The Marxist candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, led the early counting in Sri Lanka’s presidential elections on Sunday, riding a wave of popular anger at the established political order that has run the South Asian nation’s economy into the ground.

If Mr. Dissanayake, 55, is confirmed as president, it would be a remarkable turnaround for his half-century-old leftist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, which had long remained on the margins. In recent years, he led a rebranding effort of an organization once known for deadly insurrections: building a large coalition, softening its radical positions, and pitching it as the answer to the politics of patronage that has brought only hardship to many of the island nation’s roughly 23 million people.

Early results showed Mr. Dissanayake leading with about 50 percent of votes amid high turnout, estimated at 75 to 80 percent. His closest competitor had received about 20 percent of the votes cast.

At least three senior leaders of his opposition, including Sri Lanka’s current foreign minister, had already put out messages congratulating him on his imminent victory, as dawn broke on overnight vote counting that is continuing.

In Sri Lanka’s election system, voters can mark one candidate on their ballot or rank three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets 50 percent or more of the vote, a second round of counting factors in the preferences of voters whose first choice did not make it to the top two.

At the end of a peaceful and orderly vote on Saturday, the government made a surprise announcement of an overnight curfew as the counting continued. But a statement of support from Mr. Dissanayake’s camp suggested it was a coordinated effort to prevent violence, rather than anything sinister.

It is the first time a presidential election in Sri Lanka has appeared genuinely multipronged, in contrast to a history of direct competition between coalitions formed by the two parties that have dominated ever since the nation became a republic in 1972.

While officially more than 30 candidates were contesting, the majority of the votes were split among three front-runners.

The popular protest movement that forced the powerful Rajapaksa clan out of power in 2022 threw the political landscape wide open, the anger reshaping the dynamics down to the local level.

Before its fall, the Rajapaksa government had become a family affair, with various relatives serving as president and prime minister, as well as helming several ministries and key positions. But its fall has been so thorough that Namal Rajapaksa, the family’s 38-year-old political heir and presidential candidate in the current election, was a distant fourth, with a single-digit share of the votes, based on the early trends.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, the 75-year-old political survivor who stepped in as interim president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country when protesters surrounded his home, has helped stabilize the country and negotiated a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.

But Mr. Wickremesinghe was also trailing far behind in Saturday’s vote, with his roughly 17 percent of the votes putting him in third place — a sign of anger over his austerity measures that have pinched the poor hard, and of his lasting public image as part of the discredited old guard.

The main contender for runner-up was Sajith Premadasa, the opposition leader, who was formerly in Mr. Wickremesinghe’s party before a messy public split. His share of the votes in the early trends was about 25 percent.

Mr. Dissanayake positioned his National People’s Power coalition, built around his old J.V.P. party as its largest partner, as the best positioned to deliver the public demands of the protest movement for cleaning up Sri Lanka’s deeply entrenched political patronage and corruption. He brought in new faces at the top, and focused on reaching out to and mobilizing women, who were particularly hard hit by the economic collapse. He also softened his own party’s old radical Marxist messaging.

His efforts appeared to have resonated with a tired public ready for change.

“I’m voting for the Compass this time,” said Saman Ratnasiri, 49, an auto-rickshaw driver in Colombo, referring to the election symbol of Mr. Dissanayake’s coalition. He said he had never voted for Mr. Dissanayake before, but he wanted to give his outfit a shot after other leaders had failed him.

“If we don’t get it right this time also, then I might as well forget about this country,” he added.

Voters are going to the polls on Sunday for state elections in Brandenburg, the eastern German state that surrounds Berlin like a doughnut, in a regional contest that could affect the stability of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Mr. Scholz’s government has been struggling in recent months as Germans worry about the poor economy and uncontrolled migration and blame his coalition for not solving these problems.

Both the far right and the far left are expected to make significant gains on Sunday, as was the case with elections in two other eastern German states this month, further weakening the grip of the country’s center-left and center-right parties.

Here is what to know about the vote and its possible ramifications.

Why is this election important?

The election in this relatively small state — involving only about 3 percent of Germany’s voters — is being widely watched, even though it does not directly affect Mr. Scholz’s government.

Brandenburg is one of the last two eastern bastions for the chancellor’s center-left Social Democratic Party. And the state’s incumbent governor, Dietmar Woidke, is one of the most popular Social Democrats in the country.

But the far right Alternative for Germany party (widely known as AfD, its initials in German) and the far-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or B.S.W., are both poised to make significant gains. Polls suggest that the AfD is set to win a plurality of the seats in the statehouse.

If voters oust Mr. Woidke in favor of the AfD, it would be a symbolic and a practical loss for Mr. Scholz, his party and the government he leads.

Germany’s state leaders meet regularly in Berlin at the Federal Council of the States, where they approve — or block — laws passed by Parliament. If Mr. Woidke were ousted, the Council of the States could become less willing to rubber-stamp laws drafted by the government that includes his party.

Such a loss would sting on a personal level for Mr. Scholz, given that he lives in Brandenburg and maintains his election district there.

It would also not bode well for the national coalition government parties — the Social Democrats, the climate-conscious Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats — with a general election looming.

In a recent poll of German voters, more than half of respondents said they wanted the general election scheduled for September of next year to be held earlier. That sort of angst prompted the Christian Democrats, the mainstream opposition to Mr. Scholz’s party, to meet this past week to agree on their candidate for chancellor — meaning that they will be ready if the government falls and an early election is called.

Why are people moving away from the center?

The AfD in particular has been gaining support for its positions on curbing migration and ending German military support for Ukraine, a cause that is unpopular in eastern Germany.

