World roundup: May 17-18 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Mozambique, Romania, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
May 17, 1980: The South Korean military, under General Chun Doo-hwan and members of a secret military society called Hanahoe, overthrows the country’s nominally civilian government in the “Coup d’état of May Seventeenth.” The coup ended the South Korean “Fourth Republic” and reified the political power Chun had amassed following the assassination of Park Chung-hee in October 1979 and the subsequent “12.12 Military Insurrection.” Chun removed interim President Choi Kyu-hah from office and suppressed the “Seoul Spring” protest movement that had emerged to challenge military rule. The coup sparked an uprising against the military in the city of Gwangju that Chun’s new government put down brutally, with perhaps upwards of 2000 people killed in the process. Chun would serve eight years as an essentially dictatorial president, but in 1995 he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to execution for his actions in Gwangju. The sentence was adjusted down to life imprisonment and commuted in 1997 by then-President Kim Young-sam.
May 17, 1997: Having chased Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, into exile the day before, military forces aligned with Laurent-Désiré Kabila and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo enter Kinshasa, bringing an end to the First Congo War. Kabila succeeded Mobutu as president of Zaire, which was quickly renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war, which had begun the previous year when Rwandan Patriotic Front forces invaded Zaire in pursuit of fleeing Hutu génocidaires, was reignited the following year when Kabila expelled his erstwhile Rwandan and Ugandan allies from the country. The Second Congo War technically ended in 2003, though conflict in the eastern DRC has persisted through the present day.
May 18, 1291: Among several other notorious Crusades anniversaries, May 18 was the date on which the city of Acre, the last Crusader state in the Levant, fell to the besieging Mamluks. It would take several more days to clear out the city, whose fall marked the end of the main Crusading movement.
May 18, 1974: The Indian military successfully detonates the country’s first nuclear weapon in a test ironically (I assume) code named “Smiling Buddha.” The test made India the world’s sixth acknowledged nuclear weapons state after the US, USSR, UK, France, and China. In reality it’s widely believed that Israel already had nuclear weapons by this point as well, but since the Israelis refuse to acknowledge their nuclear weapons program its origins remain murky.
May 18, 2009: The nearly 26 year long Sri Lankan Civil War ends with the government’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (AKA Tamil Tigers) rebel group. Sri Lankan authorities had declared victory on May 16 and the LTTE had acknowledged its defeat on May 17, but it was on the morning of May 18 when LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was caught and killed by government forces while attempting to flee the final LTTE-controlled enclave. The war is estimated to have killed upwards of 100,000 people in total and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Security forces raided Islamic State cells in northern Syria’s Aleppo province on Saturday, according to a statement from the Syrian Interior Ministry. They killed three IS fighters and wounded another four. One member of the security forces was killed in the raids. On Sunday, an explosion near a police station in the eastern Syrian town of Mayadin killed at least three people. There’s no indication as to responsibility but I assume IS is a likely candidate.
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) conducted an airstrike that it says killed a Hezbollah “commander” in southern Lebanon’s Tyre district on Saturday. Israeli officials then accused Hezbollah of attempting the “reestablishment of Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure” in the area, “a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon.” The Lebanese government seems to disagree—at an Arab League summit in Baghdad on Saturday, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam asked for international support “to oblige Israel to stop its attacks and immediately and fully withdraw from all Lebanese territory.”
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
There are several items of note:
The IDF’s “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” project kicked off officially over the weekend with the announcement that Israeli forces had “begun extensive ground operations throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip.” In reality the IDF has been ramping up to this for several ultra-violent days in which it has displaced thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza, but the announcement does clarify things a bit.
