US sanctions Sudan

paramilitary commander

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The United States sanctioned a senior Sudanese military official on Tuesday, accusing him of overseeing human rights abuses in his country's West Darfur region. The Treasury Department announced the sanctions on Abdel Rahman Joma'a Barakallah, a commander with Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which it accused of being "a primary party responsible for the ongoing violence against civilians in Sudan."

Sudan has been gripped by a deadly conflict since April 2023 between the army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, led by his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is also known as Hemedti. In a statement, the Treasury said the RSF's campaign in West Darfur "was marked by credible claims of serious human rights abuses, including targeting of civilians, conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), and ethnically motivated violence."

UN experts have estimated that the RSF, with the support of Arab militias, have killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people in the West Darfur town of El-Geneina alone.

Armenia, Azerbaijan

cases to move ahead

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AFP) -- The UN's top court on Tuesday said that it had jurisdiction to consider rival cases by arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the latest ruling in a long-running legal clash.

The two Caucasus neighbors have for years been wrangling at the International Court of Justice over the territory that they have fought over for decades.

"The Court finds that it has jurisdiction" to consider rival cases filed by Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2021, the court said in two separate statements.

The cases concern actions taken in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been fought over since before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when former Soviet republics Armenia and Azerbaijan gained independence.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the region, populated mostly by mostly Christian ethnic Armenians, found itself inside an independent and mostly Muslim Azerbaijan.

The two nations have fought two wars -- in 2020 and in the 1990s -- for control of the then-breakaway enclave.

Junta airstrikes kill 11

in Myanmar teashop

BANGKOK, Thailand (AFP) -- Eleven people were killed when a teashop in Myanmar was hit by a military airstrike in the town of Naungcho in the northern Shan state on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for a local ethnic armed group said.

The attack, shortly before 3 p.m., comes as the junta battles widespread armed opposition to its 2021 coup and its soldiers accused of bloody rampages and using air and artillery strikes to punish civilian communities.

"They were civilians who came to drink tea and were sitting at the shop," Lway Yay Oo, a spokesperson for the Ta'ang National Liberation Army said.

At least four civilians were wounded and were receiving treatment in a hospital, she said.

Local media also reported that 11 people had died, but said many were injured in an army air attack on Lansan tea shop. The attack is the latest violation by the junta in recent months of a China-brokered ceasefire signed early this year. Beijing brokered a truce between the junta and the "Three Brotherhood Alliance" in January after months of fighting that displaced more than half a million people near China's southern border.