And because the party has held seats in the state legislature for a decade but has never had a chance to govern, that has given its politicians a wide berth to claim that they could help solve the state’s many problems if only they were let into government.

The B.S.W., led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a former communist, has also been outspoken on the issues of immigration and support for and an end to military support for Ukraine. Although neither of those planks is directly related to state politics, recent polls suggest that the party is to likely garner significantly more than a tenth of the votes.

Yet even if the AfD meets the expectations of the highest projections, it will receive less than a third of the vote, which is not enough to run the government on its own. And every other major party on the ballot has vowed not to work with them.

Why is Brandenburg a special case?

Because it surrounds Berlin, the country’s capital, parts of the state tend to be wealthier and younger than other regions of eastern Germany. By attracting Tesla to build its only European car factory there, Brandenburg has created thousands of well-paying jobs.

But other parts of the state are still reeling from a decline in coal mining, which was a major economic driver in the days before the reunification of East and West Germany in the early 1990s.

Politically, Brandenburg differs from Thuringia and Saxony, the two other eastern states that just voted. Although the far right also does well in Brandenburg, the country’s two largest mainstream parties still command significant support there. Combined, those parties — the Social Democrats and the Christian Conservatives — are posed to get more than 40 percent of the vote.

If they do, and if the Greens eke out the 5 percent needed to return to the legislature as polls suggest they will, the state’s current governing coalition of those three parties could continue.

How close is the race?

Mr. Woidke, the popular incumbent governor, recently announced that he would retire if the AfD received the most votes, even if his party can still lead a government coalition. And Mr. Scholz, fully aware that he and the Berlin government are unpopular, has refrained from campaigning for Mr. Woidke in the state.

The party’s tactics appear to have had some effect. Recent polling shows that although the Social Democrats are still trailing the AfD, the gap has been slowly closing.

Christine Marlier was angry when President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election this summer. She’s even angrier now that he appointed a right-wing prime minister, despite the fact that a leftist bloc won the most seats in Parliament.

But Ms. Marlier left that anger behind at home in the far northeast of France when she boarded a bus for a four-hour ride to a nearly 100-year-old festival on the outskirts of Paris that celebrates left-wing politics in general, and French Communism in particular.

The Fête de l’Humanité — festival of humanity — is an unlikely mixture of Burning Man, Woodstock and a political convention.

“We are never angry here,” said Ms. Marlier, 51, in between doing 1 euro shots of alcohol with her husband, both their faces decorated by sparkles.

They were standing in the middle of a dirt lane, between large white booths set up by Communist Party associations from around the country, offering the food specialties of their regions — including raw oysters and steamed lobsters, giant pans of tartiflette, and axoa, a minced veal dish from the Basque region.

A loudspeaker advertised the coming debate between the head of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, and one of the country’s top union leaders, but Ms. Marlier and her husband were already tipsy. They were planning on seeing some bands play instead.

“Here, we’re in a suspended dream, outside our daily problems and worries,” said Ms. Marlier, who works with handicapped children in elementary schools in the département of Moselle, bordering Germany and Luxembourg.

Every year, usually during the second weekend of September as the country is shaking off its vacation slumber, the festival’s organizers build a huge village out of the mud and grass of an abandoned military airport, in the distant nether regions of Paris where suburban homes give way to corn fields. Up go the stages, and up go some 350 large booths in long lines to make streets, which are often named after dead French Communist heroes.

Every year, dozens of musicians come to perform. In the past, they’ve included acts like Manu Chao, Pink Floyd, Ray Charles and Youssou N’Dour, and French stars like Aya Nakamura and Zaho de Sagazan.

And in all those booths, hundreds of political debates, lectures, and question and answer sessions are held throughout the festival’s three days. This year there were 360, running morning to evening.

That meant on Saturday afternoon, you could see a union leader square off against the head of an employers’ association; or settle into the large film tent to watch Judith Godrèche’s latest short film, “Moi Aussi,” on the prevalence of rape; or see a children’s play; or dash over to the Angela Davis stage to listen to the French musician Santa belt out lyrical songs — all more or less at the same time.

Or you could try to squeeze into the crowd pouring into the “agora” — the central red booth where the big ticket speeches happen — to see Ms. Davis herself. The retired California philosophy professor, activist and Communist presidential candidate was back at the festival for the third time since 1973.

“Hope is a discipline which you have to cultivate,” she said, her voice reverberating over loud speakers. “Because without it there is no possibility of moving forward.”

The Fête de l’Huma, as the faithful call it, began in 1930 to raise money for the official Communist Party newspaper, L’Humanité. Today, the left-wing daily is no longer the party’s official organ, but it continues to run the annual festival.

The budget has climbed to about €8 million, but the festival barely breaks even most years, said L’Humanité’s publisher, Fabien Gay, who also is an elected Communist senator.

That’s because the newspaper refuses to raise ticket prices, in keeping with the founding idea that the festival should offer culture to workers. The top price for three days of 60 music concerts is just €60 — the typical cost of a single concert in Paris, Mr. Gay pointed out.

“This is for us Communists, this is what we fight for — everything that is exceptional and grandiose must remain accessible to everyone,” said Mr. Roussel, the French Communist Party leader, who spent some of the fête in full-on campaign mode, shaking hands, slapping backs and visiting party booths from across the country, even though no election is near.

During an interview, he remembered fondly the year 1988, when the French designer Yves Saint Laurent put on a fashion show — which he called a “work of art,” comparable to the “Mona Lisa” or “Guernica” by Picasso, who also, incidentally, had exhibitions of his work here.

