Wdah, 19, i konfliktdrabbade Khartoum: "En spökstad"

Efter år av krig i Ukraina och Gaza kanske folk inte orkar höra om det som Inas Mustafa Hassan har genomlevt. Att hon, en 14-årig tjej, såg sin pappa mördas i sitt eget hem. Att hon sedan lämnade allt bakom sig och flydde till sin mamma i Tchad. Det är ännu ett människoöde, runt 150 centimeter långt och smalt som en speta, stående i lera precis vid gränsen mellan det söndertrasade hemlandet och ett av världens fattigaste länder som nu är hennes temporära hem. Kanske ett människoöde för mycket. Men vi kanske måste försöka ändå. Ett land i krig Statistiken är häpnadsväckande. Runt 150 000–200 000 personer har dött i strider (men mörkertalet är stort), runt 10 miljoner människor är på flykt, över 630 000 i läger i Tchad. Enligt vissa beräkningar kan upp mot 2 miljoner människor dö av hunger och hungersrelaterade sjukdomar i år. Kriget i Sudan startade i april 2023 när de två delarna av Sudans armé började strida: Rapid Support Force (RSF) tog snabbt huvudstaden Khartoum och stora delar av de västra och södra delarna av landet. I Darfur satte man igång att driva ut etniska afrikaner igen, som Inas och hennes familj. Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) kontrollerar de östra delarna av landet samt en enda stad i Darfur som under månader har varit omringad. Båda sidorna har internationellt stöd. RSF har Förenade Arabemiraten på sin sida, SAF får hjälp av Egypten och Iran. Ryssland verkar spela båda sidor och EU och USA försöker mest att ignorera konflikten och tänka på något annat. Knapphändig information Satellitbilder visar brända byar, flyktingläger och det som ser ut att vara massgravar, annars är det svårt att få ett grepp om vad som pågår i Sudan. Men, vid ett brunt vattendrag i mitten av Afrika får man ändå en känsla för kriget. Hundratals flyktingar plaskar över ån, som separerar Sudan från Tchad. De går vidare till läger drivna av UNHCR, där det finns mat och sjukvård. I ett sådant läger kommer nog Inas att fira sin nästa födelsedag. Om kriget inte tar slut snart kan hon kanske fira sin 25-årsdag där också. Blir lägret permanent kanske hon bor där som 35-åring. En bortglömd flykting från ett bortglömt krig med svaga minnen av sin mördade pappa.

▸ Ett landmärke, en skyskrapa, i Sudans huvudstad Khartoum står i lågor samtidigt som striderna mellan armén och de…

Striderna mellan den sudanesiska armén och paramilitären RSF fortsätter. Till följd av både markstrider och flyganfall står nu den 18 våningar höga skyskrapan Greater Nile Petroleum Oil Company Tower i lågor, rapporterar BBC. ”Detta är verkligen smärtsamt att se”, skriver Tagreed Abdin, byggnadens arkitekt, på X. Tornet är ett av Khartoums mest kända landmärken och hur branden uppstod är fortfarande oklart. Sedan oroligheterna i Sudan bröt ut i april har maktkampen fortgått. Hittills har över en miljon människor tvingats på flykt, uppger FN.

Alsiraira Mokhtar lämnade Sudans huvudstad Khartoum för att studera datavetenskap i Borlänge. Efter att ha fått stöd med uppehållstillstånd och boende trivs hon bra i sin nya stad. – Jag har varit i Stockholm och Uppsala men jag älskar Borlänge mer, säger hon.

