World roundup: January 6-7 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and elsewhere

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Hi everybody! I hope you all had as happy and restful a winter break as possible and am looking forward to continuing our news journey in 2024. Thanks for sticking with Foreign Exchanges and let’s get to it!

THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY

January 6, 1809: A joint Portuguese-British army attacks the city of Cayenne, capital of French Guiana. This operation was part of a larger British campaign to attack French colonies all over the Americas, which were being used by French privateers to interfere with British commerce. The mostly Portuguese force succeeded in capturing French Guiana, though the colony was returned to French control after Napoleon’s removal from power.

January 7, 1610: Galileo Galilei mentions in a letter his discovery of three of the four Galilean moons (Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io) of Jupiter. This is the first time Galileo documented having observed the moons, though he apparently hadn’t yet realized what they were. Initially assuming them to be fixed stars, over the days and weeks after writing this letter Galileo determined that they were moons and discovered a fourth one.

January 7, 1942: The Imperial Japanese army lays siege to US and Philippine forces on Luzon Island’s Bataan Peninsula. The beleaguered US and Philippine soldiers held out for a bit over three months, but finally surrendered to Japan on April 9. Some 78,000 soldiers surrendered, 12,000 of them American—one of the largest single surrenders in US military history. Over 20,000 Philippine and hundreds of US prisoners subsequently died in the ensuing Bataan Death March to the city of San Fernando and due to the brutality with which the Japanese military treated the captives.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) declared over the weekend that it has “completed the dismantling of the Hamas military framework in the northern Gaza Strip.” While the AP and several other news outlets are characterizing this as a sign that the IDF will now pare down its operations in northern Gaza, I’m not sure it means anything operationally. Heck, I’m not sure it actually means anything grammatically, though given that the IDF has dismantled everything else in northern Gaza it stands to reason it’s also dismantled any military frameworks that had been located there. One thing this presumably means is that the Israelis will be further intensifying operations in central and southern Gaza, the places where all the civilians driven out of northern Gaza are now located.

In more Israel-Palestine news:

• If you were hoping that the return of this newsletter would coincide with any improvement in the situation in Gaza, I’m sorry to disappoint. Conditions haven’t even changed much apart from steadily worsening. United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths characterized the territory as “uninhabitable” on Friday, and while the military campaign has been deadly enough (nearly 23,000 dead at last check) it seems like the Gazan populace is really on the brink of irreversible second-order threats like rampant illness and famine, without a functional health system. Although when we left off before Christmas there were some tentative indications of increased flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza little on that front has changed either. In truth there’s no realistic level of humanitarian assistance that can address this intense a catastrophe—only a full ceasefire and lifting of the Israeli blockade can do that.

• As if to stress how little has changed about Gaza over the past three weeks, the Biden administration has dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Middle East on another trip that’s likely to be all talk and no action. Blinken is in the neighborhood to discuss the Israeli government’s attempts to widen the war to include Hezbollah (we’ll get to that) and will presumably restate the administration’s case for the IDF to pare down its operations and to make greater efforts to improve Gaza’s humanitarian situation. Those appeals haven’t worked so far but, hey, maybe the 15th (?) time is the charm. The IDF tempered expectations for Blinken’s trip by insisting that it expects its operation in Gaza to “continue during the year 2024.” Maybe we can reevaluate things next January.

• Blinken may also want to get a handle on the continued suggestions from Israeli officials, including senior cabinet members and seemingly including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, that the endgame to this affair should involve the ethnic cleansing “voluntary evacuation” of Gaza. Putting aside questions as to the morality or even practicality of such a plan, the chatter itself is embarrassing for the administration as it tries to maintain the pretense that there’s a happy ending in this for the Palestinian people.

• The ethnic cleansing talk also isn’t doing the Israeli government any favors as it tries to quash the genocide petition the South African government filed with the International Court of Justice late last month. The filing argues that the Israeli campaign in Gaza violates the 1948 Genocide Convention and offers as evidence the many public statements from Israeli officials since October 7 that suggest genocidal intent. As a UN member state Israel is obliged in theory to obey ICJ rulings—including, say, an order to stop the Gaza operation. In practice the UN can’t enforce the court’s rulings so Israel, with US protection, will be free to do as it likes, but it would likely suffer some diplomatic and/or economic hit.

