

However, the junta’s promises have mostly been unfulfilled. The NTC, headed by Col Malick Diaw, scheduled elections for February 2022 but has repeatedly postponed them.

In the meantime the death toll from the insurgency has risen sharply; the total since 2012 has exceeded 17,700, with more than two-thirds of that occurring after 2020, according to data from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. JNIM, whose finances have been boosted by several high-profile ransoms paid for abductees, including Emirati citizens, is expanding operations to Benin and Nigeria in coastal west Africa.

Human rights groups have also alleged that Mali’s operations with Wagner mercenaries and pro-junta militias comprising hunter militias are rife with abuses.

End of the road?

The junta’s isolation seems nearly complete.

It signed a pact for military assistance with the regimes of Burkina Faso and Niger but the effect of that remains to be seen. Having broken off relations with Ecowas, Mali is also unable to draw on its military resources.

In recent years, some foreign diplomatic missions have scaled back their presence just as the junta expelled staff from other groups amid deteriorating relations with the west.

Consequently, there have been reports of increasing frustration within the ranks of the army, suggesting internal tensions among the five colonels who staged the first coup. Two of them, Diaw and the defence minister, Sadio Camara, are being mooted as potential successors who could replace Goïta.

Meanwhile, Dicko, who has been in exile in Algeria since 2023 after falling out with the government and losing his diplomatic passport, is expected to return.

“Some JNIM people are asking for Dicko to come back so they can negotiate with him instead of the Malian government,” the insider said. “This is their end goal, to turn Mali into an Islamic state and they’re very close.”

The UN special rapporteur on torture is being urged to investigate Lebanon’s role in the treatment of the Egyptian-Turkish poet and activist Abdulrahman al-Qaradawi, a dissident who has been imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates for more than 10 months over a post he made on social media.

Legal counsel representing Qaradawi filed a complaint to the UN rapporteur on Thursday, asking it to examine the situation.

Qaradawi was arrested by Lebanese authorities after he returned from Syria in December 2024, where he went to celebrate the fall of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

While there, he posted a video on social media in which he criticised the Emirati, Egyptian and Saudi governments and said he hoped they would suffer the same fate as the Assad regime.

Qaradawi comes from a politically active family. His father, Yusuf Qaradawi, was a prominent Islamist scholar associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who lived in exile until his death.

The Egyptian-Turkish activist was also an active supporter of pro-democracy protests in Egypt, and was sentenced in absentia in Egypt on charges of criticising the judiciary.

It was the UAE, however, not Egypt, that managed to convince Lebanon to arrest Qaradawi after his video in Syria, under charges of “fake news” and “disturbing public security”.

It circulated an arrest warrant for the dissident through the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a little known transnational organisation that fosters security cooperation between Arab states.

Lebanese authorities, under the previous government led by the former prime minister Najib Mikati, complied with the UAE’s request. It extradited Qaradawi to the UAE on 8 January, despite the fact that he was neither a citizen of the UAE nor of Lebanon.

The brazenness of his arrest, which showed that a person could be spirited away to a country where they were not a citizen because of a video they posted on social media, has created a chilling precedent for freedom of expression in the Middle East.

Qaradawi was extradited over the protests of his lawyers and of rights groups including Amnesty International, which warned that he could face torture if sent to the UAE.

Lebanon’s then government dismissed their concerns and justified its decision by saying the UAE promised to respect Qaradawi’s human rights.

Those pledges that his rights would be assured in the UAE, his legal counsel said, proved to be false.

Qaradawi has been held in solitary confinement for more than 10 months, with no access to sunlight, in an undisclosed location. These conditions amount to torture, his lawyers say.

To date, he has not had access to a lawyer nor has he been officially charged with a crime.

“Lebanon hastily approved the extradition on the basis that Abdulrahman’s human rights would be upheld. That promise lies in tatters,” said Rodney Dixon, the international legal counsel for Qaradawi.

Dixon added that even though it was the former Lebanese government that approved the extradition, the current government still had a legal obligation to right the wrong of its predecessor and seek Qaradawi’s return.

“Governments may change but obligations do not. Lebanon was responsible for sending him there, now it must do everything possible to bring him back,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Lebanese prime ministry said the extradition did not take place under the current government. They did not comment further.

The UAE did not respond to a request for comment but had previously told the New York Times Qaradawi’s detention complied with human rights standards.

A group of UN special rapporteurs have expressed concern over the conditions of Qaradawi’s detention, saying that his rights have been violated.

“Our worst fears that Mr al-Qaradawi would face grave human rights violations if he was extradited to the UAE appear to have been justified,” the UN experts said in March.

His family also expressed concerns, as they had been allowed to see him for only two 10-minute visits since he was detained.

“It’s been nearly a year since Abdulrahman was taken from us. The thought of him held alone in a cell, without sunlight, fresh air, or charges brought against him, is heartbreaking,” his family told the Guardian.

“We will not stop until Abdulrahman is safe. All we want is to see him back home surrounded by his family, reading us one of his poems again.”

Qaradawi’s popularity in the Arab world long preceded his visit to Syria. He built a large online following and spoke at political events.

He notably was a supporter of Hamas and praised its 7 October 2023 attack, which killed about 1,200 people in Israel. He dedicated a poem to Yahya Sinwar, the group’s late leader.

Rights groups say his detention creates a dangerous precedent in the region, where any government displeased with a person’s opinion can have them flown thousands of miles away to be imprisoned.

Dixon said: “If governments can hunt down their critics across borders and imprison them, then no one is safe. That’s why the UN and the international community must act now to stamp out this behaviour or risk setting a precedent that endangers us all.”

Tanzania’s president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, has been declared the winner of the country’s disputed election with more than 97% of the vote following violent protests across the country earlier in the week.

The landslide result announced by Tanzania’s electoral commission hands Hassan, who took power in 2021 after the death in office of her predecessor, a five-year term to govern the east African country of 68 million people.

At stake for the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party was its decades-long grip on power amid the rise of charismatic opposition figures who hoped to lead the country toward political change.

Still, a landslide victory is unheard of in the region. Only Paul Kagame, the authoritarian leader of Rwanda, regularly wins by a landslide.

Rights groups including Amnesty International cited a pattern of enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings in Tanzania ahead of the polls.

In June, a United Nations panel of human rights experts cited more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance since 2019, saying they were “alarmed by reports of a pattern of repression” ahead of elections.

Protests erupted during Wednesday’s vote for president and parliament, with some demonstrators tearing down banners of Hassan and setting fire to government buildings and police firing teargas and gunshots, according to witnesses.

