World roundup: August 11-12 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

August 11, 1473: The Ottoman Empire decisively defeats the Aqquyunlu (“White Sheep”) Turkoman confederation in the Battle of Otlukbeli. The Aqquyunlu at its height controlled most of modern Iraq and parts of modern Iran, the southern Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia. It was in eastern Anatolia where its expansion and the Ottomans’ expansion ran into one another. Aqquyunlu leader Uzun Hasan made an alliance with Venice, which was at war with the Ottomans in the Mediterranean and promised to send firearms to the Aqquyunlu if they forced the Ottomans to fight a second war on their eastern front. The Aqquyunlu kept up their end of the bargain but the guns never arrived and the “war” was over after a single major engagement.

August 11, 1492: A papal enclave, the first ever held in the Sistine Chapel, elects Cardinal Rodrigo de Borja as Pope Alexander VI. Borja effectively bought the office, promising Cardinal Ascanio Sforza the position of vice-chancellor and allegedly distributing a variety of other goodies to him and several other cardinals in exchange for their support. Alexander was the patriarch of the infamous Borgia family, whose corruption and depravity (at least some of it exaggerated by their detractors, many of whom were as offended by Borja’s Spanish roots as by any of his family’s alleged crimes) became the stuff of legend.

August 12, 1099: In the final, anticlimactic battle of the First Crusade, the Crusader army routs a Fatimid army at Ascalon. The victory sparked a Fatimid retreat that secured the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem, but the exhausted and constantly bickering knights failed to take Ascalon itself.

August 12, 1121: Georgian King David IV defeats a much larger army sent by the Seljuk Sultanate at the Battle of Didgori. The Georgian victory helped secure a measure of independence from the Seljuks.

August 12, 1687: The retreating Ottomans suffer a decisive defeat to the pursuing Habsburgs at the (second) Battle of Mohács in what is today southern Hungary. Just as the first Battle of Mohács, in 1526, led to the Ottoman conquest of much of Hungary, this battle signaled their departure from central Europe altogether. The Habsburg victory allowed them to reconstitute Hungary under their rule and to push into the Balkans and parts of modern Romania.

The Battle of Mohács in 1687, painted in 1837 by Hungarian artist József Borsos (Wikimedia Commons)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Another clash between government security forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces group left at least one soldier dead on Tuesday. This latest incident comes after the Syrian government pulled out of a planned conference with the SDF that was supposed to have taken place in Paris. Government and SDF officials did meet in Damascus on Tuesday but the prospects for advancing the March agreement that was supposed to lead to the SDF’s incorporation into the Syrian state don’t appear to be especially good. Each side has taken to accusing the other of repeatedly attacking its forces across northern and northeastern Syria.

Elsewhere, Axios is reporting that the Trump administration is trying to broker a deal between the Israeli and Syrian governments whereby they would open a “humanitarian corridor” from Israel to the southern Syrian city of Suwayda. Conditions in that city are deteriorating as residents and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights allege that the Syrian government has “besieged” it. The Israeli government seems to be on board with this idea but Syrian officials have reportedly expressed concern that the corridor could be used to bring in weapons. The administration is hoping that a successful negotiation here could mark a step toward normalizing Israeli-Syrian relations.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

There are a few items of note:

• The Israeli military (IDF) has reportedly intensified its bombardment of Gaza City in preparation for its forthcoming incursion, though it’s unclear as yet when that’s going to take place. Two anonymous Israeli “officials” told Reuters that the operation might not begin until October, though the rationale they offered for the delay—allowing plenty of time for Palestinian civilians to evacuate the city ahead of time—doesn’t ring particularly true. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously said he was ordering the IDF to speed up its timetable for an incursion, which he claims will “end the war.” It may be worth noting, as Reuters does, that Netanyahu made similar pronouncements prior to the IDF’s incursion into Rafah in April 2024 and yet the “war” (his term) is ongoing.

