World roundup: February 11 2025
Israel-Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
February 11, 1990: Nelson Mandela is released from South Africa’s Victor Verster Prison after serving 27 years for resisting the apartheid government. Mandela, whose remarkable life story probably doesn’t need to be recounted here and would be beyond the scope of this newsletter, became after his release the key figure in the negotiations to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime and in 1994 was elected overwhelmingly as South Africa’s first truly democratically elected president.
February 11, 2011: After over two weeks of protests, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigns, becoming the second Arab leader to step down as a result of the Arab Spring movement after Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Egypt underwent a transition to a democratic election in 2012, all of which was undone by the 2013 military coup that installed current president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
We’re just a bit over halfway into the six week first phase of the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire agreement and there’s a pretty strong possibility that this is the end of the proverbial line. Seizing on the assist he got from Donald Trump the previous day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he’s prepared to resume the obliteration of Gaza unless Hamas releases “our [October 7] hostages” by noon Saturday. He left the meaning of “our” vague, likely on purpose. Trump, you may recall, opined that the truce should end unless Hamas frees all of the remaining hostages. That won’t happen without a full peace accord—as in total cessation of hostilities, no more staged truces—which needless to say is exceedingly unlikely to happen by Saturday. But by “our hostages” he could could simply have meant the three who are supposed to be released on Saturday according to the schedule set by the ceasefire deal. Phrasing it vaguely lets Netanyahu justify whatever he wants to do no matter what does or doesn’t happen this weekend. Netanyahu also said that he was ordering the Israeli military (IDF) to mass around Gaza in preparation for a return to full scale violence.
This new crisis began when Hamas announced on Monday that it was suspending hostage releases due to what it claimed were Israeli violations of the ceasefire’s terms. Hamas’s complaints were that the Israelis are hampering the shipment of certain categories of humanitarian aid into Gaza, have interfered with the return of civilians to northern Gaza, and are continuing to attack Palestinians despite what is ostensibly a pause in hostilities. Buried deep within a New York Times “analysis” of the situation we learn that “Hamas’s claims were accurate” according to “three Israeli officials and two mediators” who commented anonymously. In particular, while the level of aid getting into Gaza has increased it has not increased enough, with respect to shelter materials, to meet Israel’s agreed-upon obligations. This seems relevant when considering the question of who really violated the deal, but I digress.
Underpinning the complaints Hamas articulated on Monday is probably the double whammy posed by the realization that a) Netanyahu isn’t serious about negotiating the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, with its indefinite cessation of violence; and b) Trump is serious about his proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into a luxury US colony. The latter is still speculative, though Trump (while hosting Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House) reiterated it again on Tuesday while insisting that the US will simply “take” the territory, presumably from its current occupants. Maybe Hamas’s leadership decided to force the issue by suspending hostage releases, figuring that if the ceasefire is going to end anyway—and if ethnic cleansing is now the endgame—it might as well end now.
Meanwhile, Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call delivers a new revelation about the IDF’s—and the Biden administration’s—willingness to countenance mass civilian casualties in Gaza:
The Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas in Gaza when it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding underground, and intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal.
The investigation, based on conversations with 15 Israeli Military Intelligence and Shin Bet officers who have been involved in tunnel-targeting operations since October 7, exposes how this strategy aimed to compensate for the army’s inability to pinpoint targets in Hamas’ subterranean tunnel network. When targeting senior commanders in the group, the Israeli military authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of Palestinian civilians as “collateral damage,” and maintained close real-time coordination with U.S. officials regarding the expected casualty figures.
Some of these strikes, which were the deadliest in the war and often used American bombs, are known to have killed Israeli hostages despite concerns raised ahead of time by military officers. Moreover, the lack of precise intelligence meant that in at least three major strikes, the army dropped several 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that killed scores of civilians — part of a strategy known as “tiling” — without succeeding in killing the intended target.