Demonstrators were angry about the electoral commission’s exclusion of Hassan’s two biggest challengers from the race and what they described as widespread repression.

In April, Tundu Lissu, the vice-chair of the main opposition party, Chadema, was arrested and charged with treason and cybercrime offences. His party, which had led calls for a boycott of the election unless electoral systems were reformed, was later disqualified from participating.

Last month, Luhaga Mpina, the leader of ACT-Wazalendo, another opposition party, was also disqualified, meaning Hassan contested only lesser-known opponents from minor parties.

Government critics were also abducted and arrested in the run-up to the election.

Tanzania’s main opposition party said on Friday hundreds of people had been killed in the protests, while the UN human rights office said credible reports indicated at least 10 people were killed in three cities.

The government dismissed the opposition’s death toll as “hugely exaggerated” and has rejected criticisms of its human rights record.

With Reuters and Associated Press

The UN security council has approved a US-backed resolution supporting Morocco’s claim to the disputed Western Sahara, despite fierce opposition from Algeria.

Although Friday’s vote was divided, the resolution offers the strongest endorsement yet for Morocco’s plan to keep sovereignty over the territory, which also has backing from most European Union members and a growing number of African allies.

The resolution refers to Morocco’s plan as a basis for negotiation. As with similar resolutions in previous years, the text makes no mention of a referendum on self-determination that includes independence as an option, which is the solution long favoured by the pro-independence Polisario Front and its allies, including Algeria, Russia and China.

Western Sahara is a phosphate-rich stretch of coastal desert the size of Colorado which was under Spanish rule until 1975. It is claimed by Morocco and Polisario Front, which operates from refugee camps in south-western Algeria and claims to represent the Sahrawi people indigenous to the disputed territory.

The US, which sponsored the resolution, led 11 countries in voting in favour, while three countries – Russia, China and Pakistan – abstained. Algeria, Polisario’s primary benefactor, did not vote.

Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, said the vote had been “historic” and would “build on the momentum for a long, long overdue peace in Western Sahara”.

Amar Bendjama, the Algerian ambassador to the UN, said that while the resolution was an improvement on previous iterations, it “still has a number of shortcomings”.

“It is below, below, I say, of the expectations and the legitimate aspirations of the people of Western Sahara, represented by the Polisario Front,” he said.

The resolution says “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty could constitute a most feasible solution”.

The measure also renews the UN peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara for another year, as has been done for more than three decades. Prior extensions, however, have not included a reference to Morocco and its allies’ preferred outcome.

The UN resolution calls on all parties involved to “seize this unprecedented opportunity for a lasting peace.” Depending on progress, it asks António Guterres, the secretary general, to review the peacekeeping mission’s mandate within six months.

The shift could unsettle a long-stalled process that for decades has eluded resolution, despite a UN peacekeeping mission that was designed to be temporary. Demonstrations have ensued in Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria this week, where people have vowed not to give up their fight for self-determination.

Morocco controls nearly all of Western Sahara, except for a narrow strip known as the “free zone” that lies east of a Moroccan-built sand wall.

A 1991 ceasefire was meant to pave the way for a referendum on self-determination, but fighting over voter eligibility prevented it from taking place.

Over the years, Morocco has transformed the disputed territory, constructing a deepwater port and a 656-mile (1,055-km) highway. State subsidies keep food and energy prices low, and the population has ballooned as Moroccans settle in cities such as Dakhla and Laayoune.

Polisario withdrew from the ceasefire in 2020 after clashes near a road Morocco was paving to Mauritania.

The group has since regularly reported military activity, while Morocco has mostly denied open conflict. The United Nations calls it “low-level hostilities”.

In response to the draft resolution, Polisario said that it would not join any process aiming “to ‘legitimise’ Morocco’s illegal military occupation,” saying peace “can never be achieved by rewarding expansionism”.

Morocco’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions before the vote.

The conflict is the driving force in north African diplomacy. Morocco considers support for its autonomy plan as a benchmark for how it gauges its allies.

Last October, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura suggested partitioning Western Sahara, a proposal neither side accepted. He urged Morocco to clarify what autonomy would entail and warned a lack of progress might raise questions about the United Nations’ role and “whether there is space and willingness for us to still be useful.”

The push to reassess the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara comes as the United States slashes funding for UN programmes and agencies, including peacekeeping.

US officials are taking an a la carte approach to funding, picking which operations and agencies they believe align with Trump’s agenda and which no longer serve US interests. They argue that the UN’s budget and agencies are bloated. They pledge to halt new contributions pending a review of every UN agency and programme.

About 700 people have been killed during three days of election protests in Tanzania, the main opposition party has said.

Protests erupted on election day on Wednesday over what demonstrators said was the stifling of the opposition after the exclusion of key candidates from the presidential ballot.

John Kitoka, a spokesperson for the Chadema opposition party, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that hundreds of people had been killedsince then.

“As we speak, the figure for deaths in Dar [es Salaam] is around 350 and for Mwanza it is 200-plus. Added to figures from other places around the country, the overall figure is around 700,” he said.

He added that the toll could be much higher because killings could be happening during a night-time curfew that was imposed from Wednesday.

A security source told AFP there had been reports of more than 500 dead, “maybe 700-800 in the whole country”.

Amnesty International said it had received information that at least 100 people had been killed.

Kitoka said Chadema’s numbers had been gathered by a network of party members going to hospitals and health clinics and “counting dead bodies”.

He demanded that the government “stop killing our protesters” and called for a transitional government to pave the way for free and fair elections. “Stop police brutality. Respect the will of the people which is electoral justice,” Kitoka said.

The Guardian has approached the government for comment.

Tanzanians went to the polls on Wednesday in an election in which President Samia Suluhu Hassan was expected to strengthen her grip on the country amid rapidly intensifying repression and the exclusion of key opponents from the presidential contest.

In April, Tundu Lissu, the vice-chair of Chadema, was arrested and charged with treason and cybercrime offences. His party, which had led calls for a boycott of the election unless electoral systems were reformed, was later disqualified from participating.

Last month, Luhaga Mpina, the leader of ACT-Wazalendo, another opposition party, was also disqualified, meaning Hassan will contest only lesser-known opponents from minor parties.

Government critics were also abducted and arrested in the run-up to the election.

Since Wednesday, huge crowds of protesters have attacked police and destroyed property belonging to businesses connected to the ruling party.

The demonstrations were focused mainly in the port city of Dar es Salaam but have since spread across the country.

The government reacted by imposing a curfew. Internet disruption was also reported, with the global monitor NetBlocks saying it was countrywide.

