World roundup: July 19-20 2025
Stories from Syria, Japan, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
July 19, 64: The Great Fire of Rome ignites in the area around the Circus Maximus under uncertain circumstances. The conflagration would continue to rage for six days before subsiding, only to reignite and rage for another three days. The actual circumstances behind the fire have been lost in an ocean of legends and rumors. Chief among these is the story that Emperor Nero blamed the fire on Christians and under that pretense launched the first imperial persecution of the nascent religious sect. Another theory has Nero himself ordering the fire in order to destroy Rome and rebuild it to his own tastes (in this narrative he uses the Christians as a scapegoat to escape his own culpability). Modern scholars seem generally to be skeptical of these theories. A more mundane but also more plausible theory is that the fire started accidentally and spread quickly due to high winds.
July 19, 711: An Arab-Berber army defeats the Visigoths at the Battle of Guadalete, probably in what is now far southern Spain. Although hard facts about this engagement are difficult to come by, we can probably assume that it took place, the Muslims possibly invited to invade amid a Visigothic succession dispute. We can definitely assume that the Muslims won, because they wound up conquering most of the Iberian peninsula afterward.
July 19, 1864: The Third Battle of Nanjing ends with a decisive Qing victory and the final eradication of the rebel Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The battle, which ended after the death of rebel leader Hong Xiuquan and saw the Taiping forces lose perhaps as many as 100,000 men (double that if you include losses incurred over the course of the entire siege, which began in March), was the last major engagement of the Taiping Rebellion.
July 20, 1402: An Ottoman army under Sultan Bayezid I runs smack into the famed warlord Timur at the Battle of Ankara and is resoundingly defeated. Timur took Bayezid prisoner and shattered the nascent Ottoman empire, giving most of it back to its former Turkic rulers and leaving several Ottoman claimants to fight over what was left. An 11 year civil war known as the “Ottoman Interregnum” ensued, with Mehmed I emerging victorious and resuming the empire’s expansion.
July 20, 1969: The crew of Apollo 11 carries out the first manned landing on the moon. Very early the following morning, mission commander Neil Armstrong became the first human being (as far as we know, anyway; I don’t want to upset any Ancient Aliens fans) to walk on the lunar surface. Possibly you’ve heard about this before so I don’t think we need to go into much detail.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The good news, I suppose, is that southern Syria’s Suwayda province was reportedly “calm” on Sunday, a ceasefire that had been reached the previous day apparently taking hold at least for the time being. The bad news is that the week or so of fighting that preceded said ceasefire left over 1000 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and more than 128,000 displaced, according to the United Nations. This is also the third (by my count) attempt at a ceasefire—well, technically the fourth but one of them is a bit different from the others—so there is some reason to question whether this one will hold beyond a day or two. Even this latest ceasefire was threatened by additional clashes on Saturday before things settled down overnight into Sunday.
The brief summary of events, as far as I’m able to recount, is that “tit for tat” fighting between members of the Druze and Bedouin communities in Suwayda city escalated last weekend to the point where the SOHR was counting at least 116 dead by Tuesday. By that point Syrian security forces had intervened, but instead of trying to halt the violence they apparently decided to participate in it on behalf of the Bedouin. Anyone who followed their massacre of Syrian Alawites earlier this year can presumably guess what happened next: mass killing and property destruction carried out on a sectarian basis. A Tuesday ceasefire collapsed pretty quickly when Syrian Druze grandee Hikmat al-Hijri rejected it, called for continued “resistance” to those government forces, and appealed to the international community—and specifically the Israeli government—for support.
For several reasons, but chiefly because Israel’s own Druze community demands it and because they’re a useful wedge to justify intervention in southern Syria, the Israeli government has declared itself the protector of Syrian Druze. Most of that community’s leadership doesn’t seem particularly thrilled about that but Hijri is the most significant exception. The Israeli military (IDF) carried out a handful of airstrikes against Syrian military units in the Suwayda region on Monday, but it intervened in a much more substantial fashion on Tuesday and then on Wednesday IDF aircraft struck Damascus, hitting the Syrian Defense Ministry and near the Presidential Palace. Wednesday brought another ceasefire and the withdrawal of Syrian forces—under Israeli pressure—from Suwayda, but the underlying Druze-Bedouin violence continued and seems even to have escalated.
