World roundup: August 28 2025
Stories from Iran, Mali, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE 1: As I’m sure most of you know this is Labor Day weekend here in the US. As I can feel myself needing a break, I plan to take a couple of days and return to our regular schedule on Tuesday.
PROGRAMMING NOTE 2: For subscribers who read our Saturday “Week in Review” I must unfortunately note that I have put that feature on hiatus until I can figure out a new format for it. While the WIR has always been written by someone else it still requires my involvement in terms of editing and publishing it, and when added to the six days per week that I write news roundups that means I’m working a full seven days per week. The editing and publishing components are not major time commitments but even so that schedule is increasingly wearing on me, so I am going to take some time to see if there’s a way to revamp the WIR in such a way that still allows me one day away from the newsletter per week. I want to thank Mellie and Ryan, who have been doing the heavy lifting on the WIR these past few months, for their time and efforts.
TODAY IN HISTORY
August 28, 1189: In an effort to find himself a new capital city (having lost his previous one), titular King of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan begins a siege of Acre. It took the armies of the Third Crusade, under Richard the Lionheart of England and Philip II of France, to finally conclude the siege and capture the city in July 1191.
August 28, 1521: Ottoman forces under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent capture the then-Hungarian city of Belgrade (Nándorfehérvár to the Hungarians) and destroy most of it. The Ottomans rebuilt the city and made it the capital of the Sanjak of Smederevo, and within a short time it became the largest Ottoman city in Europe other than Constantinople.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The main highway linking Damascus to the city of Suwaydah reopened on Thursday for the first time since last month’s clashes between Syrian security forces (along with their jihadist auxiliaries) and Druze militias. Syrian authorities blocked the highway following that incident and local leaders have accused them of effectively besieging Suwaydah in the wake of that violence in order to break the Druze demand for local autonomy. The humanitarian situation in Suwaydah city has worsened quite a bit since that blockade and Thursday’s opening allowed a much needed aid convoy to enter the city. It’s unclear whether the highway will remain open to allow the restoration of normal commercial activity in the province.
LEBANON
An Israeli military drone crashed in southern Lebanon on Thursday and then exploded as Lebanese military personnel were inspecting the site, killing at least two people. I haven’t seen any indication yet as to what caused the crash.
The United Nations Security Council voted on Thursday to extend the mandate of its southern Lebanese peacekeeping mission (UNIFIL) for one more year, followed by a withdrawal to be completed sometime in 2027. With the mission’s mandate about to expire on Sunday the United States (primarily acting in Israel’s interest) had threatened to veto another simple extension, and so the “one more year” option became the compromise between that and closing up shop immediately. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun had supported the simple extension but issued a statement welcoming the decision to at least give the operation one more year.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
+972 Magazine’s Ruwaida Amer describes the experience of reporting on events in Gaza while the Israeli military (IDF) is targeting Palestinian journalists:
Indeed, every journalist in Gaza over the past two years has faced hunger, displacement, and the loss of their homes and family members, all while trying to relay Gaza’s raw reality to the world. I too have spent long hours in the streets without shelter. My sick mother, still struggling to recover from spinal surgery, walks beside me and my sister as we search for somewhere, anywhere, to take refuge.
I love my job as a journalist, along with my work as a teacher, yet I am devastated and terrified. It’s been more than 680 days of continuous work, with constant internet outages, no proper electricity, no safe shelter, and no transportation. I’ve continued to report since the beginning of the war because I believe in its mission, but I do it knowing that every day could very well be my last. No words can capture what we feel as journalists with the successive loss of colleagues.
Why is Israel targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza? Simple. We are the only ones able to document and transmit what is actually happening on the ground. Every image, every testimony, every broadcast we produce pierces through the wall of Israel’s official narrative. That makes us dangerous: by recording the displacement, the starvation, and the relentless bombardment, we expose Israel’s actions to the world.
Reuters has reportedly “stopped sharing the locations” of its journalists in Gaza with the IDF due to suspicion that they were being targeted, after one of its reporters was killed in the Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital earlier this week. The rationale behind providing those locations is, of course, so that the IDF won’t target them. Remarkably, the fact that Reuters’ own reporter was killed while running its own live stream camera at Nasser Hospital did not stop that outlet from initially and uncritically parroting the IDF’s “Hamas camera position” justification for that attack.
In other items:
The IDF continued its methodical destruction of northern Gaza on Thursday, with Al Jazeera reporting that much of Gaza City’s Zaytun neighborhood has now been completely leveled. Local accounts also say that the city’s eastern Shujaʿiyah neighborhood is totally destroyed. Health personnel in Gaza have tallied at least 61 people killed so far on Thursday.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the INSIDE SCOOP on what went down at Wednesday’s White House conference on the “day after” in Gaza, which was…not very much, as it turns out. Ron Dermer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proxy, apparently assured everyone that his boss’s government doesn’t want to ethnically cleanse Gaza, nor does it want to occupy the territory long term—all evidence to the contrary on both counts—but insisted that Hamas must be out of the picture as far as governing the territory. Donald Trump tasked our two greatest living Middle East experts, Tony Blair and Jared Kushner, with devising a Hamas-free plan for administering Gaza and that was that. Sounds like they’ve got everything well in hand.
