Category World News

On February 10, Sudan’s largest antiwar coalition, Taqaddum, finally splintered.

One of the belligerent parties in Sudan’s nearly two-year conflict was deciding whether to join a new parallel government being established by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The Taqaddum coalition, which was founded in October 2023, was led by Abdalla Hamdok, the former prime minister who was overthrown by Sudan’s army and the RSF in 2021. It was made up of armed movements, political parties, and civil society activists.

Now, Taqaddum has split into two.

The parallel administration of the RSF now has the name Taasis (Foundation). They are mostly armed movements, analysts told Al Jazeera, who wagered on turning their weapons into leadership roles in the new RSF government.

“Armed groups don’t have a constituency, so they rely on a big, armed actor]like the RSF] as a guarantor for a political seat”, said Kholood Khair, founding director of the Confluence Advisory think tank.

Traditional political leaders, including Hamdok, who chose not to join the RSF formed a smaller antiwar coalition called Somoud (Resilience), trying to preserve their neutrality and reputations, she said.

“Political parties don’t need]a guarantor] and it would be political suicide for them to form a government with the RSF… they don’t want to be seen as forming a government with genociders”, she added, referring to the United States ‘ determination that the RSF committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Tainted label

Following a disagreement over how and when to integrate the former into the latter, Taqaddum was originally an antiwar coalition putting an end to the conflict that had erupted between the RSF and the army in April 2023.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in armed conflict, famine has been declared in several regions, and about 12 million people have been forced from their homes, making this the most severe humanitarian crisis by far.

Many of Taqaddum’s civilian politicians were already struggling to find relevance because they were viewed as being too close to the RSF during mediation talks, which were purportedly intended to end the war and resume the 2021 coup’s transition to democratic rule.

In January 2024, Taqaddum’s reputation suffered a much worse blow as a result of its signing of a Declaration of Principles (DoP) with the RSF.

According to the DoP, the organization allegedly sought to reinstitute basic laws of war and ensure that there were no RSF-controlled areas for service.

But the deal came days after the RSF captured Wad Madani, capital of Sudan’s breadbasket Gezira state, where it committed atrocities including rape, looting and extrajudicial killings, according to local monitors.

Many people thought Taqaddum was siding with RSF abuses by signing the DoP at the time.

According to Alan Boswell, an expert on Sudan for the International Crisis Group, many Western diplomats were “growing concern that parts of Taqaddum were RSF-aligned” as a result of the agreement.

Hamid Khalafallah, a Sudan policy analyst and a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, agreed that the signing exacerbated Taqaddum’s legitimacy crisis.

According to Khalafallah, “there was a problem where Taqaddum cosyed up with the RSF or was slightly more in line with the RSF because the army was quite hostile to peace talks” and Khalafallah said.

New start?

According to analysts, the splinter may be a “blessing in disguise,” because it allows Somoud members to distance themselves from the RSF, “reinvent themselves,” and improve communication with Sudanese civilians.

Boswell predicts the West will “wait and see” before deciding whether to accept Somoud as a neutral actor because he believes that the coalition is now noticeably smaller and less contaminated than Taqaddum.

He also thinks Somoud might be a part of a larger civilian unity government, where the majority of government officials align with one of the two parties seeking to end the conflict through a power-sharing deal.

Khalafallah urged Somoud to promote its rhetoric against the realities of Sudanese civilians on the ground and to engage with local organizations and activist groups more frequently.

According to Khalafallah, “they can acknowledge that people have better experiences when the army] recaptures territory and that there is support for the army,” Khalafallah said, underscoring that Somoud could maintain its neutrality as such acknowledgment would not conflict with their request for the army and RSF to put an immediate end to this conflict.

Bakry Elmedni, a spokesperson for Somoud and an associate professor at Long Island University’s School of Business, Public Administration, and Information Sciences, claims that the antiwar coalition was targeted by army-backed smear campaigns against the antiwar coalition.

He claims that the army “sympathizes or supports” RSF and was invited to the signing but declined to attend. He instead uses the DoP to portray Taqaddum as a coalition that “sympathizes or supports” the DoP.

“We knew from day one the accusations]against Taqaddum] were part of a political campaign… Everyone knew they were lies”, he told Al Jazeera.

“However, it did affect the impression of Taqaddum, but to tell you frankly, I don’t believe there was any evidence to suggest Taqaddum was supporting the RSF”.

Many civilians in the nation despise the RSF and applaud the army’s capture of territory, claiming that it provides some form of stability.

However, it has been claimed that the army carried out numerous reprisals killings against alleged RSF sympathisers. Human rights organizations, UN monitors, and activists on the ground claim that tactics frequently cross ethnic lines or are directed at activists and local relief workers.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has made a false statement about history as the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine draws near.

This week, US and Russian leaders held discussions about ending the conflict in Ukraine in Saudi Arabia. Later, Trump dismissed complaints that Ukrainian officials were not invited to participate.

“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well”,&nbsp, Trump said, answering reporters ‘ questions on February 18 at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “But today I heard]from Ukraine], ‘ Oh well, we weren’t invited. ‘ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You could have made a deal, you should have ended it three years, you should have never started it, and you should have stopped it.

This contradicts the evidence that Russia reportedly launched a massive invasion force into Ukraine in February 2022.