Syrian security forces redeployed into Suwayda on Saturday after the Trump administration—which is back to leaking about how frustrated everyone is with the Israeli government—brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Syria. That brought the announcement of another ceasefire in Suwayda, which is the one that now appears to be in place (albeit only after those additional clashes and ultimately the removal of Bedouin militias from Suwayda city). This time around the security forces seem actually to be doing their job instead of joining in the sectarian conflict, though we’ll see how long that lasts. It sounds like Syrian officials believed that they had US and Israeli permission—a funny concept given that these events all took place within Syria—to intervene earlier in the week but in reality they only had US permission. The Israelis have now grudgingly allowed the Syrian deployment (which violates an Israeli demand that southern Syria be “demilitarized”) but could always change their minds.
There’s obviously a lot to unpack here and I’m not going to attempt too much of that now, particularly inasmuch as it’s not even clear that the fighting is entirely over. Syria has been more a patchwork of regions than a single country for quite some time, going back at least to the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and really well beyond that, so it’s not surprising that the massive upheavals the country has experienced since December are fueling a rise in factional violence. I don’t think it makes much sense to try to sort the Druze and Bedouin participants into simplistic Good and Bad categories—I know Hijri’s appeal to the Israelis has been criticized and that’s understandable, but his Druze factions have not been the only ones fighting over the past week. Both of those communities have long-standing grievances with one another and fighters from both committed serious atrocities over the past week.
The one thing I will note is that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is once again promising to “protect” a Syrian minority community after manifestly failing to do so. Whatever grievances led to the initial Druze-Bedouin clashes that started this whole affair, if Sharaa and his security forces want to be taken seriously as protectors of the whole Syrian state then they have to start controlling its sectarian rivalries instead of participating in them. Every time those security forces go on a rampage it makes the still-new Syrian government’s relations with each of those communities—Druze, Alawites, Kurds, and so on—more challenging. One way to start fixing things would be for Sharaa to hold his security personnel accountable for their own atrocities, but indications on that front have so far not been encouraging.
LEBANON
The IDF killed two people in separate airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Saturday. It claimed that both strikes targeted Hezbollah personnel who were attempting to rebuild the group’s military infrastructure, though in one of the two Lebanese officials said that the victim was “a man who was repairing plumbing on the roof of a house.” I suppose that doesn’t rule out that he was a Hezbollah operative who was working on military infrastructure, though I wonder if perhaps this was a misidentification of some sort.
EGYPT
Egyptian police killed two people in a raid on an alleged “militant hideout” in Giza on Sunday. Authorities are alleging that both were members of the “Hasm” militant group, which the Egyptian government insists is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
I assume it comes as no surprise that the Trump administration was not able to broker a ceasefire in Gaza while I was away. Instead the situation in the territory remains pretty constant, with the IDF killing dozens of people per day (many of them while seeking aid), but also worse, as the long-term restriction of food into Gaza takes a cumulative toll. Donald Trump declared again on Friday that the parties are on the verge of a ceasefire agreement but there’s no actual evidence of any progress in negotiations. The sticking point, as it has been all along, remains Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disinterest in ending the violence in Gaza altogether. He seems dead set on implementing his government’s plan to displace Gaza’s population into the ruins of Rafah and, from there, out of the territory altogether. A genuine ceasefire would foreclose on that plan and so it is a nonstarter. Nevertheless talks continue and, in spite of it all, US and Israeli officials still seem to believe that Hamas will knuckle under any minute now.
Elsewhere:
The IDF expanded its displacement project to include the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah on Sunday, dropping leaflets advising anyone sheltering there to evacuate. It’s unclear how many people are actually doing so. Much of Deir al-Balah has been spared large scale ground operations to this point, and according to satellite analysis it’s the only part of Gaza left where less than half of the buildings have been destroyed. But with the IDF having cleared out much of northern Gaza it is the next major region for population transfer if the ethnic cleansing is to happen.
Axios reported on Friday that the Israeli government has asked the Trump administration to help encourage the leaders of three countries—Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya—to take in large numbers of Palestinians and thereby enable the ethnic cleansing effort. Mossad director David Barnea is claiming that all three “expressed openness” to the idea, but amid pushback from Arab governments it’s unclear whether the administration will get involved.
Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority while I was away, after the ultra-orthodox United Torah Judaism and Shas parties quit his coalition over the PM’s failure to codify an exemption for Haredim from military service. Assuming neither party changes course their departures will leave Netanyahu with just 50 seats in the 120 seat Knesset, but Shas at least has said that it will not support any move to topple the government and its continued backing in that regard should be enough (barely) to keep the government afloat.