Qatari Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani visited Egypt on Thursday, during which he and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty excoriated the Israeli government for what Abdelatty called its “resistance and delay” regarding the ceasefire proposal that Hamas accepted last week. The Qatari PM called on the international community to “press Israel to stop the war.” Netanyahu did respond to that Hamas acceptance by ordering his negotiators to resume talks late last week, but nothing of note has happened on the ceasefire front since then.
YEMEN
The IDF attacked what it called a “military target” in Sanaa on Thursday. Details on the target are unclear and there are no reports of casualties as yet, though rumors that the Israelis were targeting senior Houthi leadership were rampant enough that the Houthi movement itself felt the need to deny them. So it is possible that there were not only casualties but fairly prominent ones.
IRAN
As expected, the “E3” (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) formally invoked the 2015 Iran nuclear deal’s “snapback” mechanism, which means that barring any new developments the UN sanctions that were lifted under that accord will be reimposed on Iran in 30 days. The mechanism was designed to prevent Iran-friendly Security Council veto-holders (China and Russia) from blocking the reimposition of sanctions so the outcome is now inevitable unless Tehran and the Europeans reach some sort of agreement in the interim.
What that agreement might look like is unclear but statements from E3 officials make it clear that they’ve invoked the snapback mechanism in hopes of reaching some kind of settlement before the sanctions take effect, at which point Iranian officials have suggested they could simply stop engaging on the nuclear issue altogether (including their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency and possibly even involving a withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty). The snapback announcement caused an immediate and significant economic impact in Iran, dropping the unofficial value of the rial to more than 1 million per US dollar.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The Afghan Foreign Ministry summoned Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul on Thursday to protest several drone strikes that killed at least three people in Afghanistan’s Khost and Nangarhar provinces overnight. There’s been no comment from Pakistani officials as yet from what I can tell, but the Pakistani military does occasionally carry out cross-border attacks against suspected militants (chiefly but not limited to the Pakistani Taliban) who operate from Afghanistan.
MYANMAR
Myanmar’s ruling junta designated the Karen National Union rebel group as a terrorist organization on Thursday. In theory this outlaws any contact with the KNU though realistically I’m not sure how many actors who might have dealings with that group are really worried about running afoul of the junta. The KNU has been threatening to undermine the faux election that the junta is planning to conduct in December so this designation is meant to complicate that effort.
THAILAND
The Thai military is claiming that another of its soldiers was seriously injured in yet another landmine blast along the country’s border with Cambodia in recent days. This is the sixth such incident this year and the third since the end of last month’s brief Thai-Cambodian border skirmish. Thai officials continue to accuse the Cambodian military of mining the border in violation of international agreements, a charge the Cambodians have repeatedly denied.
SOUTH KOREA
World Politics Review’s Elliot Waldman highlights the role that shipbuilding is playing in the South Korean government’s effort to get on Donald Trump’s good side:
But behind the spectacle, Seoul has a more substantive strategy: helping the U.S. salvage its struggling shipbuilding industry. As part of a trade deal reached last month, [South Korean President Lee Jae-myung]’s government pledged $350 billion in new investments in the United States, $150 billion of which will go to shipbuilding ventures. Cognizant of the benefits of appealing to Trump’s ego, Lee even dubbed the plan “Make America Shipbuilding Great Again.”
The decline of U.S. shipbuilding capacity is a perennial concern among defense policymakers and elected officials of both parties in Washington. Take a look at the numbers and it’s easy to see why: U.S. shipyards, suffering from decades of underinvestment and chronic labor shortages, accounted for a negligible 0.04 percent of global commercial vessel production last year, according to U.N. data. Meanwhile, China produced more than half. And the People’s Liberation Army Navy has already surpassed the U.S. Navy to become the largest maritime fighting force in the world.
A recent report from the RAND Corporation put it bluntly: “The United States cannot compete with China alone.” If it wants to keep pace, it has no choice but to partner with East Asian allies South Korea and Japan, both shipbuilding powerhouses with 30 percent and 10 percent of global market share, respectively.
Lee’s trip to the U.S. includes a stop in Philadelphia to visit the Philly Shipyard, which was acquired by Hanwha Ocean, one of South Korea’s top three shipbuilders, last year. Hanwha says it plans to increase production at Philly from one to two ships annually to around 20.
