Opposition lawmakers in South Korea were planning to vote on Friday to impeach the prime minister and acting president, Han Duck-soo, the latest turn in a political crisis that has created a power vacuum in the country.

Mr. Han had been made acting president just earlier this month, after the National Assembly impeached and suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol on Dec. 14 for putting the country under military rule for the first time in 45 years.

Now, barely two weeks into Mr. Han’s tenure as acting president, the main opposition party has filed a motion for his impeachment as well. The move came after Mr. Han refused on Thursday to appoint three judges to fill vacancies in the Constitutional Court, the body that will be deciding whether to reinstate or remove Mr. Yoon.

The political uncertainty has tormented South Korea’s economy, pushing business and consumer confidence lower and causing the currency, the won, to plunge.

The opposition has pushed for Mr. Han to sign off on nominees to fill the bench in the nation’s highest court, but Mr. Yoon’s governing party has argued that only an elected president has the power to appoint justices.

At the heart of the matter is how the court might rule on Mr. Yoon’s impeachment. Six or more justices out of the nine-member court must vote in favor of impeachment to remove Mr. Yoon from office. The top court currently has only six justices, after three others retired earlier this year, meaning that the impeachment could be overturned with just one dissenting voice in Mr. Yoon’s trial, which is scheduled to start on Friday.

Mr. Han said in a televised address that he would hold off on appointing the nominees until the rival parties — that is, Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party and the opposition bloc comprising the Democratic Party and other smaller parties — came to an agreement on whether he had the authority to do so as the acting president.

An acting president should “refrain from exercising the president’s own significant powers, including the appointment of constitutional institutions,” said Mr. Han, a career bureaucrat.

Park Chan-dae, the Democratic Party’s floor leader, said to reporters that Mr. Han’s words were “not those of an acting president, but of one who is admitting to insurrection.”

The opposition has accused Mr. Han of aiding Mr. Yoon in his brief declaration of martial law on Dec. 3. Lawmakers accused Mr. Yoon of perpetrating an insurrection by sending troops into the National Assembly to block them from voting down his martial law and to detain his opponents. The Constitutional Court has up to six months to decide whether to reinstate or remove Mr. Yoon.

As for Mr. Han, the rival parties have disagreed on how many votes would be needed for him to be impeached. The ruling party maintains that a two-thirds threshold must be met since Mr. Han is the acting president. The opposition asserts that a majority vote would be enough to remove him from his office as prime minister as outlined by the Constitution. The speaker of the National Assembly, Woo Won-shik, a member of the Democratic Party, will decide before the vote.

Professor Cha Jina, a law professor at Korea University in Seoul, said that Mr. Han should be subject to a majority vote because “the acting president in South Korea is not actually the president and is just working in their stead as the prime minister.”

She also noted that this was the first time in the nation’s history that an acting president has faced impeachment.

If Mr. Han were to be impeached, the finance minister and deputy prime minister, Choi Sang-mok, would be next in line to be acting president.

On Thursday, the won, one of the weakest currencies in Asia this year, tumbled to levels against the U.S. dollar not seen since the global financial crisis a decade and a half ago. The stock market fell 1.5 percent on Thursday and is about 10 percent lower this year, a sharp contrast to many major indexes, in Asia and elsewhere, that have posted double-digit gains.

The cartel operatives came to the homeless encampment carrying syringes filled with their latest fentanyl formula. The offer was simple, according to two men living at the camp in northwest Mexico: up to $30 for anyone willing to inject themselves with the concoction.

One of the men, Pedro López Camacho, said he volunteered repeatedly — at times the operatives were visiting every day. They watched the drug take effect, Mr. López Camacho said, snapping photos and filming his reaction. He survived, but he said he saw many others who did not.

“When it’s really strong, it knocks you out or kills you,” said Mr. López Camacho of the drugs he and others were given. “The people here died.”

This is how far Mexican cartels will go to dominate the fentanyl business.

Global efforts to crack down on the synthetic opioid have made it harder for these criminal groups to find the chemical compounds they need to produce the drug. The original source, China, has restricted exports of the necessary raw ingredients, pushing the cartels to come up with new and extremely risky ways to maintain fentanyl production and potency.