On Thursday, the army chief, Gen Jacob John Mkunda, condemned the violenceand called the protesters “criminals”. He said security forces would try to contain the situation.

Demonstrators on Friday faced a heavy police and military presence.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said it was “alarmed” by the deaths and injuries in the protests, noting it had received reports that at least 10 people had been killed by security forces.

The OHCHR said it had received credible reports of deaths in Dar es Salaam, in Shinyanga in the north-west and Morogoro in the east, with security forces firing live ammunition and teargas to disperse protesters.

An OHCHR spokesperson, Seif Magango, said the office had urged security forces to refrain from using unnecessary or disproportionate force and for protesters to demonstrate peacefully.

Tito Magoti, a human rights lawyer, said it was “unjustified” for security agencies to use force, adding that the country’s president “must refrain from deploying the police against the people”.

He said: “She must listen to the people. The mood of the country is that there was no election … We cannot vote for one candidate.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this story.

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces claim to have arrested several of their fighters after outrage over the extent of killing in the city of El Fasher continues to build.

But the paramilitary group’s move has been met with scepticism from human rights campaigners and the Sudanese who see it as an attempt to temper criticism over the violence.

Much of the outrage has been focused on a single individual, Abu Lulu, whom RSF media outlets showed under arrest and taken to a jail cell. Lulu, a commander in the RSF, featured in numerous videos that emerged after Sunday’s attack on El Fasher of fighters executing people in civilian clothing.

“The detention of Abu Lulu appears to be a PR stunt to deflect global anger and shift attention away from the militia’s responsibility for this massacre,” said Mohamed Suliman, a Sudanese researcher and writer based in Boston. “However, many Sudanese did not buy into this and launched a hashtag: ‘You are all Abu Lulu’ – meaning the entire militia acts like him.”

Since the fighter’s arrest, images have been shared on social media of various RSF leaders, including the chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, as well as politicians considered to be tied to him, with the name Abu Lulu written underneath each of their faces.

Hala al-Karib, a prominent Sudanese activist focusing on violence against women with the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, said the focus on arresting one man was a “painful joke” intended to deflect from the scale of the violence inflicted by RSF forces in El Fasher and elsewhere.

“There is absence of accountability and indifference to our humanity. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have perished daily, and young girls and women have been ruthlessly raped during the past three years. Still, all they do is try to silence our suffering,” she said.

Karib said the RSF could not be trusted to investigate itself, saying that it had not changed since its origins as a collection of ethnic-based militias known as the Janjaweed, who carried out massacres in Darfur during the 2000s on behalf of the Sudanese government.

A civil war between the RSF and the Sudanese army began in April 2023 after a power struggle between the two forces and the conflict quickly spread across the country.

The UN human rights office spokesperson Seif Magango told reporters in Geneva on Friday that hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters could have been killed while trying to leave El Fasher.

“Witnesses confirm RSF personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint, forcing the remaining displaced persons – around 100 families – to leave the location amid shooting and intimidation of older residents,” he said.

There is concern about the fate of tens of thousands of people after Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) raised alarm about only a few thousand arriving in the Tawila displacement camp west of El Fasher, which has previously been a key destination for displaced people in the area.

“[The arrivals are] far fewer than the 250,000 civilians estimated to be in El Fasher until last month. Reports from those who fled, as well as credible sources, indicate mass killings, indiscriminate violence and ethnic targeting inside the city and on the roads to escape it,” MSF said.

MSF added they had detected malnourishment in 100% of children under five, who are all being screened as they arrived. “They are victims of torture, gunshots on the road, travelling by night, they were forced in El Fasher to eat animal feed, which has caused really bad abdominal problems, especially in children,” said Giulia Chiopris, an MSF paediatrician in Tawila. “Our surgical teams are working non-stop.”

An activist who fled to Tawila after the RSF’s attack on the Zamzam displacement camp in April said those who had arrived had to walk for at least two days to arrive. “Many men were killed and some women were tortured,” he said. “Everyone is ill or injured.”

Sudanese civil society groups have reported that displaced families are also arriving in nearby villages in north Darfur.

Another devastating chapter in Sudan’s brutal civil war has taken place as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured El Fasher from the army after an 18-month siege that trapped tens of thousands of civilians in the city in Darfur. The RSF now controls all major urban centres in Darfur, a development that raises the possibility the country could face partition.

A vast $1bn museum billed as the world’s largest archaeological facility dedicated to a single civilisation will open outside Cairo on Saturday, after countless delays over the course of its two-decade construction.

The Grand Egyptian Museum, located a mile away from the pyramids of Giza, covers an area of 470,000 sq metres. The complex was announced in 1992 but it was not until 2005 that construction began. Some areas of the museum opened in a soft launch in 2024.

More than 50,000 items will be housed in the museum, including an 83-ton, 3,200-year-old colossus of Ramesses II and a 4,500-year-old boat belonging to Khufu, the pharaoh credited with building the pyramids.

The museum includes 24,000 sq metres of permanent exhibition space, a children’s museum, conference and educational facilities, a commercial area and a large conservation centre. The 12 main galleries, which opened last year, exhibit antiquities spanning from prehistoric times to the Roman era, organised by era and theme.

Many of the artefacts were moved from the Egyptian Museum, a packed, century-old building in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Others were recently unearthed from ancient cemeteries, including the Saqqara necropolis, another complex of pyramids and tombs about 14 miles south of the museum.

Ahmed Ghoneim, the museum’s CEO, told reporters that the halls have advanced technology and feature multimedia presentations, including mixed-reality shows, to merge its timeless heritage with 21st-century creativity for new generations.

“We’re using the language that gen Z uses,” he said. “Gen Z doesn’t use the labels that we read as old people and would rather use technology.”

The grand opening was postponed several times, most recently in July because of conflicts in the Middle East, including the Gaza crisis. World leaders are expected to attend the opening ceremony alongside the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Before the opening, firework displays were reportedly tested at the Giza pyramids, which have a new connecting walkway to the museum.

The complex is part of a big infrastructure push in Egypt that includes a metro system under construction and an airport that began operations in 2020.

Aside from being a showcase of ancient heritage, the museum represents a strategic cultural-tourism investment for Africa’s second largest economy after years of disruptions. There was a drop in numbers during the 2011 Arab spring uprising and the coronavirus pandemic. A record 15.7 million people visited Egypt in 2024, according to official figures, and the government aims to attract double that number by 2032.

The government hopes the museum will draw more tourists who will stay for a while and provide the foreign currency Egypt needs to shore up its economy.

