World roundup: August 26 2025
Stories from Iran, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 26, 1071: A Seljuk army inflicts a crushing defeat on Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV near the city of Manzikert. Arguably one of the most decisive battles in history, Manzikert and the imperial political chaos that followed allowed the Seljuks to pierce the Byzantine Empire’s Anatolian heartland. Although it survived (more or less) for nearly another 400 years, the empire never fully recovered. Manzikert is also important as the seminal event leading to the formation of the Crusading movement.
August 26, 1922: The Turkish army begins what’s known as its “Great Offensive,” the final push to oust an occupying Greek army from Anatolia. The offensive was successful and brought the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War, itself a theater of the larger Turkish War of Independence, to a victorious (from Turkey’s perspective) conclusion.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
An Israeli military (IDF) airstrike killed one person in the occupied Golan region on Tuesday. As far as I know Israeli officials haven’t commented on the strike though they certainly acknowledge operating at will in southern Syria. The Syrian government did comment, saying that the strike and the IDF’s other operations “constitute a flagrant violation of the UN Charter, international law, and relevant Security Council resolutions, and constitute a direct threat to peace and security in the region.” Reporting earlier this week suggested that the Syrian and Israeli governments were close to agreeing on a security arrangement for southern Syria but it’s unclear what that will look like if it does come to pass.
Syrian state TV reported early Wednesday morning that IDF drone strikes had killed at least six soldiers in the “Damascus countryside.” Details beyond that were not available at time of writing.
LEBANON
During another visit to Lebanon on Tuesday, US envoy Thomas Barrack told reporters that the Lebanese government will be announcing its plan for disarming Hezbollah on Sunday. Possibly they’re hoping to sneak it in there while Hezbollah members are preoccupied with the organization’s annual Labor Day cookout. According to Barrack discussions within the Lebanese government are focused on peaceful tools that they might use “to convince Hezbollah to give up those arms” voluntarily, which would presumably include economic incentives for individual Hezbollah personnel and perhaps some path toward continued political relevance for the organization as a whole. Left unsaid is whether the government has any plan for proceeding if it makes its peaceful disarmament proposal to Hezbollah and the organization says “no thanks.”
Barrack won a lot of respect and admiration during his press conference when he chided the assembled reporters, who were attempting to ask questions, to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic.” He’s a really classy guy.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
There are a few items to mention:
Officials in Gaza reported at least 75 people killed over the previous 24 hours at “midday” on Tuesday, including 17 aid seekers. At least three people died of malnutrition over that period. Israeli forces are reportedly advancing deeper into Gaza City, forcing mass evacuations ahead of their approach. The IDF wounded at least 58 people during an unusual daytime raid in the city of Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israeli officials claimed that the operation “targeted money exchanges linked to Hamas.” Israeli raids like this in the West Bank typically take place overnight or in the predawn hours.
A preliminary IDF investigation into Monday’s “double-tap” strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital determined, and I promise I am not making this up, that the target was “a Hamas camera position.” That doesn’t explain why the IDF struck the facility a second time as rescue workers were beginning to respond to the initial attack, but why get hung up on details? The IDF says it can’t yet explain who decided that destroying a camera was worth bombing a hospital and killing more than 20 people or how they could have possibly come to that conclusion. Hamas called the Israeli justification “baseless,” and I think there is a strong possibility that the “camera” in question was actually being used to stream live video to foreign media outlets like Reuters. After the camera story generated a fair amount of pushback the IDF subsequently claimed that the hospital strike (or one of them, at least) killed six “militants,” though Hamas is insisting that there were no “militants” in the facility and claims that at least two of the six people on the IDF’s list were killed elsewhere.
Israeli media is speculating that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will simply “ignore” the ceasefire proposal that Hamas accepted last week. He’s already signaled that he’s no longer interested in a phased agreement so this wouldn’t be terribly surprising, though later in the week he did also appear to green light a resumption of negotiations. That may turn out to be an empty gesture.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing “Arab officials,” that the Egyptian government is training potentially thousands of Palestinian Authority police personnel to serve as the primary security force in a “post-Hamas” Gaza. This appears to confirm reporting from The Cradle and other outlets earlier this month based on somewhat more speculative comments from Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty. Other Arab states are apparently involved in this effort, specifically Jordan and some of the Gulf states (though the UAE is demanding that the PA “reform” before it gets involved). The Israeli government has on several occasions rejected any PA role in administering Gaza, so it would likely have to be pressured (by the US) into going along with this idea.