The experimentation, members of the cartels say, involves combining the drug with a wider range of additives — including animal sedatives and other dangerous anesthetics. To test their results, the criminals who make the fentanyl for the cartels, often called cooks, say they inject their experimental mixtures into human subjects as well as rabbits and chickens.

If the rabbits survive beyond 90 seconds, the drug is deemed too weak to be sold to Americans, according to six cooks and two U.S. Embassy officials who monitor cartel activity. The American officials said that when Mexican law enforcement units have raided fentanyl labs, they have at times found the premises riddled with dead animals used for testing.

“They experiment in the style of Dr. Death,” said Renato Sales, a former national security commissioner in Mexico. “It’s to see the potency of the substance. Like, ‘with this they die, with this they don’t, that’s how we calibrate.’”

To understand how criminal groups have adapted to the crackdown, The New York Times observed fentanyl being made in a lab as well as a safe house, and spent months interviewing several people directly involved in the drug’s production. They included nine cooks, three chemistry students, two high-level operatives and a recruiter working for the Sinaloa Cartel, which the U.S. government blames for fueling the synthetic opioid epidemic.

The people connected to the cartel spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

One cook said he recently started mixing fentanyl with an anesthetic often used in oral surgery. Another said the best additive he had found was a sedative for dogs and cats.

Another cook demonstrated for Times reporters how to produce fentanyl in a cartel safe house in Sinaloa State, in northwest Mexico. He said that if the batch was too weak, he added xylazine, an animal tranquilizer known on the street as “Tranq” — a combination that American officials warn can be deadly.

“You inject this into a hen, and if it takes between a minute and a minute and a half to die, that means it came out really good,” the cook said. “If it doesn’t die or takes too long to die, we’ll add xylazine.”

The cooks’ accounts align with data from the Mexican government showing a rise in the use of fentanyl mixed with xylazine and other substances, especially in cities near the U.S. border.

“The illicit market gets much more benefit from its substances by cutting them with different things such as xylazine,” said Alexiz Bojorge Estrada, deputy director of Mexico’s mental health and addiction commission.

“You enhance it and therefore need less product,” said Ms. Bojorge, referring to fentanyl, “and you get more profit.”

U.S. drug researchers have also noticed a rise in what one called “weirder and messier” fentanyl. Having tested hundreds of samples in the United States, they found an increase in the variety of chemical compounds in fentanyl on the streets.

“It’s just a wild west of experimentation,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who helped coordinate the testing of more than 580 samples of drugs sold as fentanyl in Washington State this year.

He called it “absolute chaos.”

The Experiments

The synthetic opioids that reach American streets often begin in cartel labs, where precision is not always a priority, cooks say. They mix up vats of chemicals in rudimentary cook sites, exposing themselves to toxic substances that make some cooks hallucinate, retch, pass out and even die.

The cartels are actively recruiting university chemistry students to work as cooks. One student employed by the cartel revealed that to test their formulas, the group brought in drug users living on the street and injected them with the synthetic opioid. No one has ever died, the student said, but there have been bad batches.

“We’ve had people convulse, or start foaming at the mouth,” the student said.

Mistakes by cooks were met with severe punishment, she added: Armed men locked the offenders in rooms with rats and snakes and left them there for long stretches with no food or water.

The cooks and high-level operatives described the Sinaloa Cartel as a decentralized organization, a collection of so many disparate cells that no single leader or faction had complete control over the group’s fentanyl production.

Some cooks said they wanted to create a standardized product that wouldn’t kill users. Others said they didn’t see the lethality of their product as a problem — but as a marketing tactic.

In a U.S. federal indictment against the sons of the notorious drug lord Joaquín Loera Guzmán (known as El Chapo) who lead a powerful faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, prosecutors said the group sent fentanyl to the United States even after an addict died while testing it in Mexico.

Instead of scaring people off, cartel members, drug users and experts say that many American users rush to buy a particularly deadly batch because they know it will get them high.

“One dies, and 10 more addicts are born,” said one high-level operative for the cartel. “We don’t worry about them.”