The only thing that can possibly stop the mass atrocity that is now underway is another truce or, better, a full ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The odds of such an agreement manifesting are slim to say the least, but new negotiations are taking place in Qatar that both principals say they’ve entered without any preconditions. While those talks continue, Barak Ravid at Axios is reporting that the Trump administration is using “backchannel” negotiations to “press” both parties to accept an “updated” version of envoy Steve Witkoff’s ceasefire framework. As before, that framework involves the release of around half of the remaining Gaza captives for a roughly six to eight week truce, during which time the Israelis and Hamas will negotiate on the terms of a full cessation of hostilities. But this time around the proposal apparently includes US “guarantees” that the Israeli government won’t be able to simply skip out on those negotiations and resume its massacre unilaterally, as it did in March.
That US pressure—assuming there really is any—may be working a bit, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced late Sunday that “at the recommendation of the IDF, and due to the operational need to enable the expansion of the intensified fighting to defeat Hamas, Israel will bring in a basic quantity of food for the population to ensure a famine crisis does not develop in the Gaza Strip.” This is supposed to be a one-week influx of aid to sustain the population until the US-backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” begins its work later this month. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the IDF has recommended this or that anyone in the Israeli government cares about ensuring that “a famine crisis does not develop in the Gaza Strip,” so I think it’s fair to speculate that this is being done at Washington’s behest.
When the GHF does begin operating in Gaza, it has already acknowledged that it won’t be able to distribute aid to Palestinians who “are infirm, immobile, or unwilling to travel to a secure distribution site.” That covers a not insignificant portion of the neediest part of Gaza’s remaining population, support for whom “will require aid distribution mechanisms that expand beyond the currently scoped model” according to a GHF statement. It may be worth noting that, even as the GHF is close to coming online, nobody has any idea who is actually running it. Two prominent humanitarian figures previously associated with it, former World Food Program director David Beasley and former World Central Kitchen CEO Nathan Mook, have both denied involvement. The opacity of this venture raises serious concerns about how it intends to function and contrasts utterly with the previous, United Nations-run aid system. That operation was pretty transparent, notwithstanding the Israeli government’s dubious claims that it had been hijacked by Hamas.
Saudi media is reporting that the bodies of several Hamas officials have been discovered in the wake of the Wednesday’s IDF airstrike on the European Hospital in Khan Younis—including the body of that strike’s primary target, Mohammed Sinwar. Hamas’s leadership structure has been kept intentionally opaque since the IDF killed former leader Yahya Sinwar back in October, but Mohammed Sinwar (Yahya’s younger brother) was believed to have succeeded him as the group’s top leader in Gaza.
The IDF has released what it says are the minutes of a “high-level” Hamas meeting held just days before the October 7 attack that indicate the group went forward with that plan in order to disrupt the emerging Saudi-Israeli diplomatic normalization deal. I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to demonstrate, since undermining that deal has been widely cited as one of Hamas’s primary motivations and these minutes seemingly reinforce that the attack, far from being a random act of psychotic violence as the Israeli government has repeatedly claimed to try to justify what it’s done to Gaza since then, was a deliberately calculated response to political events.
YEMEN
Flights between the Jordanian capital, Amman, and Sanaa resumed on Saturday, less than two weeks after the IDF claimed to have “fully disabled” the Yemeni capital’s international airport in a series of airstrikes. Apparently the damage was not as heavy as the Israelis would have liked. These Amman-Sanaa flights generally service Yemenis who need to seek medical treatment abroad so their resumption is a positive development.
ASIA
INDIA
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is investigating a report that the Indian government rounded up a group of some 40 Rohingya refugees in New Delhi earlier this month, flew them out to an offshore naval vessel, sailed them to India’s maritime border with Myanmar, and then essentially tossed them overboard. Indian authorities did give them life jackets so I guess that’s something. The group managed to swim ashore but their ultimate fate in Myanmar—a war-torn country in which the Rohingya have already faced one genocide and may be in the midst of another—is unknown. India’s Hindu nationalist government has been cracking down on alleged Muslim migrants—many of whom have turned out to be Indian nationals—using its recent conflict with Pakistan as its justification.
