Category World News

Colombia’s largest remaining rebel force has told civilians living under its authority to stay at home for three days while it stages military drills in response to burgeoning United States threats.

The National Liberation Army (ELN), a left-wing rebel group, ordered the lockdown on Friday, instructing residents to keep off major routes and rivers from Sunday morning as fighters conduct what the group describes as preparations to defend the country against “imperialist intervention”.

The announcement follows warnings from President Donald Trump that nations manufacturing and exporting cocaine to the US could face military strikes or even land attacks.

“It is necessary for civilians not to mix with fighters to avoid accidents,” the ELN said.

Colombia’s Defence Minister Pedro Sanchez rejected the rebel directive as “nothing more than criminal coercion”, pledging that government troops would maintain presence “in every mountain, every jungle, every river”.

The move underscores a deepening confrontation between Washington and Bogota as Trump escalates rhetoric against Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

Earlier this week, Trump told business executives that Petro had “better wise up, or he’ll be next”, citing cocaine production as justification for potential action, and alluding to the US military build-up near Venezuela amid threats to remove its President Nicolas Maduro.

In recent days, the Trump administration has imposed new sanctions on Venezuela, targeting three nephews of President Nicolas Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, as well as six crude oil tankers and shipping companies linked to them, as Washington steps up pressure on Caracas, following the US seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker.

Petro has responded to Trump’s actions, including sanctioning the Colombian president, with equal defiance, warning Trump earlier this month against “waking the jaguar” and insisting any assault on Colombian territory would amount to a declaration of war.

The left-wing president has invited his US counterpart to witness laboratory demolitions firsthand, claiming his administration destroys drug facilities every 40 minutes. In late November, the government hailed what it said was its largest cocaine bust in a decade.

The rebel group, ELN, which fields roughly 5,800 fighters, maintains control over significant drug-producing areas, including the Catatumbo region along the Venezuelan frontier.

Al Jazeera correspondent Teresa Bo, who visited ELN-held territory in November, found the group exercising unchallenged authority, with fighters openly displaying banners declaring “Total peace is a failure” and no government soldiers visible.

Commander Ricardo, a senior figure interviewed during that visit, suggested the rebels might join wider resistance should Trump attack Venezuela. Such an intervention could provoke an armed response across Latin America, he warned, describing US actions as violations of regional self-determination.

The organisation has attempted peace negotiations with Colombia’s last five governments without success.

Discussions with Petro’s administration collapsed after the ELN launched a January assault in Catatumbo that killed more than 100 people and forced thousands from their homes.

Despite claiming ideological motivation, the group derives substantial income from narcotics trafficking, competing with former FARC fighters who refused to disarm under a 2016 peace settlement for control of coca cultivation zones and smuggling corridors.

Relations between Colombia and the US have deteriorated sharply since Trump returned to office.

Washington has imposed personal sanctions on Petro, cancelled his visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York, and removed Colombia from its list of reliable counter-narcotics partners.

Meanwhile, Trump has deployed the nation’s largest aircraft carrier and nearly 15,000 troops to the Caribbean and has ordered more than 20 military strikes in recent months against alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast, killing more than 80 people.

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has hugged injured soldiers in wheelchairs at a ceremony in the capital, Pyongyang, to welcome home troops who served with Russian forces in the war against Ukraine.

State-run Korean Central News Agency said on Saturday that Kim praised the “mass heroism” of the returning 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army, which had served in Russia’s Kursk region.

Kim hailed the regiment’s conduct during its 120-day overseas deployment, which commenced in early August and involved combat and engineering duties, including mine clearing in the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukrainian forces had infiltrated and occupied for months before withdrawing.

“You could work a miracle of turning a vast area of danger zone into a safe and secure one in a matter of less than three months, the task which was believed to be impossible to be carried out even in several years,” Kim said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

“The armed villains of the West, armed with whatever latest military hardware they are, cannot match this revolutionary army with an unfathomable spiritual depth,” Kim added at the ceremony on Friday.