• There is some possibility that Netanyahu is hoping that the threat of the Gaza City incursion will force Hamas to accept his terms for a ceasefire. At any rate work on a ceasefire is continuing, with Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya reportedly headed to Cairo on Tuesday for that purpose. After reorienting the talks around an “all or nothing” proposal, AFP reported on Tuesday that mediators have returned to their previous 60 day phased framework, which may be easier to conceptualize in short order but also brings back the problem that Hamas wants assurances that the initial phase will lead into an indefinite ceasefire and the Israeli government isn’t willing to countenance that. That said, Netanyahu told Israeli media on Tuesday that he’s no longer interested in a staged ceasefire and that the “all or nothing” framework is the only one under consideration.

• The reason Netanyahu won’t countenance an indefinite ceasefire is because he’s still envisioning the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He reiterated his willingness to “allow” civilians to leave the territory on Tuesday, as ever framing the decision to go as a voluntary choice between departing Gaza or staying while Netanyahu and the IDF do everything they can to make the territory unlivable. The AP reported on Tuesday that Netanyahu’s government is in talks with its counterpart in South Sudan about resettling Palestinians there. In this scenario not only would the expulsion from Gaza be a crime against humanity, but dumping people in another war-torn famine zone would likely amount to a second crime against humanity.

• Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Monday that his government will recognize a Palestinian state during the United Nations General Assembly session in September. The government of New Zealand is apparently considering a similar step. As usual these recognitions of statehood are likely to be followed up by absolutely nothing whatsoever, making them symbolically significant and practically meaningless.

• A bit more significant is the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s announcement this week that it has sold its holdings in at least 11 Israeli firms. These appear to be firms that have ties to the IDF and this move does not represent a general divestment from Israeli companies. The fund is still invested in at least 50 of them, and while it also says that it will continue to review its Israeli investments its deputy CEO, Trond Grande, insisted on Tuesday that it will continue to invest in Israel.

I spoke with Al Jazeera journalist Mohammad Alsaafin about the situation in Gaza for American Prestige earlier today. You can listen to that interview, which covers a lot of ground, here.

IRAN

International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director-general Massimo Aparo visited Iran on Monday, marking the agency’s first high-level interaction with Tehran since the Iranian government suspended ties with it after the “12 Day War.” It doesn’t appear that his visit accomplished very much but it was mostly intended to restore some basic contact between the agency and Iranian officials and in that sense it was presumably successful.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

Unspecified militants killed at least nine soldiers in a clash in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province on Tuesday. The Pakistani military also claimed on Tuesday that its forces had killed some 50 militants near the Afghan border in the same province over the previous four days. There’s no confirmation of this and here too the identity of the militants is unclear. Pakistani officials apparently characterized them as Islamists, which suggests Pakistani Taliban or some related group, though Baluch separatists also operate in that region. Coincidentally the US government designated the most prominent of the latter, the Baluch Liberation Army, as a foreign terrorist organization on Monday. And Pakistani authorities are also saying that they’ve undertaken a new operation against Pakistani Taliban militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, though I haven’t seen any details beyond that.

MYANMAR

The UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar has compiled “significant evidence” of “systematic torture in Myanmar detention facilities,” according to team leader Nicholas Koumjian. That torture reportedly includes “beatings, electric shocks, strangulation and fingernail removal with pliers,” leading in some cases to death, and also includes the detention of children who are “often detained unlawfully as proxies for their missing parents.” The IIMM has apparently found evidence of torture practiced by rebel factions as well as by the country’s military government.

THAILAND

Thai officials are once again accusing the Cambodian military of mining the border between the two countries, after another Thai soldier was wounded by an explosive device on Tuesday. That’s the second such incident in a matter of days—three Thai soldiers were wounded by an explosive device while on patrol along the border over the weekend. The Thai army invoked its right to self-defense in a statement reacting to Tuesday’s blast, which should raise concerns about another round of cross-border violence despite the ceasefire that’s currently in place.

CHINA

The US and Chinese governments have agreed to extend their current tariff agreement for at least another 90 days. The two countries had agreed to an initial 90 day tariff reduction back in May, slashing rates from 145 percent on Chinese products entering the US and 125 percent on US products entering China to 30 and 10 percent, respectively. But they’ve so far been unable to reach a more durable trade accord and that 90 day reduction was set to expire on Tuesday. There’s not much reason to expect that they’ll be able to iron out a deal by the end of this extension period either.

AFRICA

SUDAN

Rapid Support Forces militants attacked the Abu Shouk displaced persons camp in Sudan’s North Darfur state on Monday, killing at least 40 people according to the Emergency Response Room activist group. The RSF has been besieging the state capital, Al-Fashir, and the displaced persons camps surrounding it for months now. Famine in Abu Shouk and the other facilities, caused by the siege and its restrictions on humanitarian aid, has now spread into the city itself.

LIBYA

“Libyan National Army” commander Khalifa Haftar has appointed his son, Saddam, as his second in command, according to a statement from the LNA General Command. Saddam Haftar had been serving as commander of the LNA’s ground forces and he’s increasingly taken on the role of meeting with foreign dignitaries on his father’s behalf. His promotion sets him up as Khalifa Haftar’s unquestioned successor as LNA boss and highlights the extent to which the LNA, and the eastern Libyan government that it serves/controls, is a family business. Haftar’s other sons have also seen their prominence rise within various parts of that government.

SOMALIA

The leader of the unrecognized Somaliland government, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, is reportedly heading to the US soon to pitch his case for recognition to the Trump administration. Donald Trump has suggested that he could be convinced to recognize Somaliland’s independence if its government were to do a favor for him—specifically, if it agrees to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza by taking in displaced Palestinians. Somaliland officials have welcomed his openness to recognition though as far as I can tell they’ve stayed conspicuously quiet about the Gaza piece of that equation (at least publicly). Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and is already functionally independent, has been frequently mentioned as a possible destination for expelled Palestinians.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Congolese government and M23 militant group were supposed to open a final round of peace talks in Qatar on Friday with an eye toward signing an agreement on August 18. It’s now Tuesday and neither party has a negotiating team in Qatar so clearly that plan has fallen apart. Instead they are accusing one another of multiple violations of the statement of principles they each signed last month. Congolese officials have accused M23 of carrying out near-daily attacks on military positions in the eastern DRC over the past couple of weeks and M23 has accused the government of deploying more soldiers and conducting major troop movements in the region, as well as failing to undertake a prisoner release that was stipulated in the July statement.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration on Tuesday blacklisted the Pareco-FF militant group over alleged illicit coltan mining in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province between 2022 and 2024. The group, which is opposed to M23, controlled the Rubaya coltan mining complex during that period. The administration also blacklisted the mining firm CDMC for allegedly facilitating the sale of coltan from Pareco-FF’s mines. M23 currently controls Rubaya, which according to Al Jazeera “produces 15 to 30 percent of the world’s supply of coltan.”

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Diplomatic’s Laura Rozen reports that the Trump administration is now “lowering expectations” for Donald Trump’s Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin:

The White House and State Department today sought to lower expectations for the summit between US President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, to a “listening” exercise and not a “negotiation.”

But the point of lowering expectations from the Trump administration’s perspective may be to exceed them.

“I would feel quite confident saying that there won’t be a meeting unless there’s something substantive to agree to at this point,” Russia expert Thomas Graham said on a Council on Foreign Relations virtual meeting August 7.

Comments from the State Department and White House seem intended to calm speculation that Trump and Putin might hash out a resolution to the war in Ukraine without any Ukrainian input. But Trump himself has been quite open about his feeling that any peace deal will require Ukraine to forfeit territory to Russia. He’s tried to frame it in more equitable terms, explaining to reporters on Monday that “there’ll be some land swapping going on.” Calling it “land swapping” is pretty misleading, because what he means is that he expects Ukraine to cede Ukrainian land to Russia and Russia to cede…Ukrainian land back to Ukraine. While that may be realistic, given the state of the conflict, it’s not really much of a “swap.”

UKRAINE

Ukrainian officials have unsurprisingly rejected formally ceding territory to Russia and the prospect is daunting for many reasons. Even if Trump were to whittle Putin’s claims down to just the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts), giving up that region would exact a heavy economic toll on Ukraine and would give the Russian military a valuable perch from which to launch its next invasion—and without any Ukrainian security guarantees, a “next invasion” would likely be coming at some point. Politically the idea of surrendering territory is exceedingly unpopular among Ukrainians and it also happens to violate the Ukrainian constitution. It would surely cost Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his job and he should probably consider himself lucky if that’s all he loses.

