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Exclusive: Kais Saied Unveils from Paris Tunisia’s Position on Libya

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Tunisian President Kais Saied for bilateral talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, June 22, 2020. (AP-Michel Euler)
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Tunisian President Kais Saied for bilateral talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, June 22, 2020. (AP-Michel Euler)
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Exclusive: Kais Saied Unveils from Paris Tunisia’s Position on Libya

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Tunisian President Kais Saied for bilateral talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, June 22, 2020. (AP-Michel Euler)
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Tunisian President Kais Saied for bilateral talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, June 22, 2020. (AP-Michel Euler)

Eight months after Kais Saied entered the Carthage presidential palace, the Tunisian president landed in Paris at the head of an official delegation, respecting a tradition followed by his predecessors, who made France their first international destination, after a symbolic visit to neighboring Algeria.

Reactions diverged over the results of the first summit between Saied and French President Emmanuel Macron, and their statements on Libya and the colonial era.

Minister of Finance Nizar Yaish and Foreign Minister Noureddine al-Rai, who accompanied Saied on his visit, emphasized the economic results of the talks, including a new French loan to Tunisia worth 350 million euros (400 million dollars).

Tunisian expert in international politics Faraj Maatouq valued a bilateral agreement aimed at “boosting the economic, financial and technological partnership between the two countries, which includes the establishment of a rapid railway line to link the northernmost part of Tunisia with its south.”

However, some politicians and economic and financial experts in Tunisia, played down the outcome of the meetings between the two leaders.

In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Academic Jannat bin Abdullah, said: “French President Macron clearly emphasized in his joint press conference with Saied at the Elysee Palace that the new loan represents an installment of the five-year loan agreed by the authorities of the two countries in 2017. Its value is about 1.7 billion euros, or about 2 billion dollars.”

Reda El-Shiknadali, the former director general of the Center for Economic and Social Studies and Research (CERES), said that Paris did not pledge new financial aid to Tunisia, which is experiencing structural and circumstantial difficulties.

He criticized “the promotion of old agreements concluded in 2017 as if they were a new initiative.”

But what’s more important about the first Tunisian-French summit is rather its political and diplomatic aspect, according to the opponents of Ennahda Movement, including the head of the Reform Bloc in the Tunisian parliament, Hassouna Nasfi.

The latter praised Saied’s statements that rejected the Turkish intervention in Libya and considered that the legitimacy of the Tripoli government was “temporary and needed improvement by holding new elections.”

But the spokesman for Ennahda, criticized the remarks made by the Tunisian president in France, which he said “touched on intra-Tunisian differences outside the homeland.”

On the other hand, a “cold war” was launched through the official and public social media platforms between the supporters of rapprochement with France, who oppose the Turkish role, and Ankara’s agreement with Rome in Libya.

Saied’s statements in Paris sparked a wave of controversy. Surprisingly, symbols of the Arab-Islamic movements, who stood by the president during the past months, accused him of “betraying the patriots who fought the French occupation.”

In France, the Tunisian president described the 75 years of colonization as “protection” rather than “occupation.”

MP Abdellatif Al-Alawi denounced Saied’s refusal that France apologize for its crimes during the period of its direct occupation of the country.
On the other hand, a large segment of Annahda opponents supported the president’s declared opposition to what they described as “the new Ottoman Turkish occupation of Libya.”

Finally, many political circles close to the president warned against exploiting the outcome of Saied’s visit to France and his statements to attack “state symbols” and to get involved “directly or indirectly in the international game of axes in Libya.”

Some of the former senior military officials, including ex-Director General of Military Security Major General Mohamed al-Medad, called on all parties in Tunisia to take a neutral stance, warning of a scenario of military and security escalation in Libya that could last for years.

Similarly, senior politicians, including a number of former foreign ministers, stressed the need for the Tunisian diplomacy to adhere to its fundamentals and its “positive neutrality and avoid interference in the internal affairs of countries.”

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Dealing with the Dead in the Ruins of Sudan’s War

This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
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Dealing with the Dead in the Ruins of Sudan’s War

This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)

At a makeshift morgue in Khartoum, engineer turned mortician Ali Gebbai clicked through a spreadsheet of the dead. Thousands of entries, each with a photo and burial site, keep a harrowing record of Sudan's war.

Every time the team of volunteers finds a body, they post to social media and wait 72 hours in the hopes that the victim's loved ones will come across the picture and claim the person.