“Bodies must be always nourished, but so must minds,” Mr. Roussel said.

When you arrive at the fête, 22 miles south of central Paris, it feels as if you’ve entered an alternative universe, where the Communist Party is joyfully running France and not continually losing seats in the National Assembly, including Mr. Roussel’s last summer. The party currently has just nine seats in the 577-seat legislature.

Here, it’s not K.F.C. but C.F.K.: Communist Fried Kitchen, with Colonel Sanders transformed into Marx. Red flags with the hammer and sickle flap from the awnings of booths, and people wear Communist Party shirts and hats.

In 1945, with the memory of the prominent role played by French Communists in the Resistance still fresh, some one million people crammed into the festival. This year, the attendance was 450,000, according to Mr. Gay. While many come just for the music, organizers hope some will drift into a lecture or debate — particularly those camping in the 8,000 or so tents set up along the fête’s flank.

“Millions of French people were Communists at one moment of their life, and they come back each year, because they feel part of the family,” explained Frédérick Genevée, a high school history teacher who has written four books on French Communist history, the most recent of which he was signing at the festival’s book fair. “It’s confirmation in what we believe in.”

Most of the labor at the festival is done by 10,000 volunteers who arrive in convoys, towing stoves, refrigerators, mattresses and kegs of beer from as far as Biarritz, 475 miles away.

Over two weeks, they work to build their regional booths, set up kitchens and sleeping quarters, and stay up late to talk. In many families, it’s a tradition going back generations.

“It gives us a taste of what the world could be,” said Catherine Lavauzelle, 64, a retired teacher who started coming with her father to volunteer at age 7. “If we all gave the best of ourselves, and weren’t always in competition with one another.”

The cheap wine and beer helps with the bonding. Add music, and you have a surefire recipe for love, which Mr. Genevée said was another festival theme. He met two of his ex-wives here.

Gregory Moser not only met his wife, Noémie, here; he married her on-site 11 years ago.

“We were married in the Cuba booth, had our wine reception in the People’s Republic of China booth,” Mr. Moser said with a laugh outside the regional booth from Charente, where the couple continue to volunteer. After the wedding ceremony, friends drove the newlyweds around the festival in a golf cart trailing cooking pans.

People often predict the festival’s demise. They are always proved wrong.

Similarly, every year, once the revelers have cleared out, and Ms. Lavauzelle is bleary eyed and packing up the sinks and stoves, peeling the tents up off the muddy ground, and beginning the long drive back home, she swears it will be her last. But it never is.

“It’s the feeling that draws us back,” she said. “It helps me feel better for the rest of the year, when I return to real life.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

The drones soar over the vast deserts along the Sudanese border, guiding weapons convoys that smuggle illicit arms to fighters accused of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

They hover over a besieged city at the center of Sudan’s terrible famine, supporting a ruthless paramilitary force that has bombed hospitals, looted food shipments and torched thousands of homes, aid groups say.

Yet the drones are flying out of a base where the United Arab Emirates says it is running a humanitarian effort for the Sudanese people — part of what it calls its “urgent priority” to save innocent lives and stave off starvation in Africa’s largest war.

The Emirates is playing a deadly double game in Sudan, a country shredded by one of the world’s most catastrophic civil wars.

Eager to cement its role as a regional kingmaker, the wealthy Persian Gulf petrostate is expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to fighters rampaging across the country, according to officials, internal diplomatic memos and satellite images analyzed by The New York Times.

All the while, the Emirates is presenting itself as a champion of peace, diplomacy and international aid. It is even using one of the world’s most famous relief symbols — the Red Crescent, the counterpart of the Red Cross — as a cover for its secret operation to fly drones into Sudan and smuggle weapons to fighters, satellite images show and American officials say.

The war in Sudan, a sprawling gold-rich nation with nearly 500 miles of Red Sea coastline, has been fueled by a plethora of foreign nations, like Iran and Russia. They are supplying arms to the warring sides, hoping to tilt the scales for profit or their own strategic gain — while the people of Sudan are caught in the crossfire.

But the Emirates is playing the largest and most consequential role of all, officials say, publicly pledging to ease Sudan’s suffering even as it secretly inflames it.

Starvation haunts Sudan. Famine was officially declared last month after nearly 18 months of fighting, which has killed tens of thousands and scattered at least 10 million people in the world’s worst displacement crisis, the United Nations says. Aid groups call it a calamity of “historic proportions.”

The Emirates says it has made “absolutely clear” that it is not arming or supporting “any of the warring parties” in Sudan. To the contrary, it says, it is “alarmed by the rapidly accelerating humanitarian catastrophe” and pushing for an “immediate cease-fire.”

But for more than a year, the Emirates has been secretly bolstering the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military for control of Africa’s third-largest country.

A Times investigation last year detailing the Emirati weapons smuggling operation was confirmed by U.N. investigators in January, when they cited “credible” evidence that the Emirates was breaking a two-decade U.N. arms embargo in Sudan.

Now, the Emiratis are amplifying their covert campaign. Powerful Chinese-made drones, by far the largest deployed in Sudan’s war, are being flown from an airport across the border in Chad that the Emirates has expanded into a well-equipped, military-style airfield.

Hangars have been built and a drone control station installed, satellite images show. Many of the cargo planes that have landed at the airport during the war previously transported weapons for the Emirates to other conflict zones, like Libya, where the Emiratis have also been accused of breaching an arms embargo, a Times analysis of flight tracking data found.

American officials say the Emiratis are now using the airport to fly advanced military drones to provide the R.S.F. with battlefield intelligence, and to escort weapons shipments to fighters in Sudan — to keep an eye out for ambushes.

