TAIPEI: Taiwan said on Friday that an Australian warship had sailed through the Taiwan Strait, the sensitive and narrow waterway that separates the democratically governed island from China.
The island’s defense ministry did not name the ship but said it entered the strait on Thursday and sailed through it in a southerly direction, adding that Taiwan’s military kept watch throughout. It gave no more details.
An Australian official confirmed the ship, the Toowoomba, transited the international waters of the Taiwan Strait as part of its regional deployment.
Euan Graham, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the Australian navy has regularly transited through the Taiwan Strait but “choose not to publicize it.”
The sailing has come at a difficult time in Australia-China military relations even as the two countries seek to get ties back on track.
Last week, Canberra complained of an incident involving a Chinese warship and the same Australian navy vessel in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone in which an Australian military diver was injured.
The US Navy sends ships through the strait around once a month in what it calls “routine” transits. China routinely objects to the voyages.
Graham said the Australian navy transits through the Taiwan Strait because it is the shortest route between the East China Sea and South China Sea, and he warned against reading too much into the timing of the latest sailing.
“It’s a befitting coincidence but shouldn’t be misinterpreted as Australia going out of its way to make a point to China, after the sonar incident,” he said.
“Transits through the Taiwan Strait shouldn’t be controversial, just lawfully going from the East China Sea to the South China Sea via the shortest route.”
Taiwan has over the past four years complained of repeated Chinese military activity around the island, especially in the strait.
Taiwan, which rejects China’s sovereignty claims, is gearing up for presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 13.
Australian warship sails through Taiwan Strait
https://arab.news/y2bw3
Australian warship sails through Taiwan Strait
- Sailing comes at a difficult time in Australia-China military relations even as the two countries seek to get ties back on track
Displaced Sudanese escape RSF siege in southern Kordofan
- Some women haul water from a single well, pouring it into plastic buckets to cook, wash, and clean with, while others wait in a long line outside a makeshift health clinic, little more than a large canvas tent
GEDAREF, Sudan: When paramilitary Rapid Support Force fighters closed in on the Sudanese border town and oil field of Heglig, paraplegic Dowa Hamed could only cling to her husband’s back as they fled, “like a child,” she said
Now, the 25-year-old mother of five — paralyzed from the waist down — lies shell-shocked on a cot in the Abu Al-Naga displacement camp, a dusty transit center just outside the eastern city of Gedaref, nearly 800 km from home.
But her family’s actual journey was much longer, crossing the South Sudan border twice and passing from one group of fighters to another, as they ran for their lives with their children in tow alongside hundreds of others.
“We fled with nothing,” Hamed said. “Only the clothes on our backs.”
Hamed and her family are among tens of thousands of people recently uprooted by fighting in southern Kordofan — the latest front in the war between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces that erupted in April 2023.
Since capturing the army’s last stronghold in Darfur in October, the RSF and their allies have pushed deeper into neighboring Kordofan, an oil-rich agricultural region divided into three states: West, North, and South.
In recent weeks, the paramilitary group has consolidated control over West Kordofan, seized Heglig — home to Sudan’s largest oil field — and tightened its siege on Kadugli and Dilling in South Kordofan, where hundreds of thousands now face mass starvation.
On the night of Dec. 7, the inhabitants of Heglig — many of them the families of oil technicians, engineers, and soldiers stationed at the field — got word that an attack would happen at dawn.
“We ran on foot, barefoot, without proper clothes,” said Hiyam Al-Hajj, 29, a mother of 10 who says she had to leave her mother and six siblings behind as she ran around 30 km to the border.
“The RSF chased us to the border. The South Sudan army told them we were in their country and they would not hand us over,” she said.
They were sheltered in South Sudan’s Unity State, but barely fed.
“Those who had money could feed their children,” Al-Hajj said. “Those who did not went hungry.”
They spent nearly four weeks on the move, trekking long distances on foot and spending nights out in the open, sleeping on the bare ground.
“We were hungry,” she said. “But we did not feel the hunger; all we cared about was our safety.”
Eventually, authorities in South Sudan put them in large trucks that carried them back across the border to army-controlled territory, where they could head east, away from the front lines.
Hamed, who was paralyzed during childbirth, said that “during the truck rides, my body ached with every movement.”
But not everyone made it to Gedaref.
Between the canvas tents of the Abu Al-Naga camp, 14-year-old Sarah is struggling to care for her little brother alone.
In South Sudan, their parents had put them on one of the trucks, “then they said the truck was full and promised they would get on the next one.”
But weeks on, the siblings have received no word as to where their mother and father might be.
Inside the tents, children and mothers sleep on the ground, huddled together for warmth, while outside, children dart across the cracked soil, dust clinging to their bare feet.
According to camp director Ali Yehia Ahmed, 240 families, or around 1,200 people, are now taking refuge at Abu Al-Naga.
“The camp’s space is very small,” Ahmed said, adding that food was in increasingly short supply.
Food is distributed from a single point, forcing families to wait for limited rations.
Some women haul water from a single well, pouring it into plastic buckets to cook, wash, and clean with, while others wait in a long line outside a makeshift health clinic, little more than a large canvas tent.
Asia Abdelrahman Hussein, the minister of social welfare and development of Gedaref State, said shelter was one of the most urgent needs, especially during the winter months.
“The shelters are not enough. We need support from other organizations to provide safe housing and adequate shelter,” she said.
In one of the tents, Sawsan Othman Moussa, 27, said how she had been forced to flee three times since fighting broke out in Dilling.
Now, though she might be safe, “every tent is cramped, medicine is scarce, and during cold nights, we suffer.”