I åratal använde Wagnergruppens ledare Jevgenij Prigozjin privata flygplan för att inte kunna spåras. Till slut verkar det vara precis det som blev hans död, skriver Wall Street Journal. Tidningen har talat med ryska flygvapenofficerare, Wagneravhoppare, tjänstemän från Afrika och Mellanöstern och andra som med insyn i Prigozjins resmönster för att kunna kartlägga hans flygresor – ända fram till den sista. Hans plan lyfte ofta från en flygplats utanför Moskva för möten i Syrien, Libyen eller flygresor tvärs över Sahara. Besättningen stängde ofta av transpondern, hade med sig falska pass och hörde av sig till flygledningskontrollerna mitt under flygningar för att meddela att destinationen ändrats. Mercenary leader moved around Russia, blocked surveillance and eluded sanctions until assassination in plane crash By Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Jack Gillum and Benoit Faucon 30 august, 2023 Long before his private jet plunged from the sky, Yevgeny Prigozhin suspected it could be the stage for his assassination. The Embraer Legacy 600 was one of several private jets the chief of the Wagner mercenary firm outfitted with equipment to detect surveillance, electronically tinted smart windows and white leather seats. Aboard, Prigozhin sought to evade a growing dragnet of sanctions and wanted lists, according to former Russian air force officers, Wagner defectors, African and Middle Eastern officials and other people familiar with his travel routine. His jets, often setting off from Moscow’s Chkalovsky Air Force Base or nearby civilian airports to visit clients in Syria, Libya or across the Sahara, would regularly turn off their transponders, vanishing from plane tracking screens. Crews, known to carry fake passports, would revise passenger lists just before takeoff, then radio air-traffic control midflight to announce a sudden change of destination. From his time as a youth on the same tough St. Petersburg streets as Vladimir Putin, through his stints in prison and role as Russia’s most influential war entrepreneur, until finally becoming the only member of Putin’s inner circle to challenge him, Prigozhin spent a lifetime honing his ability to live on the run. It wasn’t enough to save him. The 62-year-old military entrepreneur’s jet came down in a patch of meadow about 40 miles from Putin’s lakeside residence on Aug. 23, killing all on board. U.S. officials have assessed that the plane crashed as the result of an assassination plot. The Russian government has said it is investigating the cause of the crash but hasn’t offered an explanation. It bulldozed the site, despite international safety norms that call for preserving it. In the years before the crash, Prigozhin and his crew put in place elaborate measures to mask his flight plans, testing the limits of how easily an international fugitive could jet through dozens of foreign airports undetected. To track Prigozhin’s movements, The Wall Street Journal reviewed flight records provided by Flightradar24, an aircraft-tracking service, since at least 2020. The U.S., which along with some 30 other countries sanctioned the warlord and his companies in recent years, had offered a $10 million reward for his capture and leaned on African partners including Niger to block his plane from landing or being serviced crossing the Sahara.  The Treasury Department barred U.S. citizens and companies from servicing or engaging with his planes and yachts after his social media troll farm churned out thousands of fake accounts that spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 presidential election. In April, a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft appeared to follow one of his Wagner group airlifters about 70 miles off the coast of Syria and Lebanon, according to flight data from ADSB Exchange, another tracker. The mainstay of his fleet, the roughly $10 million Embraer Legacy 600, had changed its registration and jurisdiction several times since a Seychelles-based company linked to Prigozhin acquired it in 2018 from a firm registered in the British tax haven of Isle of Man, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. Prigozhin would sometimes shuffle between two or three different jets for a single one-way journey to the African countries where Wagner has contracts to protect leaders and national military juntas. Before landing he would question his crew on how closely ground staff would interact with the aircraft. He frequently conducted meetings in disguise or on runways in his jet in case he was threatened with capture and had to make a swift exit. Last October, Prigozhin landed at an air base in eastern Libya to meet Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar, dressed in a military uniform, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard and flanked by a security detail. Gleb Irisov, a former Russian air force officer, said he regularly bumped into Prigozhin at the Chkalovsky air base, boarding flights to Africa surrounded by bodyguards. Prigozhin stepped up security measures further after his aborted June mutiny, in which he threatened to march his mercenary army to Moscow. When flying inside Russia, he stopped flying out of the Moscow air base or other Russian military airstrips, and also stopped using government jets from the Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Management, according to people familiar with the situation. He set out on his final Africa tour in August from a sleepy commercial airport 20 miles southeast of the capital, adding himself to the passenger list shortly before takeoff. Russia’s state-controlled press is full of speculation about the cause of the