World roundup: November 1-2 2025
Stories from Iran, Nigeria, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
November 1, 1922: The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, is deposed. Turkish republican leader Mustafa Kemal (who was not quite “Atatürk” yet) sought to do away with any semblance of the old imperial government before it could participate in the negotiations that eventually resulted in the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the Turkish War of Independence, so he had the Turkish assembly vote to abolish the sultanate. Legally he may not have had the power to do this, but nobody was going to stop him. Mehmed fled into exile on the Italian Riviera, while the assembly (at Allied urging) chose his cousin Abdülmecid to succeed him but only as caliph, not sultan—a purely religious office. The assembly abolished the caliphate as well in 1924.
November 1, 1955: The Vietnam War begins, at least according to the US government. Even though the Viet Cong had already begun battling the South Vietnamese government and the North Vietnamese government wouldn’t officially get involved until the following year, this is the date when the US government reorganized its Military Assistance Advisory Group for Indochina by country. The birth of “MAAG Vietnam” is considered by Washington to mark the start of the war, and when it lists US deaths in the conflict it starts the count on this date.
November 2, 1917: The Balfour Declaration is issued. In a letter to Walter Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed the British government’s support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Balfour’s letter was less committal than Rothschild and other Zionist leaders wanted, in that he did not express support for making Palestine a “Jewish state.” Nevertheless the declaration became the basis of British policy in Mandatory Palestine moving forward and is a major milestone in the eventual creation of the state of Israel.
November 2, 1964: Saudi King Saud bin Abdulaziz is ousted in an internal family coup. Saud and his brother/crown prince, Faisal, had been engaged in a power struggle since their father’s death in 1953, a struggle that Faisal really won earlier in the year when he and the rest of the ruling family stripped Saud of his authority and forced him to name Faisal as his regent. Saud’s mismanagement of the country, along with concerns that he was losing the “Arab Cold War” to Gamal Abdel Nasser and republicanism, led to his marginalization and ultimately removal from power. Finally in November the ruling family officially deposed Saud and made Faisal king.
INTERNATIONAL
The eight core members of the OPEC+ bloc agreed on Sunday to another small increase in global oil production, but this time with a catch. The governments of Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman, Russia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia will collectively boost production by another 137,000 barrels per day in December, but are then planning to freeze production at that level for at least three months. With most crude prices somewhere in the $60s/barrel range it seems The Gang has decided that it’s time to slow down their production spree. Of course they could revisit that decision if conditions change.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani told the audience at the annual “Manama Dialogue” security conference on Sunday that his boss, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, will visit Washington sometime this month. An anonymous US official had already told the AP the previous day that the US government is tentatively planning to host Sharaa on November 10. Assuming that nothing interrupts those plans, Sharaa will have the distinction of being the first Syrian president (and, as far as I know, the first former al-Qaeda figure) to be feted at the White House. If Donald Trump has any thoughts about turning Sharaa in for the $10 million bounty the US once had out on him, he should know that Joe Biden rescinded that payout back in December. Better luck next time I guess.
Sharaa is expected to arrive in DC seeking financial support and sanctions relief. He’s likely to sign some sort of formal commitment to joining the anti-Islamic State coalition, but there’s no indication that he’s ready to join the “Abraham Accords” though I’m sure Trump would like that.
LEBANON
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened an intensification of military strikes in Lebanon on Sunday, while accusing President Joseph Aoun of “dragging his feet” with respect to disarming Hezbollah. The previous day the Israeli military (IDF) carried out an airstrike in southern Lebanon that killed at least four people, all (according to Israeli officials) members of Hezbollah’s “Radwan” special forces element. It doesn’t seem to occur to Israeli officials that the objective of disarming Hezbollah is made considerably more difficult both politically and practically when the IDF won’t stop bombing Lebanon. Or maybe it does and they just don’t care.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
There are a few items to cover:
The IDF continued its low level non-ceasefire in Gaza through the weekend, bombarding the Khan Younis region on Saturday and killing at least one person in a drone strike in northern Gaza on Sunday (his crime was apparently approaching the “yellow line” that is the boundary of IDF-occupied Gaza). Settler violence also seems to be continuing apace during the West Bank’s olive harvesting season.
