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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s top diplomat was traveling Sunday from Tehran to Geneva, where the second round of nuclear negotiations with the U.S. will take place, Iranian state media reported.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and his delegation left for the Swiss city after the first round of indirect talks took place in Oman last week. Oman will mediate the talks in Geneva, the IRNA state-run news agency reported on its Telegram channel.

Similar talks last year broke down after Israel launched what became a 12-day war on Iran that included the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear sites.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to use force to compel Iran to agree to constrain its nuclear program. Iran has said it would respond with an attack of its own. Trump has also threatened Iran over its deadly crackdown on recent nationwide protests.

Gulf Arab countries have warned that any attack could spiral into another regional conflict.

The Trump administration has maintained that Iran can have no uranium enrichment under any detail, which Tehran says it will not agree to.

Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but officials have increasingly threatened to pursue a nuclear weapon. Before the war in June, Iran has been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, just a short technical step away from weapons-grade levels.

Araghchi is also expected to meet with his Swiss and Omani counterparts, as well as the director general of the U.N.’s atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Earlier on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington remains interested in a diplomatic solution to ending its differences with Tehran, and that President Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were currently traveling for the new round of talks.

Trump said Friday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, was being sent from the Caribbean to the Mideast to join other military assets the U.S. has built up in the region. He also said a change in power in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen.”

Rubio said recent military deployments in the Middle East were a protective measure aimed at shoring up the defenses of U.S. facilities and interests. Iran has threatened to attack U.S. bases in the region if Washington decides to strike. Tehran in June attacked the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, though no American or Qatari personnel were harmed.

“No one’s been able to do a successful deal with Iran, but we’re going to try,” said Rubio at a news conference after meeting with Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico in Bratislava. “We are focused on negotiations.” Trump in recent weeks has suggested that his priority is for Iran to scale back its nuclear program, while Iran has said it wants talks to solely focus on the nuclear program.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last week met with Trump in Washington, has been pressing for a deal that would neutralize Iran’s ballistic missile program and end its funding for proxy groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Israeli prime minister said in a speech Sunday that any deal between the U.S. and Iran must make sure that “all enriched material has to leave Iran.”

It remains unclear how much influence Netanyahu will have over Trump’s policy on Iran. Trump initially threatened to take military action over Iran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month, but then shifted to a pressure campaign in recent weeks to try to get Tehran to make a deal over its nuclear program.

CAIRO — More than 6,000 people were killed in over three days when a Sudanese paramilitary group unleashed “a wave of intense violence … shocking in its scale and brutality” in Sudan’s Darfur region in late October, according to the United Nations.

The Rapid Support Forces’ offensive to capture the city of el-Fasher included widespread atrocities that amount to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, the U.N. Human Rights Office said in a report released on Friday.

“The wanton violations that were perpetrated by the RSF and allied Arab militia in the final offensive on el-Fasher underscore that persistent impunity fuels continued cycles of violence,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.

The RSF and their allied Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, overran el-Fasher, the Sudanese army’s only remaining stronghold in Darfur, on Oct. 26 and rampaged through the city and its surroundings after more than 18 months of siege.

The 29-page U.N. report detailed a set of atrocities that ranged from mass killings and summary executions, sexual violence, abductions for ransom, torture, and ill-treatment to detention and disappearances. In many cases, the attacks were ethnicity-motivated, it said.

The RSF did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

The paramilitaries’ Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo has previously acknowledged abuses by his fighters, but disputed the scale of atrocities.

‘Like a scene out of a horror movie’

The alleged atrocities in el-Fasher, the provincial capital of North Darfur, mirror a pattern of RSF conduct in its war against the Sudanese miliary. The war began in April 2023 when a power struggle between the two sides exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere across the country.

The conflict created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis with parts of the country pushed into famine. It has also been marked by heinous atrocities which the International Criminal Court said it was investigating as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The RSF was also accused by the Biden administration of carrying out genocide in the ongoing war.

The U.N. Human Rights Office said it documented the killing of at least 4,400 people inside el-Fasher between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27, while more than 1,600 others were killed as they were trying to flee the RSF rampage. The report said it drew its toll from interviews with 140 victims and witnesses, which were “are consistent with independent analysis of contemporaneous satellite imagery and video footage.”

In one case, RSF fighters opened fire from heavy weapons on a crowd of 1,000 people sheltering in the Rashid dormitory in el-Fasher university on Oct. 26, killing around 500 people, the report said. One witness was quoted as saying that he saw bodies thrown into the air, “like a scene out of a horror movie,” according to the report.

In another case, around 600 people, including 50 children, were executed on Oct. 26 while taking shelter in the university facilities, the report said.

The report, however, warned that the actual scale of the death toll of the weeklong offensive in el-Fasher was “undoubtedly significantly higher.”