• An IDF airstrike on the refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin killed at least seven Palestinians on Sunday, a day that saw at least two other Palestinians and two Israelis killed in the West Bank as well. Israeli police opened fire on a van whose driver reportedly attempted to ram them at a checkpoint near Jerusalem and wound up killing a three year old child in another vehicle, while Israeli forces also killed a man near Ramallah in unclear circumstances. One Israeli police officer was killed during the Jenin operation while an Israeli civilian (presumably a settler) was shot and killed near Ramallah. Suffice to say that while 2023 was the deadliest year on record in the West Bank, 2024 is off to a strong start in its campaign to surpass that record.

• It’s hardly a major concern right now but those of you who have been following the Netanyahu government’s efforts to gut the Israeli Supreme Court will likely have noted that the court on Monday struck down part of that project. In question was a law the Knesset passed in July that limited the court’s ability to review government decisions on the basis of “reasonability.” The court on Wednesday stayed the implementation of another measure that would limit the judiciary’s ability to force the recusal of a prime minister. This bill was proposed with Netanyahu’s legal struggles in mind and the court ruled that its adoption should be delayed at least until the next general election.

IRAQ

Islamic State fighters reportedly killed two Popular Mobilization militia fighters in Iraq’s Saladin province on Saturday night. The Iraqi military says it killed at least five IS members in airstrikes in Diyala province on Sunday morning. It’s not entirely clear whether the airstrikes were carried out in retaliation.

Speaking of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the US military carried out an airstrike in Baghdad on Thursday that killed the PMF’s deputy head of operations in the capital, who went by the name Abu Taqwa. It did so because the US government believed that Abu Taqwa, as a commander in the Harakat al-Nujaba militia, was involved in recent Gaza-motivated airstrikes targeting US personnel. But because Abu Taqwa is also, in his PMF role, working for the Iraqi government, the strike prompted Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaʿ al-Sudani to tell reporters on Friday that he’s planning to begin the process of removing US forces from Iraq altogether. Sudani was probably blustering, and even if he wasn’t the US government—as Spencer Ackerman points out—doesn’t really acknowledge Iraqi sovereignty anyway. If it did then it wouldn’t assume the right to assassinate Iraqi officials like Abu Taqwa with impunity. Nevertheless it’s worth noting that Gaza is clearly affecting US regional relations.

LEBANON

The IDF and Hezbollah spent the weekend trading fire across the Lebanese-Israeli border. Although that sounds pretty similar to where we left things last month, this situation has gotten potentially much more critical as the IDF seems to be intent on provoking a full-blown war with the Lebanese milita. On Tuesday an apparent Israeli airstrike killed at least seven people, including deputy Hamas political leader Saleh al-Arouri, in southern Beirut. Arouri seems undoubtedly to have been the target but the bigger concern may be the location. To this point the Hezbollah-IDF clashes since October 7 have been confined to southern Lebanon and Syria, but an Israeli attack on Beirut risks crossing a Hezbollah red line. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, pledged retaliation on Friday and Hezbollah’s weekend activity may in part have been directed toward that aim. However, Nasrallah still has to consider Lebanon’s extremely precarious political situation before he escalates this situation any further. The big concern is that the Israelis may continue to escalate no matter what Hezbollah does.

The aftermath of the Israeli strike in southern Beirut (Houssam Shbaro/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Beirut attack came just over a week after the IDF (probably) killed an Iranian Quds Force general in a strike outside the Syrian capital, Damascus. That’s likely to incur some sort of response from Iran, perhaps via Hezbollah. One conclusion that could be drawn from these attacks is that the Israeli government is actively courting a regional expansion of the conflict in Gaza. Even the Biden administration now appears to believe this. At the very least it seems intent on risking such an expansion. This may strike you as lunacy, and it is, but from Netanyahu’s perspective a wider war could provide cover for the atrocities his military is committing in Gaza (and any atrocities he’s intending to commit) and security for his political career (which is the thing that’s currently keeping his corruption charges at bay). And if it starts to look like the IDF has bitten off more than it can chew, he’s probably assuming (probably correctly) that the US would get involved in the war directly.

YEMEN

The US military shot down another presumably Houthi drone in the Red Sea on Saturday, as the Yemeni rebel group continues to threaten commercial shipping in the region in response to the conflict in Gaza. Maersk, one of the largest container shipping firms in the world, announced on Friday that it’s giving up on the Red Sea and diverting traffic around Africa for the foreseeable future.