Through an analysis of satellite images, The Times identified the type of drone being used: the Wing Loong 2, a Chinese model often compared to the MQ-9 Reaper of the U.S. Air Force.

The images show an apparent munitions bunker at the airport and a Wing Loong ground control station beside the runway — only about 750 yards from an Emirati-run hospital that has treated wounded R.S.F. fighters.

The Wing Loong can fly for 32 hours, has a range of 1,000 miles and can carry up to a dozen missiles or bombs. So far, the drones do not seem to be conducting airstrikes of their own in Sudan, officials say, but are providing surveillance and identifying targets on chaotic battlefields.

That makes them “a significant force multiplier,” said J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

After taking off from the base, the drones may in fact be piloted remotely from Emirati soil, experts and officials say. Recently, they have been detected patrolling the skies above the embattled Sudanese city of El Fasher, where people are starving and surrounded by the R.S.F. The city is home to nearly two million people, and fears are rising that the war is on the precipice of even more atrocities.

American officials have been pressuring all the war’s combatants to stop the carnage.

Vice President Kamala Harris confronted the leader of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, over his country’s support of the R.S.F. when the two met in December, according to officials briefed on the exchange. President Biden called this week for an end to the “senseless war,” warning that the R.S.F.’s brutal, monthslong siege on El Fasher “has become a full-on assault.”

The crisis is expected to come up again when he and Ms. Harris host the Emirati leader at the White House for the first time on Monday.

“It’s got to stop,” John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said of the siege.

‘They Can’t Lie to Us Anymore’

Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have been accused of war crimes, including brutal assaults filmed by the fighters themselves.

The war erupted in 2023, when a power struggle between Sudan’s military and the R.S.F. — a fighting force it helped create — erupted into gunfire on the streets of the capital and quickly enveloped the nation.

Sudanese military planes have bombed civilians, while rights groups accuse the R.S.F. of ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed hospitals, homes and aid warehouses.

In El Fasher, Doctors Without Borders has accused the military of bombing a children’s hospital, and R.S.F. troops of plundering food intended for a camp of 400,000 starving people.

Aid workers are hoping to airdrop food into the city, which Toby Harward, the top U.N. official for Darfur, likened to “hell on earth.”

The Emirates insists it is simply trying to halt the war and help its victims. It has provided $230 million in aid and delivered 10,000 tons of relief supplies, and it played a prominent role in recent American-led peace talks in Switzerland.

“The U.A.E. remains committed to supporting the people of Sudan in restoring peace,” Lana Nusseibeh, an Emirati minister for foreign affairs, said afterward.

Senior American officials have privately tried to coax the Emirates to drop its covert operations, bluntly confronting it with American intelligence on what the Gulf state is doing inside Sudan, said five American officials with knowledge of the conversations.

After Vice President Harris raised American objections to the arms smuggling with Sheikh Mohammed in December, the Emirati leader offered what some officials considered a tacit acknowledgment.

While not admitting direct support to the R.S.F., Sheikh Mohammed said he owed the paramilitary group’s leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, for sending troops to fight alongside the Emirates in the war in Yemen, according to two American officials briefed on the exchange.

Sheikh Mohammed also said he viewed the R.S.F. as a bulwark against Islamist political movements in the region, which the Emirati royal family has long considered a threat to its authority, the officials said. (The Emirati government did not respond to questions about the conversation.)

“They can’t lie to us anymore, because they know that we know,” said one American official who, like others, was not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence.

Relief organizations are particularly incensed with the Emirates, accusing it of running “a Potemkin aid operation” to disguise its support to the R.S.F., according to Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration official.

“They want it both ways,” he said of the Emiratis. “They want to act like a rogue, supporting their militia client and turning a blind eye to whatever they do with their weapons. And they want to appear like a constructive, rules-abiding member of the international system.”

Sudan’s civil war has turned the country, perched strategically on the Red Sea, into a global free-for-all. Iran has supplied armed drones to the Sudanese military, which has fought alongside Ukrainian special forces in the capital, Khartoum. Egypt has also sided with the military.

Russia has played both sides. Wagner mercenaries initially supplied missiles to the R.S.F., United Nations inspectors found. More recently, officials say, the Kremlin has tilted to the military, offering it weapons in exchange for naval access to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

The Houthis of Yemen sent shiploads of weapons to Sudan’s military, at Iran’s behest, and gas-rich Qatar sent six Chinese warplanes, American officials say. (Qatar and the Houthis denied sending military aid.)

The Emirates has sent an array of weapons as well, officials have concluded.

“The delivery of drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers and MANPADS to the R.S.F. by the U.A.E. has helped it neutralize the air superiority” of Sudan’s military, the European Union ambassador to Sudan, Aidan O’Hara, wrote in February in a confidential memo obtained by The Times. (A MANPAD, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, is a type of antiaircraft missile.)

The memo contained other startling assertions: that Saudi Arabia has given money to Sudan’s military, which used it to buy Iranian drones; that as many as 200,000 foreign mercenaries were fighting alongside the R.S.F.; and that Wagner mercenaries had trained the R.S.F. to use the antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Emirates.

The Emirati role appears to be part of a broader push into Africa. Last year, it announced $45 billion in investments across the continent, analysts say, nearly twice as much as China. Recently, it has expanded into a new business: war.

It turned the tide of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021 by supplying armed drones to the prime minister at a crucial point in the fight, ultimately helping him emerge victorious. Now it appears to be trying to repeat the same feat in Sudan with the R.S.F.

