NAIROBI // South Sudan's president said its northern neighbour has "declared war" on the world's newest nation, just hours after Sudanese jets dropped eight bombs onto South Sudan yesterday.
The president Salva Kiir's comments, made during a trip to China, signal a rise in rhetoric between the rival nations who had spent decades at war with each other. Neither side has officially declared war.
Sudan and South Sudan have been drawing closer to a full-scale conflict in recent weeks over the unresolved issues of oil revenues and their disputed border. The violence has drawn alarm and condemnation from the international community, including from the United States president Barack Obama.
South Sudan seceded from Sudan last year as a result of a 2005 peace treaty that ended decades of war that killed 2 million people.
The Sudan president Omar Al Bashir gave a fiery speech last week in which he said there will be no negotiations with the "poisonous insects" who are challenging Sudan's claim to disputed territory near the nations' shared border.
Mr Kiir, the southern president, arrived in China late Monday for a five-day visit to lobby for economic and diplomatic support. China's energy needs make it deeply vested in the future of the two Sudans, and Beijing is uniquely positioned to exert influence in the conflict given its deep trade ties to the resource-rich south and decades-long diplomatic ties with Sudan's government in the north.
Mr Kiir told the Chinese president Hu Jintao that his visit came at "a very critical moment for the Republic of South Sudan because our neighbour in Khartoum has declared war".
South Sudan's military spokesman Colonel Philip Aguer said that Sudanese jets dropped eight bombs overnight Monday in Panakuac, where he said there had been ground fighting earlier that day. Col Aguer said he could not offer a death toll from the attack because of a poor communication link with the remote area.
On Monday, Sudanese warplanes bombed a market and an oilfield in South Sudan, killing at least two people after Sudanese ground forces reportedly crossed into South Sudan with tanks and artillery.
Talks over oil revenue and the border broke down this month after attacks started between the two countries, with South Sudan invading the oil-rich border town of Heglig, which Sudan claims.
Following international pressure, South Sudan announced that it withdrew its troops from Heglig, but Sudan claimed its own troops had forced them out.
Mr Al Bashir, the Sudanese president, vowed to press ahead with his military campaign until all southern troops or affiliated forces are chased out of the north.
He also said he would never allow South Sudanese oil to pass through Sudan "even if they give us half the proceeds".
The landlocked South Sudan stopped pumping oil through Sudan in January, accusing the government in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of oil revenue. Sudan responded by bombing the South's oilfields.
The South Sudan government spokesman, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, said earlier this month that Chinese and American investors want to build oil refineries in the South in the next six to seven months.
Mr Benjamin said the refineries will help South Sudan process fuel for local consumption. South Sudan will also build a pipeline to the Kenyan coast and another to Djibouti through Ethiopia to be able to export its oil, he said. He said both projects were meant to make South Sudan independent of Sudan's fuel infrastructure and processing plants.
Mr Kiir yesterday told Mr Hu that he came to China because of the "great relationship" South Sudan has with China, calling it one of his country's "economic and strategic partners."
Both sides have tried to win Beijing's favour, but China has been careful to cultivate ties with each nation.
Like others in the international community, China has repeatedly urged the two sides to return to negotiations.
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
EMIRATES'S REVISED A350 DEPLOYMENT SCHEDULE
Edinburgh: November 4 (unchanged)
Bahrain: November 15 (from September 15); second daily service from January 1
Kuwait: November 15 (from September 16)
Mumbai: January 1 (from October 27)
Ahmedabad: January 1 (from October 27)
Colombo: January 2 (from January 1)
Muscat: March 1 (from December 1)
Lyon: March 1 (from December 1)
Bologna: March 1 (from December 1)
Source: Emirates
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
