Middle East Near You

With the arrival at the Murted Airbase outside Ankara of Russian planes, over the past six days, carrying the S-400 missile defence system, the expected fall out between the...

According to well-informed sources, on the night of 22 February this year, as the invited guests in Sudan’s presidential palace gardens and television crews waited for the President to...

Few Sudanese support the notion that the ideals of the revolution should be abandoned, but most have surrendered to the reality that the desired civilian transitional rule is unlikely...

Historians and political scientists who have followed recent events in Sudan closely will point to the irony of the current dispute between the military and protest groups over the...

There are at least a dozen reasons, some fictitious, why Sudan’s ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) appears reluctant to give up power, but protest groups are becoming increasingly aware...

If the walls of Sudan’s presidential palace could speak, they would tell of a stark difference in the atmosphere of the talks between the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and...

The agreement between the signatories to the Declaration for Freedom and Change and the Transitional Military Council in Khartoum has not been fleshed out in great detail, but the...

There is an almost hysterical level of mistrust in Sudan which in the view of some observers is crippling the country’s attempt to reach an agreement about its future....

Here in Sudan, claims of responsibility for the downfall of the government of Omar Al-Bashir have become commonplace. On the dusty walls of buildings are graffiti-like writings proclaiming hashtags...

Almost 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall which brought communism to an abrupt end in Europe, communism has emerged alive and flourishing in Sudan. After last...

The events unfolding in Sudan are unprecedented. Tens of thousands of protestors have gathered for a fourth consecutive day outside the Armed Forces headquarters in the capital Khartoum demanding...

The Sudanese President’s government reshuffle following the imposition of a state of emergency on 22 February has been greeted with mixed reactions. The most outstanding feature of the changes...

Outside an unmarked building in a residential area of Khartoum, Um Mohammed crouched down with her head between her knees unable to stand any longer. She and a few...

Permanently dressed in his army fatigues when seen in public, President Field Marshall Omar Hassan Al-Bashir has downed his civilian attire and has rolled up his sleeves to begin...

As the world awaited President Omar Al-Bashir’s speech on Friday, frantic negotiations resulted in a last-minute change of direction. Intelligence Chief Salah Abdullah Gosh had been told to announce...

The decision to dissolve the government, the Council of Ministers and declare a state of emergency will come as little comfort for the hundreds of thousands of protestors who...

In a country with no nightclubs or bars, strolling along the River Nile or picnicking in Khartoum’s parks used to be the usual form of entertainment for young people...

Signs that the pace of the protests in Sudan is slowing down became apparent this week when a call for mass demonstrations on Monday went virtually unheeded. This has...

The decision by Sudan’s Intelligence Services to release protestors arrested during the ongoing demonstrations across the country may come as a surprise to human rights organisations and detainees alike....

A prominent feature of the revolution in Sudan has now become a target of the on-going protests across the country. The noticeable increase in the nation’s religiosity and the...

A month after a spontaneous protest in the Northern Sudan of Atbara, known as the “City of Iron and Fire,” morphed into a series of organised demonstrations, there are...

As the year closes and a new one begins, it is clear that Sudan is in the worst economic and political crisis it has ever experienced during its independence....

The long-awaited return of Al Sadiq Al-Mahdi passed without the expected euphoria partly because of the death of his brother the night before. Descending from a plane at Khartoum...

The surprise visit to Syria by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir to meet his counterpart, Bashar Al-Assad, has raised more questions than it answers. Why was there no official announcement?...

If the 2018 election law was supposed to unite the opposition and the government in agreement about the forthcoming elections in 2020, the bill which was passed last week...

These days, predicting Sudan’s political and economic prospects is perhaps a job best left to speculators and fortune tellers. The plethora of economic woes and political strife has become...

In the heart of the Sudanese capital’s Omdurman Wad Nubawi district sits Sarah Abdullah Abdurrahman Nugallah, one of the most powerful women in Sudanese politics. Nugallah is Secretary General...

This week’s sentencing of one of the most powerful intelligence officers in Sudan has not only sent shockwaves through the ranks of the National Security and Intelligence Service (NISS)...

A day after Sudan announced plans to reduce the size of its government by over 50 per cent the extent of the economic deadlock has become clear. With the...

Just fifteen days after President Salva Kiir of South Sudan told the world in Addis Ababa that his political rival, Riek Machar, could never again be part of the...

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s emphatic first round victory in Turkey’s snap election is being regarded in the country as much as a resounding defeat for a lacklustre opposition as the...

It is by no means certain who will be the occupant of Ankara’s Presidential Palace come Monday morning. There are no predictions by election pundits of a landslide win...