The Arms Pipeline

Last year, when cargo planes began to land at the airport in Amdjarass, 600 miles east of the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, the Emirates said it had come to establish a field hospital for Sudanese refugees.

But within months, American officials discovered that the $20 million hospital quietly treated R.S.F. fighters, and that the cargo planes also carried weapons that were later smuggled to fighters inside Sudan.

The Times analysis of satellite images and flight records showed that the Emiratis set up the drone system at the same time they were promoting their humanitarian operation.

During a lengthy phone call in early May with his Emirati counterpart, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, cited American intelligence that had been declassified so that it could be shared with a foreign official. The evidence documented Emirati military support to the R.S.F., two American officials briefed on the exchange said.

But the American candor appears to have had little impact. The Emirates has only doubled down on its support to the R.S.F. in recent months, American officials and witnesses in Chad say.

Fewer cargo flights now land at Amdjarass airport, where they can be easily detected, but a greater proportion of supplies arrives by truck, often along routes that bypass major cities and towns, officials say.

Traces of Emirati-supplied weapons are also being found on the battlefield. Human Rights Watch recently identified Serbian-made missiles, fired from an unidentified drone, that it said were originally sold to the Emirates.

“It’s very clear: The U.A.E. is sending money, the U.A.E. is sending weapons,” said Succès Masra, a former prime minister of Chad.

After complaints from Western officials, he said, he told his nation’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, that allowing the Emirates to funnel weapons through Chad was a “huge mistake.”

Nothing changed. The Emirates promised Mr. Déby a $1.5 billion loan, nearly as big as Chad’s $1.8 billion national budget a year earlier.

The Emirates supports the R.S.F. in other ways, too. Earlier this year, an Emirati private jet carried the paramilitary force’s leader, General Hamdan, on a tour of six African countries, where he was treated like a head of state.

Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the nation, is the hub of the R.S.F.’s business empire, which is anchored in gold trading. The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on what it calls an R.S.F. “front company” and recently listed seven Emirati companies under investigation on suspicion of being linked to the paramilitary group.

General Hamdan’s 34-year-old brother, Algoney Hamdan, has lived in Dubai since 2014 and was singled out by American sanctions. Yet he is now an interlocutor for stuttering peace efforts. Speaking in Switzerland during last month’s talks, Mr. Hamdan brushed off the U.S. measures against him.

“If it brings peace to Sudan, they can sanction as many companies as they want,” he said.

Mr. Hamdan conceded that some R.S.F. troops had committed abuses, but insisted the Emirates was not backing the R.S.F.

“There is no proof of anything,” he said. “It’s just false propaganda.”

A Cherished Symbol of Aid

The Emirati operation in Chad has deeply worried the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, one of the world’s oldest and most venerable aid movements.

It learned only from news reports that the Emirates Red Crescent had established a hospital in Amdjarass, said Tommaso Della Longa, a Red Cross spokesman. The Emirates Red Crescent, which is funded by the Emirati government, did not inform the international federation, as it should have, he added.

The Emiratis eagerly touted their largess. The government’s publicity showed workers unloading cargo pallets and treating patients under the Red Crescent logo — an emblem dating back to the 1870s that is legally protected under the Geneva Conventions. Misuse of that symbol is a potential war crime.

Worried that its reputation for neutrality was at risk, the Red Cross sent fact-finding missions to Chad in 2023 and 2024, “to better understand” what the Emiratis were doing under the Red Crescent banner in Amdjarass, Mr. Della Longa said.

They found few answers.

When the officials arrived, they were turned away from the Emirati field hospital for unspecified “security reasons,” Mr. Della Longa said. The officials eventually left Chad without setting foot in the hospital.

The Emirates Red Crescent did not respond to questions.

Mr. Konyndyk, the Refugees International official, said it was “unheard-of” for an aid organization to bar its own officials from visiting a hospital that supposedly treats refugees.

“The Emirates seems to be instrumentalizing the Red Crescent as cover for well-documented arms shipments to a militia that is actively committing atrocities in Darfur.”

In June, Emirati officials said they had treated nearly 30,000 patients, and were looking to expand the hospital, but people in Amdjarass say the hospital opens for just four hours a day.

The Emirates opened a second field hospital in Chad, in the city of Abéché in April. When The Times visited the 80-bed facility in July, doctors readily offered a tour of its well-equipped wards, which the hospital’s director, Dr. Khalid Mohammed, said received as many as 250 patients every day.

A private Emirati company ran the hospital, and it had no connection with the Red Cross or Crescent, he said. But the hospital closed at 4 p.m. each day, limiting the medical services it could provide.

The Red Cross says it is still trying to figure out what the Emiratis are up to.

“The process is not finished,” Mr. Della Longa, the Red Cross spokesman, said of the inquiry into the Amdjarass hospital. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”

Counterbalancing Iran

As Sudan plunges deeper into what many experts called the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, American officials say they are more sharply focused on the conflict than ever.

Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, organized last month’s peace talks in Switzerland despite their low chance of halting the fighting.

And Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, intervened directly with officials from Saudi Arabia when they appeared to be obstructing talks, said three people with knowledge of the interactions.

But the Biden administration is divided on a fundamental question: How hard should it push the Emirates?

When the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, suggested on a podcast on Sept. 4 that he supported a boycott of the Emirates by the rapper Macklemore, who recently canceled a Dubai show over the Emirates’ role in Sudan, it provoked a furious private reaction from Emirati officials, several officials said.

“I sure didn’t have Macklemore as hero for Sudan on my bingo card,” Mr. Perriello said on the podcast.

Some senior White House and State Department officials felt Mr. Perriello had gone too far, while others cringed at the idea of cowing to the Emiratis for the sake of good relations.