Netanyahu also got in a bit of hot water, some of it likely inflated for effect, with the Trump administration in the past few days. The IDF bombed the only Catholic church in Gaza on Thursday, killing three people and raising a global outcry that rang a tad hollow given that the Israelis have bombed every church in Gaza before including this one. Israeli officials categorized the strike as an oopsie but we’re told that Donald Trump was “upset” about it. That incident came after Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American man to death in the West Bank the previous Friday, prompting a rare call for an investigation from US ambassador Mike Huckabee. Then there was the Israeli intervention in Syria, which apparently came without US approval and moved one unnamed member of the administration to call Netanyahu a “madman” in a comment to Axios. There is as ever no reason to think that these public shows of frustration will have any impact on US policy.
IRAQ
A drone strike killed one Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) member and wounded another in northern Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah province on Saturday. This presumably Turkish attack comes a bit over a week after the PKK symbolically kicked off its disarmament process in Sulaymaniyah and seems somewhat counterproductive under those circumstances (assuming it was a Turkish attack).
IRAN
NBC News reported on Thursday that the latest assessment of the US military’s strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last month concludes that they damaged Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility heavily enough to set work there back by as much as two years, assuming that Iranian officials wanted to reconstitute the site. But damage at the other two sites, Isfahan and Natanz, is thought to be less substantial and those facilities could be just months away from at least partially resuming their work. This conclusion lends itself to the possibility of additional Israeli and/or US strikes on those sites, especially if it looks like the Iranians are trying to rebuild them.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said early Monday that Tehran and the “E3” (France, Germany, and the UK) will hold a new round of nuclear talks on Friday in Istanbul. This comes after E3 foreign ministers held a call with Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi on Thursday for the first time since the “12 Day War” last month. The E3 is threatening to invoke the “snap back” mechanism in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which would restore UN sanctions against Iran, unless they’re comfortable with the progress toward a new nuclear agreement. There has been no progress toward such a deal since the war.
ASIA
MYANMAR
Myanmar’s military junta announced the recapture of the town of Nawnghkio from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) rebel group on Thursday. The TNLA hasn’t confirmed that development but if true it would be fairly significant as Nawnghkio sits along an important highway linking Myanmar’s Shan state to China. It would also be significant in that the TNLA has won a series of victories against junta forces since it and two other groups began their “Operation 1027” offensive in October 2023. This development could reflect a shifting of that tide.
CHINA
According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese exports of critical minerals to the US rose in June, following the latest US-China trade accord, but still remain well short of their 2024 levels. China’s export of rare earth magnets to the US was down 52 percent last month when compared with June 2024, which believe it or not represents a considerable increase over May, when those exports were down a whopping 93 percent from the previous year. These declines, which seem pretty fixed at this point, are forcing US firms to find ways to cope with shortages and to prepare for the possibility that US-Chinese tension might flare up again and worsen the situation.
JAPAN
NHK is reporting that Japan’s ruling coalition lost its collective majority in the House of Councillors in the wake of an election on Sunday. At last check it was projecting that the Liberal Democratic Party and its Komeito partner “were certain” to emerge with fewer than the 125 seats needed to control the 248 seat upper chamber of the Japanese parliament. The House of Councillors is the weaker of the two chambers, but after he’d already presided over the loss of the LDP-Komeito majority in the House of Representatives in October’s election, this result is raising pressure on LDP leader and Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru to resign. He’s shown no indication as yet that he’s even considering it.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Fighting between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces group appears to be on the rise across the Kordofan region of late. The United Nations is reporting that over 450 civilians were killed around the town of Bara in North Kordofan state last weekend and that violence claimed dozens more lives throughout the week, most killed by RSF fighters but some killed in military airstrikes. Military strikes have also killed several people in West Kordofan state in recent days.
