TODAY IN HISTORY
January 19, 1419: The Siege of Rouen ends with the English army in control of the city. Seizing Rouen helped English King Henry V cement his conquest of Normandy and the city became an important launch point for his invasions of the rest of France. The siege itself is perhaps most famous for the tragic story of 12,000 civilians who were kicked out of Rouen in December as the city was running out of food. Henry refused to allow them to pass through his lines and they died of starvation outside the city walls.
January 19, 1817: Argentine rebel leader José de San Martín leads his army, along with a group of Chilean rebels led by Bernardo O’Higgins, across the Andes Mountains into royalist-controlled Chile. Although San Martín lost by some counts as much as a third of his army in the crossing, the combined force emerged in Chile and won the decisive Battle of Chacabuco on February 12, forcing royalist forces to withdraw north into Peru. The crossing is considered a milestone in the course of the Latin American independence movement.
January 19, 1883: The borough of Roselle in New Jersey becomes the first community lit entirely with electric lighting via overhead wires. The wiring system was designed by Thomas Edison as proof that an entire town could be electrified in this way. Needless to say the concept caught on.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa welcomed Syrian Democratic Forces leader Mazloum Abdi to Damascus on Monday so that the two of them could sign the ceasefire/SDF capitulation deal they reached at gunpoint over the weekend. This event had been scheduled to take place on Sunday but bad weather forced a delay. Monday’s session apparently did not go well. The Kurdish media outlet Rûdaw is citing Foza Alyusuf of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, the main political actor within the SDF, characterizing it as “not positive” and suggesting that Sharaa entered the meeting demanding the SDF’s “surrender.” Al Jazeera quotes her arguing there is “no political will on the part of the government to implement a ceasefire” and alleging that there are Islamic State elements fighting among the government forces. The SDF has issued a general call for mobilization among its supporters, which certainly suggests that Sunday’s ceasefire has collapsed or is about to do so.
Prior to this latest development government security forces were deploying east of the Euphrates River into areas formerly administered by the SDF’s political arm, even into Hasakah province which as that AFP report notes is encroaching on what could be regarded as the Syrian Kurdish heartland. There were also reports of new fighting between government and SDF personnel in northeastern Syria’s Hasakah and Raqqa provinces that preceded the Sharaa-Abdi meeting and may have set the table for its failure. Each side is of course blaming the other for the clashes. According to Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman, Donald Trump spoke with Sharaa by phone on Monday and demanded an end to the fighting. It’s unclear whether he threatened any sort of US action if Sharaa ignores that demand.
Of potential concern is the fact that this new fighting was taking place near prison facilities where the SDF has been detaining IS prisoners, including the group’s foreign recruits. Abdi and other SDF leaders seem to have thought that maintaining those facilities would buy them leverage with the US and other Western governments, who would rather leave their IS-affiliated nationals in Syria than repatriate them. It would seem that was a miscalculation on the SDF’s part. Regardless, there are now reports of detainees escaping amid the fighting and the potential for more of them to be released (inadvertently or otherwise) is high.