"We photograph every body. We check if there's anything in their pockets to help us identify them, and we mark the spot where we buried them," Gebbai told AFP.

It was a blazing April day and a dead woman lay on the ground of the small, air-conditioned room in the Sudanese capital, her brown-speckled thobe pulled over her face and body.

If no one came to identify her, the team would prepare a clean white shroud, wash her according to Muslim custom and bury her nearby.

It is all anyone in Khartoum can hope for by way of a morgue. And it is far more than what most victims of Sudan's war receive: a shallow grave, hastily dug into the dirt where they fell.

The conflict, now in its fourth year, between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has no confirmed toll, though it has killed at least tens of thousands, and aid workers give estimates of more than 200,000.

"It's disheartening, all these estimations. When you have a population not knowing what has happened, that trauma and the impact cannot be overlooked," Jose Luis Pozo Gil, the International Committee of the Red Cross's deputy Sudan chief, told AFP.

In the year since the army recaptured Khartoum, authorities have exhumed and reburied "around 28,000 people", Hisham Zein al-Abdeen, head of forensic medicine at Sudan's health ministry, told AFP. And they have only cleared a little over half the capital.

Gebbai said he and his teams have buried 7,000 dead since the war began.

Ethnic massacres in Darfur, meanwhile, have killed thousands of people at a time, and this year alone at least 700 died in drone strikes on Kordofan.

- Morgues destroyed -

Across the country, there is nowhere to store the dead, and no way to count them.

During the worst massacres, when firebombs tear through mosques and markets, rescuers routinely run out of shrouds. The dead are buried where they lay, wrapped in their own clothes or plastic bags, often in villages with no clinic to speak of, much less a morgue that can send information to a central authority.

Zein al-Abdeen, one of only two forensic doctors in Khartoum, said the capital's morgues "were already full before the war".

According to the ICRC, Khartoum's four morgues were all forced out of service by the war, but the dead remained inside.

"When we went inside the Omdurman morgue, there were still many bodies. And there hadn't been any electricity for a long time -- you can imagine the state," Pozo Gil said.

The Omdurman morgue was "completely destroyed" in a strike, Zein al-Abdeen said, its compressors looted while bodies lay rotting everywhere they looked.

His team has been exhuming Khartoum's dead for a year, focusing on "those buried in shallow graves, in public spaces, in sewers and along the Nile".

As bullets flew and artillery arched over the river to crash into homes and hospitals, trapped civilians could not reach the next street over, much less the cemetery. So people buried their loved ones in courtyards, at playgrounds and on street corners.

Over three years, it turned Khartoum into an open-air graveyard.

"That leaves a mark on society, it destroys human dignity and it normalizes death," Zein al-Abdeen said.

The same is true for the rest of Sudan: in Darfur, where pools of blood could be seen in satellite images; in al-Jazira, where bodies were dumped in canals; and in Kordofan, where killer drones still stalk civilians.

- Finding the missing -

Most of those exhumed and reburied in Khartoum are identified, Zein al-Abdeen said, by families who buried their loved ones themselves but needed authorities to give them a proper resting place.

But many are not. From every anonymous body, authorities remove a small bone or a piece of hair, in hopes they will one day be identified. But Sudan has no working DNA labs to test the samples, and nowhere to store them until then.

"The safest place to keep the DNA samples is buried separately in the ground, and marked clearly," Zein al-Abdeen told AFP, "or we'll exhume the bodies again later."

According to the ICRC, there are at least 11,000 missing persons in Sudan.

"We know that the lack of closure for families leaves an open wound. In any kind of recovery in the future, in order to find closure, to rebuild trust, the issue of the missing has to be addressed," Pozo Gil said.

Gebbai the mortician spoke with steely-eyed resolve, but it began to crack when he remembered one young man.

"He was looking for his father and his uncle for over a year. When he came to us, he found out they had both been shot dead in the street in the early weeks of the war. It broke him, he collapsed and cried for a long time."

But at last, at least, he could visit their graves.

Features

A Lesson from 1915 … Why the Strait of Hormuz Can’t be Taken by Force

FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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A Lesson from 1915 … Why the Strait of Hormuz Can’t be Taken by Force

FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

The debate over reopening the Strait of Hormuz represents one of the most sensitive issues in politics and security. As questions continue to grow about why US President Donald Trump did not take practical steps to remove the obstacles blocking the vital passageway, this discussion sheds light on the nature of the military challenges that make any attempt to open it by force extremely dangerous, especially given the presence of non traditional threats such as naval mines and warfare.