crash, which also killed Wagner deputy Dmitry Utkin and other close associates. Speaking to the nation after the explosion, Putin called Prigozhin an old friend from the 1990s who “made some serious mistakes in life.” Social media channels considered close to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, suggested Prigozhin’s security protocols had weakened in the months before the flight. Other channels have pointed to uncorroborated testimony of aircrew who cited unusual repairs ahead of the final flight or the visit of two men who said they were prospective buyers of the jet, hours before the crash. “Prigozhin travels a lot so there’s your opportunity” to have him killed, said Dan Hoffman, former CIA station chief in Moscow. He likened Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin to a scene in “The Godfather” when Michael Corleone tells the traitor Carlo Rizzi he will be exiled to Las Vegas, only to have him murdered minutes later. Prigozhin had once counted himself among the few loyalists in the shrinking circle of hard-liners around the autocrat. After the failed mutiny, the Putin-Prigozhin relationship became murkier. In a speech several days after, Putin revealed his government had financed most of Wagner’s operating expenses, after years denying the government funding. Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, claimed to have persuaded Putin not to move ahead with a preset plan to execute Prigozhin. Wagner was invited to decamp to Belarus, and Prigozhin arrived at an airfield outside Minsk in the Embraer Legacy 600 as the country was constructing 300 tents for his fighters. On Aug. 1, that tent city began to vanish from satellite pictures, as authorities apparently dismantled it. After that, Prigozhin began to reappear in videos and voice memos, promising to expand Wagner’s footprint in Africa. He offered mercenaries to the military regime that in July seized power in Niger.A few days before his death, he used a Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-76 jet to fly from Central African Republic to Mali, where he posed with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.” On the way, he avoided the airspace of Nigeria, whose government has been unsettled by Russia’s support for military governments in West Africa. The jet that crashed was present at pivotal moments in Wagner’s international expansion. In Sudan, just days after 2019 street protests toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir, it landed in Khartoum carrying high-ranking Russian military officials, according to Sudanese officials. The delegation, including Igor Osipov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, met with the governing military council to discuss how Russian private military assistance could help them face down swelling nationwide protests. A week later, the jet traveled the same route from Moscow carrying senior Sudanese officials including Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces, an infamous paramilitary group accused of war crimes in the restive Darfur province. The commander, who goes by the mononym Hemedti, became Prigozhin’s key partner in Sudan, supplying him gold taken from mines the paramilitary group was able to expand and secure with equipment and arms provided by Wagner. Prigozhin was present at several key meetings in Khartoum around that time but often traveled under a pseudonym, according to Sudanese officials who saw him at the Republican Palace and were briefed on the meetings. The Embraer Legacy 600 jet was beginning to attract the attention of Russian journalists and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which added the jet and Autolex, the registered Seychelles owner, to sanctions in September 2019. Shortly after, Prigozhin deregistered it and re-registered it to a St. Petersburg company, Trans Logistik. Now registered as RA-02795, the jet was used to fly leaders of the Central African Republic in June 2021 from St. Petersburg, where they attended the international economic forum, to their capital city Bangui. U.S. officials, which had begun tracking the plane, asked African allies to monitor it and enforce sanctions. The government of Niger agreed to block Prigozhin’s planes from its airspace, jeopardizing his ability to fly across the vast Saharan desert.Within days of his June mutiny, Prigozhin was back on the Embraer Legacy 600, shuttling between a military air base in Belarus, Moscow and St. Petersburg. At the end of July, he flew to St. Petersburg to try to network on the margins of a Russia-Africa summit hosted by Putin that he wasn’t allowed to officially attend. Back in Russia after the final trip to Africa, he again took off in his Embraer Legacy 600 jet from Moscow bound for St. Petersburg on Aug. 23. The plane vanished from flight-tracking websites. U.S. officials, monitoring for signs of a surface-to-air missile, saw none, and concluded the explosion was caused by some alternative form of sabotage, such as an onboard bomb. Flightradar24 reported Prigozhin’s plane falling rapidly from about 28,000 feet before it stopped transmitting. On Tuesday, the warlord was buried in a short and sparsely attended service in his hometown’s Porokhovskoye cemetery. In an undated video statement that circulated on Russian social media in recent days, Prigozhin used eerily prescient language to describe what he thought was happening to the Russian state. “You better kill me, but I won’t lie,” he says. “I have to be honest: Russia is on the brink of disaster. If these cogs are not adjusted today, the plane will fall apart in midair.” Nicholas Bariyo and Kate Vtorygina contributed to this article.