The Boss

The boss knew something was wrong when the hens stopped keeling over. He said he’d been in the drug business since he was 12, when he started apprenticing at a heroin processing site.

Now a soft-spoken 22-year-old, the boss said he taught himself how to produce illicit drugs by studying the older, more experienced men he worked with. Eventually, he started his own business with a friend.

The boss said his business grew so fast that soon he was running three fentanyl labs. The drug has made him millions, he said.

Every time he goes to one of his labs, he said he brings four or five rabbits from the local pet store. If the fentanyl his people make is potent enough, he has to inject and kill only one to be sure it is fit for sale.

Two pet store employees in Sinaloa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from cartel members, confirmed that the cheapest rabbits are known to be purchased for drug testing.

The boss’s other test subjects are hens from a nearby ranch. Many fentanyl cooks test their product on chickens, according to the two U.S. Embassy officials.

Until recently, the boss said every time he injected the hens with fentanyl they would either die, fall over or stumble around as if they were drunk. All the locals knew not to eat the chickens or the eggs from the ranch.

But recently, the animals weren’t having a strong reaction to the drug, even though his process hadn’t changed.

His employees were logging the same hours at the same modest lab in the mountains, starting at 5 a.m. and sleeping there for days on end. They were working with the same equipment — laboratory shakers, trays, large containers and a blender to mix up the final product.

The boss said he eventually concluded that the culprit was a “very diluted” supply of the chemical ingredients from China. The result was a bunk product.

“It’s too weak,” he said.

To fix the problem, the boss first tried combining fentanyl with ketamine, a short-acting anesthetic, but said users didn’t like the bitter taste that came with smoking the mix. It worked much better to add procaine, he said, a local anesthetic often used to numb small areas during dental procedures.

When asked whether he felt guilty about producing a drug that causes mass death, the boss said all he was doing was giving his customers what they wanted.

“If there weren’t all those people in the United States looking to get high, we wouldn’t sell anything,” he said. “It’s their fault, not ours. We just take advantage of the situation.”

The Cook

One cook we spoke with said he got into the fentanyl business a few years ago to pay off growing debts. At first, the former shop owner regularly got sick from the exposure to the fumes. He said the armed cartel members in charge had no patience for it.

“You may throw up at the beginning when you start, and you take a quick break and take some air,” said the cook, but soon enough “one of them will scream at you to get back to work.”

A boss once shot him just because he didn’t answer a question quickly enough, he said, pulling up his shirt to reveal a stomach scar.

He is constantly experimenting with ways to make fentanyl stronger, tweaking his formula and testing it on his lab assistants, many of whom have become addicted in the process, he said. If the product comes out strong, he passes it on to his supervisors to try.

The cook said he knows all the improvisation adds up to an unpredictable product. Each batch he makes is different, he said, meaning clients who buy the exact same fentanyl pills may get wildly different doses from week to week.

He’s never fully disclosed his job to his family, simply saying he’s off to work and then returning weeks later with a lot of cash. He believes the money and the fear evident in his expression deter any questions.

“There is no retirement here,” the cook said, adding that the cartel would likely kill him for trying to stop. “There is just work and death.”

Daniele Volpe contributed reporting from Culiacán, Mexico.

For more than a year, the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militant group that controls northern Yemen, have attacked ships in the Red Sea, severely disrupting a major trade route, and have targeted Israel with drones and missiles.

This month, the pace of Houthi attacks on Israel has increased — as have Israeli retaliations.

Over the past week, the Houthis said they had launched several attacks on Israel.

In response, the Israeli military on Thursday bombed parts of Yemen, including the international airport in the capital, Sana, leaving four people dead according to the local health ministry. It was Israel’s fourth attack in Yemen over the past year and came just a week after Israel last struck.

The United States and Britain have also retaliated against the Houthis to protect international waterways. The U.S. military on Saturday said that it had targeted Houthi facilities in Yemen.

Here’s what to know about the Houthis, their attacks on ships and their conflict with Israel.

Who are the Houthis?