The answer as to why nothing has been done to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is simple, according to The Independent.

As his advisers will have told Trump before he attacked Iran, it is almost impossible to clear a passage through a minefield when the shoreline is held by the enemy, without being prepared to take significant casualties. And this, it seems, the US is not prepared to do.

It is one thing to bomb a less technologically sophisticated enemy from the air, but quite another to get involved in a real fight at sea level with an opponent who has been planning this form of asymmetric warfare for a very long time.

 

A satellite image shows a fleet of small boats at sea, north of the Strait of Hormuz near the Kargan coast, Iran, April 22, 2026. European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-2/Handout via REUTERS

According to the British newspaper, history gives a stark lesson on why America needs to tread warily – a page from the First World War.

It was March 1915. The “straits” concerned were the Dardanelles – the narrow passage linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and giving access to Istanbul. The Turks were the defenders, the British and the French the attackers.

They were in the middle of a shooting war. A vital waterway, which would normally be open for the world’s commerce, was closed because of the actions of Türkiye, the bordering power. The coastline was heavily defended, and there was a high probability that mines had been laid to block the channel.

A decision was made by the British and French that the straits were to be reopened by force – and a very considerable force was assembled for that purpose.

It comprised no fewer than 14 “capital” ships (in those days “battleships” and “battlecruisers”) supported by escorts and a large force of minesweepers.

The plan was a good one. The capital ships would stand off in clear water and bombard the shore defenses. When these had been silenced, the minesweepers would go ahead and sweep another clear area.

The capital ships would then move forward again into swept water and recommence their bombardment – successive waves of big ships moving up, but always into water which had been swept for mines. In this way, the whole channel would be cleared, and the straits reopened.

The big push commenced on 18 March 1915. To start with, it all went well. Four capital ships – HM ships Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Inflexible – formed the first attacking line.

The second line was composed of four French ships, Gaulois, Charlemagne, Bouvet and Suffren. They, in turn, were to be supported by six more British ships – HM ships Ocean, Irresistible, Albion, Vengeance, Swiftsure and Majestic – which would form a third line to pass through and relieve the French in line two.

The bombardment was started by the RN ships in line one at 11am. By 12.20pm, the French ships of line two had steamed through the first line to take up their advanced positions.

By 1.45pm, the fire from the shore batteries had slackened under the onslaught of the guns of the eight capital ships, and it was deemed safe enough to send in the minesweepers for the next phase. The third line of six ships was also called up to move the force forward.

However, 15 minutes later, everything started to go wrong. FS Bouvet hit a mine, and in a matter of minutes, she capsized and sank. There were only 75 survivors out of a ship’s company of 718.

The action continued. HMS Irresistible of the third wave was bombarding the forts when she, in turn, struck a mine at 3.14pm. She developed a severe list but continued with the action until she hit another mine, and her main engines were put out of action completely.

An attempt was made to take her in tow, but the situation was hopeless, and the order was given to abandon ship. More than 600 men were taken to safety.

 

The Epaminondas ship is seen during seizure by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, in this image obtained by Reuters on April 24, 2026. Meysam Mirzadeh/Tasnim/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Meanwhile, shortly after 4pm, HMS Inflexible struck a mine. She remained capable of steaming slowly and was ordered to withdraw. However, she had a 30ft x 26ft hole below the waterline and had to be beached to save her from sinking. She was later towed to Malta for repairs and was out of action for three months.

After these disasters, Vice-Admiral John de Robeck, the British admiral in charge of the Allied naval forces during the crucial stages of the campaign, finally decided that the waters which had been considered to be safe and swept of mines were anything but.

Accordingly, at 5.50pm, less than seven hours into the operation, he signalled a “General Recall” to withdraw the ships and return to the safe waters outside the straits.

Fifteen minutes later, at 6.05pm, HMS Ocean struck another mine, developed a major list and was deemed not to be capable of being saved. The ship’s company were taken off and she was left to her fate. Both Irresistible and Ocean later sank.

Fourteen major warships had attempted to force the straits. Within four hours, three of them had been sunk and one had been so badly damaged that she was out of action.

This one day of disaster was the end of trying to take the Dardanelles passage by solely naval means. The attempt was never repeated.

Features

Trump Keeps Talking About Iran’s ‘Nuclear Dust.’ What Is It?