The government media office in Gaza said on Saturday that it tallied the entry of 3203 commercial and humanitarian trucks into the territory from the onset of the ceasefire on October 10 through the end of the month. That’s about 145 trucks per day, less than a quarter of the 600 trucks per day that are supposed to be entering Gaza according to the ceasefire agreement, and a substantial portion of those trucks were carrying commercial products that most people in Gaza cannot afford. The continued blocking of aid also means that little to no shelter materials are getting into the territory with winter approaching.
The US military’s Central Command has released what it says is drone footage of Hamas militants looting an aid truck in Khan Younis on Friday. We’re supposed to take CENTCOM’s word for it, I guess, as no aid organization appears to have come forward to confirm that any such incident took place. On Sunday Hamas rejected the allegation, calling it “part of an attempt to justify the further reduction of already limited humanitarian aid, while covering up the international community’s failure to end the blockade and starvation imposed on civilians in Gaza.” It may be worth noting that the United Nations said on Friday that it had seen a “significant decline” in looting from the start of the ceasefire through October 28.
The Israeli government is reportedly considering a proposal to open corridors through which the Red Cross/Red Crescent society would evacuate any Hamas fighters who are still on the Israeli side of the “yellow line.” Hamas already appears to be on board with the idea, which was advanced by mediators. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of two main pockets of Hamas forces in IDF-held territory, in Khan Younis and Rafah. This plan would involve driving Red Cross/Red Crescent vehicles into those areas and using them to transport the fighters outside of the “yellow line.”
The Israeli government confirmed that it received the remains of three more Gaza captives on Sunday, though I don’t believe it had yet identified them at time of writing. The remains of three people received by the Israelis on Saturday turned out not to have belonged to any of the captives, though Israeli officials don’t seem to have made as big a deal out of this incident as they did with a similar one on Tuesday.
IRAN
Iranian media is reporting that the main drinking water supply to the city of Tehran may run out within two weeks. The Amir Kabir Dam’s reservoir is apparently at just 8 percent capacity or 14 million cubic meters of water, and while there are four other reservoirs that supply water to the Iranian capital one imagines that they’re running dry as well. Iran and its neighbors are experiencing one of the worst droughts ever recorded in that region, which is exacerbating water shortages caused by mismanagement, and with its large population Tehran has been especially hard hit.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
The Pakistani government reopened the country’s border with Afghanistan on Saturday for the first time since the two countries came to blows last month, but only in a very limited manner. Authorities opened the Torkham checkpoint in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on the Pakistani side only, and only to allow stranded Afghan nationals to return home. This may be the result of Thursday’s semi-successful ceasefire talks in Istanbul, though it’s hard to say. One assumes that Pakistani officials would have wanted those Afghans out of the country regardless of the current state of negotiations.
CHINA
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has been making preparations that should allow it to weather the latest US sanctions against Russia:
China has spent months building up its oil reserves. That might come in handy in the wake of the new sanctions the U.S. recently imposed on Russian crude.
During the first nine months of the year, the world’s second-largest economy imported on average more than 11 million barrels of oil a day, an amount above the daily production of Saudi Arabia, according to official customs data. Analysts estimate 1 million to 1.2 million of those barrels were stashed in reserves each day.
Low oil prices and concern over Ukraine’s repeated attacks on Russia’s production facilities help explain the timing of the buying spree, which accelerated in March. China is the world’s biggest importer of crude and the largest buyer of Russian oil.
It’s unclear how much effect those sanctions will have on Chinese purchasing habits, as Beijing does most of its business with Russia in yuan rather than dollars, and it’s gotten pretty good at minimizing exposure to US sanctions in general. But one interesting effect of all of this extra oil buying has been to prop up oil prices and somewhat offset recent OPEC+ production increases (see above). Prices have dropped somewhat over the past several months, but the drop has probably been smaller than it might otherwise have been given those production hikes.
AFRICA
SUDAN
AFP reports that the situation in Al-Fashir continues to be extremely dire:
Survivors fleeing the Sudanese city of El-Fasher told AFP on Saturday that paramilitary fighters separated families and killed children in front of their parents, with tens of thousands still trapped following the city’s fall.
Germany‘s top diplomat Johann Wadephul described on Saturday the situation in Sudan as “apocalyptic” while fresh satellite images suggested mass killings were likely ongoing, five days after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces seized El-Fasher.