Hassan Allam, the CEO of Hassan Allam Holding, the firm administering the museum, said it is expecting between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors a day. “The world has been waiting … everyone’s excited,” he said.

Egypt’s tourism and antiquities minister, Sherif Fathy, said: “It is a gift from Egypt to the world and we are proud to finally share it.”

The museum opens as questions are being asked about the safety of artefacts in Egypt. In recent weeks, two artefacts have been stolen, including a 3,000-year-old gold pharaoh’s bracelet taken from a conservation lab in a Cairo museum. During the Arab spring, looters also raided archaeological sites, leading to the loss of several artefacts.

Associated Press contributed to this report

Diplomats and senior UN figures speaking at the UN security council have condemned mass killings by the Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher after the Sudanese city “descended into an even darker hell” following the paramilitary group’s takeover at the weekend.

Widespread reports of ethnically targeted killings in recent days prompted the UK, as the UN penholder on Sudan, to call an emergency session of the security council in New York on Thursday.

“The situation is simply horrifying,” Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, the assistant secretary general of the UN for Africa, told the meeting. “In the past week, the UN human rights office has documented widespread and serious human rights violations in and around El Fasher. These include credible reports of mass killings in various locations and summary executions during house-to-house searches and as civilians have tried to flee the city.

“Communications have been cut off. The situation is chaotic. In this context, it is difficult to estimate the number of civilians killed. Despite commitments to protect civilians, the reality is that no one is safe in El Fasher. There is no safe passage for civilians to leave the city.”

Pobee added: “External support is enabling the conflict. Weapons and fighters continue to flow into Sudan, further contributing to the already desperate situation.”

Tom Fletcher, the under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, told the meeting: “El Fasher, already the scene of catastrophic levels of human suffering, has descended into an even darker hell.”

Fletcher condemned the reported killing of nearly 500 people at the Saudi Maternity hospital and said tens of thousands were fleeing to Tawila, where civilians, mostly women and children, faced extortion, violence and abduction.

In a statement, the security council said recent developments in El Fasher have had a devastating impact on the civilian population and that council members “condemned reported atrocities being perpetrated by the RSF against the civilian population, including summary executions and arbitrary detentions”.

The UN session was likely to be uncomfortable for the United Arab Emirates, the RSF’s key external backer, but diplomatic calls for the UN to recognise it had a responsibility to protect people from a deliberate genocide, as opposed to merely condemning a breach of international humanitarian law, were sparse.

In the UK, the foreign office minister Stephen Doughty told MPs in the House of Commons: “The reports of mass atrocities against civilians and the forced displacement caused by the RSF advances in El Fasher are both horrifying and deeply alarming.”

Calum Miller, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, called for a ban on all UK arms sales to the UAE until it was proven that any such previous exports had not been transferred to Sudan from the UAE for use by the RSF.

The Guardian reported on Tuesday that British military equipment used by the RSF had been found on battlefields in Sudan, according to documents seen by the UN security council.

Doughty admitted UK-made military equipment had been found in Sudan but distinguished “items” from “weaponry”, telling MPs: “We are aware of reports of a small number of UK-made items having been found in Sudan, but there is no evidence in the recent reporting of UK weapons or ammunition being used in Sudan.”

The UAE has repeatedly denied allegations it gives military support to the RSF.

Kate Ferguson, the co-director of Protection Approaches, a UK charity working to tackle identity-based violence and mass atrocities, said: “We need an emergency coalition of conscience to drive an immediate global effort to protect civilians and end the atrocities – and demonstrate to the UAE that enabling deliberate destruction of populations is not tolerated.

“In the face of countless warnings, the international community has failed to uphold its collective responsibilities to protect El Fasher from genocide.”

Human Rights Watch called for targeted sanctions to be imposed on the UAE leadership, while the US Democrat senator Chris Van Hollen called on his fellow senators to pass his bill banning US arms sales to the UAE.

Last month, the Quad – an external group, comprising the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, responsible for overseeing diplomacy surrounding the conflict – outlined a roadmap for peace, but it has not been implemented. It called for an initial three-month humanitarian truce to allow for rapid aid delivery, followed by a permanent ceasefire, and concluding with a nine-month transitional period leading to “an independent, civilian-led government with broad-based legitimacy and accountability”.

Nawal Khalil had been volunteering as a nurse for three years at El Fasher South hospital when the city was captured on Sunday by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). She was busy treating patients, including an elderly woman who needed a blood transfusion, when the attack began.

“They killed six wounded soldiers and civilians in their beds – some of them women,” she says. “I don’t know what happened to my other patients. I had to run when they stormed the hospital.”

Khalil, 27, was shot in the right foot and thigh as RSF fighters took control of the nearby military headquarters. She fled the city and walked for a day, injured and without food, to reach the town of Garney. “On the way, they took my phone and money. I was left with nothing,” she says.

More than 1,000 people – including women and children – walked for two days to reach the town of Tawila in North Darfur after fleeing El Fasher, which was captured after an 18-month siege.

Tawila, about 34 miles (55km) west of El Fasher, is under the control of the Sudan Liberation Army faction led by Abdul Wahid Mohamed al-Nur (SLA-AW).

On Tuesday, the Joint Forces – who are allied with Sudan’s army – accused the RSF of killing more than 2,000 civilians since the fall of the city. The UN said there were videos showing “dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters”.

According to witnesses, thousands more civilians remain trapped by the RSF and allied militias in Garney, south-west of El Fasher. Many are former soldiers from the Sudanese army, the Joint Forces and other armed groups that had been fighting alongside the army. They are reportedly being held because they cannot afford ransom demands of between 5m and 10m Sudanese pounds (£6,000 to £12,000), according to survivors who made it to Tawila. Those unable to pay have been detained for days, and in some cases released only after becoming gravely ill.

The SLA-AW has reportedly allowed government troops fleeing El Fasher to enter Tawila on condition they surrender their weapons.

Adam Yagoub, 28, a driver from Sennar in central Sudan, narrowly escaped being killed after being captured by three militiamen on camels near Garney.

“They wanted to cut my head off with a knife,” he tells the Guardian, showing his arm, which one of the fighters hit with the butt of an AK-47 rifle. “Then one of them recognised me – his brother had worked with me – and begged them not to kill me. We were 18 people who left El Fasher together, but only eight made it to Tawila. I think the others are dead.”

Yagoub says he saw 22 bodies near what he called a “fake well” used by the RSF and allied militias between Garney and Tawila. “It’s a trap,” he says. “People walk all day without water, and when they reach it, the militias are waiting. They killed 22 men there and took the bodies away to hide them.”

