Asia

Annual military manoeuvres between South Korea and the United States are underway.

But just hours before they were due to start, the US president announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to substantially scale back the exercises.

Donald Trump says they send an inappropriate and hostile signal to North Korea and its leader, with whom he has a ‘good relationship’.

The joint drills have been held for decades.

So, does Trump’s last-minute decision mean he’s seeking talks with Kim Jong Un?

Could dialogue end one of the world’s longest-running conflicts?

Presenter: Anna Burns-Francis

Guests:

In Bum Chun – Retired South Korean Lieutenant General and military and security analyst

Jenny Town – Senior Fellow and Director of 38 North programme at the Stimson Center

Rodger Baker — Geopolitical analyst at RANE, a global centre for geopolitical intelligence and analysis

New Delhi, India – On the night of August 4, in a counting hall in the eastern Indian city of Patna, some 1,000km (620 miles) from the national capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered one of its most stunning political setbacks in 12 years.

Bankipur, a constituency in the legislature of the state of Bihar, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign, winning a seat that the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, had held until just a few months earlier.

The defeat came less than two weeks after India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, bowing to seven weeks of student-led protests that had shaken New Delhi and spread to several cities. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical outfit born on Instagram in May after India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young Indians with “cockroaches” and “parasites”, had led those protests.

Nabin, the BJP chief, had spent the Bankipur campaign denouncing the country’s Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country”.

Instead, it was the BJP’s stranglehold over the constituency that was broken. That surprise electoral verdict has thrust upon India a broader question, say analysts: Will India’s most formidable political machine — the BJP — be forced to change?

A charm offensive, gone slightly wrong

The clearest sign that the BJP treats the Gen Z uprising as more than a passing nuisance is the sheer awkwardness of the party’s response. During the peak of the protests, Modi released a string of selfie-style videos on Instagram addressing the exam paper leaks that led to the protests. He reportedly told cabinet colleagues that young people were “just on Instagram”, urging ministers to court them on the platform with reels rather than media briefings.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party has launched a Gen Z outreach initiative directing civil administrative officers into schools for career counselling sessions.

The BJP has also released a gym-set video in which young people trade internet slang with an older trainer who steers the talk towards the government’s development record. The slang was laid on so thick that many Instagram users mocked the party, joking that it had seemingly paid young people to write propaganda aimed at their own generation.

After another video of Modi that briefly vanished from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

New Delhi-based analyst Asim Ali says this sudden scramble for social media relevance reveals a lot about the party itself.

The BJP once produced narratives that its own supporters would circulate unprompted. Today, he said, much of its messaging “feels more managed and paid for” – a mismatch for a decentralised space that rewards top-down discipline far less than Facebook and WhatsApp once did.

“The party’s communications machinery remains powerful, given its control over the mainstream media,” Ali told Al Jazeera. “But on social media, especially Instagram, it is unable to generate the kind of organic emotional identification that it could around 2011 to 2014.”

Gilles Verniers, a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, described the BJP’s outreach as “a battle for perception” rather than a policy shift.

“There haven’t been any proposals that fundamentally change anything,” he said. “There’s a new minister for education, but he comes from the same background, an old man from the RSS.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the far-right ideological parent of the BJP.

Verniers argued that what was genuinely broken is the BJP’s usual playbook against dissent: branding protesters antinational, foreign-funded or terrorists, as they did during demonstrations against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019-20. The changed citizenship law, for the first time, introduced a religious test for naturalised citizenship: non-Muslim asylum seekers from India’s neighbouring nations were given a faster track to citizenship.

That past approach towards protests failed this time partly because the movement mocked itself before the state could, and partly because it was pluralistic.

Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers’ protests, it could not be pinned to one religion or community, and also drew in young people from the BJP’s own so-called “upper-caste” Hindu base. It was a “truly caste-blind movement”, Verniers said.

The episode also punctured a notion pushed by the BJP, he said, that Modi held a natural command over the youth.

For the first time, the prime minister “appears his age”, Verniers said of 75-year-old Modi.

“What the movement has done is really turn him into a boomer in the public imagination, and that must really, really hurt,” he added.

Does any of this show up in the numbers?

The BJP lost two of the three by-elections held in the first week of August, in states it governs – Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, it comfortably retained the third, Manjalpur in Gujarat, Modi’s home state.

Opposition leaders drew a straight line from the losses to the student protests, but analysts were more cautious. Ali warned against reading too much into the Bankipur vote.

By-elections, Verniers added, are decided by a fraction of the electorate, “barely a third of the population vote”, and that the BJP’s system of power “has proved very resilient to absorbing setbacks”.

Verniers points to Haryana, where the BJP won a majority a few years after the northern state’s farmers joined a yearlong movement to oppose three controversial agricultural laws. It was an election fought “not on farmers, but on caste”, he said.

What had shifted was not the vote count but a surrounding story now building “into a broader narrative of challenges to the BJP”.

An MP on the ground

Few politicians visited Jantar Mantar, the epicentre of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi, as often as Pushpendra Saroj, 27, a Samajwadi Party member of parliament from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh. The Samajwadi Party is the main opposition to the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Saroj watched a gathering of a few hundred swell into thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalised following a 20-day hunger strike. He credited this to “the aggression from the government” – weeks of silence, alleged cuts to power and water and the July 20 baton charge against protesters in New Delhi. The crowd had grown beyond its student base to include army veterans and even serving police officers.

The politician pointed out that the education minister’s resignation came only after “fingers got pointed at the prime minister directly”.

A simpler sympathy helped, too. “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up,” Saroj said.

‘This is not a victory in any terms’

For many who marched in New Delhi, the story is bigger than a satirical “Cockroach” Instagram page or a single resignation. Anjali, a postgraduate student and secretary of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) at the University of Delhi, an older left-aligned group that mobilised alongside the CJP, reads the protests as the surfacing of a longer-term anger.

“We know for a fact that this did not originate from a particular remark or any particular leak,” she told Al Jazeera. “This is an accumulated anger of the youth of this country for the last 12 years. As long as communal, casteist, anti-women politics is not ended, this is not a victory in any terms,” she said.

Anjali was also critical of who paid the price once the protests ended. Muslim and Dalit students, she said, were “the first to be put behind bars”, the first to face intimidation and police complaints, echoing the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia, the New Delhi university at the heart of the anti-CAA protests.

In the western state of Goa, police detained two young men for allegedly backing jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Pradhan’s exit, an episode she reads as part of the same pattern.

What comes next for the CJP movement?

Ali, Verniers and Anjali all agree that a leap into electoral politics is unlikely for the CJP.

Verniers called that restraint from the group so far “tactically smart”, citing the example of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a protest movement that built a successful party but, a decade into power, is “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearance” in some former strongholds.

A national campaign demands money, volunteers and organisation that a young, often underemployed movement lacks. Its more durable influence, Verniers suggested, will be on other parties’ agendas, “as an interest group, rather than as a separate political force”, one the opposition has been unusually willing to embrace.

Anjali described AISA’s posture in similar terms: present at Jantar Mantar, but unwilling to let the fight narrow to one resignation. The group, she said, plans to keep building the argument against the government on campuses nationwide.

Al Jazeera reached out to 18 BJP national spokespeople for their responses to this article, but did not receive any replies.

The gap between power and legitimacy

Ali said he did not expect the BJP to trade its Hindu majoritarian politics — an ideology known as Hindutva — for one built on jobs and education, as demanded by CJP-led Gen Z protesters.

“I don’t think the BJP would dilute its Hindutva agenda; if anything, it would double down on it, so that the most salient issue in any election is religious identity.”

That may be, but what has changed, Verniers suggested, is not so much the BJP’s raw political power as its legitimacy.

“Electorally speaking, they are as dominant as they’ve ever been, perhaps more,” Verniers said. He cited the party’s ability to win elections, engineer defections, and outspend rivals, as proof of their continued success and of the BJP having pushed “the boundaries of what is democratically admissible”.

But the authority behind that dominance is what the protests have dented. And that gulf “between the actual power that the BJP has, and its ability to have citizens comply and obey” is harder to repair with a by-election win or a polished reel, he said.

That gap, Verniers said, “is the really important, interesting disconnect” the party now has to live with.

The fatal incident reportedly took place amid a rush of devotees at a temple in India’s Bihar state.

At ‌least six people have died, and ⁠several have been injured, in a “stampede-like” incident caused by a falling electricity pole at the Ashok Dham temple in Lakhisarai, in India’s eastern ⁠state of Bihar, according to officials.

“It is being said that an electric pole fell there and people were electrocuted, which led to a stampede-like situation,” Shivam Kumar, ⁠a senior police officer, ⁠told news agency ANI on Monday. “We can tell you the exact reason only after verifying everything.”

The incident occurred amid a rush of devotees at the temple to offer water to the Hindu god Shiva during the holy month of Shravan, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

At least five people ⁠were injured in the incident, a senior official told ⁠Reuters news agency, as videos from ANI showed relatives gathering in hospitals as rescuers brought in people.

“The incident at Ashok Dham in Lakhisarai is extremely tragic and heartbreaking. I am deeply distressed by the news of the devotees’ deaths in the accident,” Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary wrote on X.

“My heartfelt condolences go out to the bereaved families. The administration has been given necessary instructions to ensure proper and prompt treatment for the injured,” he added.

India’s history of crowd accidents includes ‌30 deaths at the giant Maha Kumbh festival last year, when tens of millions gathered ‌to‌ bathe in sacred waters.

Bangladesh dominated Australia throughout, and the margin of victory will send shockwaves through the cricketing world.

Bangladesh chased down ‌57 runs to complete a landmark nine-wicket victory over Australia in the series opener in Darwin on Sunday in ⁠one of Test cricket’s ⁠greatest upsets.

