World roundup: February 15-16 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
February 15, 1942: The World War II Battle of Singapore ends with the Japanese conquest of the British colony. Virtually the entire 85,000-man British force defending Singapore was lost—5000 killed or wounded and the remaining 80,000 captured. It was one of the largest surrenders in British military history and interestingly was not celebrated by Japan’s Nazi allies. Adolf Hitler apparently saw the Japanese victory as a defeat for white people the world over, and ordered Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop not to send congratulations to Tokyo.
February 15, 1989: Soviet forces complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan. This date has been annually commemorated in Afghanistan as “Liberation Day.”
February 16, 1804: A small US naval crew enters Tripoli harbor and destroys the grounded USS Philadelphia. The frigate had run aground in late October amid the First Barbary War and remained salvageable, and so US leaders decided that they couldn’t leave it in Tripolitanian hands. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur Jr. volunteered to lead a mission to enter the harbor, board the Philadelphia, and determine whether to recover or destroy it. He opted for the latter, and in pulling it off became one of the earliest US naval icons.
February 16, 1923: British archeologist Howard Carter opens the inner burial chamber of the 14th century BCE Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Carter’s discovery the previous November of Tutankhamun’s tomb, regarded as the best preserved burial site in Egypt’s “Valley of the Kings,” remains arguably the best known achievement in the field of Egyptology. The inner burial chamber was the best preserved part of the tomb and contained a large number of valuable finds. Interest in the tomb’s discovery made celebrities out of Carter and Tutankhamun (AKA “King Tut”) and helped spark a new outbreak of “Egyptomania” around the world, particularly in the US.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Drop Site’s Hoda Matar reports on life under the Israeli military occupation in southern Syria:
After the fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in early December, Israel launched a massive campaign of airstrikes across Syria, preemptively targeting and destroying huge sectors of Syria's conventional military capacity, the very types of weapons and systems that all nations possess in order to defend their borders and sovereignty. The Israeli military also invaded deeper into Syrian territory, taking control of additional land in the buffer zone and beyond, including on Mount Hermon. Israeli officials have stated their intention to remain there indefinitely and troops in the area have continued to fortify their military presence, constructing runways and erecting military outposts and bases.
In the 14 Syrian villages that lie in this area, the lives of more than 35,000 people are now dictated by the Israeli military, with curfews, roadblocks, and house raids.
Over 50 families fled Al-Hamidia, one of the villages hardest hit by the Israeli invasion, alongside Kudna and al-Rawadi. Those who stayed have had to contend with life under Israeli occupation. Mo’ath, the eldest of Abu Mo’ath’s children, says the journey to his high school in the village Khan Arnabeh nearby has become virtually impossible. “Our usual route was just six kilometers, but now that Israel cut it off, we must travel 25 kilometers,” the 16-year-old said, adding that the journey has become too lengthy and expensive for many students. “A couple of my colleagues, particularly from Al-Samdaniya, missed their exams entirely.”
Israeli officials have expressed an intention to occupy this region permanently (“for an unlimited time period” was how Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz put it a couple of weeks ago), and there’s been minimal reaction to this from the Syrian government.
Elsewhere, the US military’s Central Command is claiming to have killed a “senior finance and logistics official in the terrorist organization Hurras al-Din” in an airstrike in Syria on Saturday. Hurras al-Din is affiliated with al-Qaeda. It announced its dissolution a few weeks ago but the US military continues to strike related targets.
The Syrian government reported on Friday that it had received a shipment of currency from Russia in the amount of “hundreds of billions of Syrian pounds.” The previous Syrian government had its currency printed abroad, but the country’s new authorities instructed the Russian printer to cease operations following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in December. It’s unclear if this shipment means anything with respect to the current Syrian government’s relationship with Moscow, which is still hoping to retain the usage of two Syrian military bases. But it may be an indication that the two governments are building a relationship.
LEBANON
Israeli soldiers opened fire on a group of people attempting to enter the border village of Houla on Sunday, killing one woman. US and Israeli officials subsequently urged the Lebanese government to “disarm Hezbollah.” The previous day, the Israeli military (IDF) killed at least two people in an airstrike allegedly targeting a “senior” Hezbollah official. It’s unclear if either of the people killed were that official or even if they were affiliated with Hezbollah at all. The IDF conducted more allegedly anti-Hezbollah airstrikes on Sunday to unknown (at time of writing) effect.
