BASRA: The United Nations envoy to Iraq called Wednesday for “calm” in Basra, after six died in the bloodiest day of protests over poor public services in the southern city.
In a statement, Jan Kubis, the UN’s special representative in Iraq, called on “the authorities to avoid using disproportionate, lethal force against the demonstrators.”
He also urged authorities to “investigate and hold accountable those responsible for the outbreak of violence.”
The authorities said in a press conference on Wednesday that security personnel were wounded in Tuesday’s clashes.
“Thirty members of the security forces were wounded by grenades and incendiary objects being thrown,” said General Jamil Al-Shammari, who is in charge of security operations in Basra.
Basra was nearly deserted on Wednesday morning.
Many shops were closed, while burned tires lay strewn across the city’s streets, an AFP correspondent said.
The city — along with the province of the same name — has been hit by protests since early July against poor public services.
Residents are angry over pollution of the local water supply, which has put 20,000 people in hospital.
Kubis in his statement called on the government “to do its utmost to respond to the people’s rightful demands of clean water and electricity supplies as a matter of urgency.”
The authorities said they would take measures to put an end to the health crisis that has ravaged the oil-rich province.
The local governorate’s headquarters, the main rallying point for protesters, bore the traces of damage from molotov cocktails and fireworks thrown late into the night.
“Six demonstrators were killed and more than 20 wounded” in front of the government building on Tuesday evening, said Mehdi Al-Tamimi, head of the government’s human rights council in Basra province.
Medical sources confirmed the death toll to AFP.
Tamimi accused the security forces of “opening fire directly on the protesters.”
In his weekly press conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi said he had ordered “no real bullets ... to be fired, in the direction of protesters or in the air.”
Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr said in a tweet that “vandals infiltrated” the protesters.
Sadr’s political bloc won the largest number of seats in national elections held in May, and he is trying to form a new government with Abadi.
Protesters also blocked roads and burned tires elsewhere in Basra province on Tuesday night, a correspondent said.
Abadi announced in the night that he had met lawmakers from Basra, who are in Baghdad for the parliament’s first session since the elections.
He again indicated that water pollution would be addressed, without specifying any measures.
In July, the government announced a multibillion dollar emergency plan for southern Iraq, to revive infrastructure and services.
But protesters are wary of promises made by the outgoing government, as negotiations drag on over the formation of the next administration.
UN’s Iraq envoy calls for calm after bloody day in Basra
UN’s Iraq envoy calls for calm after bloody day in Basra
- Jan Kubis, the UN’s special representative in Iraq, called on ‘the authorities to avoid using disproportionate, lethal force against the demonstrators’
- Residents are angry over pollution of the local water supply, which has put 20,000 people in hospital
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
