Wed 25 Feb 2026 {HMC} Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group has carried out a major raid in North Darfur State, killing and wounding dozens of people.

The RSF tore through the town of Misteriha killing at least 28 people and injuring 39 including 10 women, said the Sudan Doctors Network, which monitors violence in the three-year war.

The attack destroyed the area’s only health centre. Medical personnel were among those attacked, and one healthcare worker was detained and remains missing, the network said.

“These attacks constitute a fully fledged crime and a blatant violation of all humanitarian and international laws that criminalise attacks against civilians,” the group said.

The assault on Misteriha came against a backdrop of rising tribal tensions in the western region of Darfur, where a United Nations investigation last week found that the RSF committed acts of genocide against non-Arab ethnic groups.

The town is home to Arab tribal leader Musa Hilal – who despite hailing from the Arab Rizeigat ethnic group, which forms the tribal base of the RSF – has voiced support for Sudan’s government.

The RSF was formed out of the Janjaweed militia, which fought rebel groups in Darfur and which Hilal commanded. He was sanctioned by the UN for ethnic atrocities in Darfur in the 2000s.

Emergency Lawyers, an independent group documenting atrocities in Sudan, said RSF fighters torched many houses in the town, forcing people to flee to nearby villages.

The seizure of Misteriha would likely assert RSF control of Darfur. However, it risks escalating tribal tensions in an area long known for violence and war.

Monday’s attack came four months after the RSF overran el-Fasher, the provincial capital of North Darfur, after 18 months of siege. The paramilitaries killed more than 6,000 people between October 25-27 in the city.

The attack was marked by atrocities that UN-backed experts said bore “the hallmarks of genocide”.

World’s largest crisis
RSF fighters targeted Hilal’s guesthouse with a drone strike over the weekend before launching their offensive.

Darfur, which is about the size of France, is home to many armed groups mostly organised along ethnic lines. While some have fought for either the RSF or the army, others have remained neutral, forging informal deals to keep territory under their control.

Since the war began in April 2023, fighting between the RSF and Sudan’s regular army has devastated the country, particularly in the Darfur, where the RSF has consolidated control.

The war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 11 million, creating the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis.

web 25 Feb 2026 {HMC} Aden, Yemen – Lying on the outskirts of Yemen’s interim capital, Aden, al-Basateen district starts where the paved roads end, stretching into narrow, sandy alleyways. It reveals a decades-old refugee story in which Arabic blends with Somali and the faces harbour memories of a different place, across the sea.

Residents know the area by several names, including “Yemen’s Mogadishu” and “the Somalis’ neighbourhood” – a reference to the demographic shift it has seen since the 1990s, when civil war in Somalia pushed thousands of families across the Gulf of Aden in search of safety.

Today, local sources estimate the district’s population at more than 40,000, with people of Somali origin making up the majority. They live in harsh conditions where economic vulnerability overlaps with an unresolved legal status.

Some arrived as children holding the hands of relatives, while others were born in Aden and have known no other home. But they all share one thing in common: the refugee label stamped on their official documents.

Harsh living conditions
As dawn breaks, dozens of men gather at the entrances of the area’s main streets, waiting to be picked up to do a day’s work in construction or manual labour. Many depend on this fragile pattern of employment to put food on the table.

Residents say the lack of regular work has become the defining feature of life in al-Basateen, as extreme poverty spreads and humanitarian aid declines.

Ashour Hassan, a resident in his mid-30s, waiting at a main road junction for someone to hire him to wash a car, told Al Jazeera that he earns between 3,000 and 4,000 Yemeni rials a day (less than $3). That amount is not enough to cover the needs of his family, which lives in a single room in a neighbourhood lacking basic services, surrounded by dirt roads and piles of rubbish.

In a voice mixed with fatigue and despair, Ashour summed up life in al-Basateen: “We live day to day. If we find work, we eat. If we don’t, we wait without food until tomorrow.”

Families in al-Basateen typically rely on both men and women to be breadwinners.

Some women work cleaning homes, while others run small businesses, such as selling bread and traditional foods that blend Yemeni and Somali flavours, and which become especially popular during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Many children also find themselves pushed into work despite their age. One of the main jobs for children involves sifting through waste for materials they can sell, such as plastic or scrap metal, to help support their families.

Little sense of belonging
Poverty is clearly visible in al-Basateen’s architecture and appearance, with tightly packed homes, some made of metal sheets and consisting of only one or two rooms, separated by dirt roads covered in rubbish.

But that is not the only burden weighing on al-Basateen’s Somali residents. A deeper feeling of what many here call “suspended belonging” hangs over them, with the first generation of refugees still carrying memories of a distant homeland and speaking its language, while the second and third generations know only Aden and speak Arabic in the local dialect, with Somalia only known through family stories.

Fatima Jame embodies this paradox. A mother of four, she was born in Aden to Somali parents. She told Al Jazeera: “We know no country other than Yemen. We studied here and got married here, but we do not have Yemeni identity, and in front of the law, we are still refugees.”

Fatima lives with her family in a modest two-room home. Her husband works as a porter in one of the city’s markets, while she helps support the family by preparing and selling traditional foods. Even so, she says their combined income “barely covers rent and food” because of the high cost of living and few job opportunities.

A bleak reality
Conditions in Yemen were never the best for migrants and refugees, but they have significantly worsened since a civil war began in 2014 between the Iranian-backed Houthis and the central government in Sanaa, in Yemen’s north.

The violence from that war, along with declining aid and shrinking job opportunities have increased pressure on both host communities and refugees.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that funding for support programmes in Yemen in 2025 met only 25 percent of the country’s actual needs, directly affecting the lives of thousands of families. Residents of al-Basateen say the aid they used to receive has sharply declined, and in many cases has stopped altogether.

