The luxury jet touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on a mission to collect hundreds of pounds of illicit gold.

On board was a representative of a ruthless paramilitary group accused of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s sprawling civil war, the flight manifest showed. The gold itself had been smuggled from Darfur, a region of famine and fear in Sudan that is largely under his group’s brutal control.

Porters grunted as they heaved cases filled with gold, about $25 million worth, onto the plane, said three people involved with or briefed on the deal. Airport officials discreetly maintained a perimeter around the jet, which stood out in the main airport of one of the world’s poorest countries.

After 90 minutes, the jet took off again, landing before dawn on March 6 at a private airport in the United Arab Emirates, flight data showed. Its gleaming cargo soon vanished into the global gold market.

As Sudan burns and its people starve, a gold rush is underway.

War has shattered Sudan’s economy, collapsed its health system and turned much of the once-proud capital into piles of rubble. Fighting has also set off one of the world’s worst famines in decades, with 26 million people facing acute hunger or starvation.

But the gold trade is humming. The production and trade of gold, which lies in rich deposits across the vast nation, has actually surpassed prewar levels — and that’s just the official figure in a country rife with smuggling.

For over a decade, tens of thousands of people living in Syria would disappear without explanation. They were picked up off the street. Plucked from university classes. Yanked out of stores as they bought groceries, and from taxis on their way home from work.

Relatives were never told what had happened — but they knew. Many of the disappeared had been thrown into President Bashar al-Assad’s vast network of prisons, where they were tortured and killed on an industrial scale.

This article contains graphic images.

Now, with the overthrow of the Assad regime, families of missing Syrians are hoping that they may be reunited with loved ones, or at least learn what happened to them.

On Sunday, they rushed to one of the most notorious prisons in Syria, Sednaya, in search of news. Then on Tuesday, hundreds descended onto the morgue at a hospital in Damascus, where 38 bodies discovered at the prison had been taken.

Some displayed photos of missing relatives, asking if anyone recognized them.

In desperation, some forced open the steel doors of the mortuary refrigerators, yanking out large drawers and pulling off the blankets and tarps covering the bodies.

Others clambered to get inside the room where forensic examiners were taking photos of the dead and cataloging them. The conditions of many of the bodies offered silent testimony to the brutality the prisoners had endured.

In the days since rebels toppled Mr. al-Assad’s government and freed prisoners held across the country, thousands of Syrians have flooded into Sednaya prison.

The prison sits atop a hill on the outskirts of Damascus, surrounded by barbed wire and fields riddled with land mines. Rebels who entered the prison complex on Saturday night set the fields ablaze in an effort to set off the mines.

Within hours, hundreds of prisoners were walking out of Sednaya’s gates, stunned. But many of the thousands of people converging on the prison complex looking for relatives and friends were devastated not to find them.

Rumors of secret cells three stories underground soon circulated, setting off a mad dash to free anyone who might still be imprisoned. For two days, rebels and rescue workers hammered away at concrete floors and tore them apart with excavators.

“I can see wires here! Where are they going? Is there a shaft here?” Tarek Abbas yelled from what appeared to be a prison electrical room.

Holding a shovel, he began tapping on the floor, trying to determine if any parts of it were hollow — perhaps a sign of hidden rooms.

Rescue workers digging in one cell urged family members crowding close to the bars to give them room to search. But in the end, they declared the rumors false: No secret cells were found.

The cells that only hours earlier had held the desperate and the disappeared told a tale of horror and deprivation.

Concrete floors were caked in layers of dirt, and a few blankets were strewed in rooms that one former prisoner said had contained dozens of people at a time.

As dusk began to fall, dozens of men gathered on a lawn outside the complex. Rebel fighters lay their guns on the dried earth. Civilians joined them, many carrying photos of lost loved ones in their jacket pockets.

It was a time for prayer.

As forensic examiners toiled inside the morgue at Al-Moujtahed Hospital, families outside waited for news, even if they dreaded it. They scoured a newly formed Telegram channel on which the medical workers were posting photos of the dead.

But most of the faces in the photos were too gaunt, the cheeks too sunken.

“How can we even recognize them?” one woman asked, as a man nearby scrolled through the pictures.

Gazing at photos of corpse after corpse, many were suddenly confronted with a reality they had long tried to keep out of mind.

They had imagined husbands, brothers and sons as they last saw them, as they appeared in the photos they kept in their phones and on social media. The people they were searching for were smiling, with cheeks flush with life and muscle on their bones.