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AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudan Doctors Network activist group is reporting that the Rapid Support Forces militant group killed at least 24 people in heavy shelling of the besieged North Darfur city of Al-Fashir on Wednesday. The bombardment targeted the city’s central market and a residential neighborhood. The RSF has been ramping up its attacks on Al-Fashir and the nearby Abu Shouk displaced persons camp in recent weeks and both the death toll and the worsening of the city’s humanitarian crisis have been the result.
ALGERIA
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune sacked Prime Minister Nadir Larbaoui on Thursday, without offering an explanation. He promoted Industry Minister Sifi Ghrieb as Larbaoui’s replacement.
MALI
AFP is now reporting that the Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin jihadist group has indeed “taken over” the central Malian town of Farabougou. It reported a few days ago that jihadist fighters had overrun the town’s military camp last week, but at the time all that was known was that residents and Malian military forces had fled in the wake of the attack. Despite talk of a military counterattack none has so far been forthcoming. As AFP notes, one of the first acts Mali’s ruling junta undertook after it seized power in 2020 was to break a JNIM siege of Farabougou, so aside from the strategic significant losing the town now is a symbolic indicator of just how much the junta is struggling to deal with surging jihadist activity.
RWANDA
The Rwandan government has reportedly accepted seven migrants from the US, the first group of people it has taken since it agreed to facilitate Donald Trump’s human trafficking operation earlier this month. Rwandan officials have framed their participation in this scheme as a humanitarian gesture and has involved the UN International Organization for Migration in helping to resettle these individuals. But an anonymous “Rwandan activist” told AFP that the Rwandan government’s main considerations have been “money” as well as currying favor with Donald Trump so as to better position itself in ongoing peace and mineral rights talks involving the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
An intense overnight Russian bombardment left at least 21 people dead in Kyiv in one of the largest and deadliest attacks since the 2022 invasion. A number of international buildings in the Ukrainian capital were hit, including the Azerbaijani embassy as well as European Union and UK offices. The scale of this attack should hammer home just how far this war is from a resolution despite all the recent talk of “day after” security scenarios for Ukraine. According to the White House, Donald Trump was “not happy” but “also not surprised,” which probably means he’ll float some new ambiguous threat of new sanctions against Russia and then drop the subject as has been his pattern.
Elsewhere, Russian forces are reportedly once again threatening the city of Kupiansk in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast. They’ve been slowly advancing toward the city for several weeks and open source mapping now shows them encircling it from the west and even moving into the city’s suburbs. There are also indications that Russian forces have pushed into the outskirts of Kostiantynivka, the southernmost of the four so-called “fortress belt” of cities that are still under Ukrainian control in Donetsk oblast, though those reports are unsubstantiated.
FRANCE
France’s far-right National Rally party insisted on Thursday that it will not agree to any sort of compromise with Prime Minister François Bayrou over his proposed austerity budget, which likely dooms him and his government to defeat in the September 8 confidence vote he scheduled earlier this week. Left-wing parties, including the center-left Socialists, have also ruled out supporting Bayrou in that vote and it’s difficult to see how he could muster majority support if all of those parties stick to that position. Bayrou is planning to meet with party leaders next week to try to drum up support. If he loses the confidence vote, French President Emmanuel Macron will have to decide whether or not to call a snap parliamentary election. Polling suggests that is the preferred option for most French voters.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, Just Security’s Devika Hovell argues that the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to punish the International Criminal Court represent a clear break with past “US ambivalence” toward that institution:
There has been a tendency in some quarters to downplay the significance of the Trump administration’s approach to the ICC, seeing it as merely the latest episode in a well-documented history of U.S. ambivalence. But such continuity arguments risk flattening crucial distinctions.
The U.S. has always occupied a paradoxical position in international law: both as its principal architect and its most prominent skeptic. This stance reflects a deeper ideological orientation often described in terms of American exceptionalism. U.S. exceptionalism has often meant holding the system at arm’s length, supporting international law’s aims while avoiding its constraints. Louis Henkin once described this as America’s “flying buttress” mentality – supporting the edifice from the outside, but reluctant to submit to its binding constraints. Central to this line of reasoning is the belief that the U.S. can remain outside the legal framework without undermining it because it embodies as a nation the values international law and its institutions seek to protect.
The Trump administration’s approach to international law represents a rupture in this tradition. This approach is not merely an intensification of long-standing American skepticism toward international institutions, but a qualitative shift in both rhetoric and practice. Where previous administrations sought to reinterpret, evade, or selectively engage with international law, the Trump administration is seeking actively to delegitimize and dismantle it. The ICC sanctions, in particular, reflect a transformation from disengagement to punitive confrontation – targeting not State adversaries or human rights violators, but an independent judicial institution tasked with upholding the very legal norms the United States once helped to establish and articulate.