Houthis disappear dozens of UN, NGO staff in civil society crackdown

LONDON: Emirati explorer Ibrahim Sharaf Al-Hashemi participated in an air mission that completed the first circular flight around Antarctica using two helicopters.

Al-Hashemi is the first Emirati to participate in this historic expedition, which launched on Dec. 4, 2024, and concluded on Jan. 17, 2025, according to WAM, the official news agency of the UAE.

The journey covered 19,050 kilometers and took a month, starting and ending at Union Glacier Camp. The trip reportedly took seven years of meticulous planning to tackle the region’s logistical challenges and extreme weather.

The team flew over remote icy landscapes under explorer Frederik Paulsen’s leadership, encountering massive icebergs, frozen rivers and strong winds.

Al-Hashemi’s endeavor illustrates the UAE’s growing role in global missions and long-haul flights in harsh environments, WAM added.

PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s army chief visited on Sunday his headquarters in the capital Khartoum, two days after forces recaptured the complex, which paramilitaries had encircled since the war erupted in April 2023.
“Our forces are in their best condition,” Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan told army commanders at the reclaimed headquarters close to the city center and airport.
The army’s recapture of the General Command of the Armed Forces is its biggest victory in the capital since reclaiming Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city on the Nile’s west bank, nearly a year ago.
In a statement on Friday, the army said it had merged troops stationed in Khartoum North (Bahri) and Omdurman with forces at the headquarters, breaking the siege of both the Signal Corps in Khartoum North and the General Command, just south across the Nile River.
Since the early days of the war, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) quickly spread through the streets of Khartoum, the military had to supply its troops inside the headquarters via airdrops.
Burhan was himself trapped inside for four months before emerging in August 2023 and fleeing to the coastal city of Port Sudan.
The recapture of the headquarters follows other gains for the army.
Earlier this month, troops regained control of Wad Madani, just south of Khartoum, securing a key crossroads between the capital and surrounding states.
The war in Sudan has unleashed a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and, according to the United Nations, more than 12 million uprooted.
Famine has been declared in parts of Sudan but the risk is spreading for millions more people, a UN-backed assessment said last month.
Particularly in the country’s western Darfur region and in Kordofan in the south, families have been forced to eat grass, animal fodder and peanut shells to survive.
During Sunday prayers in Rome, Pope Francis lamented how the country has become the site of “the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world.”
He called on both sides to end the fighting and urged the international community to “help the belligerents find paths to peace soon.”
Both sides have been accused of targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas, with the RSF specifically accused of ethnic cleansing, systematic sexual violence and laying siege to entire towns.
The United States announced sanctions this month against RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, accusing his group of committing genocide.
A week later, it also imposed sanctions against Burhan, accusing the army of attacking schools, markets and hospitals, as well as using food deprivation as a weapon of war.
Across the country, up to 80 percent of health care facilities have been forced out of service, according to official figures.
A deadly attack late Friday on the Saudi Hospital in the besieged North Darfur state capital El-Fasher killed 70 people and injured 19 others, the World Health Organization said on Sunday.
“At the time of the attack, the hospital was packed with patients receiving care,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
In a rare statement addressing the targeting of health care in Sudan, Saudi Arabia also condemned the attack as a “violation of international law and international humanitarian law.”
AFP could not independently verify which of Sudan’s warring sides had launched the attack.
However, local activists reported that the hospital was hit by a drone after the RSF issued an ultimatum demanding army forces and their allies leave the city in advance of an expected offensive.
The WHO chief said that another facility in North Darfur’s Al-Malha, just north of El-Fasher, had also been attacked in recent days.
“We continue to call for a cessation of all attacks on health care in Sudan, and to allow full access for the swift restoration of the facilities that have been damaged,” Ghebreyesus said.
“Above all, Sudan’s people need peace. The best medicine is peace,” he added.