SENEGAL
The French military relinquished control over its last two military bases in Senegal in a ceremony on Thursday, leaving the country bereft of French soldiers for the first time since it gained independence in 1960. I’m sure the Senegalese people will find some way to keep going. The Senegal withdrawal is part of a massive French redeployment out of Africa, much though not all of it involuntary. The only permanent French base left on the continent now is in Djibouti.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The Congolese government and the M23 militant group signed a “declaration of principles” in Qatar on Saturday in which they pledged to sign a full peace agreement no later than August 18. Of course, the fact that they could only agree on a statement of principles means they’re not yet ready for a full agreement, despite last month’s deal between the DRC and M23 patron Rwanda. The two sides have failed so far to take any proposed “confidence-building” steps, like a prisoner exchange or restoring some basic economic function to the eastern Congolese cities that are now under M23 control, that might lead into a peace deal. And apparently they’re already disputing whether the statement of principles includes an M23 withdrawal from those cities and the other territory it holds. So stay tuned, basically.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The European Union has agreed to impose what the WSJ is calling its “toughest” sanctions on Russia to date, a package that would involve, among other things, “blocking attempts to revive the Nord Stream gas pipelines, lowering a price cap for Russian oil sales and hitting banks from third countries in a move that could exacerbate tensions with China.” It also includes measures to crack down on Russian oil sales that exceed the cap.
UKRAINE
The EU undoubtedly feels comfortable moving ahead with its sanctions in part because Donald Trump is also talking about sanctioning Russia. On Monday he announced plans to send new US weapons to Ukraine via other NATO states—a reported plan to sell new Patriot air defense batteries to Germany while it sends its current Patriots to Ukraine seems to be the model—and threatened to impose “very severe tariffs” in 50 days, absent a Russia-Ukraine peace deal. The latter would include “secondary tariffs” in the amount of 100 percent on countries that trade with Russia, which would indeed be serious.
Why wait 50 days, you ask? Most likely because Trump thinks that’s long enough that he’ll be able to back out when the time comes with relatively little criticism. But Seymour Hersh is reporting a more provocative reason, which is that the Trump administration may take that time to engineer the removal of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In this telling he’d be moved out in favor of the former commander of the Ukrainian military, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, with the idea that Vladimir Putin could claim Zelensky’s removal as part of a grand victory, at which point he could agree to end the war.
We’ll see. Hersh was right about the US attack on Iran and there are signs that Zelensky is worried about something—he just named Yulia Svyrydenko as his new prime minister and moved former PM Denys Shmygal to defense minister. Svyrydenko was heavily involved in negotiations around the US-Ukraine minerals deal so she’s got some purchase with the Trump administration and the loyal Shmygal could be viewed as a buffer in case of a move against Zelensky from within the Ukrainian military. Zelensky is also offering Moscow another round of peace talks, though there’s been no response from the Russian government as yet.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
Donald Trump’s threat to impose massive tariffs on Brazil unless authorities agree to drop their criminal case against former President Jair Bolsonaro has predictable backfired. The Brazilian Supreme Court responded to the threat by ordering new raids on Bolsonaro’s home and office and forcing him to wear an ankle monitor over fears that he might attempt to flee prosecution. And current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seems to be capitalizing on the public hostility to Trump’s threat to bolster his own flagging popularity, which might springboard him into what had seemed like an increasingly unlikely reelection bid next year. Great work all around.
VENEZUELA
The Venezuelan government released ten imprisoned US nationals on Friday as part of a deal that included the repatriation of the 252 Venezuelan nationals the Trump administration trafficked to El Salvador back in March. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said the deal also included the release of “a considerable number of Venezuelan political prisoners,” but details on that piece of it are unclear.
UNITED STATES
Finally, at Foreign Affairs Jacob Ware reports on troubling indications that American-style gun violence is going international:
Less understood, however, is the dangerous degree to which the United States is exporting its once unique form of gun violence to the rest of the world. Last month, for instance, a 21-year-old gunman opened fire at his former school in Graz, Austria, killing ten students in one of the deadliest days in the country since World War II. It soon emerged that the killer held “a significant passion” for researching U.S. school shootings, an Austrian police chief said; he had been particularly inspired by the 1999 school massacre in Columbine, Colorado.
The Austrian gunman is only one in a growing set of international perpetrators of targeted violence who were inspired by an American. It has long been known that, in the U.S. context, school shootings are an epidemiological phenomenon. And the epidemic is now spreading beyond U.S. borders. In a 2024 report, Jason Silva, a leading scholar on gun violence, found that in a set of 35 countries relatively similar to the United States politically and economically, the number of public mass shootings more than doubled from the first to the second decade of the twenty-first century. “The greatest number of incidents,” Silva noted, “occurred in 2019 and 2020.” Research also shows that many of these incidents were directly linked to examples set by U.S. shooters.
Mass shootings now constitute a particularly bloody form of American foreign influence. By destabilizing U.S. allies, they threaten to undermine the United States’ global image—and foil its ability to advance its geopolitical aims.
Listening. I prefer listening. :) Keep up the great work.