IRAN

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s suicide bombing that killed at least 91 people attending a commemoration for former Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in the Iranian city of Kerman. Speculation in the wake of the incident quickly ran toward Israel but while that can’t be ruled out at this point there’s no indication of Israeli involvement. The US intelligence community has apparently decided that IS’s Afghan branch did indeed carry out the attack, which either confirms or casts doubt upon IS’s claim depending on your point of view.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

IS also claimed responsibility for bombing a minibus in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood on Saturday, killing at least two people and wounding another 14. That neighborhood is predominantly populated by members of Afghanistan’s Shiʿa Hazara community and is routinely targeted by IS attacks.

BANGLADESH

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League party “won” Sunday’s parliamentary election, an outcome I have put in quotes because it was never really in question. A number of opposition parties, including the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the vote (Hasina is not known for permitting “free and fair” elections) and turnout was only around 40 percent. Arsonists struck four polling stations (along with a school that was not being used as such) on Saturday and there are concerns that pre-election violence will continue into the post-election period. An arson attack on a commuter train on Friday killed at least four people and prompted the arrest of seven opposition-linked people including one described by Al Jazeera as “a senior BNP official.”

MYANMAR

An apparent military airstrike killed at least 17 people in a village in northern Myanmar’s Sagaing region on Sunday. Authorities are denying involvement, but the village is under rebel control and it’s not as though there are a plethora of actors conducting airstrikes on Myanmar residential areas. Elsewhere, the rebel Three Brotherhood Alliance declared on Friday that its forces had seized control of the town of Laukkai, which lies along the Myanmar-Chinese border in Shan state. Myanmar’s ruling junta later acknowledged the loss, the latest in a string of defeats it’s suffered in that province. Laukkai is known as a center for internet scammers and the Chinese government has been agitating for somebody to target their operations.

CHINA

The Chinese government on Sunday blacklisted five US arms manufacturers over weapons sales to Taiwan. Presumably none of them were doing significant business in China in the first place so the impact of these sanctions is probably minimal.

AFRICA

SUDAN

Rapid Support Forces leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has gone on an extended overseas trip that seems obviously meant to establish him as a potential head of state in whatever polity emerges from the RSF’s conflict with the Sudanese military. Analysts seem to think the trip has been orchestrated by the UAE government, which has supported the RSF and views Dagalo as an asset.

Dagalo, taking advantage of the RSF’s capture of the important city of Wad Madani last month, has spent the past several days visiting multiple African states and AFP notes in particular that he visited Ethiopia to meet, among other people, with former Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. That’s significant in that Hamdok now leads an important civilian political coalition called Taqadum (“Progress”) and is in position to lend credibility to Dagalo as an alternative to Sudanese military commander and de facto head of state Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Dagalo has been expressing an openness to a ceasefire, something Burhan continues to reject despite the fact that his military is clearly losing the war.

NIGER

Niger’s ruling junta is acknowledging that airstrikes it carried out in the Tillabéri region on Friday killed an unspecified number of civilians. According to the junta its security forces were responding to a column of “terrorists” allegedly attacking a military outpost in the region but that a “sweep” of the area on Saturday showed “civilian casualties at the scene of the strike.” Whether there was actually an attack on the outpost is anybody’s guess, though the junta is clearly insisting that there was.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on Saturday that the Biden administration is trying to find a way to maintain the US drone base in Niger despite last July’s coup and the automatic cutoff in relations that’s supposed to trigger. The junta is not overly opposed to a continued US military presence but that whole “rules-based order” spiel is rendered ever more hollow as the US continually makes exceptions to the rules for its own aims. In the event a way forward cannot be found, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the US is in talks to shift its West African drone operations to coastal countries like Benin, Ghana, and/or Ivory Coast. The US counterterrorism presence in West Africa has done little to counter terrorism but of course packing up and leaving the region altogether is out of the question.

ETHIOPIA

In one of the more potentially significant stories that cropped up while FX was on break, the Ethiopian government signed an agreement with the unrecognized government of the separatist Somaliland region granting Ethiopia access to the port city of Berbera. The deal in theory satisfies Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s long-standing demand for a Red Sea port, a demand that has raised concerns about a new Ethiopian-Eritrean war—though I have no idea whether Abiy sees it that way.