Another nurse who escaped El Fasher South hospital after the attack on Sunday said RSF fighters entered through one gate and opened fire on patients in the emergency ward, killing at least eight. “We fled through another gate, but they hit me on the head with a rifle,” he says.

In a video statement on Wednesday, the head of the RSF, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, said that any soldier or officer who had “violated the right of any person” would be held accountable.

Many of those who escaped El Fasher spent hours hiding near the army’s artillery unit before fleeing west under cover of darkness. Already displaced families from the city’s Abu Shouk camp were forced to move again, seeking refuge in the Daraja Oula neighbourhood before eventually heading for Tawila.

Those captured by the RSF in Garney were reportedly given water mixed with flour to revive them after they had walked for a day without supplies. Survivors said people were then separated by gender and perceived affiliation: men suspected of being fighters were detained, while some civilians were released or freed after paying ransoms.

The SLA-AW has deployed additional fighters around Tawila “to protect those fleeing El Fasher and to prevent clashes if the RSF pursues armed groups who have retreated with their weapons”, a local commander said.

It is understood that elements of the Sudanese army and allied groups continue to resist in the Jebel Wana area, north-west of El Fasher, after losing control of the city.

Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it is facing a large influx of people to its clinic in Tawila hospital.

“More than 1,000 people arrived [from El Fasher] at night on foot and in trucks, after an extremely dangerous journey. Many were in a state of great weakness suffering from malnutrition and dehydration,” says MSF project coordinator Sylvain Penicaud.

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed hundreds of patients and staff inside a hospital in El Fasher, according to the World Health Organization and the Sudan Doctors Network, after the paramilitary group claimed control of the city on Sunday.

The WHO secretary general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “appalled and deeply shocked” at reports that more than 460 people had been killed at the Saudi maternity hospital, without assigning blame, in a post on X.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, the Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group monitoring the civil war, said: “The Rapid Support Forces yesterday … killed in cold blood everyone they found inside the Saudi hospital.”

Fighting has been raging between the Sudanese armed forces and the RSF since April 2023, when a power struggle within the military regime broke out into open conflict in the capital, Khartoum, and quickly spread across the country.

Sudan’s army controls most of the country’s north and east, having recaptured Khartoum in March 2025, while the RSF holds territory in the west and south-west. With the army having abandoned El Fasher, the RSF now holds all five of Darfur’s regional capitals, while fighting continues in the southern region of Kordofan.

El Fasher, once a city of more than 1 million people, has been under siege by the RSF since May 2024. In August that year, famine was declared in Zamzam camp for displaced people, south of the city. In April, the RSF killed as many as 2,000 people when it seized the camp, which at the time housed 500,000 people.

Experts had also been warning that an RSF takeover of El Fasher would most likely be a repeat of its capture of Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, in 2023. The group killed as many as 15,000 civilians then, mostly from non-Arab groups.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed Arab militias, which were accused of committing genocide of African ethnic groups under the orders of former president Omar al-Bashir in Darfur in 2003.

In January, the US government formally declared that the RSF had committed genocide. Many Sudanese people still refer to the RSF as the Janjaweed.

On Tuesday, the Joint Forces, a coalition of armed groups allied with Sudan’s military, said the RSF had executed more than 2,000 unarmed civilians since taking El Fasher.

The RSF’s leader, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, admitted there had been “abuses” by his forces, in his first comments since the fall of El Fasher, posted on Wednesday on Telegram. Dagalo said an investigation had been opened, without providing further details.

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab analysed satellite imagery of the hospital on Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 October. On Tuesday, three clusters of white objects and “reddish discoloration on the ground” appeared next to the hospital, having not been there the day before. In two of the clusters, the objects were 1.1-1.9 metres long, while the size of the objects in the third group couldn’t be measured, the lab said in a report.

The report also found “evidence consistent with mass killing” at an RSF detention site at a former children’s hospital in the east of El Fasher, as well as continued “systematic killing” at the east of the city’s earth walls, originally built as a defence mechanism by the army and then reinforced by the RSF.

It isn’t yet possible to determine exactly how many people have been killed by the RSF in El Fasher, said Caitlin Howarth, the director of conflict analytics at the Yale lab. She added: “We’re not looking at small numbers, we’re looking at dozens and hundreds and, eventually, there will be thousands.”

Civilians who made it out of El Fasher have reported being stripped of belongings and extorted for ransom by RSF fighters, with many women reporting being sexually assaulted. It is likely that many have died in the desert, trying to reach displacement camps, Howarth said, adding that the true number may never be known.

The Associated Press spoke to witnesses who said RSF fighters went house to house, beating and shooting at people, including women and children. Many died of gunshot wounds in the streets, some while trying to flee to safety, they said.

“It was a like a killing field. Bodies everywhere and people bleeding and no one to help them,” Tajal-Rahman, a man in his late 50s, said by phone from Tawila, a displacement camp about 37 miles (60km) west of El Fasher that now houses more than 650,000 people.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tanzania’s president looks on course to strengthen her grip on the country as it holds a general election on Wednesday against the backdrop of rapidly intensifying repression and the exclusion of opposition candidates.

Samia Suluhu Hassan, a former vice-president who took office after the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli, in 2021, has left nothing to chance for her first presidential and parliamentary electoral test.

Candidates from the two main opposition parties in the east African country have been disqualified, opposition gatherings have been banned and government critics have been abducted, killed or arrested.

Analysts say they expect voter apathy, possible unrest over the stifling of opposition voices, and the further entrenchment of Hassan and the ruling CCM party.

“Tanzania will never be the same after this election,” said Deus Valentine, the chief executive of the Center for Strategic Litigation, a non-profit organisation based in Dar es Salam, a commercial port city on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. “We are either entering a completely new paradigm or level of impunity, or we are entering a completely new level of civil defiance. Something is going to give.”

Hassan started her tenure by undoing some of Magufuli’s authoritarian and repressive policies, including ending a ban on political rallies and making reconciliatory moves with the opposition. Along the way, she gained local and international approval.

But she later backtracked and her administration has been accused of overseeing a grim return to the repression of the past, dashing hopes of lasting change.

In June, after the reported disappearance and torture of two activists, Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda, UN experts called on the Tanzanian government to “immediately stop the enforced disappearance of political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists”.

The UN experts said more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance had been recorded in Tanzania since 2019.

A wave of abductions in the lead-up to this election has increased public anger against Hassan. One of those taken was Humphrey Polepole, a CCM insider who had resigned from his role as ambassador to Cuba and become a vocal critic of the government, CCM and Hassan’s leadership. His family said he was abducted by unknown individuals early this month.