The North’s leader also spoke of the “heartrending loss” of nine members of the regiment and announced that the unit would be conferred with the Order of Freedom and Independence. The deceased troops would also be honoured with the title Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, KCNA said, referring to North Korea’s official name.

Video footage of the ceremony released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft and Kim embracing soldiers seated in wheelchairs, as other soldiers and officials gathered to welcome the troops.

The Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed last month that North Korean troops, who had helped Russia repel Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, were now involved in clearing the area of mines.

Concluding a key meeting of his ruling Workers’ Party of Korea on Thursday, Kim also praised the deployment of North Korean troops in support of Russia’s war on Ukraine, saying it “demonstrated to the world the prestige of our army”.

North Korea’s “ever-victorious army” was the “genuine protector of international justice”, Kim said.

Under a mutual defence pact between Moscow and Pyongyang, an estimated 14,000 North Korean soldiers were deployed to fight for Russia, with the number of those killed or wounded ranging between 3,000 and 4,000.

The welcoming ceremony held on Friday marks the latest event to publicly honour North Korean soldiers who served in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

In October, Kim was featured embracing weeping soldiers at a ground-breaking ceremony for a planned memorial to those who fought for Russia, and in June, state media showed Kim draping coffins with the national flag in what appeared to be the repatriation of soldiers’ remains from Russia.

Myanmar’s military has acknowledged it conducted an air strike on a hospital in the western state of Rakhine that killed 33 people, whom it accused of being armed members of opposition groups and their supporters, but not civilians.

Witnesses, aid workers, rebel groups and the United Nations have said the victims were civilians at the hospital.

In a statement published by the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper on Saturday, the military’s information office said armed groups, including the ethnic Arakan Army and the People’s Defence Force, used the hospital as their base.

It said the military carried out necessary security measures and launched a counterterrorism operation against the general hospital in Mrauk-U township on Wednesday.

However, the United Nations on Thursday condemned the attack on the facility providing emergency care, obstetrics and surgical services in the area, saying that it was part of a broader pattern of strikes causing harm to civilians and civilian objects that are devastating communities across the country.

UN rights chief Volker Turk condemned the attacks “in [the] strongest possible terms” and demanded an investigation. “Such attacks may amount to a war crime. I call for investigations and those responsible to be held to account. The fighting must stop now,” he wrote on X.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “appalled”. “At least 33 people have been killed … including health workers, patients and family members. Hospital infrastructure was severely damaged, with operating rooms and the main inpatient ward completely destroyed,” he wrote on X.

Myanmar has been gripped by attritional fighting in a raging civil war.

Mrauk-U, located 530km (326 miles) northwest of Yangon, the country’s largest city, was captured by the Arakan Army in February 2024.

The Arakan Army is the well-trained and well-armed military wing of the Rakhine ethnic minority movement, which seeks autonomy from Myanmar’s central government. It began its offensive in Rakhine in November 2023 and has seized a strategically important regional army headquarters and 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships.

Rakhine, formerly known as Arakan, was the site of a brutal army counterinsurgency operation in 2017 that drove about 740,000 Muslim-majority Rohingya to seek safety across the border in Bangladesh. There is still ethnic tension between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Rohingya.

The Arakan Army pledged in a statement on Thursday to pursue accountability for the air strike in cooperation with global organisations to ensure justice and take “strong and decisive action” against the military.

The military government has stepped up air strikes ahead of planned December 28 elections. Opponents of military rule charge that the polls will be neither free nor fair and are mainly an effort to legitimise the army retaining power.

Sang is one of hundreds of thousands of unwanted and discriminated children left behind by the US soldiers after the Vietnam War. When his lifelong dream of finding his father comes true, Sang’s only mission is to race against time to meet his ailing dad and break the cycle of war trauma that has plagued generations.

After a long and challenging journey, Sang can finally go to the US, but without his wife, daughter, and beloved grandson. Reuniting with his father is a healing experience for both, but far from easy. Even though 50 years have passed since the last US soldier left Vietnam, many wounds remain open.