Mominul Haque cut Beau Webster to the fence for the winning runs to secure Bangladesh’s first Test win in Australia within four days in stifling heat at Marrara Oval, foiling a ⁠valiant century from home all-rounder Cameron Green.

The winning boundary triggered jubilation among Bangladesh’s players, who jumped and shouted on the sidelines.

‘Everything was perfect’

Flooring a full-strength Australia, the world’s top-ranked Test nation, in their own back yard, will be regarded by many as ⁠the South Asian nation’s finest victory in 26 years of playing the game’s longest format.

It took 23 years for Australia to host Bangladesh in a second Test series since sweeping them 2-0 in 2003, so Najmul Hossain Shanto’s side were determined to prove their worth.

They did far more than that, as they dominated the World Test Championship leaders with bat, ball ‌and in the field in virtually every session.

Bangladesh had heroes throughout the match, but on day four it was spin-bowling all-rounder Mehidy Hasan Miraz who stood up to strike the decisive blows as Australia were bowled out for 284.

Having scored 65 with the bat in Bangladesh’s first innings and caught and bowled Australia’s traditional saviour Steve Smith for 44 on day three, Miraz took another four wickets on the fourth day after Australia resumed on 161 for four, still 67 runs in arrears.

“It was excellent. A great moment for us,” Miraz said.

“The way we are ⁠playing shows our character. Everything was perfect.”

Green’s ton in vain

Miraz, the grinning 28-year-old, had wicketkeeper Alex Carey caught behind ⁠for 30 and bowled all-rounder Webster for five with a pair of sumptuous deliveries to bring Australia’s tail into play.

Australia captain Pat Cummins was caught in close for eight, with Miraz inducing a bat-pad catch for Shadman Islam.

Mitchell Starc dug in with Green for a defiant ⁠eighth-wicket partnership of 43, but he was caught behind for 18 off the bowling of fellow seamer Taskin Ahmed.

Green held on to raise his third Test century and ⁠first on home soil after lunch with two runs off Taskin.

The defiant ⁠knock was a timely response to critics of Green’s place in the side, but he was bowled out soon after for 104, becoming Hasan Mahmud’s ninth wicket of the match by playing onto his stumps.

With only a 50-run lead and tailenders Nathan Lyon and Josh Hazlewood clinging to the last ‌wicket, Green’s departure was effectively game over for Australia.

Miraz wrapped up Australia’s innings by trapping fellow spinner Lyon lbw for 15.

With clumps of delirious Bangladesh fans chanting between every ball, Shadman and Haque mowed down the runs efficiently.

Opener ‌Tanzid ‌Hasan was bowled by Josh Hazlewood for a duck but may hardly care, having scored a majestic 101 in the first innings to help Bangladesh put 426 on the board in reply to Australia’s paltry 198.

A powerful earthquake that struck eastern Indonesia has killed at least 51 people and forced about 5,000 people to evacuate, as rescue teams work to clear roads blocked by landslides and reach survivors still trapped under rubble.

The magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck at 5:58am local time on Saturday (21:58 GMT, Friday), with its epicentre about 68km (42 miles) north-northwest of the city of Ende, on Flores Island, East Nusa Tenggara province, according to the US Geological Survey, which put the depth at 10km (6.2 miles).

The earthquake, followed by some 341 aftershocks, is one of Indonesia’s deadliest in years.

A total of 36 people were seriously injured and 77 more suffered minor injuries, Deputy Health Minister Benjamin Paulus Octavianus told a televised meeting on Sunday.

More than 3,300 people in Sikka regency, one of the hard-hit areas, either fled their homes or were left stranded, taking shelter in a sports arena, according to Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency, BNPB.

“The quake was massive, the shock was so strong, we were resting at home with family,” Nona, a 51-year-old resident of Talibura village, told the Reuters news agency. “There were 13 of us inside the house, and we all ran to save ourselves.”

In the port town of Maumere, some residents camped outside collapsed homes under tarpaulin tents, while others received treatment in a makeshift tent outside a local hospital.

“Almost all of Sikka’s residents didn’t dare stay indoors, so they slept on a porch or a tent outside,” Simon Sabandi, the region’s deputy chief, told news channel KompasTV.

Lieutenant General Suharyanto, the BNPB head, said the earthquake destroyed at least 157 houses and damaged nearly 200 more, forcing about 2,000 villagers in Nagekeo regency, the area closest to the epicentre, into temporary shelters.

He said three helicopters and a rescue vessel had been deployed to support the emergency response in a region where the scattered geography of small islands makes access difficult.

East Nusa Tenggara police chief Rudi Darmoko said the disaster had caused severe damage and building collapses across the province.

Rescue teams have yet to fully reach Nagekeo, where landslides have blocked roads and disrupted communications, said Fathur Rahman, head of the local search and rescue agency in Maumere, adding that a team was attempting to reach the area by ferry.

More than 3,500 military and police personnel have been deployed overall, Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya said. More than 1,300 homes have been damaged, and 20 petrol stations remain shut due to power outages, according to state energy firm Pertamina.

Officials are considering declaring a state of emergency for East Nusa Tenggara, which would unlock further resources and funding.

A tsunami warning issued immediately after the earthquake has since been lifted.

Reporting from Jakarta, Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington said aftershocks could continue for “several days”, with authorities in the island’s northern areas ordering further evacuations as the true scale of the damage is still “emerging”.

She said several affected areas remain inaccessible to first responders and that local authorities have urged residents to stay away from shorelines and damaged buildings.

The same stretch of coastline was struck by a similarly powerful earthquake in December 1992, when the quake and the tsunami it triggered killed more than 2,500 people on Flores, Indonesia’s geophysics agency said.

Indonesia, a nation of some 290 million people spread across roughly 17,000 islands, sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, making it one of the world’s most seismically active countries.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s war against Iran is stretching the limits of U.S. aircraft carriers and leaving the western Pacific without one of the key American warships as China shows more signs of aggression.

The USS George Washington is departing the Pacific to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, amid growing concerns about mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed carrier. The Lincoln has had its time at sea extended from its original May return date to support the war in Iran.

The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.

“The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the U.S. is “doing the exact opposite” of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.

American allies in the Pacific are unsettled over the unpredictability of the Trump administration, Poling said, while China “is quite happy with U.S. distraction, with the frustration of U.S. allies and partners.”

China may take advantage

Beijing sees the U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to China’s rise and an obstacle to its ambition to seize Taiwan, the self-governing island it claims as its own. But the United States has argued that the Pacific region is too important economically to lose.

No one expects China to invade Taiwan just because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier’s absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

“They’re using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the U.S. is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore,” Clark said. “They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore.”

China conducted naval exercises this week with Indonesia and recently has shown signs of aggression toward Japan and the Philippines, two key U.S. allies that also have territorial disputes with Beijing.

China carried out military drills this month near the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Both China and the Philippines have claims over the shoal. Last month, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer conducted a live-fire exercise off Japan’s southernmost island of Okinotori.

Adm. Frank Bradley, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, has been trying to reassure regional allies of Washington’s commitment. He was in Manila on Thursday, telling his Filipino counterparts that U.S. special operations forces are ready to step up joint exercises to strengthen the countries’ alliance. He also is expected to travel to Japan.

Evan Sankey, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute who focuses on U.S. policy toward China, said aircraft carriers provide psychological assurance to U.S. allies. The absence of carriers in the region, he said, “adds to the general sense that the U.S. is distracted by events in the Middle East.”

Trump has relied on aircraft carriers for military actions

Trump has relied heavily on aircraft carriers to support his numerous military operations during his second term. The USS Gerald R. Ford returned home in mid-May after an 11-month deployment, the longest since the Vietnam War, during which it supported the U.S. fight against Iran and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The Ford had experienced a fire in a laundry space that forced the carrier to turn around and return to the Mediterranean Sea for repairs and left hundreds of sailors without places to sleep.

The USS Lincoln has been at sea 268 days as of Saturday, a record deployment without a port visit, as the Ford had. Democratic lawmakers and families of the sailors have been calling for investigations and greater visibility into conditions aboard the ship, which is preparing to return to its home port in San Diego.

Warships and their crews can handle only so much, said Robert Farley, who teaches national security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and often writes about aircraft carriers.

“People don’t get enough rest. It’s psychologically exhausting. And R&R is part of keeping the crew healthy,” Farley said. “Sometimes it’s framed as, ‘These people haven’t had a vacation.’ But we are dealing with well-known limits on the capacity of a crew to operate at top efficiency over time. And that just declines.”

Clark, of the Hudson Institute, said the squeeze on the nation’s aircraft carriers stems from the lack of preparation and planning for the Iran war.

“If we were going to mobilize to do this kind of conflict, and we anticipated it might go this long, we might have done some changes to the carrier schedule to make sure more would be available,” Clark said.

Clark said the Navy has 11 aircraft carriers and typically deploys two or three at a time. But it could soon deploy four if the USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves San Diego for the Middle East, allowing the Washington to return to Pacific.

But the massive warships will need maintenance, probably causing a bottleneck at the nation’s only two carrier shipyards.

“We’ll end up with a maintenance debt that needs to be paid for the next few years,” Clark said. “We’ll probably have less carrier presence than we’ve had in the previous years because carriers will be lined up to get into the shipyard.”

Role in modern warfare

Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow in the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program, questions the future need for aircraft carriers as warfare rapidly changes.

Carriers can be more easily targeted with drones and missiles, particularly by an adversary such as China, Swaine said, while smaller ships and submarines can be as effective in striking targets as the fighter jets that launch off a carrier.

Top Navy officials have indicated a desire to move away from a heavy reliance on carriers. Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, told the Associated Press in February that he wants to convince commanders to use smaller, newer ships and other assets instead of consistently turning to huge aircraft carriers.