Youssef Mohammed, 53, says he was one of the first Somali arrivals to the district in the 1990s, and now supports a family of seven.

“[We] have not received any support from organisations for years,” Youssef said, adding that some families “chose to return to Somalia rather than stay and die of hunger here”.

He believes the crisis affects everyone in Yemen, “but [that] the refugee remains the weakest link.”

Despite the bleak picture, a few have managed to improve their material conditions through education or by opening small businesses that have helped stimulate the local economy. But they remain an exception, and the flow of refugees continues.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula, but is also the region’s only signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and therefore allows foreign arrivals to apply for asylum or refugee status. According to the United Nations refugee agency, Yemen hosted more than 61,000 asylum seekers and refugees as of July 2025, the vast majority from Somalia and Ethiopia.

Arrivals in recent years have typically travelled to Yemen via boats, with many planning to use Yemen as a transit point before moving on to richer countries like Saudi Arabia.

Hussein Adel is one of those recent arrivals. He is 30, but leans on a crutch on a street corner in al-Basateen.

Hussein arrived in Aden only a few months ago, having made the dangerous journey on a small boat carrying African migrants.

He told Al Jazeera that he fled death and hunger, only to find himself facing a harsher reality. Hussein shelters on the rooftop of a relative’s home and spends his days searching the city for occasional work. His leg injury, he said, was caused by Omani border guards who shot him while he was crossing into Yemen.

As evening falls, the noise in al-Basateen’s alleyways quiets down. Men lean against the walls of worn-out homes, and children chase a ball through narrow passages barely wide enough for their dreams.

On the surface, life looks normal – like any working-class neighbourhood in a city exhausted by crises. But here, in “Yemen’s Mogadishu”, there is an extra trauma – the sense of a lack of belonging, the memory of refugees fleeing danger and poverty at home, and a lack of stability that will not go away.

SOURCE AL JAZEERA.

web 25 Feb 2026 {HMC} Afghan and Pakistani forces engaged in new clashes along their troubled border region, days after deadly air strikes on Afghanistan by Pakistan sent tensions soaring.

The two countries gave competing accounts of the violence on Tuesday, each accusing the other of triggering it.

Zabihullah Noorani, head of the Afghan information department in the eastern Nangarhar Province, said Pakistani forces carried out the first shots in the Shahkot area near the border. The fighting has ⁠since stopped, and there are no Afghan casualties, he added.

Pakistani government official Mosharraf Zaidi accused Afghan forces of firing unprovoked near the Torkham border area.

“Pakistan’s security forces responded immediately and effectively silencing the Taliban aggression,” Zaidi wrote in a post on X.

The fighting follows Pakistani strikes on Afghanistan’s Nangarhar and Paktika Provinces on Sunday, which the UN mission in Afghanistan said killed at least 13 civilians.

‘We will respond’
Afghanistan’s Taliban government said at least 18 people were killed and denied Pakistan’s announcement that the military operation killed more than 80 fighters.

Relations between the neighbours have plunged in recent months, with land border crossings largely shut since deadly fighting in October that killed more than 70 people on both sides.

Islamabad accuses Afghanistan of failing to act against armed groups that carry out attacks in Pakistan, which the Taliban government denies.

Pakistan’s military claimed its latest air strikes in Afghanistan targeted “camps and hideouts” belonging to armed groups behind a spate of recent attacks, including a deadly suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Islamabad.

The Afghan Defence Ministry condemned the attacks, saying they “hit a religious school and residential homes”, causing “dozens of deaths and injuries, including women and children”.

“We hold the Pakistani military responsible for targeting civilians and religious sites. We will respond to these attacks in due course with a measured and appropriate response,” said the ministry.

Source Aljazeera

web 25 Feb 2026 {HMC} About 6.5 million people in Somalia face acute hunger due to drought, the government and the United Nations said on Tuesday, sounding the alarm days after the UN’s food agency warned that food aid could grind to a halt by April without new funding.

Somalia declared a national drought emergency in November 2025 after years of failed rains, and other countries in the region have also been hit.

More than a third of those facing acute malnutrition are children, Somalia’s government and the United Nations Somalia said in a joint statement. The crisis has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, with many crowding into camps in Mogadishu and other cities.

“The drought … has deepened alarmingly, with soaring water prices, limited food supplies, dying livestock, and very little humanitarian funding,” George Conway, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, said in a statement.

Woman loses two children

Hawo Abdi said she lost two children to illness after the drought laid waste to her homeland in Somalia’s Bay region.

“When I saw that the suffering was getting worse, I fled my home and came to … Mogadishu,” she told Reuters from her shelter on the outskirts of the capital.

Last week, the UN World Food Programme put the number of those facing acute hunger at 4.4 million, and said it had already cut back its assistance to just over 600,000 people from 2.2 million earlier this year.

It was not clear whether the new figure reflected a sharp increase in those at risk or different counting methods.

Possible relief

The government and United Nations figures tally with those also released on Tuesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which sets the global standard for determining the severity of a food crisis.

While rainfall in the April to June season could offer some relief, some 5.5 million people were expected to remain in the crisis level or worse, with 1.6 million people in the emergency level, the statement said.

Abdiyo Ali was forced to abandon her farm in the Lower Shabelle region.

“Our farms were destroyed, our livestock died, and water sources became too far away. We have nothing left to bring with us,” Ali told Reuters last week while preparing her food in a displaced people’s camp outside Mogadishu.

SOURCE:reuters