YEMEN
The United Nations World Food Program announced on Saturday that one of its aid workers died while being held prisoner by the Houthi movement in northern Yemen. He was among a cohort of aid workers arrested on January 23. The circumstances of his death are unclear apart from the fact that he was in custody. The UN on Monday suspended all humanitarian operations in Yemen’s Saada province, which is the Houthi heartland, after the movement arrested another group of eight staffers. Houthi officials have not, to my knowledge, attempted to justify these arrests.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
A suicide bombing outside a bank in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz province killed at least five people (not including the bomber) and left seven more wounded on Tuesday morning. There’s been no claim of responsibility as yet but one assumes this was an Islamic State operation.
UPDATE: IS has now claimed responsibility.
NORTH KOREA
Pyongyang is reportedly planning to send another cadre of soldiers to Russia, even though the first group it sent has by multiple accounts suffered heavy losses. The Diplomat’s Jennifer Mathers argues that those losses are less meaningful to the North Korean government than what the survivors will have gained:
For Kim Jong Un, sending his soldiers to fight with Russia provides his troops with valuable experience of combat in a conflict that is rapidly defining how war will be waged in the future.
Since the end of the Korean War (1950-53), Pyongyang has placed a high priority on maintaining a large and heavily armed standing army. After training, North Korean soldiers are mostly used for patrolling the Demilitarized Zone, which marks its border with South Korea. Participating in Russia’s war against Ukraine provides the North Korean military with its first experience of combat in more than 70 years.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The UAE reportedly pitched a “Ramadan ceasefire” to the warring parties in Sudan on Tuesday, but the Sudanese military quickly rejected any halt to its conflict against the Rapid Support Forces militant group “until the siege is broken on all cities and areas that are besieged.” (The RSF continues, for example, to besiege the city of Al-Fashir, in Sudan’s North Darfur province.) It’s pretty well established at this point that the UAE has been arming and supporting the RSF (its unconvincing denials notwithstanding), and so a cynical observer could argue that this ceasefire idea was really a desperate attempt to stabilize a client that has suffered a string of defeats and now looks like it may lose its foothold in Khartoum. I am of course not a cynic, so I would never dream of questioning the Emiratis’ deep concern for the wellbeing of the Sudanese people.
ALGERIA
The governments of Algeria, Niger, and Nigeria signed new contracts on Tuesday to advance a “feasibility study” on the proposed Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline. That project, initially announced in 2009, would carry natural gas from Nigeria through Niger and on to the Algerian coast, where it could be shipped on via pipeline to Europe or liquefied and exported by tanker. At the time it was estimated to cost $10 billion and obviously that number will be considerably higher now, though rising gas prices may still make the project worth the price.
NIGERIA
Boko Haram fighters attacked a military base in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Tuesday, killing at least three soldiers and wounding another four. There’s no word as to whether the attackers suffered any casualties.
SOMALIA
Islamic State fighters reportedly attacked a number of military sites in Somalia’s autonomous Puntland region overnight, but regional officials say the attacks were unsuccessful and security forces (with UAE air support) killed some 70 militants. Those officials have not offered any detail as to their own casualties.
The IS franchise in Somalia has suddenly become a very big deal after mostly being regarded as an afterthought to al-Shabab for the past several years. Now, Washington Post reporters are writing things like “the Somali [IS] branch has become the Islamic State’s new operational and financial hub, according to U.S. Africa Command.” We’re also told that “large numbers of foreign fighters have flowed into Somalia, establishing a formidable force that now threatens Western targets” and UN “investigators” are claiming that “the group has also become a key source of funding for other Islamic State affiliates around the world.” This could all certainly be true, but I will say it’s interesting timing for everyone to decide that IS-Somalia is the Most Dangerous Organization in the World just as Donald Trump—who pulled US forces out of Somalia toward the end of his first term—has returned to office.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Fighters from the CODECO militia coalition attacked several villages and a displaced persons camp in the eastern DRC’s Ituri province on Monday night, killing at least 55 people. Recovery work is ongoing and the pattern in these sorts of incidents is that the death toll rises as workers locate the bodies of hitherto missing persons. CODECO is an ethnic Lendu organization that began as an agricultural cooperative in the 1970s but turned to violence in the late 1990s when the Lendu and Hema communities went to war with one another. It remains one of the most active militant groups in the eastern DRC.