The Houthis, Shiite militants who have been fighting Yemen’s government for about two decades, overran the Yemeni capital, Sana, in 2014, forcing the country’s internationally recognized government to flee to the southern city of Aden.

A Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention to oust the militants but failed, leaving the Houthis in power in northern Yemen, ruling most of the population and igniting a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The Houthis have built their ideology around opposition to Israel and the United States, seeing themselves as part of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” along with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Their ideology is reflected in the slogan on the group’s flag: “Allah is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.” Their leaders often draw parallels between the American-made bombs used to pummel their forces in Yemen and the arms sent to Israel and used in Gaza.

Talks between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in September 2023 raised hopes for a peace deal that would potentially recognize the Houthis’ right to govern northern Yemen. In December 2023, the United Nations announced that the warring parties had agreed on a road map for peace, but progress was frozen soon after when the internationally recognized Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, said it was suspending the deal’s implementation, citing Houthi escalation in the Red Sea.

Once a group of poorly organized rebels, the Houthis in recent years have bolstered their arsenal, which now includes cruise and ballistic missiles and long-range drones. Analysts credit this expansion to support from Iran, which has supplied militias across the Middle East.

Does the U.S. consider the Houthis a terror group?

The Trump administration initially labeled the Houthis a terrorist organization in 2021, shortly before former President Donald J. Trump left office. The Biden administration lifted the designation weeks later to make it easier for humanitarian aid to enter Yemen. Early this year, the State Department announced that it was reimposing the label in view of the Houthi attacks on ships.

The terrorist designation allows Washington to impose financial penalties and criminally prosecute anyone who knowingly provides a labeled group with “material support,” and the Treasury Department has been trying to pressure the Houthis by cutting off financing and supplies.

Why are they attacking ships?

Weeks after Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, prompting Israel to unleash a devastating military campaign in Gaza, the Houthis, in solidarity with Hamas, said they would target any ship traveling to or leaving Israel and said they had launched drones and missiles at Israel.

But the Houthi criteria for attacking ships quickly expanded to include vessels with direct or indirect links to Israel or past visits to Israeli ports, then also to ships with ties to the United States or Britain, and the Houthis have since broadened the category multiple times.

The Houthis have launched more than 130 attacks with drones and missiles on vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a nonprofit group that tracks the strikes.

Perhaps the most audacious Houthi operation came in November 2023, when gunmen hijacked a vessel named the Galaxy Leader and took it to a Yemeni port, where they have been holding the ship’s crew members captive for more than a year.

In August, a Houthi attack on an oil tanker carrying the equivalent of about one million barrels of crude oil threatened to become an environmental disaster as the vessel burned for weeks. It was ultimately towed to safety.

How are the attacks affecting countries around the world?

To travel between Asia and Europe, global shipping companies have for decades sailed through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Now, many shipping companies are diverting their cargo around the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip, a route that adds an extra 4,000 miles and 10 days to shipping routes and requires more fuel.

So the Houthi attacks have significantly increased the costs and risks of transporting goods, contributing to the higher prices for goods around the world, according to economists — price spikes that influenced elections in Europe and the United States.

The cost of shipping a container from Asia to northern Europe is up 270 percent in 12 months, according to Freightos, a digital marketplace for shipping. But continuing to use the Red Sea would raise insurance premiums and endangers sailors, some of whom have been killed or kidnapped in the attacks.

What has the U.S. been doing to stop the attacks?

The Biden administration assembled a naval task force, called Operation Prosperity Guardian, that includes the United States, Britain and other allies and has been patrolling the Red Sea to, in the words of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, “preserve freedom of navigation” and “freedom of shipping.”

U.S. and British warships have intercepted some Houthi missiles and drones before they reached their targets. In the first half of this year, the two countries’ conducted at least five joint strikes against the Houthis.

What has Israel signaled it will do?

On Thursday, after Israel struck Yemen for a second time this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in an interview with local news media that Israel was “just getting started” responding to the Houthis.

Israel Katz, the defense minister, on Thursday reiterated a threat he had made earlier about Israel’s intent to assassinate Houthi leaders. “We will hunt down all the Houthi leaders, hit them as we have done elsewhere,” Mr. Katz said. “No one will be able to escape Israel’s long arm.”