The dispute reflected the limits of challenging the Emirates, a country the United States relies on for many global priorities. The Emirates is a staunch American ally against Iran, a signatory of the Abraham Accords to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a potential player in postwar Gaza, and it has even facilitated prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russia.

The Gulf state has shrugged off international censure before, notably over its role in Yemen, but it appears to be sensitive to growing criticism over Sudan.

When European diplomats considered last February whether the nation “would have any qualms about the slaughter and devastation” caused by its actions in Sudan, the confidential E.U. memo said, the diplomats concluded that the Emiratis “would be more concerned about any damage to their reputation rather than any sense of moral culpability.”

But whether the Emiratis would be willing to cede Sudan to one of the many rival powers piling into the war, especially Iran, is another matter entirely.

The prospect of Iran gaining a foothold on the Western shores of the Red Sea has clearly unnerved the Emirates and several other Arab countries involved in Sudan, officials say.

That sense of alarm is driving a proxy war and prompting rival powers to pour ever more weapons into Sudan, pushing the tottering state toward complete collapse.

The Emiratis say Sudanese refugees are grateful for the Emirati help. But the anger among others is growing.

Last week, when Ms. Nusseibeh, the Emirati minister who took part in peace talks in Switzerland, visited one of the hospitals in Chad to showcase her country’s good works, she was confronted by an infuriated Sudanese refugee.

“You know very well that you ignited this war!” yelled a man during a public meeting, in an exchange that quickly spread on social media. “We don’t want anything from you, except that you stop it.”

Speaking by phone, the man, who asked to be identified as Suliman out of fear of reprisals, said he hadn’t been able to contain himself.

R.S.F. brutality had forced him to flee Sudan a year earlier, joining 800,000 refugees now in Chad, he said. So when the Emirati minister sat before him, he said, he saw “the reason my house was destroyed.”

“I lost everything,” he said. “I had to get up and say what was in my heart.”

Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Shuaib Almosawa from Bangalore, India. Videos and graphics by Alexander Cardia and Josh Holder.

The Muslim cleric preparing to lead what, if everything goes as planned, will become the world’s smallest state, has laid-back plans for the tiny new country.

His hoped-for Muslim state in Tirana, Albania’s capital, will be a Vatican-style sovereign enclave controlling territory about the size of five New York City blocks, and it will allow alcohol, let women wear what they want and impose no lifestyle rules.

“God does not forbid anything; that is why he gave us minds,” said the cleric, Edmond Brahimaj, known to followers as Baba Mondi, explaining how he intends to rule over a 27-acre patch of land that Albania wants to turn into a sovereign state with its own administration, passports and borders. The Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, says he will announce plans for the entity, to be called the Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order, in the near future.

“All decisions will be made with love and kindness,” said Baba Mondi, 65, a former Albanian Army officer who is revered by millions around the world by his official title, His Holiness Haji Dede Baba. He is the paramount leader of the Bektashi, a Shiite Sufi order founded in the 13th century in Turkey but now based in Albania.

In an interview, Mr. Rama, the prime minister, said the aim of the new state was to promote a tolerant version of Islam on which Albania prides itself. “We should take care of this treasure, which is religious tolerance and which we should never take for granted,” he said.

An avowedly moderate Islamic microstate, the prime minister said, would send a message: “Do not let the stigma of Muslims define who Muslims are.”

The territory of the proposed new Islamic state is a compound in a low-rent residential district of eastern Tirana. It is just a quarter of the size of Vatican City, currently the world’s smallest country, governed by the pope, an absolute monarch.

Baba Mondi said that “size doesn’t matter,” adding, “I don’t need to be a dictator,” though he conceded that the only significant constraint on his authority will be God. After toasting visitors with raki, a fiery drink distilled from grapes, he noted that he made no claim to infallibility.

“Only God,” he said, “doesn’t make mistakes.”

The Bektashi domain features a domed meeting and prayer hall, a museum showcasing the order’s history, a clinic, an archive and the administrative offices of Baba Mondi, a cheery man with a white beard and waspish disdain for rigid dogma. Muslim extremists who set off bombs and use violence to spread their version of the faith, he said, “are just cowboys.”

Combining a loose interpretation of the Quran with mysticism, elements of Turkey’s pre-Islamic faiths and devotion to their deceased wise men, known as dervishes, the Bektashis moved their headquarters to Tirana from Turkey nearly a century ago after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, shut down their operations.

Viewed as heretics by many conservative Shiites and Sunnis, and subjected to centuries of persecution in Muslim lands, the Bektashis have been a force in Albania and neighboring countries such as Kosovo and Macedonia since the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of the Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Members of the sect played a prominent role in Albania’s nationalist awakening against Turkish rule, promoting a relaxed version of Islam that helped rally the country’s large Muslim and Christian communities behind the secular cause of independence.

Though one of Europe’s poorest countries, Albania has a long history of helping people in need, sheltering Jews during World War II and Afghans fleeing the Taliban in 2021. Its international airport is named after Mother Teresa, the ethnic Albanian nun who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work in India.

A team of legal experts, including international lawyers, is drafting legislation defining the new state’s sovereign status inside Albania. That will need to be endorsed by Parliament, controlled by Mr. Rama’s governing Socialist Party. It is unclear which, if any, countries will agree to recognize the Bektashis’ sovereignty.

So far, Mr. Rama, a nonpracticing Roman Catholic, said, only a few of his closest aides know about the plan and NATO allies like the United States have not been consulted.

One country that is highly unlikely to recognize it is Iran, which has many mostly underground followers of Sufi Islam, including some Bektashis, but views itself as the guardian of Shiite Islam against heterodox readings of the faith.