Now, as they stood in the morgue’s courtyard, their memories were being overwritten by the images of ghostly corpses.

As the day dragged on, the crowd at the morgue grew larger — and more impatient. Throngs of people pushed and shoved, desperate to get into the mortuary refrigerator.

“Please,” one examiner pleaded. “Take a step back, take a step back.”

By early afternoon, the crowd had won.

People flooded into the mortuary cooler. They stepped over the feet of one corpse that lay across the doorway and tore open the tarps wrapped around the dozen others in the room. One woman shrieked at what she found.

Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn, the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes.

“Our children are martyrs, our children are martyrs,” one woman screamed, stumbling out of the room.

Others left silently, blank stares on their faces and tears streaming down their cheeks.

“Our children are dead,” one woman yelled between sobs. “Our children, our children. They are dead.”

It seemed a slam dunk: a proposal to rename an avenue running through the center of Romania’s capital that honored a World War II fascist functionary convicted of war crimes.

Diana Mardarovici, the Bucharest city councilor who had proposed changing the street’s name, figured nobody at City Hall would object to removing a tribute to someone who had been involved in confiscating money, jewels and property from Jews and in other crimes for Romania’s Nazi-aligned government.

“I thought this would be peanuts, a piece of cake,” Ms. Mardarovici recalled. “Surely, I thought, we all agree that Nazis are bad.” Her proposal last year never even made it to a council vote.

“My colleagues on the City Council are not Nazis. My colleagues don’t hate Jews,” she said. “But they feel that admitting past crimes by people they see as heroes takes away from their national identity.”

The episode was one of several abortive efforts in recent years to banish street names, statues and other honors accorded to Romanian fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, some of whom were the country’s best-known writers and intellectuals, celebrated for developing Romanian culture and opposing communism.

Mircea Vulcanescu, whose name Ms. Mardarovici wanted to remove from the street, was a philosopher, sociologist and economist who, though convicted of war crimes after World War II, is still widely lauded as a luminary of Romanian culture.

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South Korean police raided the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether his declaration of martial law last week, which plunged the country into a political crisis, was insurrection.

At a parliamentary hearing, Jung Chung-rae, a legislator from the opposition Democratic Party, said “the police are conducting a raid on the presidential office.” Mr. Jung is also chairman of the parliamentary committee that deals with judicial matters.

A police special investigation unit in charge of the investigation confirmed the raid and said it had also carried out search and seizure operations at several other offices: the Korean National Police Agency, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency and the National Assembly Police Guards.

The authorities have barred Mr. Yoon from leaving the country, as prosecutors and the police try to determine whether he and his supporters in the military and the government committed insurrection when they ordered soldiers to enter the National Assembly. Mr. Yoon’s office was not immediately available to comment.

Mr. Yoon is the first sitting president of South Korea to face a criminal investigation, and he now faces the possibility of being arrested while in office. The opposition has accused Mr. Yoon ​of committing insurrection when he sent the troops to the Assembly to block lawmakers from voting against military rule. If Mr. Yoon is arrested, it is unclear what would happen to his role as the country’s leader. The Constitution only states that when the president is “unable to perform his or her duties for any reason,” the prime minister ​will step in as an interim leader.

Some scholars say the only ways to incapacitate the president would be impeachment or his resignation. It is not clear if the opposition has enough support from lawmakers in the ruling People Power Party, or P.P.P., to pass an impeachment bill. Their first attempt failed on Saturday when the P.P.P. boycotted the vote, denying the quorum in parliament needed for the bill to pass.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo apologized for being unable to stop the president from declaring martial law. “I am truly sorry and feel a lot of guilt” he said at the National Assembly, bowing his head multiple times.

Large protests erupted following the imposition of martial law, with people calling for Mr. Yoon’s ouster and impeachment. Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the National Assembly on Saturday as Mr. Yoon survived an impeachment motion after his party decided to not participate in the vote.

But the widespread anger over Mr. Yoon’s declaration of martial law is yet to subside, and his future is uncertain. His own party has said he is “excluded” from running state affairs. And while it saved Mr. Yoon from impeachment, it has said the plan is to give him an “orderly exit.”

Kim Yong-hyun, Mr. Yoon’s former defense minister who was arrested on charges​ of being involved in insurrection, tried to kill himself late Tuesday, Shin Yong-hae, the justice ministry official in charge of correctional facilities, told a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday.