Israel is apparently turning more attention to the Houthis now, after reaching a cease-fire agreement with Hezbollah last month and largely undermining Hamas’s capabilities in Gaza over more than a year of war.

In response to Israel’s attack, Mohammed Abdulsalam, a Houthi spokesman, said that targeting civilian infrastructure was “a Zionist crime against the entire Yemeni people.” He added that Israeli strikes won’t “deter Yemen from supporting Gaza.”

At a makeshift clinic in Sudan’s battle-torn capital, a determined young woman rushed to save fighters and civilians alike.

She had no formal medical training. But as beat-up cars skidded to a halt outside the clinic’s door, disgorging the wounded, she did her best to treat them — stanching gunshot wounds, changing dressings, improvising blood tests with her cellphone.

Drones buzzed overhead. Snipers perched on rooftops. Explosives struck the clinic, and more than once, the woman, Amal Abdelazeem, thought she was going to die.

The war has remade her. “I’m a different person now,” she said, days after escaping the city.

Hers was the generation that was supposed to save Sudan. They thronged the streets and toppled a dictator in 2019, in a moment of audacious hope that promised a sparkling future to wash away the decades of stale autocracy. Ms. Abdelazeem, then in college, attended one protest. “We needed a new Sudan,” she said.

But the old Sudan returned quickly, and with a vengeance. The civil war that erupted last year between rival military factions not only split a giant African nation in two — it also derailed an entire generation, forcing young Sudanese to make painful choices as they navigated a war that few wanted.

Democracy activists picked up guns to fight alongside the soldiers they once despised. Artists set up food kitchens. Lawyers collected rape testimony. Millions fled Sudan.

But millions more, like Ms. Abdelazeem, who is 26, had to stay. She was trapped in a neighborhood that had fallen to the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the fearsome paramilitary group that is battling Sudan’s military for control of the country. Such areas are the conflict’s blind spots, so dangerous that even local reporters dare not venture there.

She had no money to run, and the war quickly presented a series of excruciating choices. It split her family — one brother was detained by the R.S.F., while another brother joined them. It forced her to choose between food and safety.

And she felt buffeted between the two sides, patching up fighters while being targeted by them, viewed with suspicion at every turn.

One morning at a checkpoint, a young R.S.F. fighter brusquely demanded to know why Ms. Abdelazeem insisted on wearing a niqab, the face veil that showed only her eyes. Was she spying for the other side? He tugged the veil from her face.

Enraged, Ms. Abdelazeem grabbed the fighter’s rifle, turned it around and pointed it straight into his face.

“I wanted to shoot him,” she recalled, blinking through tears. “But I couldn’t.”

Saucepan Helmets

Ms. Abdelazeem knew what it was to struggle.

She had grown up on the western edge of the capital, Khartoum, where the urban sprawl blends into the desert, in a family of working-class strivers who prized education. She graduated with first-class honors in laboratory sciences in 2020.

After college, she also began to wear the niqab, a decision that horrified her mother. Ms. Abdelazeem said she had always been strong-willed. But she gave herself easily to stories, devouring thrillers, philosophy and internet culture that fed her restless curiosity.

She loved frothy American sitcoms like “Friends” — although she didn’t approve of how the characters slept around. She preferred the pop stars and television shows of South Korea, whose culture she saw as more innocent and sweet. She taught herself the rudiments of Korean from YouTube and got her first passport in 2022 in the hope of traveling to the country.

But a year later, war broke out, and those plans were shelved.

At first, she stayed out of it. Fighting was concentrated across the River Nile, in downtown Khartoum, and her neighborhood in Omdurman was relatively quiet.

But then government warplanes bombed an R.S.F. base nearby, scattering fighters across the area. They ransacked homes, stole cars and broke open a prison in search of recruits. Beggars were executed by fighters who accused them of spying for the military. When thunderous gunfire erupted outside her family’s home, she cowered under the kitchen table, gripping a stick against potential rapists. Her mother wore an upturned saucepan on her head to protect against bullets. “Ridiculous, I know,” Ms. Abdelazeem said, chuckling at the memory.