“The Iranians are frankly my last thought,” Mr. Rama said, noting that Albania broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2022 after linking it to a cyberattack on Albanian government and banking networks.

Baba Mondi has long campaigned against extremism. After Islamist militants killed 12 people in a 2015 attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the Bektashi leader traveled to Paris along with Mr. Rama, the prime minister, to join a march against terrorism.

He said the new Bektashi state might need a small intelligence service “because we have enemies too” but won’t have an army, border guards or courts. Details such as who will be eligible for passports still have to be worked out, he added, but the passport color has been decided: green, an important color in Islam. Albania allows dual nationality.

Committed to soothing rather than stoking tensions, the new state has already sworn off the curse of many nations — that of territorial ambition. Baba Mondi vowed not to make any attempt to expand his territory by grabbing back land his order once held in the Albanian capital.

The Tirana compound, which originally covered nearly 90 acres, has shrunk by two-thirds since Albania’s former communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, outlawed all religion in 1967 and his government began building warehouses on Bektashi territory in the capital. After the collapse of communism in 1991, the Bektashis lost yet more land when private developers built homes on the edge of the compound without permission.

Mr. Rama said the borders of the proposed Bektashi state would be defined by what the sect has: “What was seized is not part of that,” he said. Squabbles over property ownership, he said, would only undermine the state’s purpose as a “model of coexistence.”

“This is not a property issue but a spiritual issue,” he said.

Baba Mondi, for his part, declared the statehood plan “a miracle” and expressed hope that the United States and other Western powers would recognize his state’s sovereignty if Parliament endorses the prime minister’s plan.

“We deserve a state,” he said, “We are the only ones in the world who tell the truth about Islam” and “don’t mix it up with politics.”

How many Bektashi believers there are in the world is unclear, and even their number in Albania is subject to wildly different estimates, ranging from just a few percent of the country’s population of less than three million to many times that.

Baba Mondi said that around half the total population was Bektashi, the rest being Sunnis, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and evangelical Christians. That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it reflected a widespread view of the sect, even among some Christians, as Albania’s national religion.

In Kruje, a town north of the capital that is the site of a castle used in the 15th century by Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero, Ismet Kaciu, a retired Bektashi teacher, said that he had not heard of Mr. Rama’s plans to give his sect Vatican-style sovereignty over the Tirana site.

But, he said during a visit to a Bektashi shrine near Skanderbeg’s castle, he would be overjoyed if that happened. It would, he said, help to keep younger Albanians, including his own four children, who work in Italy, from drifting away from their faith and their country.

Nuri Ceni, a 79-year-old Bektashi historian, hailed the offer of statehood as “a hugely important gift” that would not only strengthen tolerant Islam inside Albania but also help spread “our message of peaceful coexistence regardless of religion or race.”

“We are against all the forms of extremism that are today so dangerous,” he added

Mr. Rama acknowledged that creating a sovereign Islamic state in Tirana would take time. “Maybe everyone will say: ‘This guy is crazy,’” he said. But, he added: “They have said that many times before. I don’t care. The important thing, crazy or not, is to fight for good.”

Elon Musk suddenly appears to be giving up.

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech. Mr. Musk and his company had loudly and harshly criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court for months, even publicly releasing some of its sealed orders, but neither had publicly mentioned their reversal by Saturday morning.

The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand.

Mr. Musk has had to come to terms with that reality in other countries, including India and Turkey, where his social network complied with orders to censor certain posts. But in Brazil and Australia, he complained about government orders he disagreed with and accused local officials of censorship. His company’s responses to governments have often been in line with his personal politics.

Brazil is one of X’s most important international markets, with analysts estimating that it had more than 20 million users there. Since X has been blocked, Brazilians have flocked to the social network’s rivals: Bluesky and Threads, which is owned by Meta.

The longer X remain blocked, the more Mr. Musk risked losing market share and revenue — problematic for a company that has alienated many American advertisers by allowing users to say just about anything on the site.

Another Musk-controlled company, the satellite-internet service Starlink, was also caught in the crossfire. Brazil’s Supreme Court took $2 million from Starlink in Brazil to cover fines it had issued against X.

Many of the accounts X had been ordered to take down in Brazil belonged to prominent right-wing Brazilian commentators who had once intensely praised Mr. Musk for resisting the court’s orders. Some were now conflicted about his backpedaling.

Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”

A day later, Mr. Figueiredo said he understood Mr. Musk’s stance “and appreciates his efforts.”

The turn of events was a major victory for Brazil’s Supreme Court and the powerful justice who has led the push to regulate online speech, Alexandre de Moraes.

Justice Moraes has become one of Brazil’s most polarizing figures since the nation’s Supreme Court granted him broad authority to order tech companies to take down content that he deems a threat to Brazil’s institutions.

Since 2019, he has ordered social networks to take down at least 300 accounts, according to a New York Times analysis of a portion of his court orders, which had been leaked or released publicly. For more than half of those accounts, Justice Moraes did not provide details in the orders for why they should be taken down. He has generally issued such orders under seal, but The Times analyzed orders published by X and U.S. congressional Republicans. There are likely many more orders that remain secret.

Justice Moraes has said that he takes down accounts that attack Brazil’s democratic institutions. When ordering X to be blocked last month, he said it was because Mr. Musk intended to “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law.”

Mr. Musk had made confronting Justice Moraes one of his pet issues this year, at times posting repeatedly about the judge, insulting him, calling for his jailing and vowing to defy his orders. The issue came to a head when X stopped complying with the judge’s orders and then closed the company’s offices in Brazil to avoid consequences.

