World News · Tuesday, 23 June 2026
01 · Briefing · what happened
A paramilitary the Sudanese state once built now encircles a city of half a million
The RSF has surrounded el-Obeid in central Sudan, and governments warn of a massacre if it attacks — the latest turn in a war fought by a force the army created.
Key takeaways
- Sudan's RSF, a paramilitary the government itself created and armed, has surrounded the city of el-Obeid; governments warn of a massacre if it attacks.
- The US paused some Iran oil sanctions for 60 days, trading relief for nuclear inspections and an open Strait of Hormuz; US petrol prices have fallen six weeks running.
- A wave of African states, now including Guinea, is banning raw mineral exports to force refining — and the profit — to stay at home.
A city ringed, and a warning of slaughter
The United States said on Monday it is alarmed that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a paramilitary group, not the national army — are massing fighters around el-Obeid, a city of roughly half a million in central Sudan, and warned of possible “mass atrocities” if they assault it
Why this city, and why now? El-Obeid sits on the roads that connect Sudan’s capital region to its vast western region of Darfur. Whoever holds it controls supply lines. The RSF already overran the western city of el-Fasher; el-Obeid is the next domino on the route, and the pattern of these sieges has been grim. The UN says drone warfare alone has killed more than 1,000 people in Sudan in 2026
To understand the danger, you have to know where the RSF came from. It is not a foreign army or a rebel band that appeared from nowhere. It grew out of militias the Sudanese government armed and paid years ago to fight its wars in Darfur. The state built a force it could not later command. In 2023 that force turned on the army it once served, and the country split into two militaries fighting over the same ground. The people of el-Obeid are caught between them.
For anyone tracking the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies, Sudan remains the largest and least-watched. The number to follow this week is whether el-Obeid is stormed or spared — diplomats are betting that loud, early warnings can change the cost-benefit math of an attack before it begins.
America eases the pressure on Iran’s oil
The US waived a block of sanctions on Iranian oil for 60 days, pointing to progress in talks held in Switzerland
The immediate cause is a war earlier this year between Iran and the United States that rattled energy markets. The deeper logic is leverage: Washington is trading sanctions relief for inspections and an open shipping lane, the two things it most wants. Oil markets noticed — Iranian crude flows through Hormuz have surged as more ships transit the strait
What we still don’t know is whether the 60-day pause becomes a real agreement or just a breather. Iran called the talks only a “brief discussion” and stopped short of Washington’s optimism
Ukraine tries to turn Crimea into an island
Ukraine has sharply stepped up strikes on Russian-occupied Crimea, aiming to cut the peninsula off from mainland Russia and make the occupation too expensive to sustain
The strategy is patience, not breakthrough. Rather than storm the peninsula, Kyiv is trying to make daily life there grind to a halt, so the cost of holding it rises month after month. For anyone watching the war’s trajectory, the signal worth tracking is fuel: when an occupier can’t sell petrol to its own civilians, the squeeze is working.
A prime minister steps down in London
Keir Starmer announced he will resign as UK prime minister, triggering a contest to replace him and postponing a planned EU-UK summit
The story nobody’s covering: Guinea keeps its gold at home
Guinea, in West Africa, has banned the export of unrefined gold with immediate effect, ordering that all of it be processed inside the country first
This matters beyond one country. Guinea joins Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, and Zimbabwe in a quiet continental shift: stop selling raw rock cheaply, force the higher-value work to happen locally, build the jobs at home
02 · Lesson · why it matters
The hired hand who learns he doesn't need you
When you pay someone to do your hard thing, you give them the very strength you may later need to stop them.
A force built to be useful
The group surrounding el-Obeid did not arrive from another country. Years ago, when Sudan’s government faced a rebellion in its western region, it did what governments under pressure often do: it hired help. It armed local militias, paid them, and pointed them at the problem. The militias were useful precisely because they were ruthless and because they were not the regular army — they could do things the state wanted done without the state having to own them.