Wagnerledaren Jevgenij Prigoszjin levde ett liv på flykt med olika maskeringar och avtal som endast ingicks med en handskakning. Hans sista dagar kantades av resor runt i Afrika och Mellanöstern för att visa att han fortfarande hade kontroll, skriver Wall Street Journal. Det han inte visste var att det blev hans avskedsturné. Den senaste resan utomlands började i Bangui i Centralafrikanska republiken, dagen efter mötte han Rapid Support Forces i Sudan och tog emot guld från Songominan i Darfur. – Jag behöver mer guld, sa Prigoszjin enligt en sudanesisk tjänsteman. On the run, the paramilitary chief crisscrossed his global business empire, stopping in Central African Republic and Mali, desperate to show he was still in control; ‘I need more gold.’ By Benoit Faucon 24 August 2023 Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future. Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent. In the riverside presidential palace in Bangui, the capital, Prigozhin told President Faustin-Archange Touadera that his aborted June mutiny in Russia wouldn’t stop him from bringing new fighters and investments to his business partners in Central Africa, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Shortly after, a Wagner helicopter landed nearby carrying five commanders from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group reliant on the mercenary group to wage war against their country’s government. The delegation had traveled to Bangui from the restive Darfur province bearing a gift for Prigozhin, who had provided them surface-to-air missiles: gold bars from the mines his mercenaries helped secure in Sudan’s war-torn west. On the other side of the Sahara, Prigozhin’s rivals in Russia’s defense ministry were delivering a competing message to Wagner’s clients in Libya. The Kremlin was taking formal control of a sprawling corporate network whose ambitions had outgrown President Vladimir Putin’s comfort. The delegation was led by deputy defense minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov—the man whom Prigozhin publicly berated and rebuked for using the informal “you” to address him when Wagner captured the Southern Military District HQ in Rostov, Ukraine, on June 24. Prigozhin flew back to Russia around the same time, stopping over in Mali, and weaving through the airspace of client states he was trying to salvage from Kremlin control. It was a farewell tour that the 62-year-old paramilitary chief didn’t realize he was making. When the Embraer Legacy 600 jet carrying Prigozhin and his most senior lieutenants fell from the sky on Wednesday just 40 miles from one of Putin’s lakeside residences, it cut short an international contest that had been quietly playing out for two months as both the Kremlin and the self-styled military oligarch vied for influence in the countries that once sourced their mercenaries from Wagner. For years, Prigozhin had been increasingly living on the run, changing between wigs to impersonate bearded Arab military officers while refueling his jet in the dwindling number of airports that would grant him permission to land. His Wagner group and the hundred-some shell companies it was linked to were mostly known for their mercenary operations, but by the end of his life had also expanded into finance, construction, supply and logistics, mining and natural resources—and even a thoroughbred racing firm, Sporthorses Management, controlled by his daughter, Polina. Its income derived from exports of Sudanese gold to Russia, and diamonds and wood from the Central African Republic to United Arab Emirates and China, Western and African officials said. His death leaves the future of those businesses uncertain. The Kremlin now seeks to nationalize an opaque network centralized around Prigozhin’s personal authority. On Thursday, Putin expressed his condolences for those who died on the doomed jet, calling Prigozhin someone with a “complicated life story,” who had greatly contributed to the Russian cause. “He made some serious mistakes in life,” Putin said of the man he once awarded the country’s highest military honor, the medal of the Hero of Russia. “As far as I know, he returned from