World roundup: July 31 2024

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

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 31 (or thereabouts), 751: An Abbasid army defeats an imperial Tang Chinese force at the Battle of Talas in Central Asia. Arab and Chinese armies had by this point bumped into one another several times in that region, but Talas proved to be fairly decisive in terms of establishing Islamic over Chinese primacy. The main reason for this isn’t so much the battle as the subsequent An Lushan Rebellion in China, which the Tang survived but in a substantially weaker state with much less control over their imperial periphery. Talas was also once believed to have been instrumental in the transmission of paper-making technology from China to the Arabs and thus on to the West, but this seems to be overblown.

July 31, 1941: The invading Wehrmacht defeats the Soviet Red Army at the Battle of Smolensk, part of World War II’s Operation Barbarossa. Though a fairly stunning German tactical victory, leaving over 400,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded and over 300,000 captured, strategically Smolensk contributed to the overall collapse of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The stiff Soviet resistance caused German leaders to slow down their advance on Moscow, which gave the Soviets time to strengthen their defenses around the city and contributed to the attrition of the German army. The subsequent Battle of Moscow ended in a significant Soviet victory.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

An apparent Israeli airstrike of some kind killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and a bodyguard in Tehran early Wednesday morning. Haniyeh was in Iran to attend Tuesday’s inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and was staying in some sort of military veterans’ compound in the northern part of the city. Details surrounding the assassination are still pretty sketchy and given the controlled Iranian media environment may take some time to filter out, so for example it’s unclear what weapon was used though some sort of drone seems likely. The Israeli government had not claimed responsibility at time of writing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a televised address Wednesday evening, but only acknowledged the killing of Fuad Shukr (see below) while obliquely nodding toward the Haniyeh strike.

The US government, in the person of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has denied involvement in the strike—aside from arming and nurturing the Israeli security state, I guess—though there is some reason to wonder whether the Israelis could have carried out this operation without some level of direct US support. Israel has conducted a number of targeted killings (assassinations, murders, take your pick of terminology) inside Iran (and elsewhere) in the past but it’s never done so by air in Iran, which adds another layer of logistics to this hit. Blinken also denied any US foreknowledge of the attack, something that really strains credulity although it’s not out of the question and it’s also possible that Blinken himself was intentionally kept in the dark. Later on Wednesday the White House expressed some tepid concern about both the Haniyeh and Shukr killings, with spokesperson John Kirby telling reporters that the attacks “certainly don’t help with the temperature going down.” That will definitely make the Israelis think twice about any further provocations.