Over time that loose arrangement hardened into the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary with its own command, its own money, its own gold mines, its own reasons to exist. In 2023 it turned on the army that had created it. The state had built a tool strong enough to use, and in doing so built a tool strong enough to refuse.
The bargain underneath
Strip away the guns and this is one of the oldest arrangements in human life. You have something hard to do and not enough hands to do it. So you find someone, give them resources and authority, and ask them to act on your behalf. A landlord hires a manager. A government hires a contractor. A company hires an executive. A parent hands the car keys to a teenager. Every one of these is the same shape: a principal who wants something done, and an agent paid to do it.
The bargain works because the agent gets paid and the principal gets the thing done. But there is a crack in it that never fully closes. The agent has their own interests, and those interests are not yours. Most days the gap is small and nobody notices. The trouble starts when the gap widens and the agent realises they now hold something you handed them — and they don’t have to give it back.
Why the strong agent is the dangerous one
The discomforting part is that the danger grows with the very competence you were hiring for. A weak agent who can’t do the job is easy to dismiss; they have no leverage. A strong agent who does the job brilliantly accumulates exactly the things that make them hard to control — skill, resources, a network, a reputation, the keys to the system you depend on.
Sudan’s government did not lose control of the RSF because the RSF failed. It lost control because the RSF succeeded — grew rich, grew armed, grew confident — until one day the state needed it more than it needed the state. The same logic runs through quieter places. The brilliant employee who becomes the only person who understands the critical system. The contractor your whole operation now runs through. The ally you armed who no longer needs your blessing. Strength was the point, and strength is the risk.
The reader is inside this too
It is tempting to read all this as a story about warlords and feel safely outside it. But the arrangement is everywhere you’ve ever delegated. You hire a builder and trust they’ll use good materials where you can’t see. You sign up to an app and hand it the keys to your photos, your contacts, your location, trusting it acts for you and not on you. You vote for a representative to wield power on your behalf and hope they remember whose behalf that is.
Each time, you are the principal, handing strength to an agent, hoping the gap between their interests and yours stays small. Usually it does. The point is not to trust no one — a life with no delegation is no life at all. The point is to notice when you’ve handed someone something you would struggle to take back.
What holds the bargain together
So what actually keeps an agent honest? Not goodwill alone. The arrangements that survive are the ones where the principal kept some real leverage — a way to check the agent’s work, a rival the agent has to compete with, a cost the agent pays for betrayal, a limit on how much power flows in any one direction. Sudan’s tragedy was that it built no such limits into the force it created. It poured strength into one set of hands and kept no counterweight.
When you next hand something to someone to do on your behalf — a task, a key, a vote, your data — the useful question is not “do I trust them?” It is “if their interests and mine came apart tomorrow, what could I still do about it?” If the honest answer is nothing, you have not made a deal. You have made yourself dependent, and called it a deal.
On the whole
The world is built on delegation. We could not feed ourselves, govern ourselves, or get through a single day without handing hard things to others to do for us. That is not a flaw to be fixed; it is how anything larger than one person gets done. But every act of handing-over carries a small, quiet risk that the hand you fill will one day not want to give it back. Sudan shows the extreme of it — a force built to serve that now lays siege to the people it was meant to protect. Most of our delegations never come to that. The wisdom is only to stay aware that we are always, in small ways, doing the same thing: trusting strength to someone whose interests are not quite ours, and keeping, where we can, a little of the leverage we’d want if the day ever came that we needed it.
03 · Lab · your turn
Who holds the keys?
Practise delegating a hard task while choosing how much power to hand over and how much leverage to keep if interests diverge.
04 · Hope · carry this
The same week that 29 governments raised their voices for one threatened city is a quiet reminder that warning loudly, early, and together can still change what a stronger hand decides to do. We are not powerless before the forces we set in motion — and the leverage we keep, and the alarms we sound, are the threads that hold the better outcome in reach.
More from World News