IRAN
Tuesday’s meeting in Geneva between representatives of the Iranian government and the “E3” (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) did not produce a new nuclear accord, nor did they end with an agreement to extend the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and thereby forestall the reimposition of United Nations sanctions on Iran. Instead the Iranian delegation reportedly reiterated its stance that a) the E3 states have no right to reimpose those sanctions and b) Iran will respond “harshly” if they do. The parties did agree to keep talking, so that’s something, but the E3 is still threatening to invoke the 2015 deal’s “snapback” mechanism by the end of August unless there’s some movement toward a new accord.
There may be a consensus emerging around a six month extension of the 2015 deal, which will otherwise expire in October, to allow time for more negotiations. The Russian government, which is also party to the current accord along with the E3 and China and whose support would be necessary to approve an extension, seems to be amenable to that idea. In the meantime, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi announced shortly after the Geneva meeting that a new team of IAEA nuclear inspectors had arrived in Iran for the first time since July, when the Iranian government expelled the organization in the wake of the “12 Day War.” The resumption of IAEA inspections should help ease tensions around the state of Iran’s nuclear program and could facilitate the aforementioned extension as well as a new round of talks. Whether or not the US would be involved remains an open question.
Speaking of Grossi, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he’s receiving “round-the-clock protection” from Austria’s elite EKO Cobra police tactical unit due to “a specific threat…from Iran-linked individuals.” Details beyond that are unclear. Iranian officials have accused Grossi of providing justification for the Israeli government to undertake the “12 Day War” via the drafting of “baseless” and alarmist (that’s how the Iranians characterize them) reports about the state of Iran’s nuclear program and its cooperation (or lack thereof) with the IAEA.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Officials in Pakistan’s Punjab province have been forced to evacuate tens of thousands of people due to heavy flooding, after the Indian government released a significant amount of water from its upstream dams. Heavy monsoon rains had left rivers and streams in India overflowing their banks. What’s noteworthy about this is that rather than simply release the water and let the Pakistani government deal with the consequences, Indian officials actually notified Islamabad ahead of time. According to the AP this marks “the first public diplomatic contact between [the Indian and Pakistani governments] in months,” presumably going back to their brief military clash over Kashmir back in May.
MYANMAR
AFP is reporting, based on witness accounts, that a military airstrike hit the town of Mrauk U in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state on Monday night, killing at least 12 people. Residents of Rakhine are increasingly struggling with food shortages as the country’s ruling junta has largely cut the region off as it tries to battle the Arakan Army rebel group.
SOUTH KOREA
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung visited the White House for a summit with Donald Trump on Monday that seems, somewhat surprisingly, to have gone fairly well:
The day began ominously for Mr. Lee and his delegation. Mr. Trump rattled them with a social media post hours before the meeting. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there,” he wrote.
It was a shock to the visitors, who scrambled to figure out what Mr. Trump’s cryptic posting meant. It turned out that he was channeling a conspiracy theory from the far right in South Korea that accuses Mr. Lee of undermining the alliance with Washington, and persecuting Christian churches.
Mr. Lee left for Washington with a load of thorny issues weighing on him. The two sides still had to agree to the granular details of a trade deal. And Mr. Trump had demanded that South Korea spend more on its own military, pay more for U.S. troops stationed on its soil and buy more American weapons.
Mr. Trump repeated those demands in the Oval Office, but Mr. Lee was quick to heap praise on Mr. Trump. He called him a global peacemaker and stoked his interest in restarting peace talks with [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un].
Who could have predicted, really, but Lee’s flattery worked. Trump bragged about his relationship with Kim and eventually walked back his troubling post. As far as either of them engaging in any sort of diplomacy with Kim, so far the messaging out of Pyongyang on that front has been decidedly negative—but that could certainly change.
OCEANIA
AUSTRALIA
The Australian government expelled Iranian ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi and three other officials on Tuesday after determining that Tehran had orchestrated “two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne” last year, on a kosher restaurant and a synagogue respectively. They were given seven days to leave the country. Canberra is also planning to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. The Iranian government does have a record of engaging in covert activities in hostile countries, as The Guardian was quick to point out. That said, it’s unclear what Tehran would have had to gain by attacking these particular targets, though Australian officials chalked it up to an effort to “sow discord.” The Iranian Foreign Ministry rejected the Australian allegations and pledged to take “reciprocal action.”
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudanese media is reporting that Rapid Support Forces militants have seized control of “roughly half” of the Abu Shouk displaced persons camp in North Darfur state, and that the group “has intensified” its attacks on the nearby city of Al-Fashir. The RSF has prioritized completing its conquest of North Darfur, which would secure its control over Sudan’s entire Darfur region, since the Sudanese military expelled its forces from the Khartoum region earlier this year. The intensification of that effort has been reflected in escalating casualty figures from both the camp and the city over the past couple of weeks.
IVORY COAST
Unspecified armed men attacked a village in the northern Ivory Coast overnight Sunday into Monday, killing at least four people with at least one person still missing. Given the proximity of this attack to the border with Burkina Faso, the likelihood is that the attackers were jihadists and the motive may have been local support for the Burkinabè “Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland” paramilitary force.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The Qatari Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday that the Congolese government and M23 militant group have finally sent delegations to Doha to resume negotiations toward a peace deal. The parties blew past their August 18 deadline for negotiating a final accord, though Qatari officials have been insisting that they’re both still engaged in the process.
The conflict in the eastern DRC is of course one of seven that Donald Trump is claiming to have resolved as part of his somewhat desperate-seeming public pitch for a Nobel Peace Prize. According to the AP he’s overstating things just a bit:
Trump on Monday repeated claims that he ended the decadeslong conflict, describing Congo as the “darkest, deepest” part of Africa. “For 35 years, it was a vicious war. Nine million people were killed with machetes. I stopped it. ... I got it stopped and saved lots of lives,” he asserted.
The Associated Press previously fact-checked Trump’s claim and found the war far from over. Now residents report clashes in several hot spots, often between the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels who seized key cities earlier this year and militia fighting alongside Congolese forces.
EUROPE
LITHUANIA
The Lithuanian parliament approved Minister of Social Security and Labor Inga Ruginienė as the country’s new prime minister on Tuesday. The relative political newcomer replaces Gintautas Paluckas, who resigned last month amid corruption allegations, as PM and effective leader of Lithuania’s Social Democratic Party.
UKRAINE
According to Reuters, “Ukrainian open-source researchers” have confirmed the Russian military’s seizure of two more villages in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk oblast in recent days. Russian officials had already claimed their capture but there was no way to independently verify that. The Ukrainian military is still denying that it’s lost those villages but it did admit for the first time on Tuesday that Russian forces have entered the province. The Russians first entered Dnipropetrovsk last month but Ukrainian officials had steadfastly denied it for several weeks.
AMERICAS
BOLIVIA
The final results of Bolivia’s legislative assembly election, which took place concurrently with the first round of the country’s presidential election earlier this month, suggest that the ruling Movement for Socialism Party (MAS) may be on the brink of extinction. Not only did MAS’s presidential candidate finish in the low single digits (with the other leftist candidate doing only slightly better), the party lost nearly all of its congressional representation—all 21 of its seats in the Chamber of Senators and 73 of its 75 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. October’s presidential runoff will pit two conservatives against one another—Senator Rodrigo Paz, the surprise first round winner who’s cast himself as more of a centrist; and former President Jorge Quiroga, who has embraced a right-wing agenda. Neither Paz’s Christian Democratic Party nor Quiroga’s Libre Party won a majority in the next legislative session, so whichever of them wins will need to compromise to pass legislation.
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Intercept’s Sam Biddle reports that the US military is interested in exploring what AI can do for its overseas propaganda efforts:
The United States hopes to use machine learning to create and distribute propaganda overseas in a bid to “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments,” according to a U.S. Special Operations Command document reviewed by The Intercept.
The document, a sort of special operations wishlist of near-future military technology, reveals new details about a broad variety of capabilities that SOCOM hopes to purchase within the next five to seven years, including state-of-the-art cameras, sensors, directed energy weapons, and other gadgets to help operators find and kill their quarry. Among the tech it wants to procure is machine-learning software that can be used for information warfare.
To bolster its “Advanced Technology Augmentations to Military Information Support Operations” — also known as MISO — SOCOM is looking for a contractor that can “Provide a capability leveraging agentic AI or multi‐LLM agent systems with specialized roles to increase the scale of influence operations.”
So-called “agentic” systems use machine-learning models purported to operate with minimal human instruction or oversight. These systems can be used in conjunction with large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT, which generate text based on user prompts. While much marketing hype orbits around these agentic systems and LLMs for their potential to execute mundane tasks like online shopping and booking tickets, SOCOM believes the techniques could be well suited for running an autonomous propaganda outfit.
The US State Department and other agencies have warned of the potential for AI-generated propaganda to be used against the US, and it would seem that rather than taking a principled stand against the practice the Pentagon has decided to adopt it. SOCOM insists that its MISO operations “do not target the American public” and I’m sure there’s no reason to worry that it’s lying, or that whatever AI capacity it develops might one day be repurposed against the American public by a different agency. The evidence for AI’s efficacy in this regard is still mostly theoretical, but there does seem to be cause for concern as the technology matures.