In fact, the joke was on the R.S.F., she said. It turned out that the fighters were firing in the air to celebrate reports they had killed Sudan’s military chief — which turned out to be wrong.

The war closed in on her family. Ms. Abdelazeem’s mother fell sick and died suddenly. They started to run out of money. She sold her laptop and phone, for a pittance, to an R.S.F. fighter. But he was killed before paying the full amount.

As she grew desperate, Ms. Abdelazeem heard about a job at a makeshift private clinic in an abandoned clothes factory near the front line. She took it.

“I figured it was better to die from bullets than from starvation,” she said.

The Clinic

A small team of medics ran the clinic, offering to help wounded fighters for money, and local residents for free. Most fighters arrived with gunshot wounds, Ms. Abdelazeem said, while some had been stabbed in disputes or injured in car crashes as they careened through empty streets.

A majority of the fighters in that area were Libyan, she said — one of numerous foreign contingents in a war that has drawn mercenaries from Africa, Russia, Ukraine and even Colombia. “They drank a lot,” she said.

She learned on the job, treating wounds and dispensing drugs, but also drew on her training to set up a laboratory for blood samples, improvising tests with a technique that used the flash on her cellphone camera. Many fighters had syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, she discovered.

That clinic’s work turned it into a target for Sudan’s military, she said. When she went onto the roof in an effort to grab the weak cellphone signal, she removed her white lab coat to reduce the risk of being hit by drones firing bombs.

Nearly half of all hospitals in the capital area have been damaged in the war, targeted by both sides, according to a recent report from the Yale School of Public Health.

Sometimes, Ms. Abdelazeem earned as little as $2 a day. But she also found purpose in the work, especially when injured children were saved. A strong camaraderie developed among the besieged medics, driven by the adrenaline that comes from living on the edge.

“To be honest, it could be fun,” she said. After close calls, “it made us appreciate life.”

Brothers

To help feed the family, her 21-year-old brother, Yassin, took odd jobs. But that raised the suspicions of R.S.F. fighters, who beat and detained him three times, he said in an interview. Once, he escaped by ambushing an R.S.F. guard and throttling him. “I didn’t look back,” he said.

But another brother, Mohamed, 25, joined the R.S.F.

Mohamed had always been trouble, Ms. Abdelazeem said, and in the war fell in with a group of R.S.F. fighters who roamed their neighborhood. He was assigned to an internal R.S.F. unit charged with reining in the widespread car theft that made the group unpopular, she said.

Then Mohamed looted his own family’s home, she said, walking out with a fridge and a TV, brushing past his sister as she implored him to stop.

The violence drew dangerously close. The clinic pharmacist died, she recounted, after a bomb hit the bus she was traveling in. A friend who was a nurse said she was nearly raped by an R.S.F. commander. The clinic shut down after being struck by a volley of drone strikes.

One day, Ms. Abdelazeem was visiting another hospital when Libyan mercenaries rushed in carrying a seriously wounded fighter. A doctor did his best to save him. But after some minutes, one fighter, apparently believing his comrade could not survive, pulled out a gun and shot him dead.

“In the heart!” Ms. Abdelazeem said, crying softly and kneading her hands as she spoke. “You can’t kill someone just because there’s no hope,” she added. “Where is God in that?”

It was the final straw. Gathering up her last belongings and five family members, Ms. Abdelazeem boarded a bus for Port Sudan, 500 miles by road to the east. At a checkpoint, Sudanese Army personnel held up the bus while they interrogated her about the medicines in her bag, suspicious she had aided the other side.

Exiled to Casablanca

Perched on the Red Sea, Port Sudan is the Casablanca of Sudan’s war — a place where people from across Sudan blow in, seeking shelter or fortune or travel papers enabling them to flee the country as quickly as possible. The wealthier ones lounge by the sea in the evening, drinking coffee and dangling their feet in the Red Sea. But Ms. Abdelazeem and her family couldn’t afford any of that.