Africa only yesterday.” “Different factions linked to the Russian military will probably try to take over these lucrative business contracts and create new proxy forces,” said David Lewis, from the U.K.’s Exeter University. “Prigozhin was particularly skilled at managing these transnational networks, but he is not indispensable.” Countries from Mali to Syria had come to depend on Prigozhin’s hired guns, and just days ago, he was offering his services to the new military government of Niger, which seized power last month. Yet new mercenary companies, run by Russia’s GRU military-intelligence agency, were competing to take over Wagner’s contracts. Putin had personally told Touadera, the Central African Republic president, that the time had come to distance himself from Prigozhin. When Touadera visited Prigozhin’s hometown of St. Petersburg for a conference last month, he abstained from taking a selfie with the Russian warlord. For his part, the sardonic ex-convict shrugged off the possibility of his impending demise. “We will all go to hell,” Prigozhin said in an undated video, released Wednesday by the Grey Zone Telegram channel, which frequently publishes official Wagner statements. “But in hell, we will be the best.” This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen African government, military and intelligence officials, Wagner defectors, activist groups and reviews of encrypted conversations and flight data, as well as corporate organizational charts reviewed by the Journal. Prigozhin’s flights between Russia and Africa were confirmed by Gleb Irisov, a former Russia air force officer who spoke to airport crew. Much of Prigozhin’s dealings were shrouded in scores of heavily sanctioned shell companies that banked in opaque jurisdictions. It was a veil of obfuscation that helped the Kremlin claim deniability as the Wagner group helped Russia amass influence, fan protests in Africa against pro-Western governments and swerve around sanctions. Many of the deals he struck with foreign governments were conducted on a handshake basis, with the details unknown beyond a tiny circle of Wagner officials handpicked by Prigozhin. One was Dmitry Utkin, the former GRU officer whose Nazi tattoos can be seen in photographs, who also died in Wednesday’s plane crash. His thousands of workers, mercenaries, line cooks, mining geologists and social-media trolls were often paid in cash, at times from a plastic bag by Prigozhin himself—who in turn often billed governments by sending his private jets to collect his arrears in cash. Since June, the Kremlin had been trying to assert control over that shadowy web of murky arrangements. The Defense Ministry—led by Prigozhin’s chief rival, Sergei Shoigu—had been dispatching delegations to inform foreign governments that they would henceforth do business directly with the Russian state. After the mutiny, Prigozhin struck a deal with Putin and moved his forces in Russia to seek shelter in Belarus. But Prigozhin refused to retire quietly, crisscrossing the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa in a bid to keep his business links alive. He posted audio messages, offering mercenaries to the military regime that had recently taken power in Niger, and a video of himself in Mali posing with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.” The warlord, who was sanctioned by more than 30 governments, was accustomed to living on the run. He flew in planes that regularly turned their transponders off and avoided airspace where Western-allied governments could claim a $10 million State Department reward for information on the man alleged to be responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He had been forced to make at least one emergency landing in the middle of the Sahara after running out of fuel and frequently conducted meetings on runways in his jet in case he had to make a swift exit. He traveled on fake passports and dispatched advance parties of Wagner cybersecurity experts to sweep for bugs. He preferred to brief social media followers over audio messages—impossible to geolocate—or through videos in locations that were difficult to identify. Last October, Prigozhin