World roundup: August 20 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Pakistan, Sudan, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 20 (give or take), 636: In one of the two great military victories of the early expansion of Islam, a caliphal army wins a stunning victory over the Byzantines in a six-day battle near the Yarmuk River (around the convergence of the modern borders of Syria, Jordan, and the occupied Golan). Despite being heavily outnumbered, the “Arabs” (for lack of a better shorthand) won thanks largely to better intelligence on the disposition of the Byzantine forces and the tactical genius of their field commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid. The Byzantines suffered heavy losses and made the strategic decision to retreat into Anatolia, effectively ceding Syria, the Levant, and eventually even Egypt to the caliphate.

A very anachronistic but lively representation of the battle by an unknown 14th century Catalonian illustrator (Wikimedia Commons)

August 20, 1988: A ceasefire brings the nearly eight year long Iran-Iraq War to an end. The war cost hundreds of thousands of lives and included some of the most appalling war crimes of the 20th century, all to achieve essentially a restoration of the prewar status quo (except for all the casualties, of course).

INTERNATIONAL

New research offers some discouraging news in terms of the pace at which the Arctic is melting:

A new study released this week presents the record ice melt on the Svalbard islands in summer 2024 as a glimpse into a future where other Arctic ice masses, including those on Greenland, could melt faster than currently anticipated.

The amount of ice that melted on Svalbard, the archipelago north of Norway in the Barents Sea, made the region one of the most significant contributors to global sea level rise last year.

Ice melt records set in 2020 and 2022 were just marginally greater than previous years, but an extreme and long Arctic heat wave last summer, intensified by weather patterns disrupted by climate change, opened a new page in the record books. The melting was “in a different league,” said Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, professor of geosciences at the University of Oslo and lead author of the research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Schuler said the study shows how what seems like a once-in-1,000 year event “will become normal in the future,” he said. “Usually, we say, ’Oh, let’s talk about the world that our grandkids will experience.’ But this is something within our lifetime.”

The new data measuring the loss of ice confirmed some of scientists’ worst fears about global warming, said James Kirkham, an ice researcher with the British Antarctic Survey who did not contribute to the new study.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The US military conducted a raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province that reportedly “killed two senior Islamic State officials” overnight. There’s no confirmation as to their identities, but a Syrian media outlet is reporting that one of them was a man named “Salah Numan” or possibly “Ali,” who may have been number two in the organization under “caliph” Abu Hafs al-Qurayshi.