Meanwhile, a crowd of demonstrators—probably organized by Hezbollah or at least consisting mostly of Hezbollah supporters—has been blocking the main road connecting Beirut to the city’s airport since Thursday, after the Lebanese government barred Iran’s two largest air carriers from flying into that facility. This is in response to allegations that Tehran uses that facility to smuggle arms and/or cash to Hezbollah. On Friday night the demonstrators attacked a United Nations convoy, wounding a deputy commander in the UN’s Lebanese peacekeeping force. Lebanese authorities have arrested at least 25 people in connection with that incident and the fallout may reverberate beyond just a criminal investigation.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
There are several items to cover:
Hamas and the Israeli government completed Saturday’s detainee exchange as scheduled, so the ceasefire deal survives another week in spite of the tensions that emerged several days ago. Negotiations on the second phase of that deal are expected to resume this week but my sense is that the Israeli government’s interest in reaching a deal is negligible and the Trump administration isn’t inclined to push for a successful outcome (see below). That said, the administration’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is apparently talking as though the second phase will happen and he seems to be the one person in this administration who is not inclined to indulge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most genocidal fantasies. So maybe there’s some reason for cautious optimism there.
The IDF killed at least three police officers in southern Gaza in an airstrike on Sunday. The Gazan Interior Ministry called the strike a “serious violation” of the truce and said that it “calls upon the mediators and the international community to compel the occupation to stop targeting the police force, which is a civil apparatus.” Israeli officials claim the police officers were targeted after they’d been seen approaching IDF positions. Though Saturday’s exchange did take place Hamas is still accusing the Israeli government of violating the ceasefire by impeding the flow of shelter materials and heavy machinery into Gaza, which was the main reason it had threatened to suspend hostage releases.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Israel on Sunday on the first leg of his first Middle East trip in his current office. He and Netanyahu were at pains to demonstrate unity both with respect to Gaza—demanding the “elimination” of Hamas doesn’t leave much room for extending the ceasefire agreement—and Iran. I hesitate to make too much of this because there’s never much evidence that Trump’s own spokespeople, including his lead diplomat, are actually able to speak for Trump. But nothing Rubio said really aligned with Trump’s self-description as a “peacemaker.”
The Egyptian government is still working on an alternative to Trump’s ethnic cleansing/colonization plan for Gaza, apparently with support from the World Bank. Details are still vague but according to The Guardian it would involve the creation of “a social or community support committee” that would assume governance for the territory in place of Hamas. Qatar and the UAE would take primary responsibility for rebuilding Gaza, something officials in both countries say they’re only willing to do if its population is allowed to remain on the land. Left unsaid at this point is the status of Hamas’s military wing or its involvement in the security of Gaza which alone makes this plan a nonstarter (as it exists now) for the Israeli government.
A new report from an independent Israeli outlet claims that, back in May, the IDF strapped an explosive device to an 80 year old man in Gaza City and forced him to inspect houses for traps. They held his wife hostage while he did so—the bomb was to dissuade him from “running away” even though he required a cane to walk so I don’t think he was going to do any sudden escaping. Once he’d finished this task, the soldiers who forced him to do it ordered him and his wife to move south and they were promptly gunned down by another IDF unit. I do not know if this report is accurate but the practice of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians to work as human shields in this way is well documented.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Unspecified militants attacked a military outpost in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Saturday, killing at least four soldiers. The attackers, at least six of whom also died in the clash, were most likely Pakistani Taliban.
TAIWAN
The US State Department has changed the wording on its “Relations with Taiwan” fact sheet to remove the language “we do not support Taiwan independence.” Taiwanese media joyfully reported the change on Sunday. Does this reflect a policy shift on the part of the Trump administration? Your guess is as good as mine. The new language does say that “we oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side,” which presumably includes any declaration of independence by the Taiwanese government, though who knows at this point? As far as I know the Chinese government hasn’t yet commented on this but I suspect they’ll have something to say about it eventually.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese army captured a tactically significant bridge in Khartoum on Saturday, further strengthening its position in a city that the Rapid Support Forces militant group largely controlled just a few weeks ago. The RSF still holds territory in the central, western, and southern parts of the city but there’s no sign that the military’s advance is slowing down.
NIGERIA
A military airstrike reportedly killed at least six civilians in northern Nigeria’s Katsina state on Saturday. Apparently they were responding to a bandit attack that killed two police officers and mistook a group of civilians for the attackers (who had already withdrawn).