At war with the regular army since April 2023, the RSF pushed the military out of its last stronghold in the vast Darfur region after a grinding 18-month siege.
Since the takeover, reports have emerged of summary executions, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions, while communications remain largely cut off.
NIGERIA
Donald Trump took to social media on Saturday to threaten an invasion, I guess, of Nigeria, “if the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians.” Trump added that the US “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities” and “if we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” He threatened to cut US aid to Nigeria and said that he was “hereby instructing our [Defense Department] to prepare for possible action.” That action could be limited to airstrikes but Trump indicated on Sunday that he hasn’t ruled out deploying ground forces to Nigeria.
I suppose a bit of context is in order here, though Alex Thurston is writing something more comprehensive on this for FX that I hope will be out soon. Basically it’s been an article of dogma for several years in certain religious right circles that there’s a genocide of Christians happening in Nigeria. The main perpetrators are jihadists, but in some tellings of this myth they’re colluding with Muslim Nigerian leaders, in particular former President Muhammadu Buhari. The actual facts, which are more or less irrelevant to the narrative, are that Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province primarily operate in Muslim majority parts of Nigeria and the brunt of their violence is directed at Nigerian Muslims, though those groups do employ anti-Christian rhetoric. The religious right types also conflate the ongoing conflict between predominantly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farmers in central Nigeria as a facet of this supposed “genocide,” though that is in reality a conflict over resources in which the Christian communities are often (though certainly not always) aggressors rather than victims.
The “genocide” myth surfaced on a recent episode of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, pushed by its host—a man who I’m fairly confident knows less about Nigeria than I know about hosting a comedy interview show on paid cable. That may be how Trump came to hear of it, though given his lack of an attention span he must have heard or seen something in the past few days to explain Saturday’s outburst. The Nigerian government, which unsurprisingly seems to have been caught totally off guard, is now saying that it would “welcome US assistance” against the jihadists but only so long as it respects Nigerian sovereignty, while denying that there’s any sort of “genocide” happening involving the country’s Christian population.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Ukrainian military’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) is claiming that its forces destroyed Russia’s Koltsevoy pipeline, located near Moscow, in an operation that took place on Friday night. If true this could be a significant development, as that pipeline supplies gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel to the Russian military. There’s no indication as to the extent of the attack aside from what Ukrainian officials have claimed.
UKRAINE
In Ukraine, meanwhile, Russian airstrikes killed at least nine people on Saturday including at least two children. The main locus of fighting on the ground continues to be the eastern city of Pokrovsk, which Ukrainian military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed in a Saturday social media post that his forces are still “holding” while undertaking “a comprehensive operation to destroy and dislodge enemy forces.” Open source mapping indicates that Russian forces have seized a foothold in southern Pokrovsk but the rest of the city remains contested. The Russian military is claiming that its forces killed every member of a Ukrainian special forces unit that deployed to the city on Friday, but Ukrainian officials have denied that claim.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, the US military summarily executed three more alleged drug traffickers in another alleged drug boat in the Caribbean on Saturday. This is the 15th such strike that the Pentagon has conducted since early September and marks 64 murders it’s committed in those strikes. The Intercept’s Nick Turse reports that Trump administration officials are now admitting that they’re killing people on the basis of “evidence” that wouldn’t be sufficient to arrest them:
The Trump administration has made a series of startling admissions about the people it is killing in its undeclared war against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Trump officials acknowledged in separate briefings provided to lawmakers and staffers on Thursday that they do not know the identities of the victims of their strikes, and that the War Department cannot meet the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or try survivors of the attacks. Such victims who find themselves in the water are now deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a murky designation under international humanitarian law.
Since September 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 civilians. The Trump administration insists the slayings are permissible because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. Two government officials told The Intercept that the administration secretly declared a “non-international armed conflict” weeks if not months before the first attack of the campaign.
Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.
Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.
US Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on Friday that “administration officials” are arguing that they have the authority to kill anyone “affiliated” with cartels that Donald Trump has designated as terrorist organizations. But they won’t define the parameters around the term “affiliated,” which taken to an extreme conclusion suggests that they feel they can manufacture a case for murdering just about anybody. I doubt, at the very least, that they’re going to stop with the boaters.