An estimated 46, 000 Ukrainian soldiers and at least 12, 000 civilians have been killed by Kyiv’s “started it,” according to its allies and in Ukraine, because of the idea.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, responded that Trump “exists in this disinformation space.”

Trump’s deputy in his first term, Mike Pence, posted on February 19 on X, “Mr President, Ukraine did not ‘ start ‘ this war. In a brutal and unprovoked invasion by Russia that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The Truth must guide the way to peace.

After Zelenskyy’s comments, Trump piled on more attacks on Truth Social, claiming the Ukrainian president “is very low in Ukrainian Polls” and is “a Dictator without Elections”.

Zelenskyy received a 57% trust rating among the respondents to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll conducted between February 4 and 9 respectively. That is down from 90 percent in May 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion, but up from 52 percent in December 2024. In a state of martial law, which is currently in place, Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary and presidential elections. Once martial law is lifted, Selenskyy has promised elections.

We requested confirmation that Ukraine had started the conflict, but we were unsuccessful in getting a response.

Russia’s defense of Ukraine is a consistent ploy in a shaky argument.

What transpired in February 2022

Russian tanks and troops stormed Ukraine as people lay asleep, and missiles fell from the world’s largest military operation since World War II, according to US military analysts. The attack came after weeks of Russian maneuvers, including staging a massive military exercise along the Ukrainian border that the US estimated to have taken place with 190,000 Russian soldiers.

News coverage, video footage and the United Nations noted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in real time. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced it as a “special military operation” at 6am Moscow time (03: 00 GMT) on February 24, 2022.

In a televised address, Putin stated that the goal of this operation is to protect those who have been facing the Kyiv regime’s history of humiliation and genocide. We will work to demilitarise and denounce Ukraine, as well as put to death those responsible for numerous bloody crimes committed against people, including Russian Federation citizens, in this regard.

About 800km (500 miles) and a time zone away, residents of Kyiv awoke to the sounds of explosions. People in the small eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk were frightened by loud booms as they sat in their beds. Families packed belongings, swarmed ATMs and filling stations, and tried to flee the Russian invasion in cars, trains, planes and on foot.

How did the false claim that Ukraine was the start of the conflict come about?

Putin had long denied that Ukraine was even a country, blatantly describing its history and culture, and claimed that the Ukrainians were Russians who needed to be reunited with them in order to prepare the ground for the invasion.

PolitiFact recognised Putin’s lies justifying the Ukraine war as “our 2022 Lie of the Year”.

In 1990, Ukraine’s parliament declared its independence from the Soviet Union, a call it repeated in August 1991. Four months later, Ukraine gained its independence. In December 1991, Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence, and within days, the USSR dissolved. In 1994, Ukraine agreed with the US, the United Kingdom and Russia to exchange its nuclear arsenal, the world’s third-largest, for security guarantees.

But the rush of post-Soviet history grated on Putin, analysts say.

Putin has been in charge of Russia’s top leadership since 1999, when he was reportedly the country’s top man but was widely regarded as its most important center of power for four years.

He has long sought to lay the theoretical foundations for the Ukraine war, which has a population that surpassed that of Russia and accounts for one-nineth of Ukraine’s GDP prior to the war.

As early as 2008, Putin told then-President George W Bush that “Ukraine is not a country”. Since then, Putin has argued that there is no separate Ukrainian people from Russia.

In 2022, West Virginia University political scientist Erik Herron, the author of the book Elections and Democracy after Communism, told PolitiFact that “these claims were intended to refute the existence and agency of the Ukrainian nation.”

Yet, the history of Ukraine has involved several empires or states, some of which were entirely separate from Russia, Eugene Finkel, an associate professor with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told PolitiFact on the eve of the war.

Putin set the table for the 2022 invasion with a 5, 000-word essay in July 2021. In it, he argued that much of modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands and that “Russia was robbed” of them.

Putin’s essay blamed the conflict on the West, claiming that the protest-driven ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, an ally of Russia, was engineered from the outside and that the Ukrainian government elected in 2014 was illegitimate.

Putin argued that Ukraine was poised “to join NATO and have NATO missiles placed in Ukraine and aimed at Russia”, said Alexander Motyl, a Rutgers University-Newark political scientist. In Putin’s telling, “poor Russia was forced to rush to the persecuted Ukrainians ‘ defense and forestall NATO-inspired Ukrainian aggression”, Motyl said.

In 2023, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev echoed Putin’s stance, saying Ukraine is a part of Russia, but “we live in different apartments”.

More than 140 academics signed a letter defending Putin’s claim as “factually wrong, morally repugnant, and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of Nazis victims and those who courageously fought against it, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army,” shortly after the war started.

As for Trump’s recent remark, it is a “distillation of these Russian talking points”, Herron said.

Our ruling

Trump said Zelenskyy “started” the war in Ukraine with Russia.

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces launched an invasion of Ukraine, a country that the night before was at peace. Putin based the attack on false allegations about Ukraine, and he called it a “special military operation.” Russian tanks and troops stormed Ukraine as people lay asleep, and missiles fell from the world’s largest military operation since World War II, according to US military analysts.

The attack came after weeks of Russian maneuvers, including staging a massive military exercise along Russia’s border with Ukraine, which the US estimated to have taken place with 190,000 Russian soldiers.

A video that his family has condemned appeared on Israeli media that showed the detained director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital wearing chains. Dr. Hussam Abu Safia hasn’t been seen since his arrest in December for the first time.