They found lodgings in a sweltering university hostel crammed with 1,500 displaced women and children. That’s where we found Ms. Abdelazeem a week after her family arrived, remonstrating loudly about the poor conditions. Fights regularly erupted between the women, who hailed from across Sudan’s ethnic and social divides, she said. Children played in dirty corridors. Flies buzzed in toilets. Food was scarce.

She had been reunited with an older sister at the hostel — a bittersweet moment because the sister had attempted suicide weeks earlier, following a difficult divorce.

They all had to move again in December, when the authorities shifted the dormitory residents to a tented camp a few miles away. On a video call, Ms. Abdelazeem offered a tour of the desolate encampment, which had a single toilet for 200 families.

She was grateful to be alive, even if her family had joined the sea of 11 million Sudanese displaced by the war.

If she had learned one thing, she said, it’s that were no good guys in war. Both sides committed numerous atrocities. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to hate them, or even to root for one side.

“In the end, they’re all Sudanese,” she said. “I feel sorry for them.”

That included her brother, Mohamed, who days earlier had called, saying he had had enough of fighting in the war and wanted money to get out. She barely had enough to feed herself and her family members. Still, she clung to the idea of saving him.

“He’s stupid, I know,” she said. “He’s irresponsible, I know.”

But, she added, “He’s still my brother.”

Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from Port Sudan, Sudan.

Security forces for Syria’s new government were pursuing at least one senior official and military forces loyal to the former dictatorship on Thursday, as they struggled to tamp down unrest in a number of regions and stabilize the country.

Government forces have been searching for Mohammed Kanjou al-Hassan, a former official in charge of military justice under the ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitoring group.

In 2023, Britain imposed sanctions on Mr. al-Hassan for “his involvement in repressing the civilian population in Syria,” according to an official record that listed targets of British sanctions. Mr. al-Hassan was responsible for crimes at Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, according to the Syrian Observatory.

An attempt to arrest Mr. al-Hassan on Wednesday set off deadly clashes in the western region around the port of Tartus — part of the heartland of Mr. al-Assad’s Alawite minority. Government security forces were ambushed by loyalists of the former government in the area, according to the Syrian Observatory.

Fourteen members of the government forces were killed, according to Mohammed Abdel Rahman, Syria’s interim interior minister.

The hunt for Mr. al-Hassan suggested that Syria’s new leaders were stepping up their efforts to pursue top members of the Assad dictatorship amid a clamor in the country for justice and accountability.

A central challenge for Syria’s new administration is to impose law and order while it attempts to hold members of the Assad regime accountable and build a system of governance.

The government forces deployed on Thursday in Mr. al-Hassan’s hometown near Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Sana, the state-run Syrian news agency, said the forces were sent to the area to pursue “remnants of Assad militias, protect civilians and restore security and stability.”

The new government has been facing unrest cropping up in a number of regions.

During the past week, members of the minority Alawite sect have protested in cities like Latakia in the west and Homs in central Syria. A video posted online of an Alawite shrine set alight appeared to play a role in setting off the protests, but officials in the transitional government have said it was old and republished on Wednesday.

Protests also broke out this week in the capital, Damascus, after the burning of a Christmas tree, which heightened concerns about sectarian strife after the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the overthrow of the old government, rose to power.

The rise of Islamists in Syria has led to some fears of persecution among the country’s many minority communities, including Christians, Druse and Alawites.

Ahmad al-Shara, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has promised that minorities will be protected.

On Thursday, the interim ministry of information said it was banning the publication of content with “a sectarian character that seeks to spread division.”

The Finnish authorities seized an oil tanker on Thursday on the suspicion that it was involved in cutting vital undersea cables and said the ship might have been part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” aimed at evading Western sanctions.

In a statement, the police in Finland said the authorities had boarded the Eagle S tanker in Finnish waters. The ship, which is registered in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, had been sailing from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Port Said, Egypt, when it was detained.

The police said they were investigating whether the vessel was involved in the latest suspected act of sabotage on undersea infrastructure: the cutting on Wednesday of the Estlink 2 submarine cable, which carries electricity between Finland and Estonia. The Finnish authorities said Thursday that four other cables carrying data also had been damaged. The police called the latest cable cuts “aggravated vandalism.”