ETHIOPIA
Addis Standard is reporting that a drone strike killed at least four people, three of them children, in Ethiopia’s Amhara region on Thursday. That is the second fatal drone strike in Amhara in about a week and comes in the context of what AS says is “intense fighting” between Ethiopian military forces and the Amhara Fano militia. Federal security forces and the Fano have been battling at varying degrees of intensity since the government attempted to bring all regional militias under central control back in April 2023.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The governor of the eastern DRC’s South Kivu province, Jean-Jacques Purusi, reported on Sunday that M23 militants have entered the provincial capital, Bukavu. There had already been sightings of M23 fighters and their Rwandan partners in the outskirts of the city on Friday so this is not terribly surprising. Nobody is yet saying that they’re in control of the city but neither do they seem to be facing much resistance as Congolese forces appear to have withdrawn. Al Jazeera is reporting that “a sense of calm” has settled over Bukavu after a period of “chaos” and “looting” on Saturday.
Elsewhere, Ugandan military commander Muhoozi Kainerugaba took to social media on Saturday to threaten an invasion of the eastern DRC’s Ituri province and specifically its capital, Bunia, citing attacks against the Hema community. The ethnically Lendu CODECO militia has been in a state of conflict with the Hema since the late 1990s and carries out fairly regular massacres of Hema villages. Uganda is also thought to be supporting M23 and may see an opportunity to carve out its own constituent territory in the eastern DRC just as Rwanda seems to be doing. That said, making wild threats on social media is sort of a pastime for Kainerugaba so I don’t know that it’s worth making too much of this.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
In Ukraine-related news:
The Russian military claimed on Saturday that it had taken the village of Berezivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast. Berezivka is due east of Pokrovsk, which remains heavily pressured by Russian forces. However, in a bit of a reversal the Ukrainians claimed on Sunday that they’d retaken the village of Pishchane, located just a few kilometers southwest of the city. The Russians took that Pishchane last month and it’s been contested since then, but AFP’s reporting suggests a pretty significant Ukrainian advance.
Several senior Trump administration officials—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (whose brief seems to be expanding)—are reportedly heading to Saudi Arabia for talks with Russian officials on ending the war in Ukraine. Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke on Saturday about improving bilateral relations, and one assumes the subject of the negotiations came up at some point. To clear up any lingering ambiguity, the Ukrainian government has apparently not been invited to participate, despite their obvious relevance to the proceedings. European governments have likewise been cut out of the process.
Several outlets, including The New York Times and The Financial Times, are reporting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, rejected a proposal for the United States to take control of 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in a meeting on Wednesday with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Ostensibly the exchange would have been minerals for US military support, but it seems the Trump administration viewed the mineral rights as payment for past, rather than future, US support. Zelensky argued that the deal’s “security guarantees” were “not very concrete” and thus the arrangement was “not in our interest today.” This may help explain why Donald Trump is freezing Zelensky out of peace talks. Negotiations may continue though that’s unclear at this point.
SERBIA
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in the Serbian city of Kragujevac on Saturday, continuing the anti-corruption protests that began after the fatal collapse of a concrete train station canopy in Novi Sad back in November. The protesters marched from across Serbia intending to block roads for 15 hours and 15 minutes, in honor of the 15 people who died in that incident. They’re demanding a full investigation into the collapse with criminal charges for anyone found to be responsible, as well as pardons for protesters who have already been arrested.
AMERICAS
ARGENTINA
Argentine President Javier Milei suddenly finds himself taking heavy criticism for having apparently conned people into buying a fraudulent cryptocurrency. Milei’s endorsement—he said the coin was “dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy” in a social media post—caused the coin’s price to spike from almost nothing to around $5, only to crash shortly thereafter when large holders apparently dumped it and pocketed the profits. Milei now says he had nothing to do with the coin and his spokespeople are calling his endorsement a “mistake.” The Argentine government’s anti-corruption office is investigating.
UNITED STATES
Finally, the US Department of Energy now says that the Trump-Musk administration ultimately canned fewer than 50 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration. This comes after the administration sacked some 325 probationary NNSA employees on Thursday night, apparently without realizing that this agency is responsible for overseeing the manufacture and safety of nuclear weapons. Officials raced to reverse the firings on Friday, but according to NBC News they ran into a logistical challenge when they were unable to figure out how to contact the terminated employees. They had, of course, already frozen their government email accounts. At least some of those who were contacted and have gone back to work say they’re going to be looking for new jobs. That seems like a good idea.