In June, Tanzanian police dismissed claims of increasing abductions and disappearances, claiming some were staged. Hassan has in the past ordered an investigation into abduction reports but the findings have not been made public.

A crackdown on opposition parties has intensified in recent months. In April, Tundu Lissu, the vice-chair of the leading opposition party, Chadema, was arrested and charged with treason and cybercrime offences. His party, which has led calls for a boycott of the election unless electoral systems are reformed, was later disqualified from participating.

Last month Luhaga Mpina, the leader of ACT-Wazalendo, another opposition party, was also disqualified, meaning Hassan will contest only lesser-known candidates from minor parties.

Nicodemus Minde, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies, said at a seminar organised by the institute: “The political landscape going into the election remains sharply polarised, with opposition leaders facing legal harassment and civic space that has been constrained.”

He said the absence of Chadema and ACT-Wazalendo from the ballot had made this election “arguably the least competitive” since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992.

CCM and its predecessor TANU have ruled the country since independence in 1961, making it one of the longest-ruling political forces in Africa.

Hassan’s administration has pointed to plaudits for Tanzania’s economic growth and low inflation under her watch. She is campaigning on promises to focus on strengthening healthcare and education and provide economic empowerment to uplift lives and foster inclusive growth.

“In our current and forthcoming manifestos, we are focusing on the people,” Hassan said at a campaign rally in the eastern district of Temeke last week. “Our goal is to make sure that every Tanzanian has a chance to participate meaningfully in the nation’s economic growth.”

Among those being allowed to run against CCM is Salum Mwalimu, a running mate of Lissu during the 2000 presidential election. He is running for the Chaumma party, which is made up of many Chadema defectors.

Mwalimu’s campaign promises include reforms to government systems, including delivering a new constitution. “Tanzanians should expect great change from our party, which is committed to transforming the country,” he said at the national electoral commission last month when he went to collect presidential nomination forms.

Observers say Hassan’s opponents lack the resources and name recognition to compete with the countrywide party machinery that CCM has built over the decades and benefited from to entrench its rule.

In the 2020 presidential election, Magufuli won with 84.4% of the vote and Lissu was second with 13.04%.

More than 37 million people are eligible to vote. The election encompasses separate votes for the president, MPs and local politicians.

Tanzania’s president looks on course to strengthen her grip on the country as it holds a general election on Wednesday against the backdrop of rapidly intensifying repression and the exclusion of opposition candidates.

Samia Suluhu Hassan, a former vice-president who took office after the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli, in 2021, has left nothing to chance for her first presidential and parliamentary electoral test.

Candidates from the two main opposition parties in the east African country have been disqualified, opposition gatherings have been banned and government critics have been abducted, killed or arrested.

Analysts say they expect voter apathy, possible unrest over the stifling of opposition voices, and the further entrenchment of Hassan and the ruling CCM party.

“Tanzania will never be the same after this election,” said Deus Valentine, the chief executive of the Center for Strategic Litigation, a non-profit organisation based in Dar es Salam, a commercial port city on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. “We are either entering a completely new paradigm or level of impunity, or we are entering a completely new level of civil defiance. Something is going to give.”

Hassan started her tenure by undoing some of Magufuli’s authoritarian and repressive policies, including ending a ban on political rallies and making reconciliatory moves with the opposition. Along the way, she gained local and international approval.

But she later backtracked and her administration has been accused of overseeing a grim return to the repression of the past, dashing hopes of lasting change.

In June, after the reported disappearance and torture of two activists, Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda, UN experts called on the Tanzanian government to “immediately stop the enforced disappearance of political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists”.

The UN experts said more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance had been recorded in Tanzania since 2019.

A wave of abductions in the lead-up to this election has increased public anger against Hassan. One of those taken was Humphrey Polepole, a CCM insider who had resigned from his role as ambassador to Cuba and become a vocal critic of the government, CCM and Hassan’s leadership. His family said he was abducted by unknown individuals early this month.

In June, Tanzanian police dismissed claims of increasing abductions and disappearances, claiming some were staged. Hassan has in the past ordered an investigation into abduction reports but the findings have not been made public.

A crackdown on opposition parties has intensified in recent months. In April, Tundu Lissu, the vice-chair of the leading opposition party, Chadema, was arrested and charged with treason and cybercrime offences. His party, which has led calls for a boycott of the election unless electoral systems are reformed, was later disqualified from participating.

Last month Luhaga Mpina, the leader of ACT-Wazalendo, another opposition party, was also disqualified, meaning Hassan will contest only lesser-known candidates from minor parties.

Nicodemus Minde, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies, said at a seminar organised by the institute: “The political landscape going into the election remains sharply polarised, with opposition leaders facing legal harassment and civic space that has been constrained.”

He said the absence of Chadema and ACT-Wazalendo from the ballot had made this election “arguably the least competitive” since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992.

CCM and its predecessor TANU have ruled the country since independence in 1961, making it one of the longest-ruling political forces in Africa.

Hassan’s administration has pointed to plaudits for Tanzania’s economic growth and low inflation under her watch. She is campaigning on promises to focus on strengthening healthcare and education and provide economic empowerment to uplift lives and foster inclusive growth.

“In our current and forthcoming manifestos, we are focusing on the people,” Hassan said at a campaign rally in the eastern district of Temeke last week. “Our goal is to make sure that every Tanzanian has a chance to participate meaningfully in the nation’s economic growth.”

Among those being allowed to run against CCM is Salum Mwalimu, a running mate of Lissu during the 2000 presidential election. He is running for the Chaumma party, which is made up of many Chadema defectors.

Mwalimu’s campaign promises include reforms to government systems, including delivering a new constitution. “Tanzanians should expect great change from our party, which is committed to transforming the country,” he said at the national electoral commission last month when he went to collect presidential nomination forms.

Observers say Hassan’s opponents lack the resources and name recognition to compete with the countrywide party machinery that CCM has built over the decades and benefited from to entrench its rule.

In the 2020 presidential election, Magufuli won with 84.4% of the vote and Lissu was second with 13.04%.

More than 37 million people are eligible to vote. The election encompasses separate votes for the president, MPs and local politicians.

The Trump administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.

“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.

Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

Soyinka speculated that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reassess his visa, which he said he would not attend.

According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, seen by Agence France-Presse, officials have cancelled his visa, citing US state department regulations that allow “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.

Reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre, he jokingly called it a “rather curious love letter from an embassy”, while telling any organisations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka said.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The Trump administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably targeting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.

“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours from top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.

His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.

In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka left the door open to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

Trump’s crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.