One big problem, of course, is that Somaliland isn’t an internationally recognized state and Berbera (like the rest of the region) is at least technically considered part of Somalia. The Somali government has already rejected the agreement and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed a new law to that effect on Sunday. Somaliland is functionally independent and the port deal includes a promise that Ethiopia will recognize its de jure independence at some point. Still, the legality of this arrangement is definitely questionable.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

Russian artillery reportedly killed at least 11 people in the Pokrovsk district of Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast on Saturday. The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, claimed a successful attack on a Russian airbase in western Crimea, though Russian officials only acknowledged that their air defenses had shot down four missiles over the peninsula. The Russian military appears to have stepped up its air campaign over the past couple of weeks, including a significant barrage overnight into Sunday, but otherwise this conflict seems fairly static. It is worth noting that Ukrainian shelling killed at least 21 people in the Russian city of Belgorod on December 30 in the deadliest such incident on Russian soil since the start of the invasion some 22 months ago. Russian authorities characterized that incident as a “crime” and accused the Ukrainians of indiscriminately attacking civilians, one day after Russian airstrikes had killed at least 41 people across Ukraine.

POLAND

Polish farmers have reportedly agreed to end their blockade of the Ukrainian border after reaching a deal with new Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government. The deal includes a new corn subsidy as well as other measures intended to protect farmers from declines in food prices caused by the influx of agricultural products from Ukraine. Polish farmers and truckers have been blockading the border since November—the truckers are, at least for the moment, continuing their protest over lower shipping prices being charged by Ukrainian truck drivers who don’t have permits to operate in the European Union. The groups have made some allowance for aid crossing into Ukraine but their blockade has interfered somewhat with that process. Tusk has seemingly prioritized ending these demonstrations.

AMERICAS

BOLIVIA

The Bolivian Constitutional Court ruled late last month that former President Evo Morales is not eligible to run for reelection next year. In doing so it reversed a 2017 ruling that argued that, despite constitutional restrictions, Morales had a human right to run for a fourth term as president. He did run for that fourth term in 2019 and his victory was immediately followed by a coup that removed him from office. The new ruling, which in theory cannot be appealed, seemingly eliminates the possibility of a showdown with incumbent Luis Arce, Morales’s former economy minister who won the 2020 election that removed the 2019 junta from power. The growing dispute between them has been threatening to fracture their Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Morales decried the ruling but it’s unclear what he intends to do about it.

UNITED STATES

It turns out that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been in the hospital since January 1 for what the Pentagon describes as “complications following a recent elective medical procedure.” What makes this interesting is that Austin apparently didn’t feel the need to tell anybody, including his boss Joe Biden, until Friday, which seems like it’s probably not standard procedure in these sorts of situations. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the whole thing but it seemed worth mentioning in case, say, Austin decides to retire abruptly in the near future.

Finally, HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports on new tension within the Biden administration over what it’s doing—or, really, not doing—to prevent a regional Middle Eastern war:

American officials say the Biden administration is not doing all it can to reduce tensions, despite public commitments from senior officials to avoid a regional blow-up.

“I’ve been trying to keep an avalanche from falling on Lebanon and so have a lot of people,” one official told HuffPost, saying many national security personnel fear unchecked U.S. support for Israel will make it overly confident about expanding operations into Lebanon. “The problem is no one can rein in Biden, and if Biden has a policy, he’s the commander-in-chief ― we have to carry it out. That’s what it comes down to, very, very, very unfortunately.”

They described multiple U.S. government war games aimed at predicting the implications of spiraling fighting along the Lebanese-Israeli border. “Every scenario shows this would escalate into something terrible… whether in terms of counterterrorism or war with Iran,” the official said, adding the Defense Department is especially concerned about the prospect.

Another U.S. official said American pressure on Israel’s government has yet to yield results.

Top figures like Secretary of State Antony Blinken “have been good but don’t seem to have made an impact on Israeli leadership,” they said, citing months of American statements decrying a bigger war.

“Netanyahu, Dermer and Gallant” ― respectively, Israel’s prime minister, strategic affairs minister and defense minister ― “are hell-bent on seizing this moment to expand the war into southern Lebanon and deliver some mythical imagined death blow to Hezbollah,” the official continued.