Middle East Near You

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...

This week’s cabinet decision to put forward a new election law appears to support the view that some members of Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) are planning to...

The Sudanese are not generally known for peddling conspiracy theories. However, during this severe economic crisis many elaborate claims and counter claims about the causes and consequences of the...

The arrest of 16 prominent businessmen on charges of corruption and embezzlement may have made the media headlines in Sudan, but under the country’s current “illegal wealth” laws there...

Despite the growing domestic disquiet, the Sudanese government has again confirmed it has no plans to pull its estimated 10,000 troops out of Yemen. The calls for withdrawal have...

The sacking of Sudan’s Foreign Minister, Professor Ibrahim Ghandour, does not appear to be a surprise for many within the Sudanese diplomatic corps, unlike the rest of the country,...

For young people in Sudan, it is not difficult to understand the link between learning English and ending up dead in the Mediterranean Sea. That may sound far-fetched, but...

Last month’s shock reappointment of Salah Abdallah Mohamed Saleh, known as Gosh, as the head of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) was a snap decision that stunned...

As Sudan’s ambassador returns to Cairo today after a two-month absence, the precise reasons for Abdel-Mahmood Abdel-Halim’s dramatic withdrawal remains unexplained. Likewise, there is no available information on the...

On 13 November last year, a report was released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the state of consumer subsidies in Sudan. It received scant media coverage but...

The irony of the presence of Egyptian troops gathering on the Eritrean-Sudanese border over its objection to Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam is not lost on legal experts aware of Egypt’s...

With the recall of Sudan’s Ambassador from Egypt, the closure of the Eritrean Border and a recent visit by Turkey’s President in which a Turkish takeover of a strategic...