KHARTOUM: Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan appointed on Monday former UN official Kamil Idris as the country’s new prime minister, more than two years into a brutal war.

Idris, a career diplomat and past presidential candidate, was the director general of the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization and has also served in Sudan’s permanent mission to the UN.

“The chairman of the sovereignty council issued a constitutional decree appointing Kamil El-Tayeb Idris Abdelhafiz as prime minister,” a statement from Sudan’s ruling Transitional Sovereignty Council read.

In 2010, Idris ran in the presidential elections against longtime Islamist-military ruler Omar Al-Bashir.

Since April 2023, the war in Sudan has pitted Burhan’s army forces against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands, displaced 13 million and created what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Idris replaces veteran diplomat Dafallah Al-Hajj Ali, who was appointed by Burhan at the end of April and served less than three weeks as acting prime minister.

Burhan had earlier said that he would form a technocratic wartime government to help “complete what remains of our military objectives, which is liberating Sudan from these rebels.”

In April, the RSF announced it would form a rival government, a few weeks after signing a charter in Kenya with a coalition of military and political allies.

The move has raised international fears that Sudan would be permanently divided between the two sides, both of which have been accused of war atrocities.

The conflict has already carved up Sudan, with the army holding the north, east and center while the RSF dominates nearly all of Darfur and, with its allies, parts of the south.

DAMASCUS: Syrian authorities on Monday announced that they had thwarted an attempt to smuggle out four million tablets of captagon, an amphetamine-like narcotic that has flooded the region.
The interior ministry said in a statement that authorities seized “over four million captagon tablets that were tightly hidden inside industrial equipment designed for manufacturing flour used for human consumption.”
It said they had acted on “accurate information received from our sources about a shipment of drugs hidden inside industrial equipment prepared for smuggling outside the country.”
The tablets were seized in the key port city of Latakia — the coastal heartland of deposed president Bashar Assad’s Alawite minority.
Under Assad’s rule, captagon became Syria’s largest export during the civil war that erupted in 2011 and a key source of illicit funding for his government.
Since Assad’s ouster last December, the new Islamist authorities have discovered millions of captagon pills in warehouses and on military bases.
The interior ministry said those involved in the latest operation have been “arrested, the equipment containing the drugs has been seized, and the arrested individuals have been referred for investigation based on a decision issued by the public prosecution.”
Last week, Syrian authorities announced the seizure of around nine million captagon tablets that were headed for Turkiye, after a month-long operation.
Drug smuggling has persisted in Syria despite the new rulers’ efforts, with neighboring countries occasionally seizing large quantities of captagon.
Iraqi security forces seized more than a ton of captagon smuggled from Syria via Turkiye in March, and Jordan thwarted a smuggling attempt from Syria in April, confiscating “hundreds of thousands” of captagon tablets.