The first signs of the reversal came on Thursday, when Justice Moraes said in a court filing that X had hired new lawyers in Brazil.

One of those lawyers, Sérgio Rosenthal, said in a text message on Thursday that X planned to comply with all of the judge’s orders to take down accounts. “The goal is to regularize the company’s situation in Brazil,” he said.

On Saturday morning, a different lawyer, André Zonaro Giacchetta, said the conditions to return to Brazil “have already been met, but it depends on the assessment of” Brazil’s Supreme Court.

As recently as Wednesday, X seemed to still be defying the court. The company appeared to use a technical maneuver to evade efforts by internet providers to block its site in Brazil, allowing it to go live for many users in the country.

The company said in a statement that its return in Brazil on Wednesday was “inadvertent.” Mr. Musk himself seemed to suggest that the return of his network was a supernatural phenomenon rather than an intentional move to sidestep the authorities.

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,” he posted on X.

But Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said in a statement that it believed the change was “a deliberate intention to disregard the Federal Supreme Court’s order.”

​​Justice Moraes seemed to agree, issuing a fine of $1 million per day and blocking the social network again. X remained inaccessible across Brazil on Saturday.

Kate Conger contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Lis Moriconi from Rio de Janeiro. Flávia Milhorance and Paulo Motoryn contributed research.

For the second time in less than two months, Israel located and killed Hezbollah’s most senior and secretive military figures as they held covert meetings near Beirut. And in between those strikes, Israel incapacitated hundreds, if not thousands, of the group’s rank-and-file members by remotely blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies.

Hezbollah’s response so far: calls for vengeance and routine rocket fire into northern Israel.

The assassination of the senior military leader, Ibrahim Aqeel, and other ranking Hezbollah militants on Friday capped a week that threw Lebanon’s most sophisticated political and military force into deep disarray and appeared to hail a stark shift in the calculations that had long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Since the two forces effectively fought each other to a standstill in a hugely destructive war in 2006, Israel and Hezbollah have been arming up and preparing for the next major confrontation, feeding a situation of mutual deterrence that kept intermittent clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border from spiraling into another big war.

Israelis feared that a new conflict could include Hezbollah’s targeting of sensitive infrastructure inside Israel and well-trained Hezbollah commandos rampaging though Israeli communities. Hezbollah knew that Israel’s air force could swiftly cause extensive destruction in Lebanon, especially in the communities from which the group draws its support.

This past week, however, Israel’s leaders decided to push past that equation and crossed what had been unofficially considered red lines. So far, it appears to have worked.

“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”

Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed that Mr. Aqeel, whom Israel described as leading Hezbollah’s Radwan force, an elite combat unit, had been killed in the airstrike on Friday, and Hezbollah on Saturday announced the deaths of about a dozen other fighters, including Ahmed Wahbi, another ranking commander. The Israeli military said that at least 16 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the strike on Mr. Aqeel, but did not identify them.

The attack, in a densely populated area south of Beirut known as the Dahiya, brought down two eight-story buildings and terrified people across the Lebanese capital.

On Saturday, Lebanon’s health ministry said the toll from the strike had risen to 37 dead, including three children, and 68 wounded. In the aftermath, Lebanese families circulated images of missing relatives on social media, including children. Overall, 70 people have been killed in Lebanon since Tuesday, and about 3,000 injured.

Friday’s strike followed 11 months of tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel across the Lebanon-Israel border that killed people on both sides and forced about 150,000 residents to flee their homes. Hezbollah began striking northern Israel after the start of the war in Gaza last October, saying that it was seeking to bog down Israeli forces in support of Hamas, its ally in Gaza.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 dragged back to Gaza, damaging Israel’s sense of security and changing how its leaders thought about the threats on their borders.

Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza that aimed to destroy the group. Months of cease-fire negotiations have failed to stop the violence, and the Gaza health authorities say that more than 41,000 people have been killed.

Israel’s tolerance for Hezbollah’s military presence on its northern border has also declined, and even before this past week Israeli officials regularly called for stepped-up attacks on the group.

“It has been very clear since the first months of the war that Israel is saying, ‘This threat that we lived with for 18 years, we are not able to live with it any more,’” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “‘We can’t have this massive force on our northern border.’”

Underpinning the status quo before the Gaza war was an Israeli resistance to risking losses and sustaining damage compared with the professed willingness of Hezbollah fighters to die for their cause, Mr. Salem said. That dynamic, too, has changed.

“The simple threat of Hezbollah causing damage no longer has the same effect on Israel that it had before Oct. 7,” he said.

This past week, Israel dramatically upended how it fights Hezbollah by infiltrating the group’s supply chain to booby-trap thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, severely disrupting its communications, in addition to conventional airstrikes like the one that killed Mr. Aqeel and other commanders. That combination has constricted Hezbollah’s ability to respond.

“Hezbollah has been backed into a corner by Israel,” said Ms. Khatib of Chatham House. “Even if its military arsenal remains intact, its ability to deploy it has been curtailed.”

On Friday, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said that Israel would continue its “series of actions in the new stage” of its conflict with Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the border area can return home. Some experts view that language as suggesting that Israel’s plans could include a ground invasion.

In a speech on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leaders said they welcomed such a step. Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and fighting on their own turf could give its guerrilla fighters an advantage.

Despite Israel’s superior firepower, it has not managed to defeat Hamas in 11 months of brutal combat in Gaza, whose borders are closed. Hezbollah is widely regarded as a more sophisticated force and could take advantage of Lebanon’s open borders to rearm in a way that Hamas cannot.