Mr. Kim was trying to end his life while in a jail restroom but gave up his attempt when wardens rushed to stop him, Mr. Shin said. Mr. Kim was in stable condition after the incident, Mr. Shin added.​

The chiefs of the national police agency and the Seoul metropolitan police were also detained by investigators on Wednesday for questioning over their roles in the six hours of martial law that rocked South Korea a week ago.

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As a rebel alliance tries to create a transitional government for Syria, armed factions and outside powers are still fighting to fill the void left by retreating government forces.

Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria who are backed by the United States said early Wednesday that they had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Manbij, a city where they have been battling to fend off forces backed by Turkey.

And the Israeli military has launched hundreds of airstrikes against military assets across Syria in recent days, saying it was trying to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists.

Here’s a guide to understanding where things stand in Syria, and what may come next.

Who’s in charge?

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, was the main rebel group leading the latest offensive, launching a surprise assault in late November from northwestern Syria that quickly led to the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. It is now leading the transition to a new Syrian government.

Mohammed al-Bashir, a rebel leader affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, announced in a brief address on Syrian television on Tuesday that he was assuming the role of caretaker prime minister until March. 1. Mr. al-Bashir previously served as the head of the administration in rebel-held territory in the northwest.

The alliance said it would grant an amnesty for lower-level government workers and soldiers, but vowed to hunt down and punish senior officials of the previous regime who were implicated in torture and other abuses.

“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers, and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” said Ahmed al-Shara, the leader behind the rebel push, who was formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

The group is a former affiliate of Al Qaeda that broke with the older group years ago and came to dominate Idlib, the last stronghold of Syria’s opposition during the 13-year civil war.

Geir Pedersen, the United Nations’ special envoy for Syria, said on Tuesday that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other armed groups controlling the capital had issued “reassuring statements” about forming a government of “unity and inclusiveness.” He urged Syria’s armed groups to protect civilians and create a government that represented the country’s many ethnic and religious communities.

But he warned of the dangers of renewed violence among the patchwork of groups operating across Syria and of the risks posed by what he called Israel’s “very troubling” military operations in the country.

Who is Ahmed al-Shara?

Mr. al-Shara of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham recently gave up his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, after concluding the shocking military offensive that unseated the Assad regime.

He was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, the child of Syrian exiles, according to Arab media reports. In the late 1980s, his family moved back to Syria, and in 2003, he went to neighboring Iraq to join Al Qaeda and fight the U.S. occupation.

He spent several years in an American prison in Iraq, according to the Arab media reports and U.S. officials. He later emerged in Syria around the start of the civil war and formed the Nusra Front, which eventually evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Since breaking ties with Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Shara and his group have tried to gain international legitimacy by putting aside global jihadist ambitions and focusing on organized governance in Syria.

Questions have emerged about what kind of government Mr. al-Shara would support and whether Syrians would accept it. In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has espoused a government guided by a conservative and at times hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.

Since the rebel offensive began, Mr. al-Shara has sought to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions. Some analysts say he now faces the test of his life: whether he can unite Syrians.

What is Israel doing in Syria?

Israel is carrying out intensive airstrikes on military targets that were controlled by the Assad government. Its ground forces have advanced beyond the demilitarized zone on the Israel-Syria border, their first overt entry into Syrian territory in more than 50 years.

Israel said on Tuesday that it had destroyed Syria’s navy in overnight airstrikes, as it continued to pound targets in Syria despite warnings that its operations there could ignite new conflict and jeopardize the transition of power to an interim government.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that the Israeli military had “destroyed Syria’s navy overnight, and with great success.” Photos from the Syrian port city of Latakia showed the smoldering remains of ships sunk at their dock.

Mr. Katz said that Israel’s military “has been operating in Syria in recent days to hit and destroy strategic capabilities that pose a threat to Israel.” He did not explain what new or immediate risk Syria’s navy presented to Israel, which has the most powerful military in the Middle East.

On Tuesday, an Israeli military spokesman denied reports that the military was advancing on Damascus. The spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said the military was inside a buffer zone between Israel and Syria and at other points “in order to protect the Israeli border.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “would like to form relations with the new regime in Syria,” but said he had approved the bombing of Syrian military targets “so that those don’t fall into jihadists’ hands.”

What is Turkey doing?

Fierce fighting was underway on Tuesday between rebels supported by Turkey and U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces near Kobani, a town in northern Syria with historical and symbolic significance.

On Tuesday, Turkish-backed fighters were “violently attacking” in the vicinity of Kobani, said Farhad Shami, a spokesman for the U.S.-allied forces. Both he and an independent group monitoring the war said Turkish warplanes were assisting their allies on the ground with airstrikes.

