World roundup: April 21 2023

Stories from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Argentina, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 21, 43 BC: In the followup to April 14’s Battle of Forum Gallorum, Mark Antony’s army is again defeated by a consular army led by Aulus Hirtius with the support of Octavia at the Battle of Mutina. Antony decided after this defeat to lift his siege of Mutina, which he’d ostensibly undertaken in order to kill its governor, Decimus Brutus, who was one of Julius Caesar’s assassins. He set about amassing a huge army of Caesarian loyalists. Decimus Brutus wound up fleeing east to join Brutus and Cassius, but was captured and killed by allies of Antony on the way. Conveniently for Octavian, Hirtius died during the battle, and when his fellow consul Pansa died the following day of wounds suffered at Forum Gallorum, Octavian was left to claim credit for the victory uncontested. The newly empowered Octavian soon turned on the Senate and later allied with Antony under the framework of the Second Triumvirate.

April 21, 1526: An army led by a Timurid prince named Babur defeats the Lodi Sultanate at Panipat and lays the foundation for the Mughal dynasty.

April 21, 1802 (probably): A Saudi-Wahhabi army/mob sacks the city of Karbala.

INTERNATIONAL

In today’s global news:

• Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.

• The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.

• The World Meteorological Organization reported on Friday that global sea levels are rising at fully twice the annual rate at which they rose from 1993-2002, the first decade for which such data was collected. Melting glaciers and rising ocean temperatures (water expands as it gets warmer) are the main contributors. And there’s now so much carbon in the atmosphere that those glaciers will continue to melt and those ocean temperatures will continue to rise for millennia.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman reports on another Syrian normalization call that, in this case, is coming from inside the house:

As Arab governments and Turkey seek to mend fences with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the country’s Kurds have unveiled a new initiative to make peace with Damascus, saying that Western governments opposed to normalization should not stand in their way.

In a nine-point declaration made public on Tuesday, the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) affirmed its commitment to Syria’s territorial integrity and said that it was ready to “meet and hold dialogue with the Syrian government and all Syrian parties for consultations and discussions to provide initiatives to find a solution to the Syrian crisis.” It emphasized that such efforts would not be at odds with floundering UN-led efforts to end the conflict. However, the document emphasized that “the solution to the Syrian crisis must be sought inside the country” — in other words, the Syrian Kurds would not be taking their cues from Western governments. Those lines were clearly intended for Assad, who accused the Kurds during a visit to the Kremlin last month of “working for a foreign power” and labeled them “traitors” and “collaborators.”

As Zaman notes, Syrian Kurds have been negotiating on and off with the Syrian government for a few years now, to no avail probably because Damascus has almost all the leverage in that process and therefore has little need to concede anything of substance. Kurdish leaders have surely figured out by now, given the historical relationship between the US and Kurdish groups in the region and given Washington’s response to Turkey’s various incursions into northern Syria, that if or when the US is forced to choose between them and Turkey it will choose Turkey. This public statement may have been intended to send a message to the US as well as to Damascus, but we’re past the point where I think it’s reasonable to expect the US to take a harder line on Turkish operations. Syrian Kurds don’t have any good options here, but making the best possible deal with Damascus may be the least bad one.