arrived at an air base in eastern Libya to meet the Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar. Prigozhin dressed in a military uniform with oversize epaulets and peaked cap, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard. He was surrounded by a retinue of six heavily armed henchmen, and locals thought he was a follower of the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement. “Everyone who saw him thought he was Salafist,” said a Libyan who witnessed his arrival. Photos from the meeting, reviewed by people present, show Prigozhin smiling through his beard. Shortly after it was taken, he shouted at Haftar through a translator, demanding some $200 million for Wagner’s help securing the Libyan warlord’s territory, including its oil wells. Prigozhin later sent another private jet the next month to pick up the cash. Prigozhin was convinced Haftar’s regime was infiltrated by French intelligence and the CIA. Even the Libyan uniform he would wear on trips to Libya was made in Syria and brought from there—ensuring no bugs or tracking devices could be inserted. This year, his attempted Russian mutiny left him with enemies on his own side. Putin seemed resolved to kill Prigozhin during the hours when his convoy of disgruntled mercenaries approached Moscow, the autocratic ruler Alexander Lukashenko of neighboring Belarus later recalled. Lukashenko claimed he had phoned the Russian president and talked him out of that decision, offering Belarus instead as a place where Wagner could find safety. Prigozhin arrived in a private jet three days later. “Having betrayed their country and their people, the leaders of this mutiny also betrayed those whom they drew into their crime,” Putin said in a speech that month, glaring into a camera. “They lied to them, pushed them to their death, putting them under attack, forcing them to shoot their people.” The Kremlin began asserting control over the business network Prigozhin had founded. Agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, raided Wagner’s glass office tower headquarters in St. Petersburg for evidence against Prigozhin; across town, Russian law enforcement seized computers and servers at his Patriot Media Group, the social media troll factory blamed for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. Pro-Wagner social media channels were blocked within Russia, and some of his subsidiaries were raided by Russian security services, which claimed to have found pistols, fake passports and the equivalent of $48 million in cash and gold bars in his properties. Prigozhin still hoped to salvage the mercenary outposts he had built in Africa and the Middle East. A new detachment of Wagner mercenaries was set to rotate into Central African Republic to secure the country ahead of an August referendum that would allow the president to serve without term limits. Another contingent was in place, training the local defense forces. The new deployments also expanded the mercenaries’ foothold along the border with Congo, to protect from a cross-border rebel attack, say Western security officials. “We are not drawing down, and more than that, we are ready to go further and increase our various contingents,” Prigozhin told Cameroon-based Afrique Media in a July interview. “For the moment all our obligations are fulfilled, and they will be, no matter what comes our way.” At the end of that month, five weeks after his rebellion, he set out to network with African leaders at St. Petersburg’s Trezzini Palace hotel, one of the accommodations for a Russia-Africa summit attended by 17 African heads of state and Putin. They included Touadera, the Central African Republic president whose government credited Wagner with saving the country after years of armed rebellion. Touadera, told by Putin to avoid Prigozhin, sidestepped the warlord. Prigozhin managed to meet up with Touadera’s chief of protocol, then headed to meet a Cameroonian journalist. None of the African leaders attending was seen with Prigozhin. Instead, the African presidents were ushered into a gilded Kremlin conference room, across from Putin and a man Prigozhin was coming to see as a rival: Gen. Andrey Averyanov, the head of GRU’s covert offensive operations unit. Viktor Bout—the arms dealer who once supplied weapons to warlords in Liberia, recently returned to Russia from a U.S. prison in an exchange for U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner—also appeared on a panel, while Prigozhin languished outside. Prigozhin had become concerned that his operations in Africa were being shifted to the GRU, Russian Telegram channel VchK-OGPU, known for leaks from FSB, reported. The same week as the summit, the presidential guard in Niger kidnapped their pro-American president Mohamed Bazoum, and installed themselves as the country’s new military leadership. Prigozhin released a voice memo offering to send mercenaries to help shore up the junta. His allies in Mali also met with the new Nigerien leadership. So far, Niger appears to have passed on the offer, West African and U.S. officials have said. Crowds of young men—some waving Russian flags and pro-Putin placards—however, have marched through the capital, demanding Niger break from the West. Neighboring Nigeria, worried about a band of Russian-backed military governments expanding across West and Central Africa, has threatened to use military force to reverse the coup. Prigozhin’s death “doesn’t change anything,” a Nigerian intelligence official said. “Russia is still there. When the Wagner leader is gone, they are still active in Africa…Maybe now the Kremlin’s hands will be more strengthened.” Prigozhin’s last trip began in Bangui, where Touadera and his intelligence chief Wanzet Linguissara agreed to meet him in the Presidential Palace, a whitewashed riverside complex. A spokesman for Touadera didn’t respond to a request for comment. Linguissara declined to comment. A spokesman for the Officers Union, a corps of Russian military instructors in Bangui that backs Prigozhin, said it had “no precise information on whether he was in Bangui.” At the meeting, Prigozhin said Wagner would reinforce its presence to ensure security and facilitate new investments in agriculture, according to a person briefed on the meeting. The following day, Prigozhin was welcoming the Rapid Support Forces commanders from Sudan. As they handed over the gold, packed in wooden crates from Darfur’s Songo mine, the warlord said he needed more. “I need more gold,” Prigozhin said, according to a Sudanese official familiar with the conversation. Wagner supplies had helped the paramilitary group score a series of battlefield victories against Sudan’s Islamist military government, including the recent capture of a weapons factory and the largest police base in Khartoum. “I am going to make sure you defeat them,” he added. Leaving Bangui, Prigozhin flew to Bamako, Mali, based on flight records of a private jet he frequently used to crisscross the continent, posing in front of local army pickups in a video, before heading back to Moscow. On Tuesday, a delegation from the Russian Defense Ministry landed in Libya at the invitation of Haftar, the Libyan warlord who had paid Wagner for securing its oil wells and territory. Prigozhin’s mutiny had left Haftar’s close circle nervous about Wagner’s presence in Libya, said Mohamed Eljarh, a managing director at security consulting firm Libya Desk with connections in Haftar’s camp. “They felt that if they do it in Russia, they can do it in Benghazi,” said Eljarh, who said the two sides discussed a formal defense partnership with the Russian government. Russian intelligence officers would now be stationed in Benghazi, and the head of the Russian contractors will be replaced with a new mercenary firm set up in Wagner’s place. But the same fighters would remain. Haftar asked for spare parts, maintenance and training for its aging aircraft fleet and even requested that Russia help supply it with Iranian drones it is using in Ukraine. “Russia wanted to send the message that it’s now a partnership between two armies,” a Libyan security official said, as a state-to-state relationship. “Putin told me Libya is very important for us,” Yevkurov told Haftar. “It’s the first Wagner country we are visiting.” —Gabriele Steinhauser contributed to this article.

