World roundup: July 25 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Thailand, Sudan, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I am sending out today’s roundup a bit ahead of schedule in order to make a family commitment this evening. We’ll make up anything I miss on Sunday. Thanks for reading.

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 25, 1139: An army under the future Afonso I, then Count Afonso of Portugal, defeats the Almoravids at the Battle of Ourique. Details of this battle are sketchy, but it was apparently such a glorious victory that in its aftermath Afonso declared Portugal’s independence from the Kingdom of León and thereby gave himself a promotion from count to king. Later legends had Afonso being visited on the eve of the battle by, variously, Saint James the Greater (whose tomb is held to lie in Santiago de Compostela), Saint George, or even Jesus Himself, guaranteeing victory.

July 25, 1799: In the finale to his big, failed eastern campaign, Napoleon once again defeats an Ottoman-Mamluk army at the Battle of Abukir. The French expedition had stalled out at Acre and political upheaval back in France was demanding his attention. Abukir offered him a chance to declare victory and then slip out of Egypt and head home, while the French occupation of Egypt continued through August 1801 when a British intervention brought it to an end.

French painter Antoine-Jean Gros’s 1806 Bataille d’Aboukir, 25 juillet 1799 (Wikimedia Commons)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The US military’s Central Command is claiming that its personnel killed a “senior ISIS leader” named Dhiyaʾ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani and “his two adult ISIS-affiliated sons” in a “raid” in northern Syria’s Aleppo province on Friday morning. There’s no indication of any other casualties, although it should be noted that the US military can be reluctant to acknowledge such things.