Bahraini king receives call from Egyptian president

PORT SUDAN: Shelling by Sudanese paramilitaries killed five people outside one of the last medical facilities still operating in Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman on Tuesday, a medical source told AFP.
Requesting anonymity for safety reasons, the source said volunteers at Al-Nao Hospital were among the dead in the bombardment by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been at war with the regular army since April 2023.
“The shells landed in the garden adjacent to the hospital,” the source said.
Al-Nao Hospital, which is supported by medical charity Doctors without Borders (MSF), lies in an area controlled by the Sudanese army and has been repeatedly attacked since the start of the war.
Greater Khartoum has been one of the main battlegrounds of the struggle for power between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy. RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 12 million.
Both sides have been accused of indiscriminately shelling health facilities and residential areas.
Gains by the army in Khartoum in recent weeks prompted the RSF to announce a counteroffensive last week.
On Saturday, at least 60 people were killed in an RSF bombardment that hit a busy market in Omdurman.
The RSF holds much of western and southern Sudan while the army retains control of the east and north.

ANKARA: Syrian president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, arrived in Turkiye on Tuesday for talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his second international trip since ousting President Bashar Assad, an official told AFP.
Al-Sharaa was to meet the Turkish leader in the capital Ankara after flying in from Saudi Arabia, where he was seeking help from Gulf countries to finance the reconstruction of his war-ravaged nation and revive its economy.
Turkiye, which has close ties with Al-Sharaa, reopened its diplomatic mission in the Syrian Arab Republic and sent its spy chief and foreign minister for talks with him soon after the HTS overthrew Assad on December 8.
The pair will discuss “joint steps to be taken for economic recovery, sustainable stability and security,” Erdogan’s communications chief Fahrettin Altun said on Monday.
Despite being constrained by its own economic crisis, Turkiye is offering to help with Syria’s recovery after a devastating 13-year civil war.
In return, Turkiye is keen to secure Damascus’s support against Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria, where the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been battling Ankara-backed forces.