TODAY IN HISTORY
February 11, 1979: The Iranian army returns to barracks after several days of clashes with rebellious supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This capitulation marks the final collapse of the Iranian monarchy and is most often cited as the date signifying the Iranian Revolution, though the Islamic Republic would not take full shape for several more weeks.
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
SYRIA
This Week in Northern Syria’s Alexander McKeever just had an opportunity to visit the city of Raqqa and speak to residents there about the recent conflict between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces. His post is locked for his subscribers so I don’t want to give much of it away but I do think this section may be of interest to people wondering why local Arabs seem to have turned on the SDF:
In general people you speak to in Raqqah are quite opposed to [the SDF-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria or DAANES] and happy to see its local administration gone. While many will tell you they opposed it from the start, seemingly more measured accounts differentiate between three periods of DAANES rule. According to such accounts during the first year or two rule was an optimistic and relatively inclusive period, with civil society activists participating in local governance and significant local support coming from the anti-[Islamic State] Coalition.
Following this came a deterioration in the economic situation due to the Lebanese banking crisis of 2019 and increased US sanctions on Syria, a further monopolization of power within the DAANES local government by the cadros [non-local Kurdish administrative officials] accompanied by institutional corruption, all occurring at a time of increased pressure from Turkey. DAANES’s local legitimacy throughout its rule in Raqqah was based on being a favorable alternative to the Asad regime. This legitimacy disappeared along with the former regime on December 8th 2024, with DAANES coming to rely on securitization and political repression of the local population to maintain power in [this] new national context. Members of the Asayish and the Apoçi Revolutionary Youth organization regularly went through locals’ phones at checkpoints, arresting perceived supporters of the new government.
People also complained about “neglect” with regards to service provision, which isn’t hugely surprising given that the SDF was never flush with revenue (it controlled productive oilfields but wasn’t able to operate them to capacity) and had to devote much of what it did make to security expenditures. It may also have prioritized services and administrative operations in other parts of its territory at the expense of places like Raqqa although I imagine that would be hard to prove.