The toll does not include at least 460 people who were killed by the RSF on Oct. 28 when they stormed the Saudi Maternity hospital, according to the World Health Organization.

Around 300 people were also killed in RSF shelling and drone attacks between Oct. 23 and Oct. 24 in the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people, 1.5 miles northwest of el-Fasher, the U.N. Human Rights Office’ report said.

Woman and girls sexually assaulted

Sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, was apparently widespread during the el-Fasher offensive, with RSF fighters and their allied militias targeting women and girls from the African Zaghawa non-Arab tribes over allegations of having links to or supporting the miliary, the report said.

Türk, who visited Sudan last month, said survivors of sexual violence recounted testimonies that showed how the practice “was systematically used as a weapon of war.”

The paramilitaries also abducted many people while attempting to flee the city, before releasing them after payment of ramson. Thousands have been held in at least 10 detention centers — including the city’s Children Hospital, which was turned into a detention facility — run by the RSF in el-Fasher, the report said.

Several thousands of people remain missing and unaccounted for, the report said.

The pattern of the RSF offensive on el-Fasher was a mirror of other attacks by the paramilitaries and their allies on the Zamzam camp for displaced people, 9 miles south of the city, and on West Darfur’s city of Geneina and the nearby town of Ardamata in 2023, the U.N. Human Rights Office said.

Türk said there were “reasonable grounds” that RSF and their allied Arab militias committed war crimes, and that their acts also amount to crimes against humanity.

He called for holding those responsible — including commanders — accountable, warning that “persistent impunity fuels continued cycles of violence.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked his international allies for their support but suggested there was still questions remaining over the future security guarantees for his country.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Zelensky repeatedly thanked American and European allies for helping Ukraine by providing air defense systems that protect infrastructure like power plants and “save lives.”

Previous U.S.-led efforts to find consensus on ending the war, most recently two rounds of talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, have failed to resolve difficult issues, such as the future of Ukraine’s Donbas industrial heartland that is largely occupied by Russian forces.

Later with reporters, Zelensky questioned how the concept of a free-trade zone — proposed by the U.S. — would work in the Donbas region, which Russia insists Kyiv must give up in order to get peace.

He also said the Americans want peace as quickly as possible and that the U.S. team wants to sign all the agreements on Ukraine at the same time, whereas Ukraine wants guarantees over the country’s future security signed first.

European nations, including the U.K. and France, have already said they will commit troops to Ukraine to guarantee its future security. The U.S. is also expected to be involved and discussions are currently ongoing about the nature of America’s support.

Russian officials are opposed to any foreign troop presence in Ukraine, Zelensky suggested, because Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to have the opportunity to attack Ukraine again.

Zelensky also said he was surprised that Moscow had replaced the head of its negotiating team before another round of U.S.-brokered talks and suggested the move was deliberately aimed at delaying negotiations.

The talks take place against a backdrop of continued fighting along the roughly 750-mile front line, relentless Russian bombardment of civilian areas of Ukraine and the country’s power grid, and Kyiv’s almost daily long-range drone attacks on war-related assets on Russian soil.

During negotiations, Russian officials have insisted Ukraine give up more territory in the east of the country to end the war. But Zelensky told the Associated Press that it was “a little bit crazy” to suggest Ukraine withdraw from its own territory or exchange it.

Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed defending the country’s Donbas region, he said, pointing out that 200,000 people also live there and it would not be acceptable to effectively hand them over to Russia.

Zelensky also questioned how the concept of a free economic zone would work.

“Imagine,” he said, if foreign soldiers patrolled the zone and Putin provoked them and they left. In that case, he said, there could be a “big occupation” of Ukraine and a lot of losses.

If Putin is given any opportunity for victory “we don’t know what he will do next,” Zelensky said.

Such a model, Zelensky told the AP, would have “big risks” for Ukraine and for any country which committed to guaranteeing Ukraine’s security. But he said he was ready to discuss it as it could be important as a compromise in exchange for securing support to reconstruct Ukraine.

During negotiations, Moscow has to accept monitoring of a ceasefire and return some 7,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war in exchange for more than 4,000 Russian prisoners held by Ukraine, Zelensky said.

Earlier on Saturday, drone strikes killed one person in Ukraine and another in Russia, Ukrainian officials said, ahead of fresh talks next week in Geneva aimed at ending the war.

An elderly woman died when a Russian drone hit a residential building in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.

In Russia, a civilian was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a car in the border region of Bryansk, regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said.

Russia-installed authorities said a Ukrainian airstrike on a village Saturday wounded 15 people in Ukraine’s partially occupied Luhansk region.

The attacks came a day after a Ukrainian missile strike on the Russian border city of Belgorod killed two people and wounded five, according to regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov.