World roundup: August 16-17 2025
Stories from Sudan, Russia, Bolivia, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: My apologies, but I am fighting an ear infection that makes talking—especially at length—uncomfortable, so I am going to have to beg off of our regular voiceovers until that clears up. I’ve got an medical appointment tomorrow to pitch my case for antibiotics so hopefully it won’t be too long an interruption. As always those who need the voiceover can use the Substack app’s text-to-voice feature. Thanks for your patience.
TODAY IN HISTORY
August 16, 1946: On what’s known as “Direct Action Day,” the All-India Muslim League organizes widespread protests calling for the creation of a separate Muslim state upon Britain’s departure from India. Those protests turned violent in several places, particularly in British Bengal (whose territory included modern Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal state), and that violence generally broke down along religious lines. Over about three days more than 4000 people were killed and 100,000 displaced just in Kolkata, and heavy violence continued until British authorities moved additional forces into Bengal on August 21. Debate over who bears more responsibility for this incident continues to the present day.
August 16, 1972: A rogue element within the Moroccan military attempts a coup against King Hassan II by attacking his airplane. The midair assassination attempt killed eight people but was thwarted by the king himself, who jumped on the radio and shouted “The tyrant is dead,” thereby causing the attacking aircraft to break off. Mohamed Oufkir, Moroccan defense minister and the ringleader of the coup plot, was later found dead after having suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Moroccan authorities said he’d committed suicide.
August 17, 1717: Prince Eugene of Savoy’s Habsburg army successfully concludes its month-long siege of Belgrade. The garrison finally surrendered after the Habsburg forces drove off a last-ditch Ottoman attempt to relieve the besieged city. Belgrade became a Habsburg city in the Treaty of Passarowitz the following year, but the Habsburgs were forced to give the city back to the Ottomans in the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade.
August 17, 1945: Rebel leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta issue a proclamation declaring Indonesia’s independence from the Netherlands. The proclamation kicked off the 1945-1949 Indonesian Revolution, and this date is annually commemorated as Indonesian Independence Day.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
A suicide bomber blew himself up in the city of Aleppo on Sunday. The previous day, an apparent car bomb exploded in Damascus. Apart from the Aleppo bomber there were no casualties in either incident nor to my knowledge have there been any indications as to responsibility.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli Defense Ministry reiterated on Saturday its intention to forcibly displace Palestinian civilians to southern Gaza ahead of the Israeli military’s (IDF) planned re-invasion of Gaza City. It intends to resume shipments of tents and other shelter supplies into the territory to facilitate the relocation. Several of the city’s suburbs and neighborhoods are already emptying out amid an intensified IDF bombardment over the past several days. The Israeli government is forging ahead with that plan despite massive protests over the weekend (including a general strike on Sunday) in opposition, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the country demanding a ceasefire and the return of the remaining captives being held in Gaza (as well as the bodies of those who have died while being held there). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several members of his cabinet accused the protesters of essentially acting on behalf of Hamas.
Elsewhere, the Trump administration has stopped processing visas for anyone from Gaza pending what it says will be a “a full and thorough” investigation of the practice, after right-wing internet troll Laura Loomer publicly complained about Palestinians entering the US. That includes medical visas, the main reason why anyone from Gaza would seek to travel to the United States under the circumstances. I don’t really have anything to add to this as I think the petty cruelty speaks for itself.
YEMEN
The IDF bombed a power station near Sanaa on Sunday in retaliation for the most recent Houthi missile and drone strikes targeting Israel. There’s no indication of casualties but the attack did damage the infrastructure—though the extent of that damage is unclear.
IRAN
Security forces reportedly killed seven members of the Ansar al-Furqan jihadist group in a Sunday morning raid in southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province. Ansar al-Furqan formed in 2013 as the product of a merger between two other groups. It’s one of multiple Sunni/Baluch extremist groups that operate in the region under a mixing of Sunni jihadism and Baluch separatism. Another of those groups, Jaysh al-Adl, claimed responsibility for the killing of a police officer on Saturday.
ASIA
MYANMAR
The Myanmar military reportedly killed at least 21 civilians in an airstrike on the important gem mining town of Mogok on Thursday evening. As the AP put it, this “incident was the latest in a series of frequent and deadly military airstrikes” as Myanmar’s ruling junta seeks to regain territory from the country’s various rebel groups and falls back on its air power advantage in its efforts to do so. It is at least the second such strike on Mogok, which is controlled by the Ta’ang National Liberation Army rebel group, this month.
TAIWAN
Prior to his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, Donald Trump apparently told a Fox News interviewer that Chinese President Xi Jinping told him that he “will never [attack Taiwan] as long as [Trump is] president.” He didn’t say when this supposed communication took place though the two did speak by phone in June and Trump has claimed that they spoke in April though Beijing has never confirmed that and we should probably allow for the possibility that Trump is either lying or hallucinated it. Similarly I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this claim about Taiwan though it’s newsworthy enough to simply note that he said it.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces militant group shelled the besieged city of Al-Fashir and its neighboring displaced persons camps on Saturday, killing at least 31 people in the Abu Shouk camp and at least 17 people in the city itself. The RSF has been besieging Al-Fashir, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, for over a year and periodically escalates its attacks on the city and/or the camps to weaken their defenses. The group has already taken the largest of the camps, Zamzam, displacing its residents to other camps and into Al-Fashir. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken refuge in the city and the camps after fleeing RSF violence in other parts of Darfur.
NIGER
An apparent jihadist attack killed 20 people in southwestern Niger’s Tillabéri region on Saturday. The attackers intercepted a truck conveying people from a nearby market and reportedly killed the driver and 19 male passengers. They spared two women and two other passengers were able to flee, according to a “local resident” who spoke to AFP. There’s been no claim of responsibility nor any comment from Nigerien officials.
NIGERIA
Nigerian authorities say they’ve arrested the leaders of two relatively small jihadist groups: Mahmud Muhammad Usman of Ansaru, which split from Boko Haram in 2012 and later pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda; and Mahmud al-Nigeri of Mahmuda, which apparently split off from Boko Haram more recently and has been operating in north-central Nigeria. Ansaru has not been especially active in recent years but its involvement in occasional terror attacks, particularly in northwestern Nigeria, has been speculated. Neither is anywhere near as active or capable as Islamic State West Africa Province or the original Boko Haram.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The Allied Democratic Forces jihadist group killed at least nine people in an attack on the village of Oicha in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province overnight Saturday into Sunday. ADF fighters also carried out a “series of attacks” on the North Kivu village of Bapere between Wednesday and Friday, killing over 30 people and taking more than a 100 others captive.
Elsewhere, AFP reported on Sunday that the Qatari government has submitted a new proposed peace deal to both the Congolese government and the M23 militant group. The Qatari government was supposed to have mediated a final round of negotiations between those parties over the past week, leading to the signing of an accord on Monday. Those talks never took place, but Qatari officials claim that “both parties have responded positively to the facilitator and expressed a willingness to continue negotiations.” So perhaps there’s still a chance to resume the peace process.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Whatever transpired during his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, the result was another shift in Donald Trump’s weathervane approach to the Ukraine war—this time firmly back in Russia’s direction. Most strikingly, after spending months insisting on a ceasefire—which Putin has consistently opposed—and saying that morning that he was “not going to be happy” unless he and Putin agreed on one, on Saturday he abruptly declared via social media that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.”
Now, I note this not so much to criticize Trump as to point out that by his own standards the summit failed, but rather than admit failure he simply changed his standards (without acknowledging it, of course). There’s certainly an argument to be made that abandoning his insistence on a ceasefire was the right decision considering that it was a dead end as far as Putin is concerned. Responsible Statecraft’s Anatol Lieven has made that argument, for example. A tenuous ceasefire, which is realistically all that could have been imposed in this situation, may not even be in Ukraine’s interest in the long run.
Without the ceasefire the focus shifts to negotiating a permanent peace deal—well, permanent until one or the other party decides to break it, I guess. On that front Putin made what Barak Ravid called a “maximalist” territorial demand, that Ukraine withdraw from and effectively cede the entirely of the “Donbas” region (Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts). Russian already controls most of that region but a chunk of it (almost all in Donetsk) is still in Ukrainian hands. He did offer something of a concession in return, which is that if Ukraine were to withdraw from the Donbas Russia would freeze the current front line in the two other mainland provinces it claims to have “annexed,” Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. In truth the front in those provinces has been frozen for quite some time, but Putin has in the past claimed that he will settle for nothing less than the entirety of those provinces. He may now be signaling that he’s open to giving up the parts that Ukraine still controls, though obviously that would be decided as part of the peace talks. The status of small slivers of Russian-held territory in other Ukrainian provinces—Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Sumy—is unclear to me based on what I’ve read.
The Trump administration is also claiming that Putin expressed openness to “security guarantees” for Ukraine, including an “Article 5-like” construct that would in theory offer Ukraine the same protection as if it were a NATO membership—albeit without the membership. I say “in theory” because even under a commitment like this it is very hard to imagine NATO someday going to war with Russia over Ukraine, but I digress. As far as I know the only people saying that Putin opened the door to something like this are in the US government so I would treat these reports skeptically to say the least. But if Putin did give ground on this point that could go a long way toward getting a peace deal that the Ukrainians can actually accept, even with the inevitable loss of territory.
UKRAINE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is heading to Washington on Monday for what is from his perspective an emergency damage control meeting with Trump. There is a very real possibility that if he doesn’t simply accept Putin’s demands (as Trump relays them) he’ll get another dressing down on the Oval Office couch followed by another break in US-Ukrainian relations. In hopes of preventing that outcome, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, and several European Union leaders—including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—are going to join Zelensky at the White House. On Sunday the Ukrainian leader suggested that negotiations should “start” with the current front line. He’s pushing back against Putin’s demand that Ukraine withdraw from the Donbas as a preemptive step. We’ll see if Trump is amenable to that.
In the meantime, the Russian military claimed the seizure of two more Ukrainian villages on Saturday, one in Donetsk and the other in Dnipropetrovsk.
AMERICAS
BOLIVIA
The first round of Bolivia’s presidential election produced a somewhat surprising result, though not from the perspective of the Bolivian political left. Early results show conservative senator Rodrigo Paz winning the round with just over 32 percent of the vote, with former President Jorge Quiroga in second place and joining him in an October runoff. Polling had suggested that Quiroga would wind up in a close race with businessperson Samuel Doria Medina, but he finished a fairly distant third in this preliminary tally. Medina has apparently already endorsed Paz so that should give him a significant boost heading into the second round.
Regardless of who made it to the runoff the outcome is the same a Bolivian left whose two candidates, Movement for Socialism (MAS) party nominee Eduardo del Castillo and Senate president Andrónico Rodríguez, both finished in single digits. Jacobin’s Olivia Arigho-Stiles has a piece highlighting the economic and internal reasons for the Bolivian left’s collapse and warning that a return to center-right neoliberal austerity could bring with it a wave of social unrest.
UNITED STATES
Finally, at Foreign Affairs, Colgate University’s Michael Johnston argues that Donald Trump is changing the nature of US political corruption:
Whether he is launching cryptocurrency schemes or accepting a Qatari jumbo jet or issuing pardons for the relatives of major donors, Donald Trump has drawn frequent accusations of corruption in the early months of his second term as U.S. president. Each instance of corruption raises critical concerns about misused authority, undemocratic governance, or foreign influence. But larger trends in corruption are notoriously difficult to assess. Corruption is difficult to define clearly and impossible to measure directly, since it usually happens in secret. Some corruption is legal, some is not. Some of it originates in the public sector, some in the private sector, and some in the gray areas in between.
Until recently, the United States, like most other market democracies, was generally regarded as not suffering unduly from corruption. Measures such as the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens and businesses from bribing foreign officials (and whose enforcement the Trump administration has announced plans to scale back), made Washington a global leader in anticorruption. Yet amid questions about potential ethical standards violations on the U.S. Supreme Court, the increased influence of special interests in U.S. politics, and financial scandals involving several members of Congress, that good reputation was slipping even before Trump took office for the second time. In the advocacy group Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perception Index—not a measure of corruption itself, but a barometer of how experts and businesspeople perceive a country’s corruption level—the United States tied (with Barbados, Hong Kong, and Ireland) for 17th cleanest out of 173 countries and territories, with a score of 74 out of 100 (where 100 indicates a perception of being corruption-free). By 2024, the United States had dropped down the rankings. With a score of just 65, it tied with the Bahamas for 28th place.
But the most worrisome development is not any individual decision or a change in the frequency of corruption—which, after all, remains unknowable. It is, instead, a shift in the type of corruption visible at the highest level of the U.S. government. At a moment when the United States’ institutional guardrails are eroding, the Trump administration has embraced a style of governance in which power flows directly from a single leader, creating opportunities for personal deals to drive official decisions. That sort of corruption threatens free political and economic processes and can, eventually, become integral to the way the entire system functions—making it highly resistant to reform.