Finley and Tang write for the Associated Press.

New Delhi, India — Authorities dispatched workers early to New Delhi on the morning of July 26 to paint over the graffitied walls near the Jantar Mantar observatory.

A day earlier, protests over an exam leak scandal, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), had led to the ousting of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The entry curve of the protest strip read: “#2026 Gen-Z REVOLUTION!!!”

A man in his early twenties climbed a tree carrying a powerful loudspeaker and blasted a song. “Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom!” The crowd followed the words, with their hands raised in the air.

Azadi, translated as “freedom” in English, a popular hip-hop song from the Bollywood film Gully Boy, became the anthem of the student protests in one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in years.

Fast-paced video footage of police personnel beating students at New Delhi’s Parliament Street gave a new lease of life to the nearly decade-old track.

It was not just in Delhi – the chants reverberated in other cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow and Mumbai.

Just a decade ago, Azadi was among the most radioactive words — and criminalised protest slogans — in Delhi, for which student leaders were jailed for treason.

After thousands of protesters returned home following the minister’s resignation last month, the lights at Jantar Mantar had gone out. But rows of bright-yellow metal police barricades still lined the street. Many of them were painted over by protesters. One of them read, in red: “Umar, Sharjeel, Gulfisha were here before you”.

The journey of the Azadi chant — from Pakistan’s feminist movement, the Kashmiri resistance, to the mainstream in India — charts the evolution of both a political slogan and student politics and activism in India under Modi’s rule over the last decade.

‘Criminalising university spaces’

December 9, 2016, was supposed to be a casual evening at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s premier public universities that for decades has also been a cauldron of political activism.

A group of students coming together to meet was just another banal event. This meeting was to discuss capital punishment in India, looking at the case of a Kashmiri, hanged for an armed attack on India’s parliament in 2001.

At least, that’s how Banojyotsna Lahiri, a close friend of Umar Khalid and one of the organisers of the event, who spoke to Al Jazeera, remembered that winter evening.

Indian TV media channels, seen as friendly to Modi’s government, made the event a national political flashpoint, repeatedly airing footage of students chanting Azadi slogans, led by then JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar.

Pro-Modi media labelled the students as “sympathisers of terrorists” and some channels even aired doctored clips about the event.

Students like Khalid and JNU became household names as the controversy “blew out of proportion,” Lahiri said.

“Intense media trial picked up. It was a targeted campaign: propagating that antinational students lived off taxpayers’ money,” Lahiri recalled. Within days, sedition charges and arrests followed, with Khalid and others released on bail a few weeks later.

The JNU has been a traditional bastion of left-liberal politics, which also puts it in the crosshairs with the country’s Hindu majoritarian right, especially under Modi. But it was not the only university with popular anti-establishment politics at the time.

After a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, died by suicide in Hyderabad, in southern India, alleging caste discrimination, the Central University there erupted in protests, followed by a government crackdown.

These events in early 2016 kicked off a government campaign that gradually eroded space for dissent and expression in India’s public universities. Students said this has worsened over the years.

Right-wing goons attacked student leaders. Khalid was shot at in New Delhi. Universities blocked permissions to hold discussions, film screenings or protests.

“It requires a lot of courage to be a student activist or leader in India, after coming from small towns,” Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said.

“It is the first time in independent India where the government has undertaken a coordinated, well-thought-out attack on student activism.”

Lahiri said that the media campaign led to serious repercussions for those involved in the protests.

“The tag of antinational was accepted in wider Indian imagination, outside universities and these students [like Khalid] could never shed it,” Lahiri said.

In 2019, protests erupted against proposed amendments to India’s citizenship laws, which were seen as discriminatory against Muslims and rendering them second-class citizens.

Several Muslim student leaders in Delhi shot to national prominence for their fiery speeches and organising protests against the proposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The government appeared to step back from a nationwide screening of who qualifies as an Indian citizen amid the protests.

Another crackdown followed, jailing dozens of prominent student activists and burying their cases under piles of charges, including terrorism.

After the citizenship protests in 2019, which ran into 2020, students say the spaces in universities for protest shrank even further.

Police presence and inquiries were beefed up; students allege that several politically biased appointments to university administrations were made, and funding for research and institutions was slashed.

Six years on, student leaders like Khalid, who was rearrested, and Sharjeel Imam continue to be imprisoned without trial.

The journey of ‘Azadi’

After the controversy in 2016, the visuals of JNU reverberating with Azadi slogans inspired a music producer, Dub Sharma, to layer electronic beats over the crowd chants, which flows as the central melody.

Those slogans called for freedom from caste-based hierarchy, capitalism, hunger, and to break free from the influence of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Three years later, the track was tapped by director Zoya Akhtar for her 2019 Bollywood flick, Gully Boy, inspired partly by the poverty of rappers in Mumbai’s slums. Sharma recreated the song for the movie — and recruited popular Mumbai artist Divine to rap to it.

But the revised version of the song only retained “freedom from hunger” from the crowd’s original chants, omitting other calls for social justice. The film’s team faced criticism for hollowing out the original track but they defended it, arguing that the track was altered to suit the film’s own arc.

Seven years ago, in the recreated version, Divine rapped about income inequality, politicians’ privileged children and called on people to take over a corrupt system — all of which have become the central theme of Gen Z protests across the world.

Under Modi, India has continued to slide in multiple democratic indices. This year, Sharma’s rehashed score became the anthem of the students’ resistance, calling for wider educational reforms.

The earliest modern political life of the Azadi chant can be traced to Pakistan’s feminist resistance to General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. The late Indian feminist activist Kamla Bhasin recalled being inspired by the chant’s fluidity and adopting it to the Indian subcontext, making the calls suitable to specific protests.

Kashmiri resistance to Indian occupation adopted the slogan in the late 1980s as well. The left liberal movement in New Delhi caught up, too. But their calls to freedom were specific to their unique contexts.

A year before Bhasin passed away in 2021, she referred to the Azadi chants in an interview as “a living, breathing slogan”.

“This slogan grows every day, it evolves every day. Its meaning is not set in stone.”

Beginners’ guide to protesting in Delhi

A month after India’s chief justice controversially equated India’s unemployed youth with cockroaches and parasites, the insult caught the national imagination last June.

A Boston University graduate, Abhijeet Dipke, casually wondered: “What if all cockroaches come together?” in a post on X. He then started a social media campaign, under the self-named Cockroach Janta Party, and went viral on the internet. It gained more than 22 million followers on Instagram, more than double Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014.

Dipke returned to India, pledging to launch an agitation, channelling support in calling for education reforms starting with the resignation of the former education minister, after a series of examination scandals that affected millions of Indian students.

On June 6, he landed in New Delhi and came straight to the Jantar Mantar protest site, where he stood with Neha Bora, the national president of All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

Bora, a slight 29-year-old, had been with AISA for eight years, since her college days in Delhi’s JNU.

“[The Cockroach movement] did not have any idea about what might happen, or what to expect here,” she told Al Jazeera, sitting cross-legged in a loose T-shirt. “They didn’t know what to do. They were excited but also scared.”

Bora said student unions, like hers, “helped the protest stand” and take shape.

After the protest occupied the Jantar Mantar strip, defying frequent police orders to vacate, Bora’s AISA, alongside the Student Federation of India (SFI), another prominent left-wing student organisation, organised a protest camp. Six students joined educator-turned-activist Sonam Wangchuk, 59, on a hunger strike.

For a month, student volunteers from these organisations took shifts at the protest site, making sure it was occupied at all times. They gave the protest slogans, placards, and a voice that helped bring it international prominence.

“Sit-in means a lot of repetition for those people who you’re appealing to join,” Bora said, describing challenges. “As a student organisation, we knew the science behind keeping protest alive: bring in different sections of society to support the movement, like lawyers, professors and farmers.”

The Jantar Mantar protest was particularly remarkable in ways that experienced protest organisers — whose politics for years has been criminalised or sidelined — quietly equipped a younger generation to organise what, from the outside, appeared to be a leaderless movement, political analysts say.

With this came the same playbook from opponents to delegitimise the students, said Bora. For weeks, they fought back against “baseless conspiracies and allegations of being antinationals or foreign-funded”. At one point, Education Minister Pradhan called the protesters the “B-team of terrorists”.

However, this time, criminalising the young protesters did not work, and the demonstration continued to grow in popularity. Rather, the movement, campaigning on education issues, gave the student organisation a shot at gaining a foothold in national politics, said Apoorvanand.

Rediscovering ‘Azadi’

This summer, the grammar of Indian politics appeared to flip in the Gen Z protest wave. A stroll through the protest strip, reverberating with Azadi chants, raised a question: what had changed in New Delhi since 2016?

Before peeling back the layers, Lahiri, Khalid’s friend, insists that one needs to settle on a baseline: “The earlier citizenship protests were for Muslims, led by Muslims. Their names were Muslims, therefore [they were] easier to criminalise.” Several political analysts agree.

By contrast, none of the most prominent names in this year’s student protests was Muslim — though the organisers repeatedly called out the “hate and divisive politics” of the ruling government, which has been criticised for alleged targeted attacks on minorities.

Mohammad Junaid, a volunteer at the site, became the most visible Muslim face at the Jantar Mantar strip. Even before everyone had returned home after the protest ended, Junaid and his family members were picked up and harassed by police, he said.

At one point, the Cockroach leaders asked the protesters to refrain from chanting “negative” Azadi slogans. That made no difference among the crowd, though.

N Sai Balaji, a student activist who served as AISA’s national president from 2019 to 2023, said there is a clear difference between the student leaders’ pre and post-citizenship protests, where they have moved on from being objects of representation to owning the narrative.

“It’s just not the same kind. They are tech-savvy 1786809159, know how to integrate their message, and they know the language of the internet so well because they grew up there,” he told Al Jazeera. He compared this with his own generation growing up watching TV.