On the ground, meanwhile, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday that the Russian military appears to have broken through Ukrainian defensive lines near the mining town of Dobropillia in Donetsk oblast. If the Russians are able to exploit that breakthrough to take significant territory it will undoubtedly change the complexion of Friday’s summit and could render the question of whether or not Ukraine will give up the rest of Donetsk in a peace deal irrelevant.

AMERICAS

BOLIVIA

Bolivian voters will head to the polls on Sunday for a general election that includes the first round of the country’s presidential election. That contest is expected to be significant inasmuch as it’s likely that a right-wing candidate will win for the first time since Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia’s 2005 election. Neither Morales nor incumbent President Luis Arce is on the ballot and their personal feud, along with Bolivia’s economic struggles, seems to have brought down the entire left field. The candidate of their Movement for Socialism (MAS) party, Eduardo del Castillo, is polling in the low single digits. Another prominent leftist and one-time Morales ally, Senate president Andrónico Rodríguez, is polling in the high single digits. Morales, who was barred from running for what would have been a fourth term, has been calling on his supporters to vote “null” as a way to discredit the election altogether. Polling indicates that businessperson Samuel Doria Medina and former President Jorge Quiroga, both conservatives, will wind up heading to a runoff in October.

VENEZUELA

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs’ William Camacaro looks at the Trump administration’s latest attempt to hype up a drug war justification for ousting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro:

The most recent and series of attacks against the Bolivarian Revolution began with a press release by the U.S. Treasury Department on July 25 of this year. Titled “Treasury Sanctions Venezuelan Cartel Headed by Maduro,” the release designated the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” as a terrorist entity and named President Maduro as its head. It further pointed to his alleged relationships with both the Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel, and accused them of being “violent narco-terrorists.” A few days later President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to prepare options for the possible use of U.S. military force against drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations authorizing military intervention in countries with drug trafficking. This came weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of being the head of the “Cartel of the Suns.” In a further escalation, Rubio stated that the recent designation of the “Cartel of the Suns” as a “terrorist organization” now provides a pretext for Washington to use military and intelligence tools against Maduro and his allies.

All of these accusations sound very ominous, but there is no evidence for them. This narco-mythology is viewed by some political analysts as political cover for eventual attacks on not only Venezuela but also its regional allies like Nicaragua, Cuba, and Bolivia. For this reason Venezuelan security forces have issued strong statements of loyalty and defiance in the face of threats from the North. The Trump administration is doubling a reward to $50 million for the arrest of President Maduro, accusing him of being one of the world’s largest drug traffickers and working with cartels to flood the U.S. with fentanyl-laced cocaine. Historically, rewards of this magnitude for political leaders are rare. The first similar historical case was the reward for the apprehension of Pancho Villa after his raid on Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916. The reward for Pancho Villa was $5,000, while a smaller reward of $1,000 was offered for his lieutenants. More recently, the State Department formalized its “Rewards for Justice” program in 1984. Its first high-profile case was Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989, accused of drug trafficking. The reward for Saddam Hussein in 2003 was $25 million.

UNITED STATES

Finally, as you may have heard, Donald Trump has decided to federalize law enforcement in Washington DC, deploying National Guard troops to deal with what he insists is a skyrocketing violent crime rate in the city. DC’s violent crime rate is actually declining but why let the facts get in the way, etc. The Intercept’s Nick Turse has more on an act with a pretty dubious historical precedent:

The timeline for the troop deployment is hazy. According to a memorandum Trump issued on Monday, National Guard troops will remain deployed until the president determines “that conditions of law and order have been restored.”

Justice Department figures show violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.

“If we look at both practically the way the Trump administration is using the military around the country and also formally, in what they are asserting about their authority — the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military.

“The last person to assert that sort of boundless authority to deploy the military domestically and use it for law enforcement in this country was King George,” he told The Intercept, referencing King George III who lost the American Revolution.