Reports of ethnically motivated mass killings and other atrocities are emerging from El Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces took control of the city in Sudan’s western Darfur region last week.

Video released by local activists showed a fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range.

Different footage shared by pro-democracy activists purportedly showed dozens of people lying dead on the ground alongside burnt-out vehicles. The footage has not been verified.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Joint Forces – who are allied with Sudan’s army – accused the RSF of having executed more than 2,000 unarmed civilians in recent days.

The claim could not be verified but Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been monitoring the war in Sudan using open-source intelligence and satellite imagery, said on Monday it had found evidence consistent with alleged mass killings by the RSF.

On Tuesday the Yale lab said the city “appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti Indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution”. This included what appeared to be “door-to-door clearance operations” in the city, it said.

The RSF said on Sunday it had seized control of the army’s main base in the city and released a statement saying it had “extended control over the city of El Fasher from the grip of mercenaries and militias”.

The Sudanese army chief, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said on Monday that his forces had withdrawn from El Fasher “to a safer location”, acknowledging the loss of the city.

The RSF has been engaged in a bloody civil war with the army since April 2023 after a power struggle between the two sides. More than 150,000 people have been killed and more than 14 million displaced due to the fighting.

Fears had been mounting in recent weeks for the safety of tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the city by an 18-month RSF siege.

The UN rights chief, Volker Türk, said on Monday there was a growing risk of “ethnically motivated violations and atrocities” in El Fasher. His office said it was “receiving multiple alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions”.

The UN Human Rights Office said there were reports of “summary execution of civilians trying to flee, with indications of ethnic motivations for killings”, as well as videos showing “dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being [Sudanese army] fighters”.

News agencies have been unable to contact civilians in the city, where the Sudanese Journalists’ Syndicate says communications, including satellite networks, have been cut off by a media blackout.

Shayna Lewis, a Sudan specialist at Preventing and Ending Mass Atrocities, one of the groups closely in touch with Darfur civilian society, accused the RSF of massacring civilians. She said: “Residents of El Fasher who previously left the city are finding out about the death of their loved ones through footage of executions that are widely circulating on social media.”

There are grave fears of a repeat of the RSF massacres that took place in West Darfur’s capital, Geneina, after it captured the city in 2023, when up to 15,000 civilians – mostly from non-Arab groups – were killed.

According to the UN, more than 1 million people have fled El Fasher since the start of the war and about 260,000 civilians, half of them children, remain trapped without aid. Many have resorted to eating animal fodder.

The UN’s migration agency said more than 26,000 people had fled the fighting in El Fasher since Sunday, either seeking safety in the outskirts of the city or heading to Tawila, 45 miles to the west.

In Tawila, teams from Médecins Sans Frontières said they were facing a massive influx of wounded coming from El Fasher to the town’s hospital. Since Sunday evening, 130 had been hospitalised, including 15 in critical condition, MSF said.

The RSF’s capture of El Fasher, the last remaining major city in Darfur controlled by the army, gives the paramilitary group control over all five state capitals in Darfur and marks a significant turning point in the war.

The army is now excluded from a third of Sudanese territory, a development that experts say raises the possibility the country could face partition.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

British military equipment has been found on battlefields in Sudan, used by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group accused of genocide, according to documents seen by the UN security council.

UK-manufactured small-arms target systems and British-made engines for armoured personnel carriers have been recovered from combat sites in a conflict that has now caused the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe.

The findings have again prompted scrutiny over Britain’s export of arms to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has been repeatedly accused of supplying weapons to the paramilitary RSF in Sudan.

They also raise questions for the UK government and its potential role in fuelling the conflict.

Months after the UN security council first received material alleging that the UAE may have supplied British-made items to the RSF, new data indicates that the British government went on to approve further exports to the Gulf state for military equipment of the same type.

British engines made specifically for a type of UAE-manufactured armoured personnel carrier also appear to have been exported to the Emirates, despite evidence that the vehicles had been used in Libya and Yemen in defiance of UN arms embargos.

The UAE has repeatedly denied allegations it gives military support to the RSF.

Now in its third year, the war between the RSF and Sudan’s military has killed at least 150,000 people, forced more than 12 million to flee their homes and left nearly 25 million facing acute hunger. Both sides are accused of war crimes and the targeting of civilians.

The UK military equipment found in Sudan features in two dossiers of material, dated June 2024 and March 2025, and seen by the security council. Both were compiled by the Sudanese military and claim to present detailed “evidence of UAE support” for the RSF.

Evidence that the UK continued supplying military equipment to the UAE, despite the risk it could end up fuelling Sudan’s ruinous conflict, has prompted deep concern.

Mike Lewis, a researcher and former member of the UN panel of experts on Sudan, said: “UK and treaty law straightforwardly obliges the government not to authorise arms exports where there is a clear risk of diversion – or use in international crimes.

“Security council investigators have documented in detail the UAE’s decade-long history of diverting arms to embargoed countries and to forces violating international humanitarian law.”

Lewis added: “Even before this further information about British-made equipment in Sudan, these licences should not have been issued, any more than to other governments responsible for arming the Sudan conflict.”

Abdallah Idriss Abugarda, chair of the UK-based Darfur Diaspora Association, which represens Sudanese from the western region of Darfur, called for an investigation into the issue.

“The international community, including the UK, must urgently investigate how this transfer occurred and ensure that no British technology or weaponry contributes to the suffering of innocent Sudanese civilians. Accountability and strict end use monitoring are essential to prevent further complicity in these grave crimes,” he said.

Images contained in the two dossiers of material seen by the security council – of which the UK is a permanent member – suggest that British-made small-arms target devices were recovered from former RSF sites in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and its twin city of Omdurman.

Although difficult to verify without metadata or precise geolocation information, several photographs are marked with labels indicating they were made by Militec, a manufacturer of small-arms training and target systems based in Mid Glamorgan, Wales.

Databases indicate that the UK government granted a number of licences to Militec to export items to the UAE as far back as 2013.

New information also reveals that between January 2015 and September 2024, the UK government issued 26 licences for the permanent export to the UAE of military training devices in the “ML14” category, which covers Militec’s products.

These licences were issued to 14 companies, including Militec. The government has refused to disclose which licences were granted to which companies.

The licences indicate that on 27 September 2024 – three months after the UN security council received images alleging the presence of ML14 rated small-arms equipment in Sudan – the UK government issued an “open individual export licence” for the same category of products to the UAE.

Such open licences allow Britain to export unlimited quantities of the equipment over the agreement’s lifespan, but without the need to monitor where it ultimately ends up.