CHINA
Apparently the Chinese government had a mixed reaction to reports that the Pakistani military used Chinese-made weapons to down a number of Indian aircraft when those two countries exchanged fire earlier this month. On the one hand, the fighting provided a demonstration that Chinese fighter jets and Chinese air defense systems can be effective in combat. On the other hand, Beijing is trying to carry itself as a stabilizing influence in the world (in contrast with the US) and in particular is trying to cultivate a better relationship with the Indian government. It’s trying to do these things even as it looks to expand its arms industry and in full knowledge that it is Pakistan’s primary weapons supplier, which makes for a difficult balancing act. Chinese officials have been trying to maintain it by highlighting the effectiveness of their hardware while generally calling for calm in South Asia.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces militant group killed at least 14 people in an artillery strike on the Abu Shouk displacement camp in Sudan’s North Darfur state on Sunday. Abu Shouk and the nearby city of Al-Fashir have been the focus of the RSF’s ground campaign for months now, even as the overall focus of group’s conflict with the Sudanese military has shifted away from ground combat toward dueling drone strikes.
Middle East Eye’s Ragıp Soylu and Oscar Rickett argue that said shift has exposed an escalation in this conflict’s proxy war between the UAE, supporting the RSF, and Turkey, backing the military. According to their account, the barrage of drone strikes that targeted the de facto military capital of Port Sudan earlier this month (which only abated a few days ago) was prompted by a May 3 military strike (using Turkish drones) that hit a military cargo plane in the city of Nyala, in South Darfur state, that killed dozens of RSF personnel and foreign fighters, many of whom were en route to medical treatment abroad. They’re claiming that the retaliatory attacks on Port Sudan were directed by the UAE itself, not the RSF, and that at least some of the drone fire may have originated outside Sudan—most likely in Somalia’s Puntland region.
LIBYA
The head of Libya’s “Government of National Unity,” Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, has according to the UAE’s Erem News outlet denied claims that his administration is negotiating with the US to receive up to 1 million Palestinians who would be displaced from Gaza. Although NBC News claimed “exclusive” reporting on the alleged plan on Friday there are indications that the story may have actually originated with a far-right fabulist website and so I think we can safely dismiss the whole thing barring any new (and credible) revelations.
NIGERIA
Thursday’s Boko Haram attack on a village in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state was apparently one of two such incidents that left at least 57 people dead with more than 70 still missing. As was reported previously, the Boko Haram attackers rounded up villagers accused of collaborating with the rival Islamic State West Africa Province group. With so many people missing the death toll is likely to rise as recovery work continues, though Boko Haram does engage in kidnapping for ransom so it may have taken at least some of these people captive for that purpose.
SOMALIA
A suicide bombing at a military recruitment office in Mogadishu killed at least 13 people on Sunday. There’s been no claim of responsibility but it would be very surprising if this were not an al-Shabab attack.
MOZAMBIQUE
The Guardian reports on a series of apparent jihadist attacks that have roiled a crucial nature reserve in northern Mozambique:
One of Africa’s largest protected areas has been shaken by a series of attacks by Islamic State-linked extremists, which have left at least 10 people dead.
Conservationists in Niassa reserve, Mozambique, say decades of work to rebuild populations of lions, elephants and other keystone species are being jeopardised, as conservation operations grind to a halt.
On 29 April, militants attacked buildings in Niassa, killing two anti-poaching scouts. Two more scouts are missing and another seriously injured. The attack, which was later claimed by Islamic State-Mozambique, came 10 days after another raid on a nearby safari camp in which two people were beheaded and six soldiers were killed.
A village of 2,000 people has been displaced by the violence and all conservation work has been suspended in Niassa reserve, according to local groups. On Monday, wildlife and community organisations warned that the violence is risking more than 20 years of conservation work in the area.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
As their brevity indicated, Friday’s Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul did not go very well, the parties’ agreement on a large POW exchange notwithstanding. The main takeaway appears to be that they remain very far apart on the terms of any potential settlement. According to “a Ukrainian diplomatic source” who spoke to Reuters, the Russian delegation made demands that went “far beyond anything that was previously discussed,” including a demand for full international recognition of all five Ukrainian provinces that Moscow claims to have annexed. The framework previously proposed by the Trump administration would have included formal recognition of only one of those provinces—Crimea—and de facto recognition of Russian authority over only those parts of the other four provinces that its forces currently control. Instead, Russian negotiators demanded that the Ukrainian military withdraw from the parts of those provinces that it still controls.