“That is why the traditional media was useless for them. Rather, they became the media themselves,” Balaji said. “They owned their story. Something we could not do.”

Balaji stressed that social media influencers and alternative media spaces reported the protest and became the main medium of amplification. Many began boycotting traditional media outlets seen as friendly to the government. “And no one was calling them antinationals in this new space,” he said.

Instead, for instance, when videos of Bora on hunger strike were watched by millions, Balaji said, it made people question the status quo. “India’s aspirational class, who felt betrayed by the government’s broken promises, found hope in people who were sitting selflessly,” Balaji stressed.

“That’s where the whole propaganda vanishes. Suddenly, the so-called antinationals become humans too,” he added.

Lahiri said the current generation of student leaders broke through traditional moulds of activism. “With their language, imagery, and Instagram reels, people outside universities are now able to connect more,” she said.

And with spaces inside universities criminalised, the students’ politics are yet again spilling out onto the streets, added Lahiri. She went a step further to note that unlike her own generation, the new student protesters are “trying to do politics under even harsher circumstances”.

Call it shallow, Lahiri argued, breaking into a laugh, but just saying, “Fu** Modi,” is more of a slap in the face, instead of our sentiments coated in academic language.

Out of the flood of online memes and posters, one stayed with Lahiri. It read: “Umar Khalid walked, so Gen Z could run.” She is not sure if Khalid would agree with this, but she does.

For Bora’s part, she told Al Jazeera, the 2019 citizenship movement led by Muslims “inspired a revolution inside” her, which keeps her going even today.

Painting her predecessors as antinationals and traitors of India, Bora said, the Modi government criminalised the mere expression of the word Azadi by “creating so much noise around it.”

However, “when students faced police brutality — when the wounds of those batons were fresh on their bodies — one understands that the Azadi slogan is the most radical assertion of fundamental rights in India”, Bora said.

Indian PM said the Maoist-influenced Naxalite armed rebellion is largely gone, but its ideological backers still pose threat.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said the country has largely eliminated a Maoist rebellion which it battled for decades but still faces a threat from the movement’s ideological backers.

Speaking on India’s Independence Day on Saturday, Modi said India had succeeded in “getting rid of armed Naxals” – referring to members of the Maoist-influenced Naxalite movement that challenged state authority across swaths of central and eastern India.

However, he said “dimagi Naxals” (intellectual Naxals) are looking for opportunities to create violence, and need to be “identified and isolated”.

The phrase “dimagi Naxal” echoes the politically charged label “urban Naxal,” a term Modi and leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party have previously used for activists, academics, intellectuals and other government critics.

The remarks come weeks after a youth-led protest movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, emerged as a rare challenge to Modi’s government and helped force the resignation of his education minister.

While Modi did not mention the protests, he repeatedly highlighted initiatives aimed at young Indians, including AI skills training and free online coaching for competitive exams.

He said India had transformed from a “fragile” economy into the world’s fastest-growing major economy over the past decade and reaffirmed his government’s goal of turning the country into a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its independence.

India’s Naxalite movement began in 1967 with an uprising in the village of Naxalbari in eastern India, and grew into a decades-long armed rebellion championing the rights of landless farmers, the rural poor and Indigenous communities. Thousands of civilians, rebels and security personnel died in the fighting.

Modi said the Maoist movement had “destroyed the future” of generations of young people and credited his government’s security and development policies with sharply reducing Maoist violence since taking office in 2014.

Rights groups have for years accused India’s government of using anti-terror laws, sedition-related provisions and foreign-funding rules to squeeze civil society and target activists, journalists and groups critical of its policies.

Australia close Day Three of the first Test against Bangladesh on 161-4, trailing the record-chasing tourists by 67.

Spinner Mehidy Hasan Miraz took the key wicket of Steve Smith to reduce Australia to 161-4 after the third day of the first Test in Darwin and move Bangladesh closer to a historic win.

At the close on Saturday, Australia trailed the visitors by 67 runs in their second innings, with Cameron Green on 43 and Alex Carey on 19.

After being dismissed for 426 shortly after lunch, Bangladesh seamer Hasan Mahmud stunned Australia when he claimed both openers cheaply.

Hasan, who took a career-best 6-55 in the first innings, bowled Jake Weatherald (0) and Travis Head (17) in identical fashion, both chopping on to their stumps.

On a good batting strip, Marnus Labuschagne and Smith initially steadied the ship.

Labuschagne, who has been out of form and seen his place in the team increasingly come into question, eased to 31 before playing over the top of a straight ball from left-arm spinner Taijul Islam and being bowled.

Smith, so often Australia’s saviour, batted sensibly but with the score on 122 he got a leading edge to off-spinner Mehidy and chipped it straight back to the bowler.

“The way we showed character and the way we played for the last two or three days was outstanding,” visiting captain Najmul Hossain Shanto told Fox Sports.

“We are taking it session by session, focusing on the process and not the outcome.”

Earlier, Mehidy did the damage with the bat, scoring a valuable half-century in Bangladesh’s first innings.

After Bangladesh were well beaten by a Cricket Australia XI in their only warm-up match, including being bowled out for 54 in the second innings, many expected this Test to be an easy Australia victory.

But the unfancied visitors bowled the hosts out for 198 on the first day and then showed great dedication with the bat to keep the home side in the field for 138 overs.

Mehidy shielded the lower order brilliantly in the morning session to frustrate a tiring Australian attack.

When he was finally dismissed for 65 by Josh Hazlewood shortly after lunch, he had helped put his team into a strong position halfway through the match.

Bangladesh are attempting to win a Test in Australia for the first time, at the third attempt.

Mehidy shines for Bangladesh to frustrate Australia

After Bangladesh resumed the day on 351-6, fast bowler Hazlewood took two wickets in the first hour to give the hosts hope of wrapping up the tail relatively quickly.

But Mehidy’s outstanding batting allowed Bangladesh to defy the Australian bowlers on a typically hot and humid Darwin morning.

They were helped by some poor Australian catching, including an almost inexplicable miss by Smith, who got under a mistimed pull from Taskin Ahmed in the deep but dropped the simplest of chances.

Two balls later, Mehidy miscued a pull shot only for a diving Head to spill a more difficult chance.

After defying the Australians for more than an hour in the final session on Friday, Hasan lasted just four overs of the first session on Saturday before being trapped leg before by Hazlewood, adding one run to his overnight score of 13.

Taijul Islam made a breezy 17 before becoming Hazlewood’s 299th wicket in Tests when he guided a ball straight to Cameron Green at gully.

With Mehidy shielding Taskin, Bangladesh pushed the lead past 200 and kept the Australian bowlers toiling for another two hours.

Hazlewood, the pick of the attack with 6-89, reached 300 wickets in Tests when he had Mehidy caught behind by Alex Carey to leave Bangladesh 418-9.

He got his 301st when Number 11 Ebadot Hossain fell the same way for seven.

More than half of women’s organisations still operating in Afghanistan could cease operations within the next year, UN Women warns.

Five years since the Taliban came to power, the United Nations has warned that funding issues mean more than half of women’s organisations still operating in Afghanistan could cease operations within the next year.

Susan Ferguson, UN Women’s special representative in Afghanistan, appealed to donor countries on Friday not to cut funding for women’s programmes, saying to do so would only deepen the suffering of Afghan women.

More than half of 74 women’s organisations surveyed in April are likely to have to suspend operations or close in the next year due to funding problems, Ferguson said.

The UN’s $1.7bn humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan was only 25 percent funded, and nearly three-quarters of the women’s organisations had experienced funding cuts in 2025, while about two-thirds reported that they had six months or less of operational funding remaining, she added.

The UN’s call comes as the Taliban marks five years since US forces withdrew from the country, effectively handing back power to the group in August 2021, after 20 years of war.

Bright white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have been installed this week across the Afghan capital Kabul, with new murals declaring: “Independence is a sign of dignity, pride and identity”.

The Taliban is also hosting a cricket match as part of the celebrations – but, just like much of public life in Afghanistan, women and girls are barred from attending.

Crippling restrictions for Afghan women

The Taliban has imposed more than 100 decrees restricting women’s rights since returning to power, affecting nearly every aspect of their daily lives, from education and employment to freedom of movement, healthcare and access to justice, Ferguson said.

Despite repeated Taliban promises to find an ideologically compliant way for them to attend school, girls are still banned from secondary schools and women from universities.

More than half of 3,200 women surveyed by UN Women said they now leave their homes only once or twice a month.

Seven in 10 women described their mental health as bad or very bad, Ferguson said.

On Friday, a group of 56 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Lebanon, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, issued a joint statement at the UN renewing calls on the Taliban to reverse restrictions on women and girls, saying its “systematic repression of women and girls has become a defining feature of the current system”.

A slew of challenges

Five years of Taliban rule have left wider Afghan society facing a slew of other challenges.

More than half of primary school-aged children are out of school, and child malnutrition has reached critical levels in a third of Afghanistan’s provinces, according to the UN World Food Programme.

Infrastructure in the country has been damaged by a series of deadly earthquakes and floods that have also killed thousands.

While deaths from “terrorism” have fallen precipitously since the Taliban took power, according to data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, the country has become embroiled in a series of deadly border confrontations with its neighbours in both Iran and Pakistan.

The country also remains relatively diplomatically isolated, with Russia being the only country worldwide to formally recognise Taliban rule.

One week on from Saudi ⁠⁠Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye signing their ⁠joint defence agreement, the Turkish defence ministry revealed more details about the alliance on Thursday. They include plans to hold ⁠⁠joint military exercises and to deepen cooperation between their defence industries.

The bid to deepen security cooperation between three of the biggest economies among Muslim-majority countries comes amid heightened military tensions and conflicts in the Middle East.

Over the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly hit by Iran, which says it is targeting US military assets in the Gulf.

Pakistan’s ⁠⁠foreign ministry said that the agreement states ⁠⁠that an armed ⁠⁠attack on any one of the ⁠⁠three countries would be ⁠⁠regarded as an ⁠⁠attack against them all –  similar to NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause.

At a weekly briefing in the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday, the Turkish defence ministry said the pact’s fundamental goal was to ensure defence and military ties were put on a “more institutional and sustainable” footing.

“Under the accord, strategic political and military mechanisms plan to be established involving the defence ministers, foreign ministers, and chiefs of general ⁠⁠staff/armed forces commanders and that coordination among the three countries will ⁠⁠be conducted at the highest level,” it said.

What do we know about the Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Pakistan pact?

It follows a visit by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, accompanied by army chief Asim Munir, to Saudi Arabia to perform the Umrah pilgrimage in Mecca.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also travelled to Saudi Arabia on Friday to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Turkiye, which has NATO’s second-largest army, has said the pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan and major oil ‌‌exporter Saudi Arabia was open to expansion – Egypt has been touted as a potential candidate — and did not seek to replace any existing alliances.

How have similar defence pacts fared?

The mutual defence pact is similar to several others in the region and beyond, yet many have had mixed records in practice.

Such alliances have the potential to deter large-scale interstate wars against their members, analysts say. But their effectiveness drops once conflicts move into a ‘grey zone’, which can include military occupation, settlements, internal repression or proxy violence.

Experts say they often serve merely as a signal of a strengthened political alliance rather than being a true collective defence.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 1949

NATO grew largely out of Cold War fears of aggression and expansionism by the Soviet Union.

The US, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom signed the initial treaty on April 4, 1949.

The group has expanded into a 32-member alliance, with Sweden being the most recent member two years ago.

Many argue that NATO was a factor behind the Soviet Union’s reluctance to directly attack Western European member states during the Cold War, and vice versa with the Warsaw Pact.

The US also entered multiple bilateral treaties with different countries in the 1950s and 1960s. This provided Washington with strategic reassurances to its pact partners and went some way to shape their domestic and foreign policies.

A key provision of the NATO treaty, the so-called Article 5, states that if one member of the alliance is attacked in Europe or North America, it will be considered an attack on all members. That effectively put Western Europe under the ‘nuclear umbrella’ of the US.

NATO has invoked Article 5 only once in its history, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the US.

According to NATO, the alliance plays an important role in fighting “terrorism”.

Arab League Joint Defence and Economic Cooperation Treaty, 1950

The League of Arab States, or Arab League, was established in 1945 to promote economic, political and social cohesion among emerging Middle Eastern states Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

It came amid the formation of Israel and its threats to countries in the region.

In 1950, Arab states signed a mutual defence treaty, stating that an attack on one is an attack on all – at least on paper.

Inter‑American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, 1947

Following the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, leaders in the Americas signed this treaty in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, also known as the Rio Treaty.

Its core principle was that an attack on one member country counts as an attack on all.

This treaty was invoked during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The ANZUS Treaty, 1951

In September 1951, the US, New Zealand and Australia signed a treaty pledging to meet the common dangers in the Pacific region.

Following the September 11 attacks, ANZUS was invoked for the first time.

In 1986, the United States suspended its ANZUS security obligations to New Zealand over Wellington’s anti‑nuclear policy. This effectively froze New Zealand out of the alliance, while US–Australia cooperation continued.

US-Japan Security Treaty, 1951

The US and Japan pledged in a bilateral agreement to act and meet the common danger in case either of them faced an armed attack.

This agreement was signed in 1951 in San Francisco alongside the World War II peace treaty.

While the treaty was never invoked, about 50,000 US military personnel are stationed in Japan.

US-South Korea Mutual Defence Treaty, 1953

Following the end of the Korean War, the US and South Korea pledged to help each other from external armed attacks. This treaty came into effect in 1954.

While it was never invoked, it gave the US a legal framework to station about 28,500 troops in South Korea.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)’s Peninsula Shield Force 1984

The GCC is a political and economic alliance of six countries in the Arabian Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The GCC was established in Saudi Arabia in 1981, aiming to promote economic, security, cultural and social cooperation between the six member states.

In 1984, the GCC established a standing coalition land force, the Peninsula Shield Force, tasked to defend the six-member states amid the Iran-Iraq War.

It is composed of infantry, armour, artillery and combat support elements from each of the states, with 40,000 personnel.

The 2000 Joint Defence Agreement was signed to develop a joint military industry for arms manufacturing.

In September 2025, when Israel attacked Hamas leaders in Qatar, the GCC pledged to “activate a joint defence mechanism”.

Treaty on European Union (TEU), 2009

The modern EU was officially formed in 1993 in the Netherlands with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.

In 2009, the Treaty on European Union (TEU) created the mutual defence obligation which was signed into EU law.

Under Article 42(7) of the TEU, if one EU member is the victim of “armed aggression”, others have an obligation to aid and assist by all the means in their power.

France has invoked this clause only once, in 2015, following the Paris attacks that killed 130 people. Other EU members provided bilateral military support — including deployments to French‑led operations abroad — so that France could redeploy troops to strengthen security at home.

Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), 2002

The CSTO is a Russia-led military alliance that includes some former Soviet republics.

Established in 2002, its members comprise Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Belarus.

Article 4 of the CSTO states that aggression against one is considered aggression against all, with an obligation to provide necessary aid, including military.

The CSTO has deployed troops once, in 2022 in Kazakhstan upon the request of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to help manage demonstrations caused by rising fuel prices.

A series of Houthi attacks in recent weeks, which are among the deadliest in years, is raising fears that Yemen could be sliding back towards all-out war as conflict spreads across the Middle East.

A 2022 truce led to the end of heavy fighting between the pro-Iranian Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, which had been ongoing since September 2014.

But a series of clashes over the last month between the two sides – intensifying in the last two weeks – has led to civilian and military casualties and threatened to reignite the war.

Here is what we know.

What are the latest attacks?

The Houthis have killed a number of civilians in a series of attacks on the government-controlled west coast port of al-Makha, also known as Mocha.

There was also an attack on a commercial vessel in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on Tuesday, which Yemen’s coastguard said killed six people and injured 10 others. The Houthis said the vessel was carrying weapons.

It followed the Houthis targeting Yemeni government military sites in eastern Yemen with drones and rockets, killing at least 30 government soldiers and causing further clashes. The Houthis have also attacked Saudi Aramco’s Jazan oil refinery.

In response, Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), said the internationally -recognised government would not accept “a new truce that reproduces previous experiences”.

“No action by the Houthi militias will go unanswered or unchecked,” al-Alimi said, according to Yemen’s Saba news agency.

But he also appeared to leave space for a political way back, saying the Houthis could still “lay down their arms, engage in political life and compete through the ballot box on an equal footing with all other Yemenis”.

What is behind the latest tensions?

The Houthis seized the capital Sanaa in 2014 and have since fought a war with the government for control of the country.

Although the intensity of the war declined significantly after the 2022 truce, no comprehensive peace settlement followed.

The fragile status quo came under increasing pressure after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on February 28 .

On July 13 , Yemeni government forces – which are backed by Saudi Arabia – attacked Sanaa airport, reportedly to prevent an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation from landing. The government accuses Iran of arming the Houthis.

The rebel movement responded by launching missiles towards Saudi Arabia. Then, on July 20 , the Houthis announced a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia, threatening oil shipments diverted towards the Red Sea and attacking Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu.

Is Saudi Arabia changing its approach?

As the attacks have intensified, Saudi Arabia has begun to take a more proactive approach to its security – both in Yemen and across the region, according to experts.

Some analysts believe the prospect of the Houthis ultimately blocking Bab al-Mandeb – the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean – may have helped push the Saudis to change their strategy.

Saudi Arabia was somewhat insulated from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz because it could use its East-West Pipeline to transport oil from fields in the east to the Red Sea, bypassing the strait.

If the Houthis were to severely restrict shipping through Bab al-Mandeb, that would threaten the Red Sea route for one of the world’s largest oil exporters.

Last month, Riyadh announced a new international alliance intended to protect shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks. Dozens of countries were invited, with the kingdom saying 13 had agreed to participate.

It is also deepening its security relationships with Pakistan and Turkiye through a new joint defence agreement, while Saudi coordination with Washington also appears to be strengthening.

The Saudi Defence Minister, Khalid bin Salman, recently met US Vice President JD Vance amid reports that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had secured US support for potential military action against the Houthis.

But in Yemen, the shift in the Saudi position may have been more visible when the Saudis intervened against the United Arab Emirates-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) at the end of last year. That allowed Yemen’s fractious anti-Houthi coalition to coalesce around the Yemeni government and present a more united front against the rebels.

Simon Mabon, professor of international relations at Lancaster University in the UK, said Saudi policy on the issue has changed significantly.

“After years of attempting to de-escalate and work towards an accommodation with the Houthis, Riyadh appears to have concluded that approach is no longer viable,” Mabon told Al Jazeera.

“Saudi Arabia’s concern has become particularly acute because conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has increased the importance of alternative oil and shipping routes through the Red Sea.”

But rather than trying to totally defeat the Houthis and retake the capital Sanaa, Mabon said Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government now appear to be focused on pushing Houthi forces away from the coast.

“That’s a marked shift from what we had been seeing previously,” he said.

Could Pakistan and Turkiye be drawn into the war?

The Saudi-Pakistan-Turkiye agreement potentially raises the stakes of any further Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia.

Al Jazeera’s Yousef Mawry, reporting from Sanaa, said the latest attacks were being interpreted by some experts as a direct defiance of the new defence pact.

Pakistan has been directly affected by the recent escalation. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said three Pakistanis were killed and another person injured in a Houthi attack on a vessel in the Red Sea.

“Pakistan strongly condemns the Houthi attack on a non-combatant commercial vessel,” Dar said, adding that the government was in contact with Saudi and Yemeni authorities.

But experts say the defence pact does not mean that Pakistani or Turkish troops will join the war in Yemen on behalf of their ally.

Wolfgang Pusztai, a security policy and defence analyst, told Al Jazeera that the agreement so -far is “just ink on paper”.

What role is Iran playing?

Iran has long cultivated a so-called “axis of resistance” of governments and groups opposed to Israel and the United States, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, armed groups in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen.

The Houthis supported Iran towards the end of March by launching attacks towards northern Israel and have since threatened to expand their operations in the Red Sea.

Last month, Iran reportedly asked the Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea oil route if the US attacked Iranian power infrastructure.

A source close to the Houthis told Reuters that missiles and drones had been positioned near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait in Yemen’s highlands overlooking Hodeidah and the Gulf of Aden.

Mohammed Albasha, a Yemeni American analyst and former spokesperson for Yemen’s embassy in Washington, said the Houthis’ attacks on Saudi Arabia should therefore also be understood within the broader US-Iran confrontation.

“By threatening Saudi shipping there, the Houthis can increase pressure on both Riyadh and Washington, while supporting Iran in its wider confrontation with the United States,” Albasha said.

Is another all-out war imminent?

Analysts say the crucial question is whether the latest attacks are intended to pressure the Saudi and Yemeni governments, or whether the Houthis believe they are simply taking the initiative in a new potential ground war.

The Houthis also say Saudi Arabia is using the port of al-Makah to reinforce and resupply government forces and believe Riyadh and its Yemeni allies are preparing an offensive against Houthi-held territory.

Nadwa Al-Dawsari, Associate Fellow at the Middle East Institute, said those fears may be fuelling the current escalation.

“Since January, there has been significant progress towards bringing Yemen’s different government forces under a more unified command,” Al-Dawsari told Al Jazeera.

“Government forces have also demonstrated growing air capabilities, carrying out air and drone strikes against Houthi missile and drone launchers and other military sites.”

“The Houthis’ objective in this recent escalation is to disrupt these preparations before government forces are ready, degrade their capabilities and force them onto the defensive.”

Ultimately, she said, the Houthis are trying to shape the rules of any coming confrontation so that “if escalation takes place, it happens on their own terms”.

While a Saudi-led ground offensive is not inevitable, the Houthis have also shown over the past decade that they cannot be defeated by air power alone, Mabon said.

“Yemen’s mountainous terrain makes a ground campaign exceptionally difficult, while Riyadh has little appetite to become trapped again in a prolonged war,” he said.

A Saudi-backed offensive led by Yemeni government forces is still more plausible than a large Saudi ground deployment, he added.

The consequences of major fighting on the ground between the two sides will inevitably mean that civilians will suffer most.

“Amidst all of this, the tragedy is that people in Yemen are paying the price,” Mabon said.

“It wasn’t long ago that Yemen was facing one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War. People are struggling, and continued fighting will make it far worse.”

Three nations to group ministers, hold ⁠joint exercises and deepen defence industry cooperation under the pact signed last week.

Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will group senior ministers, hold ⁠joint exercises and deepen defence industry cooperation under a military pact signed between the regional powers last week, Turkiye’s defence ministry says.

The three countries on August 7 signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on August 7, which stipulates that an armed attack against any member would be regarded as ‌an attack on all, similar to NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause.

At a weekly briefing in Ankara on Thursday, the Turkish defence ministry said the pact’s fundamental goal was to ensure defence and military ties were put on a “more institutional and sustainable” footing.

“Under the accord, strategic political and military mechanisms plan to be established involving the Defence Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and Chiefs of General ⁠Staff/Armed Forces Commanders, and that coordination among the three countries will ⁠be conducted at the highest level,” it said.

The ministry added that joint military exercises involving land, naval and air forces, as well as air defence and unmanned systems were planned, in ⁠addition to deeper defence industry cooperation.

“The aim is to provide not only product and system supply, but also joint ⁠development and production, technology cooperation, and sustainable maintenance and ⁠logistics support,” it said, adding that unmanned and autonomous systems, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence capabilities would be prioritised.

Turkiye, which has NATO’s second-largest army, has said the pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan and top oil ‌exporter Saudi Arabia was open to expansion — with Egypt as a potential candidate — and did not seek to replace any existing alliances.

The ministry also said Turkiye ‌was ‌participating in meetings in Jeddah aimed at establishing an international coalition to protect Red Sea shipping.

On developments in the Middle East, ministry spokesperson Rear Admiral Zeki Akturk said lasting peace and stability in the region would be possible if Israel ends its occupation and attacks in Gaza and Lebanon.

He said Israel continues attacks that have deepened the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as also reflected in United Nations reports.

“Israel’s rejection of the 15-point Gaza Plan has been another indication that it is pursuing a policy of regional expansionism. On the other hand, despite the framework agreement that was signed, Israel similarly continues its attacks and military activities in southern Lebanon,” Akturk said, referring to the plan proposed by the United States.

“We once again emphasise that it is essential for the international community to take a more determined and stronger stance against Israel’s actions by upholding international law and humanitarian values in order to establish peace and stability in the region,” he said.

Iran continues to deny claims by the United States that it controls the Strait of Hormuz as talks aimed at negotiating a peace deal between the two sides falter.

US President Donald Trump repeated his claim that the US is in “total control” of the critical waterway on Wednesday, but was met with angry denials from Iran, which has stated that it will not reopen the strait until demands regarding US aggression, reparations and sanctions are met.

“Claims and repeated posts by US officials that the Strait of Hormuz is no longer blocked do not change the reality,” Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) posted on X on Wednesday.

“The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked and will not be reopened until Iran’s conditions are accepted,” it added.

Here’s what we know about the latest developments in the strait, through which one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies are shipped during peacetime, and the prospects for ongoing talks.

What’s the latest on the US-Iran standoff?

Iranian forces are currently preventing ships that do not have its express approval from navigating through the narrow strait, which passes through territorial waters of Iran and Oman.

Despite Trump’s claim that the US has control over the strait, shipping traffic through the key waterway has dropped to a one-week low as a result of Iran’s blockade.

Meanwhile, the US is operating a naval blockade on Iranian ports both in and around the strait. On Tuesday, US forces targeted a Panama-flagged vessel they said was headed for an Iranian port, in the Gulf of Oman, and which they alleged had failed to respond to warnings.

On Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US “has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures”, including when launching its war on Iran, which it did alongside Israel with strikes on Tehran on February 28.

In a post on X, Araghchi said Washington’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz were “an even bigger miscalculation”.

“Worse than fake news is fake intelligence,” he said.

Hojjatoleslam Hossein Taeb, the commander of the paramilitary Basij Organisation – an affiliate of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – reiterated that the strait is “under Iran’s control and management”.

“Today you see that the Strait of Hormuz is under the management and control of the Islamic Republic, and our country continues on its path in complete security,” Taeb said on Thursday, according to Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.

“The Americans saw the power of the Islamic revolution,” he added.

What do we know about Iran-Oman talks?

Iran says it is not talking directly to the US about the strait. Instead, it says it is holding talks with Oman, which it proposes to share in the future management of the strait.

Following the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US on June 17, under which Iran undertook to keep the strait open for 60 days, there were soon disagreements about control of the waterway and the routes that ships should take. Iran fired on some ships it said had not followed its permitted route, leading to a renewal of hostilities with the US.

Iran also disagreed with the US over whether it could charge fees to ships passing through the strait. As a result, the strait – which was fully and freely open to all shipping before the US launched its war on Iran – has become the main obstacle to the progression of wider peace talks.

Now, talks between Iran and Oman are aimed at ironing out these issues.

On Tuesday, Qatar said negotiations between Iran and Oman over the strait had reached “an advanced stage”.

“As mediators, we want the Strait of Hormuz reopened as soon as possible,” Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari said during a news conference.

Negotiators are trying to reach a compromise that would allow commercial shipping to resume while addressing the security concerns of both Iran and Oman.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman has said talks with Oman are focused on “establishing safe inbound and outbound shipping lanes” that “uphold sovereign rights while also addressing the national security considerations of both Iran and Oman”.

Last week, Iran said it had agreed on the coordinates for these shipping lanes with Oman.

What do we know about broader peace talks between Iran and the US?

Iran says it is not speaking directly to the US because it has violated the June 17 MoU by restarting strikes on Iran in July.

Now, Pakistan is making efforts to mediate peace talks. It said on Tuesday it was working to bring the US and Iran “to the negotiating table”, as Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi held talks with senior Iranian officials in Tehran.

In April, the US and Iran held face-to-face negotiations, with US Vice President JD Vance and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf attending talks in Islamabad. On June 17, the two sides remotely signed the MoU, which was supposed to kick-start a 60-day negotiation process. However, various disagreements prevented that process from getting off the ground, and talks have stalled since then.

Alan Eyre, a distinguished diplomatic fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera earlier this month that the only important negotiations taking place right now are Iran-Oman talks over the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran says it is not worth talking directly because it “can’t count on anything the US says”, Eyre said.

Commenting on the possibility of future talks between the longtime foes, Negar Mortazavi, senior fellow at the US-based Center for International Policy, said the key question is whether the escalatory rhetoric from both sides is “opening negotiating positions or actual red lines”.

“If both sides are prepared to compromise, there is still a path towards ending the conflict and reopening the strait,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera on Wednesday.

“If they are not, Hormuz could remain restricted, and the confrontation risks becoming another prolonged, open-ended conflict in the Middle East.”

What are the latest demands from Iran and the US?