Turkey and the United States, allies in NATO, both welcomed the fall of the Assad government over the weekend. But one of Turkey’s central strategic goals in the region is to weaken Kurdish forces, putting it at odds with Washington.

Turkish-backed forces captured the city of Manbij on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, and pushed north toward Kobani, less than 40 miles away.

On Tuesday, the Kurdish forces there announced a cease-fire brokered by the United States.

What is the U.S. doing?

The main U.S. interest in Syria is the defeat of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which maintains a presence in the northeastern and central parts of the country. About 1,000 U.S. Special Operations troops are housed in bases in the east and northeast of the country, often working closely with Syrian Kurdish troops.

President Biden authorized U.S. airstrikes on Sunday against Islamic State camps and operatives inside Syria. A swarm of B-52, F-15 and A-10 warplanes hit more than 75 targets in central Syria, according to U.S. officials.

He said the United States would support the region “should any threat arrive from Syria during this period of transition.”

“We’re cleareyed about the fact that ISIS will try to take advantage of any vacuum to re-establish its capability, to create a safe haven,” Mr. Biden said. “We will not let that happen.”

What are the internal factions in Syria?

In addition to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, there are several major armed groups in Syria, and many smaller ones.

Syrian Democratic Forces

Forces from Syria’s Kurdish ethnic minority, which makes up about 10 percent of the population, became the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

After the Islamic State was largely defeated in 2019, the Kurdish-led forces consolidated control over towns in the northeast, expanding an autonomous region they had built there. But Kurdish fighters still had to contend with a longtime enemy, Turkey, which regards them as linked to Kurdish separatist insurgents in Turkey.

Syrian National Army

This umbrella group, which includes dozens of groups with different beliefs, receives funding and arms from Turkey, which has long been focused on expanding a buffer zone along its border with Syria to guard against the activities of Kurdish militants.

Turkey wants to create an area where it can resettle some of the three million refugees who have fled Syria and are living within its borders. But it has struggled to harmonize the ragtag groups that make up the Syrian National Army.

The group is largely composed of the dregs of the Syrian civil war, including many fighters whom the United States had rejected as criminals and thugs. Some received training from the United States early in the war, but most were dismissed as too extreme or too criminal. Most have no clear ideology and had turned to Turkey for a paycheck of about $100 a month when the group was formed.

The Druse militia

Syria’s Druse minority is concentrated in Sweida, an area in the southwest. This week, Druse fighters joined the push to topple the Assad regime, launching an offensive in the southwest and clashing with government forces, according to media reports.

The Druse fighters are part of a newly formed group of Syrian rebels, which includes fighters from other backgrounds, working under the name the “Southern Operations Room.”

The Druse are a religious group practicing an offshoot of Islam, developed in the 11th century, that contains elements of Christianity, Hinduism, Gnosticism and other philosophies. There are more than one million Druse across the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Lebanon, with some also in Jordan and Israel.

Islamic State

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, seized vast stretches of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014, establishing a brutal caliphate before it was beaten back by a U.S.-led coalition. Now its members are largely in hiding.

Lately, there have been signs of the group’s resurgence in Syria amid wider instability in the region. The Pentagon warned in July that Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq were on track to double compared with the previous year. The group has repeatedly tried to free its members from prisons and has maintained a shadow governance in parts of northeastern Syria, the U.S. said.

On Tuesday, Islamic State forces killed 54 people in the Homs region in central Syria who had been part of the Syrian government’s military and fled during the collapse of the Assad regime, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Reporting by Neil MacFarquhar, Farnaz Fassihi, Vivian Yee, Samuel Granados Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Raja Abdulrahim, Adam Rasgon, Ephrat Livni and Thomas Fuller

When President Donald J. Trump visited Britain in 2019, British officials arranged for him to have afternoon tea with Charles, then the Prince of Wales, at his London residence, Clarence House. The thinking among British diplomats was that the 70-something heir to the throne would be a good partner for the 70-something heir to a real estate fortune.

It was not clear that Mr. Trump, now 78, and Charles, now 76, had much in common, beyond age and inherited wealth.

But the British were on to something in trying to deepen the personal ties between Mr. Trump and the royal family. He already regarded Queen Elizabeth II, the king’s mother, with a reverence bordering on awe. His visit to Buckingham Palace ranked as one of the highlights of his first term.