By September 2024 there was growing concern that the UAE was arming Sudan’s RSF.

Nine months earlier in January 2024, a report by the UN panel of experts on Sudan – appointed by the security council to monitor Darfur’s arms embargo – stated that claims the Emirates were supplying weapons to the RSF were “credible”.

Years earlier, the UK government had also received evidence that UAE-based firms could be a diversion risk for small arms accessories. Three years earlier, the UK authorised exports of UK-made night-vision sights to a UAE business, which were subsequently procured by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Militec was contacted, but declined to comment. It is understood that all of its exports are licensed by the relevant UK authorities and there is no wrongdoing by the company.

Images in the dossiers seen by UN diplomats show Nimr Ajban-series armoured personnel carriers (APCs) allegedly captured or recovered from RSF positions.

The Nimr Ajban APCs are manufactured in the UAE by the Edge Group, a primarily state-owned arms conglomerate.

A photograph in the 2025 document shows the data plate from the engine of a Nimr APC marked “Made in Great Britain by Cummins Inc” and indicates it was manufactured on 16 June 2016 by a UK subsidiary of Cummins, a US firm.

By 2016 the UK government was aware that the UAE had supplied Nimr APCs in violation of a UN arms embargo to armed groups in Libya and Somalia.

Evidence published by the security council stated that the UAE had supplied armoured vehicles to Zintani militias in Libya in 2013.

There appears to be no UK licence data to indicate when the British-made engine for the Nimr vehicles was exported because they are not solely designed for military equipment and do not require a special licence.

A Cummins spokesperson said: “Cummins has a strong compliance culture as evidenced by our 10 ethical principles set out in our code of business conduct. Our code explicitly covers compliance with applicable sanctions and export controls in the jurisdictions in which Cummins conducts business, and in some cases our policies go even further than applicable legal requirements.

“Cummins also has a strong policy against participating in any transaction – direct or indirect – with any arms embargoed destination without full and complete authorisation from the relevant governmental authorities.

“Cummins has a process to thoroughly review all defence transactions to evaluate legal and policy considerations, and under that program we have regularly obtained export licenses where legally required, as well as applied other compliance measures.

“With respect to Sudan specifically, we reviewed all our past transactions and did not identify any military transactions where Sudan was indicated as the end-use destination.”

A spokesperson for Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “The UK has one of the most robust and transparent export control regimes in the world. All export licences are assessed for the risk of diversion to an undesirable end user or end use.

“We expect all countries to comply with their obligations under existing UN sanctions regimes,” the FCDO said.

Sources said licensing decisions were made on a case-by-case basis and the UK was aware of the risk of diversion to the conflict in Sudan and that export licences, including those to the UAE, were regularly refused.

The UAE declined to comment.

Alassane Ouattara has been declared the winner of the presidential election in Ivory Coast by a landslide.

According to provisional results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission (CIE) on Monday evening, the 83-year-old won a fourth term as head of the west African country with 89.77% or 3.75m votes.

Ouattara ran against four less well-known candidates after the opposition heavyweights Laurent Gbagbo and Tidjane Thiam were barred from contesting. But those who appeared on the ballot on Saturday – the former first lady Simone Gbagbo and three former ministers Jean-Louis Billon, Ahoua Don Mello and Henriette Lagou Adjoua – were unable to make headway.

The result trumps Ouattara’s winning margins in his previous three victories, including his 2015 win, when he secured 83% of the vote. Lagou Adjoua, who also contested in 2015, improved her previous record of 0.89% by getting 1.15%.

On Sunday evening, Billon, a former trade minister, congratulated Ouattara in a concession statement on social media, saying his decision had been informed by partial results he had seen. Billon ended up being runner-up with 3% of the tally.

Barring any surprise from the Constitutional Council during the stipulated five-day period, the octogenarian, who has been in office since 2011, will lead the world’s largest cocoa producer until 2030. Ouattara has supervised high economic growth rates and vast infrastructural development, but has been accused of crony capitalism and a clampdown on opposition to his rule.

Despite 8.7 million people being registered to vote, the election was marked by low turnout in urban areas, especially within the commercial capital of Abidjan. At multiple polling units in the densely populated communes of Yopougon and Cocody, officials said fewer than 50 voters had come in by midday.

The CIE said turnout was approximately 50%.

Some observers said the low turnout inadvertently led to what has been the country’s most peaceful election in years. In 2010, after the former president Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat to Ouattara, a deadlock ensued that led to the death of an estimated 3,000 people in the months that followed. Ten years later, more than 50 people were killed as Ouattara secured a controversial third mandate.

Before the vote, there had been tensions as youths ransacked the electoral commission’s office in Yamoussoukro, the political capital, leading the authorities to declare a curfew from 10pm to 6am on the eve of the election and after voting ended. Earlier this month, more than 250 protesters were arrested, with 32 handed three-year sentences, leaving the country on edge.

Human rights groups had also noted the heavy deployment of security personnel before and during the election, raising alarm about the sidelining of prominent opposition figures and a clampdown on dissent.

Paul Biya, the world’s oldest serving head of state, has been declared the winner of Cameroon’s election, granting him an eighth term that could keep him in office until he is nearly 100.

The country’s constitutional council said Biya won 53.66% of the vote, while his former ally turned challenger, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, got 35.19%.

Biya, 92, took office in 1982 and has held a tight grip on power ever since, doing away with the presidential term limit in 2008 and winning re-election by comfortable margins.

Cameroon has been on edge in recent weeks while the country waited for the official results. Four people were killed on Sunday in clashes between security forces and supporters of the opposition in the economic capital, Douala.

Tchiroma had claimed victory two days after the election, which took place on 12 October, publishing a tally that showed he had secured 54.8% of the votes, to Biya’s 31.3%. His team said his victory was based on results representing 80% of the electorate that they had collated.

He also called for protests if the constitutional council were to announce “falsified and distorted results”. The ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement dismissed his claims, urging him to wait for the official results.

The situation has been particularly volatile in the northern city of Garoua, Tchiroma’s home town, , where youths on motorcycles gathered with crude weapons outside his residence in anticipation of a possible arrest.

There have also been protests in the capital, Yaoundé, as well as in neighbourhoods in other parts of Cameroon including Bafoussam and Douala, two of the country’s most populous cities. In a video posted on social media at the weekend, Tchiroma claimed security personnel had attempted to breach his residence to arrest him.

Biya is only the second head of state to lead Cameroon since independence from France in 1960. He has ruled with an iron fist, repressing all political and armed opposition, and holding on to power through social upheaval, economic disparity and separatist violence.