At the end of last week, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council set out new conditions it says the US must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can fully reopen.

The six conditions include an end to US threats against Iran and insults to what Zolghadr described as the country’s national and religious values; a permanent end to attacks against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq; the lifting of the US naval blockade and withdrawal of naval and air forces from around Iran; compensation for damage from what he called two “imposed wars”; the lifting of sanctions; and the unconditional release of frozen Iranian assets.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that his administration was going to seek payment for “50 years” of damage caused by Iran, framing the move as a direct response to Tehran’s claims.

The payments, he said, would cover deaths among US forces in the region as well as civilian protesters in Iran, claiming that 52,000 people have been killed in Iran in the past four months. Tehran says some 3,117 people died in antigovernment protests that swept the country in January, prior to the launch of the US-Israel war. In February, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported about 7,000 deaths, including 6,500 protesters.

On Thursday, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Assidi reported, citing observers, that Iran is focused on two primary issues.

“First was the security assurances Iran sought, ensuring that a reached deal could pave the way for a period of stability in the country,” Assidi said.

“Second were economic concerns, primarily articulated in demands for the US naval blockade to be removed and sanctions frozen, which represented the key demands coming from the Iranian side,” he added.

Despite the rhetoric from Trump, analysts have told Al Jazeera that the US may have to concede to some of Iran’s demands as it faces growing pressure domestically to avoid another escalation.

The US media have reported that concerns over dwindling defensive munitions have contributed to Trump’s decision not to carry out his threatened large-scale strikes against Iran.

New Delhi, India – The vapour heat treatment (VHT) facility in Rehmanpur village of Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh – used to sterilise fruit and vegetables – was preparing for the busiest time of the year when Japanese quarantine inspectors turned up in March.

Export documents had been cleared, shipping schedules finalised, and growers in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat reserved their best Alphonso and Kesar mangoes for export to Japan, one of Asia’s premium markets.

Everything appeared set for the season to begin when production ground to a halt. Japanese inspectors reviewing the fumigation, disinfection and certification procedures raised concerns about the whole process, prompting Japan to suspend imports of the fruits.

However, on March 31, the plant protection authorities in Yokohama sent a formal letter, saying all Indian mango shipments bearing inspection certificates issued on or after March 25 would be barred until inspectors could confirm that operational standards had improved.

It was the first major disruption in India-Japan mango trade in nearly two decades. In 1986, imports of the fruit were barred over fruit fly concerns. Restrictions were lifted in 2006 after the country built VHT infrastructure, strengthened pest surveillance and agreed to annual inspections.

Japan ‘gave us credibility’

The 2026 halt now affects six approved varieties of mango – Alphonso, Kesar, Langra, Banganapalli, Chausa and Mallika – covering the peak export window of April through to June.

Japan imported roughly $1.54m worth of fresh and processed mango products from India between 2025 and 2026. It might appear to be a modest sum, but the Japanese market holds huge significance for the rest of the global trade. Japan pays premium prices for mangoes and the country’s approval signals quality to the rest of the world.

The suspension came at an already challenging time for mango farmers in India. Sustained heatwaves through the Konkan belt had destroyed much of Maharashtra’s Alphonso crop. Geopolitical disruptions in West Asia had pushed freight costs higher, and exporters who had spent years establishing relations with the Japanese suddenly faced cancelled contracts and inventories rotting in storage.

Vikram Shah, a Mumbai-based exporter who shipped about 2.5 tonnes of mangoes to Japan in 2025, highlighted the importance of its market.

“Japan was never our biggest market in terms of quantity, but it was the one that gave us credibility,” Shah told Al Jazeera. “We spent six years building trust with buyers there. I travelled to Osaka twice, sat with importers, visited their cold storage facilities and learned exactly what they expected from us. Relationships like that take years to build and can disappear in a single season.”

Rajesh Patil, an Alphonso grower in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, said his family had cultivated mangoes on a three-acre (1.2-hectare) orchard along the Konkan coast for two generations. The Japanese market, he said, consistently delivered far higher returns than domestic auctions, leading him to invest heavily in meeting Japan’s stringent import standards.

“We upgraded the orchard because Japan rewarded quality,” Patil said. “I spent nearly ₹80,000 [$840] on grading and handling equipment, attended pest-management training sessions, and changed the way we harvest and pack fruit,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The Japanese market paid almost twice what I could earn locally. When you make those investments, you expect the system supporting exports to be as reliable as the fruit you grow.”

China objects to rice

On April 17, China revoked the import licences of three Indian rice exporters after the General Administration of Customs rejected their consignments, claiming traces of genetically modified organisms (GMO).

The exporters disputed the finding, pointing out that their shipments received GMO-free certification before their departure and that the Indian government also said all domestic paddy and rice fields are free of genetic modification.

Rice makes up more than 20 percent of India’s agricultural exports, with a record-breaking $12.5bn of it shipped in the last financial year (2025-26). The three suspended exporters now face an uncertain path back into China, rattling their community.

Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), under India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, notified the companies and, on June 8, published a list of laboratories approved for GMO tests on China-bound shipments.

SK Singh, an agricultural scientist in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera the dispute exposed weaknesses in India’s testing system.

“Our labs built expertise in pesticide residue and aflatoxin testing because that’s what most markets wanted,” he said. “China’s demand for GMO verification calls for a different scale of capacity.”

The exporters’ certificates came from accredited labs even if the certification network remains uneven, he added.

Only a handful of facilities, concentrated in New Delhi and Hyderabad in the southeastern state of Telangana, run the required protein analysis, forcing exporters in northern Punjab and Haryana states to ship samples hundreds of kilometres away.

Fragmented supply chain

There were other warning signs before the crisis hit mangoes and rice.

Hong Kong suspended several Indian spice products over pesticide residues, and testing found quality deviations in nearly 12 percent of the samples. The European Union also raised the inspection frequency on Indian cumin to 30 percent in January 2025, following 312 spice alerts on its rapid alert system in 2024.

Ananya Bose, a food safety scientist in Kochi in the southern state of Kerala, traced the problem to a fragmented supply chain.

“A farmer sells to an aggregator, who sells to a trader, who supplies a processor. Somewhere in that chain, the record of what was sprayed disappears,” she said. “The trail is detailed until the first sale, then it effectively ends.”

Bose has pushed for mandatory digital pesticide records, since regulators abroad expect traceability from field to shipment, a standard many states still treat as optional.

These setbacks may read as isolated incidents, but they expose a gap between India’s agricultural strength and the traceability, food safety and certification standards that Japan, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada now demand. Those standards are tightened by consumer pressure for transparency, climate-driven pest concerns, food-security strategy and the COVID pandemic.

At the same time, competitors have moved faster, with Thailand building a nationwide traceability programme, Vietnam investing in farmers’ training, and Brazil and Chile pouring money into cold-chain systems.

India’s progress has lagged with just 207 registered pack houses, 72 percent of them concentrated in Maharashtra. Moreover, scarce cold storage facilities and logistical costs eat up roughly 15 percent of export value, almost double that of advanced nations. Small farmers owning less than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land make up more than 86 percent of India’s cultivators, making standardisation difficult at scale.

“India built its strategy around producing more, while premium markets reward proving quality along the way,” agricultural economist Anil Gupta told Al Jazeera.

Gupta pointed to some real gains: recognised laboratories grew from 22 to 89 over the past decade, and approved export certificates climbed from roughly 61,000 to more than 170,000.

“The progress is measurable, but so is the scale of the challenge,” he said. “These improvements mark a beginning, well short of the finish line.”

Ujjwal Kumar Ghosh, a senior official in the government’s Department of Commerce, has called for tighter controls on antibiotic residues, pesticides and aflatoxins in spices, tea, fruits and vegetables. He said funds have been set aside to upgrade laboratories, though without a timeline.

“The government is strengthening the system from testing to inspection and traceability. We are tightening controls on antibiotic and pesticide residues and aflatoxins, expanding laboratory capacity, introducing risk-based inspections and using digital systems and rapid screening to identify problems faster. The objective is to help exporters meet stricter global food-safety standards while protecting India’s access to international markets,” said Ghosh.

India still holds just 2.4 percent of global agri-exports despite ranking as the world’s second-largest agricultural producer, with processed exports stuck near 17 percent, against 25 percent in the US and 50 percent in China.

And growers are facing the fallout.

Gujarat’s Kesar mango farmers lost their strongest Japanese buyer. A basmati rice farmer in Haryana’s Karnal said local prices had already dropped 8 percent. And a turmeric processor in Kerala’s Erode said residue testing cost him 15,000 rupees ($157) last quarter, almost 10 percent of his profit.

Agriculture still employs about 42 percent of India’s workforce while producing less than a fifth of the national output.

“This is about far more than a few rejected shipments,” Gupta said. “The countries that succeed will consistently meet the standards global buyers demand.”

Indian farmers have long proven they can grow for the world. The task now is building systems that convince the world to keep buying.

Pyongyang conducts second weapons test in less than a week as Seoul, Washington gear up for annual military exercises.

North Korea has launched a ballistic missile towards the Sea of Japan, according to Seoul and Tokyo, marking the second such test from Pyongyang in less than a week.

The launch on Wednesday came as South Korea and the United States announced plans to hold their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military drills starting on August 17.

“Our military detected at around 6:00 am [21:00 GMT Tuesday] a ballistic missile launched by North Korea from the Wonsan area towards the East Sea,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a message to reporters, referring to a body of water also known as the Sea of Japan.

South Korea’s military said the missile flew more than 700km (435 miles).

It said it has boosted its surveillance posture and that it was closely exchanging information on the launch with Washington and Tokyo.

Japan’s Defence Ministry said on social media that the suspected ballistic missile had “already fallen”, without providing further details.