With the Trump restoration imminent and the British government now led by a left-of-center prime minister, Keir Starmer, who could find himself politically at odds with Mr. Trump, the crown may end up being a useful weapon in Britain’s campaign to keep the president-elect’s affections.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump forged ties to the next generation, meeting Prince William, the 42-year-old son of King Charles III, after both attended the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. His comments afterward left little doubt that Mr. Trump savors his exposure to royals of any age.

“I had a great talk with the prince,” Mr. Trump told The New York Post. “He’s a good-looking guy,” the president-elect went on. “He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that.”

Beyond the gushing tone, Mr. Trump raised the eyebrows of royal watchers when he appeared to share details about the health of William’s father and his wife, Catherine, Princess of Wales, both of whom were diagnosed with cancer this year.

Mr. Trump passed along William’s assurance that Catherine was “doing well,” but added, “I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad.”

Some interpreted his reference to the king as ominous, while others brushed it off as an innocent case of oversharing by Mr. Trump. Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William has his office, declined to comment on the remarks or on the health of Charles.

Either way, Mr. Trump’s affection for the Windsors is palpable. Diplomats and historians said they could imagine Charles being an emollient presence if Mr. Starmer proceeds with his plan to draw Britain closer to the European Union — something Mr. Trump vehemently discouraged in his first term.

“Britain’s relationship could become much more strained with the United States,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. “You could see them using the monarchy strategically to maintain as warm relations as possible while continuing the process of rehabilitating the relationship with Europe.”

Although the king studiously avoids politics, Charles has a long-established interest in subjects like the environment. In arranging the afternoon tea in 2019, which included Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, and Charles’s wife, Camilla, officials said they hoped Charles might gently broach the subject of climate change, on which he and Mr. Trump have starkly different views.

The king “enjoys substantive conversation more than banal platitudes, so there may be scope for him to build a substantive relationship with the president-elect,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to Washington who once served as deputy private secretary to Charles.

“With members of the Labour government scrambling to disavow some of the less obliging things they had to say about Trump before he was re-elected, that could be of real value to the U.K.,” Mr. Westmacott added.

Mr. Starmer’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, once described Mr. Trump as “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” when he was a Labour backbencher in Parliament in 2018. He has since dismissed those comments as “old news,” and told the BBC that they did not come up when he and Mr. Starmer met Mr. Trump for dinner in Trump Tower in September.

British diplomats said the evening went well, but there is a deep disquiet in London about Mr. Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on trading partners and withdraw support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, not to mention his suspicion of NATO and hostility for the Paris climate accord.

Some cautioned that Charles, for all his well-honed diplomacy, will not budge Mr. Trump from these positions.

“It’s a useful piece of soft power, but up to a point,” said Kim Darroch, who served as ambassador to Washington during Mr. Trump’s first term. “I’m not sure you’re going to get any big concessions from him because he likes the royal family.”

Sally Bedell Smith, who has written several biographies of the royal family, noted that Mr. Trump had encountered Charles before. He played host to him at Mar-a-Lago during the prince’s visit to Palm Beach County, Fla., in 1988, in which he played polo. And Mr. Trump’s younger brother, Robert Trump, who died in 2020, was a major benefactor of the prince’s philanthropies.

Ms. Smith said Charles and Mr. Trump had moved in some of the same rarefied circles, including among the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which could play into the president’s geopolitical agenda.

“Trump is portraying himself as a peacemaker, and Charles has great relations with all those Gulf leaders,” she noted.

Mr. Trump’s fascination with the queen was deeper, dating back to his childhood. He often invoked his mother, Mary Anne Macleod, who was born in Scotland, and how much she admired Elizabeth, according to former aides.

Fiona Hill, a British-born American who served on the National Security Council during Mr. Trump’s first term, said that he dropped hints about a visit to Britain in meetings with Theresa May, who was prime minister at the time. Mrs. May would “pretend not to understand,” reflecting her qualms at playing host to a man who was deeply unpopular with the British public.

“Meeting Queen Elizabeth II was particularly important to President Trump,” Ms. Hill wrote in her memoir. “A meeting with the Queen of England was the ultimate sign that he, Trump, had made it in life.”

His fascination was vividly demonstrated in footage shot during his re-election campaign for a TV series about Mr. Trump’s comeback, “The Art of the Surge.” In it, he showed off a book of photographs of him with the queen (“who was fantastic, by the way”) and Charles, standing near the honor guard at Buckingham Palace.

“Look, Charles, so beautiful,” Mr. Trump said, leafing through the pages. “These images, I mean, who has images like these?”