#sudan

#sudan

When: January 3, 5pm/16:00 GMT Where: Ibn Batouta Stadium in Tangier Pre-tournament favourites Senegal open their AFCON round-of-16 campaign against Sudan, the lowest-ranked side left in the competition and appearing in the knockout stages for the first time in 14 years. Senegal finished top of Group D with seven points after two wins and a draw, edging the Democratic Republic of the Congo on goal difference.

Sudan must face 2022 champions Senegal in the last 16 of the Africa Cup of Nations after losing 2-0 to Burkina Faso in their final group game, while Algeria beat Equatorial Guinea 3-1. Lassina Traore's early strike put Burkina Faso ahead at the Mohammed V Stadium in Casablanca on Wednesday, before Algozoli Nooh squandered the chance to equalise for Sudan when he put a penalty wide.

A UNICEF nutrition survey released this week found that 53 percent of children under 5 in North Darfur's Umm Baru locality are acutely malnourished. Further, one in six children under 5 are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, "a life-threatening condition that can kill a child in weeks if left untreated," the group noted. It is one of the worst levels of hunger ever recorded in a UN emergency hunger assessment, at more than three times the World Health Organization's emergency threshold of 15 percent.

Thirty women were sheltering in the Saudi maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, on 28 October when the massacre began. Some had just given birth and others were still in labour. Working at the hospital that night, lab technician Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, 28, was one of the few known survivors. I heard the voices of women and children screaming, he says. They were killing everybody inside the hospital. Those of us who were able to run, did.

Six United Nations peacekeepers from Bangladesh were killed and eight more were wounded in a drone attack on a UN base in Sudan on Saturday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said. The drone strike hit a logistics camp of the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) in Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan state. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the "unjustifiable" attack and said that such attacks "may constitute war crimes under international law."

I have studied Sudan all of my adult life. I lived there in 1980 and wrote my doctoral dissertation on Sudanese foreign policy. It's a country, I learned, that breaks the heart of anyone who loves it. In the years since, I have not found a single American article or book on Sudan that did not get some detail wrong. But Anne Applebaum's "This Is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like," deeply depressing though it is, gets everything right. It even conveys, somehow, the feeling of Sudan. I had thought that I should write something about the utter depravity of the current civil war, but now I don't have to.

Following the coup that overthrew al-Bashir in 2019, a fragile civilian-military transitional arrangement failed to unite competing factions. Political instability, localised rebellions, and a simmering rivalry between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) the successor to the Popular Defence Forces, government-backed militia known as the Janjaweed who committed war crimes in Darfur in the early 2000s escalated into full-blown conflict.

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.