BEIRUT: Rebels shot down a Syrian warplane in the opposition stronghold of Idlib province on Wednesday as Russian-backed government forces closed in on a strategically important town, rebel sources and a war monitor said.
A pilot who ejected from the plane was captured, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which reports on the war using a network of sources. Syrian state media made no initial mention of such an incident.
The hard-line extremists Tahrir Al-Sham, the most powerful insurgent group in the area, said its fighters had shot down a Sukhoi 22 jet that had taken off from a Syrian air base in Homs province.
The jet was downed near Khan Sheikhoun, a rebel-held town that was hit by a sarin gas attack in 2017 and is now being targeted in a Russian-backed government offensive.
Government forces seized new ground from rebels near Khan Sheikhoun on Wednesday, advancing to within a few kilometers (miles) of the town. A rebel commander told Reuters that the town, in opposition hands since 2014, was in “great danger.”
Dozens of people were killed in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017 in the poison gas attack that prompted President Donald Trump to order a missile strike against the Syrian air base from where the United States said it had been launched.
An investigation conducted by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said the Syrian government was responsible for releasing sarin on the town on April 4, 2017. Damascus denies using such weapons.
Syrian rebels have shot down government planes on several occasions during the war that spiralled out of the uprising against President Bashar Assad in 2011.
Tahrir Al-Sham’s statement did not say how the plane had been shot down. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said heavy machine guns had been used.
The northwestern Idlib region is part of the last major stronghold of the opposition to President Assad.
Assad’s side had struggled to make any gains in the area in an offensive that got under way in late April. But since the collapse of a brief cease-fire this month, it has managed to take several significant positions, including the town of Al-Habeet on Saturday.
The advance toward Khan Sheikhoun threatens to encircle the last remaining pocket of rebel-held territory in neighboring Hama province, including the towns of Morek, Kafr Zeita and Latamneh.
The humanitarian adviser to the UN Special Envoy for Syria said the new surge in violence in the northwest threatened the lives of millions after more than 500 civilians were killed since late April.
Tahrir Al-Sham is the latest incarnation of the group formerly known as the Nusra Front, which was Al-Qaeda’s official wing in the Syrian conflict until they parted ways in 2016.
The group is designated as a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council.
Syrian rebels shoot down government warplane in northwest
Syrian rebels shoot down government warplane in northwest
- Syrian army captured 5 villages, including Tel Aas and Kfar Eean
- Syrian military media said they fought Al-Qaeda-linked militants
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.