Omfattande krigsförbrytelser pågår på båda sidor av konflikten i Sudan, enligt en ny rapport från Amnesty International, skriver AP. Enligt rapporten ska civila vara medvetna mål för att bli dödade eller skadade. Kvinnor våldtas och flera av dem hålls i förhållanden som ”som motsvarar sexuellt slaveri” , mestadels i huvudstaden Khartoum. – Sexuellt våld har varit ett definierande element i den här konflikten sedan början. Civila har inget riktigt bra alternativt, det är svårt för dem att lämna och det är otroligt farligt att stanna, säger Donatella Rovera en av rapportförfattarna. Sedan den 15 april i år har strider pågått mellan den reguljära armén och den paramilitära styrkan Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Mellanöstern och Afrika fortsätter att hamna i botten när världens städer bedöms utifrån allt ifrån sjukvård och utbildning till miljö och infrastruktur. Den positiva nyheten är att regionernas poäng har ökat jämfört med tidigare år. Det skriver The Economist, vars systerbolag Economist Intelligence Unit ligger bakom indexet. Bland annat har Saudiarabiens investeringar på kulturområdet ökat markant. Detsamma gäller landets satsningar inom sport. När det kommer till stabilitet ser det däremot desto sämre ut. ”Styret fortsätter att kväva all opposition”, skriver The Economist. The Middle East and Africa remain at the bottom of EIU’s index. But their scores are going up By The Economist July 31, 2023 Egypt’s government worries that its citizens may get trapped in their lifts. Frequent power outages in Cairo, the capital, during the sweltering summer months mean that such miserable confinement is not an unlikely occurrence. Like many other cities in the Middle East and Africa, Cairo’s wobbly infrastructure makes it a difficult place to live. Food inflation is running at 66%, and members of the middle class are sliding into poverty. That reality is reflected in findings by eiu, our sister company, and its liveable cities index. See where Cairo and other cities in the Middle East and Africa ranked in our map below. EIU’s global index judges 173 cities on five categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Notably, some big cities like Khartoum, in Sudan, and Baghdad, in Iraq, are not included in the index. Despite the general low rankings of cities in the Middle East and north Africa, liveability is generally improving. Its cities received an average score of 61, up from 58 last year. The score for sub-Saharan Africa (the world’s least liveable region) rose from 50 last year to 54 in 2023. Both regions saw improvements in cities at the bottom of the rankings. Algiers and Lagos—both in energy-exporting countries—benefited from rising energy prices, allowing their governments to pump money into public services and infrastructure. Abu Dhabi retained its top spot in the region, thanks to good scores for its infrastructure and stability. Dubai, another city in the United Arab Emirates, was a close second. Tel Aviv in Israel, once a beacon of democracy in the region, came third. But its score was dragged down by increased instability—in large part because of unrest spurred by the government’s bid to limit the powers of the country’s independent judiciary. There were other notable shifts across the Middle East and north Africa. Several cities in Saudi Arabia improved their score in the culture and environment category, which measures such things as the availability of sporting and cultural offerings. In culture, Saudi Arabia once lagged behind the likes of Cairo and Casablanca. Now it is trying to establish itself as the region’s media hub, pumping money into home-grown films and lavish music concerts. Even more notable is its foray into sports: it has acquired several European footballers to play in its domestic league, including Cristiano Ronaldo in late 2022. In June of this year it reportedly invested $3bn to merge its upstart golf tournament with America’s pga Tour and Europe’s dp World Tour, the biggest in the sport. But Saudi’s stability scores remained unchanged. Its rulers continue to stifle any opposition. As in the past several years, war-ravaged Damascus, Syria’s capital, scored the lowest of any city in the world. Although Bashar al-Assad, the country’s brutal dictator, is no longer a pariah in the Middle East, his gradual return to the international stage has not led to any improvements in the living standards of his people. It is not likely that will change anytime soon. Cities in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t fare so well either. Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, is still the most liveable place on the continent south of the Sahara, but it dropped seven places in the rankings. (Cape Town, the country’s much-improved second city, is not part of the index.) The public sector there is failing: those with the means pay for private alternatives. Blackouts are more frequent there than they were last year. Its residents probably worry about getting stuck in a lift even more than Cairenes. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Sudans huvudstad Khartoum har under fredagen tidvis varit utan både internet och mobiltelefontäckning, samtidigt som intensiva strider har pågått mellan regeringen och den paramilitära gruppen RSF, skriver AFP. Mobilnätverket ska ha kommit igång vid 11-tiden lokal tid men internet ska fortfarande ligga nere, enligt boende som AFP har pratat med. Internet har varit viktigt för att kunna nå ut med information om striderna, men även för boende att få tillgång till basala behov såsom mat och medicin. Samtidigt skriver The Guardian att över 30 personer har dött i en attack under tisdagen. Veckan beskrivs av tidningen som den värsta veckan för civila dödsoffer sedan striderna började.