A satellite imagery taken on February 1, 2026, shows a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Isfahan nuclear site, Iran. 2026 (PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via Reuters/ File photo)
A satellite imagery taken on February 1, 2026, shows a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Isfahan nuclear site, Iran. 2026 (PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via Reuters/ File photo)
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Trump Keeps Talking About Iran’s ‘Nuclear Dust.’ What Is It?

A satellite imagery taken on February 1, 2026, shows a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Isfahan nuclear site, Iran. 2026 (PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via Reuters/ File photo)
A satellite imagery taken on February 1, 2026, shows a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Isfahan nuclear site, Iran. 2026 (PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via Reuters/ File photo)

Luke Broadwater, David E. Sanger*

In recent weeks, US President Donald Trump has been talking about a substance he says is key to ending the United States’ war against Iran: “nuclear dust.”

In the president’s telling, Iran’s nuclear program was so badly damaged by US bombs last year that all that remains under the rubble is a sort of powdery aftermath.

The phrase “nuclear dust” seemed designed to diminish the importance of what Trump is actually talking about — Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium, which is stored in canisters about the size of large scuba tanks.

The material is not, in fact, “dust.” It is typically a gas when stored inside the canisters, though it becomes a solid at room temperature. It is a volatile and highly toxic substance if it comes into contact with moisture and, if mishandled, can trigger a nuclear reaction.

Trump’s phrase oversimplifies the complex tasks of enriching uranium, to say nothing of negotiating an end to the war. It’s also a phrase nuclear experts say they’ve never heard before.

“I just interpreted it as Trump’s kind of colorful way of talking,” said Matthew Kroenig, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, according to the New York Times.

Here’s a closer look at what Trump means when he talks about “nuclear dust,” and why it’s important for an end to the conflict.

What is ‘nuclear dust’?

Trump is referring chiefly to the uranium Iran has enriched to 60%, near the 90% purity normally used to make a bomb. There is no use for fuel enriched to that level for, say, producing nuclear power.

So it is a warning sign to the international community that Iran could quickly convert the fuel to bomb-grade, even though there would still be many steps to then build a nuclear bomb.

The United States struck three key nuclear sites in June 2025, including a complex outside Isfahan, where much of the near-bomb grade material was believed to be stored.

“It’s not yet bomb-grade, but it’s on the way there, and it was being stored on the nuclear facility at Isfahan,” Kroenig said.

“And so when Isfahan was bombed, that material was presumably entombed there,” he added.

American intelligence officials believe that the Iranians dug down to gain access to the material, though there is no evidence any of it has been moved.

Uranium contains a rare radioactive isotope, called U-235, that can be used to power nuclear reactors at low enrichment levels and to fuel nuclear bombs at much higher levels.

The goal of uranium enrichment is to raise the percentage levels of U-235, which is often done by running it through gas centrifuges, machines that spin at supersonic speeds to increase the purity of the fuel.

Why is it important to ending the war?

Trump has said that Iran had agreed to turn over its nuclear materials to the United States, though Tehran has denied that claim.

“The US will get all nuclear dust,” Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week. “You know what the nuclear dust is? That was that white powdery substance created by our B-2 bombers.”

Iranian enrichment levels have been rising since Trump withdrew the United States from the Obama-era nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, saying the agreement wasn’t tough enough.

Trump then imposed several rounds of American sanctions on Iran. In response, Tehran repeatedly moved beyond the strict limits that the agreement had placed on its uranium enrichment, and began to resume production of nuclear material.

“They were enriching at very low levels before Trump administration withdrew the United States from the JCPOA,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “So what he is calling ‘nuclear dust’ did not exist inside Iran after the signing or the first several months of the JCPOA”

Can the material be removed during wartime?

Trump acknowledges removing Iran’s enriched uranium would be difficult. On Truth Social, he said this week that “digging it out will be a long and difficult process.”

It could be almost impossible without Iranian agreement.

“This would be a mission that would take a lot of time, and there would be a lot of nerds that aren’t good at killing people that would need to be involved here,” Logan said. “So the idea of doing this while we have our swords drawn strikes me as crazy.”

He said it would be similarly difficult for the Iranians to extract the material during the war.

“Trump is correct to say that we have eyes over the target pretty much all the time, and the Iranians couldn’t just swoop in the middle of the night and spirit it out; it’s an extremely volatile substance,” he said.

“We don’t know the conditions of the underground storage. Those tanks in which it has been stored might not be in great condition. It’s going to require a lot of nerds on the ground. And that’s true for the Iranians as much as it is true for us,” Logan added.

*The New York Times