The Finnish authorities said the tanker might be part of Russia’s shadow fleet, which emerged as a way to circumvent Western-imposed price caps on Russian oil transported by sea. The caps were introduced several months after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

To skirt the restrictions, the Kremlin invested billions of dollars in a fleet of mostly unmarked tankers not easily traced to Russia. Many sail under the flags of other nations, like the Central African country of Gabon, and sell to buyers in countries like India and China, which are not bound by the price cap.

The goal was largely economic and mostly successful. Since the oil price cap was enacted, nearly 70 percent of Russia’s oil is being transported by so-called shadow tankers, according to an analysis published in October by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute, a Ukraine-based think tank.

But the use of such tankers to intentionally sabotage European infrastructure would be an unusual escalation.

“We assume at this stage that the vessel in question is a member of the shadow fleet,” the head of Finland’s customs agency, Sami Rakshit, told a news conference, without providing further details.

Finland’s prime minister, Petteri Orpo, said that while there was no direct evidence linking the Eagle S to Russia, the incident underscored the Baltic nations’ vulnerability to potential meddling by Moscow.

“This underlies the danger of the shadow fleet in the Baltic Sea,” Mr. Orpo said at a news conference in Finland’s capital, Helsinki.

“Our main task is to find effective means to stop the shadow fleet,” Mr. Orpo added. “The shadow fleet pumps money into Russia’s war fund so that Russia can continue to wage its war in Ukraine against the people of Ukraine, and it has to be stopped.”

He said the Finnish government had not been in touch with Russia. After its seizure, the Eagle S was anchored in Finnish waters, as the Finnish authorities investigated, working with the Estonian authorities.

The investigation comes as a number of other undersea cables have been cut in recent months, raising fears of a covert campaign against NATO nations that have supported Ukraine in the face of Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, said on Thursday that he had spoken to Estonia’s prime minister, Kristen Michal, about the “possible sabotage” of the undersea cables.

NATO “stands in solidarity with Allies and condemns any attacks on critical infrastructure,” Mr. Rutte wrote on social media, adding, “We stand ready to provide further support.”

After a series of undersea explosions blew apart the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines linking Russia to Western Europe in the fall of 2022, Western intelligence agencies said the evidence pointed toward pro-Ukraine forces, even if the question of who might have been directing them remained a mystery.

Last month, two fiber-optic cables were cut in the Baltic Sea in what Germany’s defense minister described as an act of sabotage. One cable connected Finland and Germany; the other ran between Lithuania and Sweden — all countries that are members of the NATO alliance.

Russian ships have been reported in the Baltic and North Seas near areas where critical infrastructure lies beneath the water, and dozens of Russian tankers have begun sailing under different flags.

Last month, naval and coast guard vessels from European countries surrounded and monitored a Chinese commercial ship in the Baltic Sea, after two undersea fiber-optic cables were severed.

Investigators from a task force that included Finland, Sweden and Lithuania were trying to determine if the ship’s crew intentionally cut the cables by dragging the ship’s anchor along the sea floor. American intelligence officials had assessed that the cables were not cut deliberately, though the authorities in Europe said they had not been able to rule out sabotage.

The authorities in Finland said they were looking into whether the anchors of the Eagle S had cut the cable.

Mr. Orpo said that Finnish leaders had discussed the cable cuts with officials from Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, NATO and the European Commission.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, commended Finland’s “swift action.”

“Yesterday’s Baltic Sea incident highlights threats to E.U. infrastructure,” she said on social media. “Together we will increase our common protection of European critical infrastructure including undersea cables.”

Mr. Michal, of Estonia, said that his government had been coordinating with Finland to respond to the cable cuts.

“Glad that we managed to act decisively and stop the suspected vessel for further investigation,” he wrote on X.

The cut to the Estlink 2 cable caused little disruption for Finland or Estonia. A spokeswoman for Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications said there would be no impact on the public, according to the country’s public broadcaster.

However, communication services between Helsinki and the German city of Rostock were affected, according to Cinia, a digital communications company that owns the cable. It said in a statement that repairs to the cable could take several weeks.

Michael Schwirtz and Michael Levenson contributed reporting.