This being the first real negotiating session between Russia and Ukraine since 2022, it’s not hugely surprising that the Russians came in pushing their most maximalist demands. Surely they’re anticipating that further negotiations would whittle away at the territorial claims in particular. But Russian officials are also talking about their willingness to keep fighting for years to come unless they get what they want, and there’s a possibility that those demands are so maximalist that they’ll discourage further talks for the foreseeable future. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak by phone on Monday, after which a way forward may become more apparent. Or, you know, not.
ROMANIA
In something of a surprise, Bucharest Mayor Nicuşor Dan apparently won the second round of Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, taking a bit under 54 percent of the vote to defeat far-right candidate and first round winner George Simion in the unofficial results. Dan campaigned on a pro-European Union, pro-Ukraine, anti-corruption platform and may have capitalized on his reputation as an non-establishment candidate who was not tainted by association with Trumpism. At any rate I would imagine that’s how some of the post-election analysis will read, especially given how conservative parties performed in places like Canada and Australia earlier this year.
POLAND
Bearing in mind all the usual caveats about exit polling, it would appear that centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of Poland’s presidential election on Sunday, edging out right-wing candidate Karol Nawrocki. Exit polling has him at just under 31 percent of the vote, to just over 29 percent for Nawrocki. That result, if it proves accurate, would align pretty closely with pre-election polling for both candidates. It would also send them to a June 1 runoff for which pre-election polling has tended to favor Trzaskowski.
PORTUGAL
Last but not least, Portugal’s snap parliamentary election appears to have gone partly as expected on Sunday, with Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s conservative Democratic Alliance bloc winning the vote but falling short of an outright majority, taking 86 seats in the 230 seat Assembly of the Republic. Another unstable minority government it is, then. What did not go entirely according to plan was the result for the far-right Chega party, which outperformed its polling to tie the underperforming Socialist Party for second place with 58 seats each. Chega’s strength will likely force Montenegro to govern further right in his new term—or at least give him a convenient excuse for doing so.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, World Politics Review’s John Boyce looks at what the explosion of interest in “critical minerals” is costing humanity:
One morning last May, a small band of activists descended on Germany’s largest Apple store in the heart of downtown Berlin. Placards in hand, they conducted a noisy but peaceful demonstration to denounce labor rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo related to the mining of cobalt required for manufacturing iPhones. This protest and others like it underline how the race to secure the raw materials for the tech and renewable energy revolutions—known as critical minerals—is fueling human rights abuses, regional conflict and environmental degradation around the world.
In recent years both the U.S. and the European Union have attempted to add an ethical dimension to their mineral acquisition policy. As part of [the] Dodd Frank act, the U.S. legislated on the issue in 2010, requiring publicly listed U.S. companies to conduct due diligence in sourcing materials to avoid complicity in “funding conflict or human rights abuses.” In 2017, the EU introduced the Conflict Minerals Regulation, which “requires EU companies to ensure they import these minerals and metals from responsible sources only.” Both moves came in response to growing evidence of a soaring global trade in so-called conflict minerals, a trend which is only being further fueled by the race to secure critical minerals.
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As Boyce goes on to write, “the International Energy Agency, or IEA, estimates that the critical minerals market is now worth more than $320 billion and is set to grow exponentially in the coming years.” That creates a powerful incentive to acquire those minerals by any means necessary. I think we can assume that whatever “ethical dimension” has crept into US policymaking around this issue in recent years is out the window as far as the Trump administration is concerned, so this problem is surely set to continue worsening.
PRC Air Defense and Radar performed poorly. PRC 4.5 Gen jet and its AESA BVR missile outperformed.