UPDATE: By Friday the death toll had risen over 80, according to UN peacekeepers.
After a couple of relatively quiet days, the M23 militant group and its Rwandan partners launched a new attack on Congolese military forces in South Kivu province on Tuesday. The fighting is heaviest near the town of Kavumu, which is both home to an important military airstrip and around 70 kilometers outside the provincial capital, Bukavu. Residents of Bukavu are reportedly steeling themselves for an attack in the very near future. Elsewhere, M23 fighters are reportedly shutting down displaced persons camps in territory they’ve already conquered. This is probably meant to show that the militants are so magnanimous that they’ve allowed those previously displaced persons to return to their homes. But the effect, according to the UN, has been to re-displace some 110,000 people who have nowhere else to go.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union is already working on its response to Donald Trump’s new across the board 25 percent steel and aluminum tariffs. According to The Financial Times, the bloc has “approved levies of up to 50 per cent on €4.8bn of US imports and could quickly take a final vote to impose them. The products would include bourbon whiskey, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, motorboats and some steel and aluminium.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was scheduled to discuss the matter with US Vice President JD Vance on the sidelines of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday but I’m not sure how that went. EU trade ministers are scheduled to meet on Wednesday.
RUSSIA
Trump administration Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made an impromptu visit to Russia on Tuesday and secured the release of US national Marc Fogel, who’d been in a Russian prison since 2021 on drug charges. Russian authorities caught Fogel, a schoolteacher, with marijuana (medicinal, apparently) at Sheremetyevo airport and eventually sentenced him to 14 years in prison. It’s unclear what Witkoff gave up to secure Fogel’s release—according to Donald Trump it was “not much” and the release was more akin to a goodwill gesture than a deal. Trump expressed his “hope” that the release could mark “the beginning of a relationship” that would eventually lead to a Ukraine peace deal.
UKRAINE
Another overnight Russian bombardment, targeting natural gas facilities primarily, forced a new round of power outages across several parts of Ukraine. According to Ukraine’s state-owned energy firm Naftogaz the attack damaged energy production facilities in central Ukraine’s Poltava oblast.
AMERICAS
HAITI
The AP reports on Haitian migrants who say they’ve been handled brutally by authorities in the Dominican Republic prior to their deportation back to Haiti:
A crowd of 500 descended from dusty trucks on a recent morning and shuffled through a tiny gap in a border gate separating Haiti from the Dominican Republic.
They were the first deportees of the day, some still clad in work clothes and others barefoot as they lined up for food, water and medical care in the Haitian border city of Belladère before mulling their next move.
Under a broiling sun, the migrants recounted what they said were mounting abuses by Dominican officials after President Luis Abinader ordered them in October to start deporting at least 10,000 immigrants a week under a harsh new policy widely criticized by civil organizations.
UNITED STATES
Trump’s aluminum and steel tariffs (see above) have been poorly received pretty much all over, not just in the EU. In particular they seem to have caught the governments of Canada and Mexico—two of the three biggest exporters of steel to the US—by surprise, seeing as how both figured they’d already weathered the tariff storm. They and Brazil, the third of those three major exporters, are considering their options with respect to a response.
Finally, the United States fell to a tie for 28th in the world in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, with a score of 65 out of 100. The drop was apparently due in large part to a loss of faith in the integrity of the US judiciary, for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend. I rarely mention these sorts of rankings in this newsletter because in a word I think they’re ridiculous, but the foreign policy community in DC does take them seriously and in particular it is cognizant of how the US stacks up in these subjective ranking.
And I’m guessing that the US ranking is going to go down again next year, because not only is the Trump administration decriminalizing foreign bribery it’s also decided to stop enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Well, mostly. Attorney General Pam Bondi says that the Justice Department will continue to prosecute “instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors,” but as far as good old fashioned lobbying and other commonplace forms of corruption are concerned it’s apparently open season.