“North Korea has never simply let a South Korea-US joint military exercise pass without a response,” Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University, told the AFP news agency.

“This is a message that Pyongyang is closely watching the upcoming drills and could stage a provocation if it deems one necessary.”

US-South Korea drills

The Ulchi Freedom Shield training is to start on Monday and run for 11 days. Its scale will be similar to previous years, with 18,000 South Korean soldiers taking part, according to South Korea’s military.

North Korea has in previous years denounced the exercises as a rehearsal for invasion, and responded to the drills with weapons tests and harsh rhetoric. Seoul and Washington, however, have repeatedly said their training is defensive in nature.

On August 6, South Korea, the US and Japan detected the launch of a short-range ballistic missile from North Korea in what was Pyongyang’s first ballistic weapons testing activity since late June.

North Korea did not confirm the reported launch.

Pyongyang has ratcheted up its criticism of Tokyo’s defence policy, issuing statements at least seven times since July.

On Tuesday, North Korean state media condemned Japan’s latest defence white paper as a “re-invasion-minded” document, saying it “groundlessly described” Pyongyang as ⁠the greatest strategic challenge to “justify its reckless arms buildup”.

North Korea has also been accused of playing a more active role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that Moscow had used a North Korean ballistic missile during an attack that killed seven workers at a Ukrainian steel plant in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement last Friday, pledging to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression and stating that an armed attack on any one of the three would be regarded as an attack on all.

The pact comes as the three countries navigate growing regional tensions, including concerns over Israel’s expanding military reach and Iran’s regional influence.

Together, these countries form a sizeable military bloc. Riyadh is a top oil exporter, Ankara has NATO’s second-largest military, and Islamabad is the only nuclear-armed Muslim country.

In this explainer, Al Jazeera breaks down their combined land, air and naval strength.

Joint land, air and naval strength

Together, the three countries combine nearly 1.4 million active military personnel, 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval assets according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index, which ranks the defence capabilities of 145 countries.

The index scores each country’s potential war-making capability across land, air and sea, drawing on factors including manpower, equipment, natural resources, finances and geography.

• Manpower: Combined, the three countries include about 1.4 million active personnel, backed by large paramilitary and reserve forces. Pakistan provides the largest pool of active personnel at 660,000, followed by Turkiye at 481,000 and Saudi Arabia at 247,000.
• Air power: Together they operate 3,415 military aircraft including fighter jets, helicopters, transporters and training military aircraft. Pakistan possesses some 1,397 aircraft, followed by Turkiye at 1,101 and Saudi Arabia with 917.
• Land forces: The three countries field some 6,046 tanks and more than 179,000 armoured vehicles, alongside thousands of artillery systems and multiple-launch rocket systems. Pakistan has the highest number of tanks at 2,677, Turkiye has 2,284 and Saudi Arabia, 1,085.
• Naval power: Their combined fleets include 344 naval assets, including 33 frigates, 24 corvettes and 22 submarines. Turkiye comes out top here with 192 naval assets, followed by Pakistan’s 120 and Saudi Arabia’s 32.
• Defence spending: Their combined defence budgets amount to about $124.4bn annually. Saudi Arabia has the largest military budget of the three at $63.9bn in 2026, while Turkiye set aside $51.4bn and Pakistan $9.1bn according to Global Firepower.

Complementary military powers

Andreas Krieg, an academic, security analyst and political risk consultant specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, said the pact’s significance lies in how the three countries’ different capabilities could complement one another.

“Saudi Arabia contributes capital, geography, infrastructure and political convening power. Turkiye contributes an increasingly sophisticated defence-industrial base, drones, missiles, sensors, electronic warfare, naval systems and NATO-derived military expertise,” he said.

Meanwhile, Pakistan contributes manpower, a large professional military establishment, operational experience, defence production and nuclear capability.

What does the alliance mean for each country?

For Saudi Arabia, the pact diversifies its defence partnerships beyond the United States, adding Turkiye’s advanced military capabilities and Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, amid growing threats to vital maritime corridors such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb.

Pakistan is one of nine states that possess nuclear weapons, which it first tested in 1998. The country of more than 250 million people relies heavily on China for its arms imports.

Turkiye, which joined NATO in 1952, has no nuclear weapons of its own but hosts US warheads under NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements.

David Des Roches, a former director of Arabian Peninsula affairs in the US Department of Defense, told Al Jazeera that the deal also serves Saudi arms diversification amid Western export unpredictability, since Turkiye and Pakistan can supply items like 155mm artillery shells at scale.

For Turkiye and Pakistan, it opens Saudi financial markets for their defence industries – both have manufacturing capacity exceeding what their own economies can sustain.

Zaid M Belbagi, managing partner at Hardcastle Advisory, told Al Jazeera that, for the US, the stakes are high. “Pakistan is a recipient of US aid, Saudi Arabia is the largest foreign buyer of US military equipment, and Turkiye is NATO’s second-largest army after the United States – so the spectre of the US within this agreement is quite interesting,” he said.

Krieg added that the US remains highly important, particularly for intelligence, advanced missile defence, and high-end military technology – but said that regional actors want to convert their own resources into usable power rather than purchasing from Washington.

“The old model was overwhelmingly hub-and-spokes, with Washington at the centre and individual states looking primarily to the United States for security. What is emerging now is horizontal connectivity between regional powers,” said Krieg.

Which other countries could join the pact?

Egypt is the only country whose potential membership has been publicly raised by a signatory. Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called Egypt a “natural partner” and said he expected Cairo to join once technical issues are resolved.

Krieg said Egypt’s military weight, strategic geography and control of the Suez Canal would make it a significant addition to the pact.

But Cairo may be wary of binding military obligations and the impact on its existing agreements, analysts said. “Egypt may join only if the language protects its aid relationship with Washington, doesn’t undermine existing alliances and peace treaties, and maintains its own freedom to decide when and where it fights,” said Karim Elgendy at Chatham House.

We all know the classic Seven Wonders of the World, but Lonely Planet has now revealed its most ‘Secret Wonders of the World’.

From bright thermal spas to haunting bell towers and oddly-named villages, these are nine of the most incredible spots either natural and manmade.

Pamukkale-Hierapolis, Turkey

When it comes to natural wonders, one of those highlighted by Lonely Planet is Pamukkale-Hierapolis in southwestern Turkey.

The striking thermal springs have white rocks with bright turquoise water and waterfalls.

Visitors can actually swim in part of Pamukkale in the man-made Cleopatra Pool.

In some parts you can walk through or even wade through the water.

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Zhangye Danxia National Geopark, China

Another colourful spot is Zhangye Danxia National Geopark in Gansu, China.

The mountainous site is full of bright colours from green to pink and orange that has formed over millions of years.

Around the geopark are dedicated paths and platforms so you can see the mountains in all their glory.

One of the best times to visit is during the wet season between May and September – the combination of rain and the sunrise or sunset make the colours more vivid.

Beehive Huts, Ireland

One secret wonder is much closer to the UK as it’s found on the south-west coast of Ireland.

Beehive Huts, or clochán, date back to the 8th century, thought to once be used to store grain or shelter against storms.

Lots are easy to visit with many on the Dingle Peninsula with views across the coastline.

Some of the most easily accessible are the Fahan Beehive Huts which cost around €3 (£2.56) to enter.

Campanile de Curon, Italy

Another is Campanile de Curon, a bell tower in the middle of a lake in Italy.

It’s actually on the site of a sunken village which was flooded when three lakes merged into one.

It submerged the village of Curon Venosta leaving only the bell tower to be seen.

In the winter when the lake freezes over, it’s possible to walk over to it.

Chiricahua National Monument, USA

The Chiricahua National Monument is an enormous site made up of towers of balanced rocks.

Across 12,000 acres, the protected area in Arizona is known as a ‘wonderland of rocks’.

The area is open to visitors who want to explore its creeks, volcanic formations, and grottoes.

Most head to see Big Balanced Rock which, as the name suggest, s is a large rock that is perched on a narrow pedestal in a way that doesn’t look possible.

Chicken, Alaska

Found deep in Alaska is a former gold rush village called Chicken – and it even has a huge chicken Mr. Eggee as the mascot.

The village got its name back in the 1900s when workers could not agree on the spelling of ptarmigan, a bird found in the local area.

Instead, they settled on chicken, and now the village even holds a Chickenstock music festival with live folk music and plenty do the chicken dance.

The village is accessible between April and September as in winter its connecting highway closes due to extreme weather like heavy snow.

Völklinger Hütte, Germany

Some of the man-made secret wonders include the Völklinger Ironworks, in Germany, which looks more like something from a steampunk film.

Found in the south-west of the country, these are the world’s only fully preserved ironworks from what was considered the “Golden Age” of the iron and steel industry.

It’s no longer in use and is actually a museum and gallery space with entry from €17 (£14.52).

There are regular exhibitions and tours of the ironworks too.

Quinta da Regaleira Wells, Portugal

Just a few hours away from the UK in Sintra, Portugal is Quinta da Regaleira Wells.

The well is made up of two staircases across nine levels, they are found beneath the UNESCO-protected Quinta da Regaleira.

Unlike traditional wells, these don’t hold any water but were rather used for secret Masonic ceremonies.

For anyone heading to Lisbon, it’s a 35-minute drive away – you need to buy a ticket and can either do a guided or self-guided tour of the site.

Moray, Peru

Another man-made secret wonder is Moray in Peru which are deep carved circles with steps – essentially like an amphitheatre.

It’s in the Sacred Valley region around 11,500 feet above sea level.

It was built by the Inca Empire between the 15th and early 16th centuries believed to be used to experiment with agriculture at the time.

For those who want to visit, you have to buy a tourist ticket which covers 16 historical sites across Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

For the full 385 Secret Wonders of the World check out the book at shop.lonelyplanet.com.