World roundup: July 9 2025

Stories from Lebanon, Mali, Brazil, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE #1: One final reminder that I am taking several days off from the newsletter for our annual summer break, so tonight’s roundup will be our last until Sunday, July 20.

PROGRAMMING NOTE #2: Friend of the newsletter Eleanor Janega has written a new post at her Going Medieval blog on the Crusades. I note this because Eleanor is great and we dabble in Crusades history around here from time to time, and also because it’s a good opportunity for me to promote the limited series that American Prestige did with Eleanor and her We’re Not So Different co-host, Luke Waters, called Welcome to the Crusades: The First Crusade. It’s available for purchase now for those who would like a deep dive into the events and characters of that First Crusade, so please check it out. Your support may help decide whether there will be a Welcome to the Crusades: The Second Crusade at some point down the road.

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 9, 969: The Fatimid general Jawhar ibn Abdallah leads the communal Friday prayer in the Amr ibn al-As Mosque in Fustat in the name of the Fatimid Caliph al-Muʿizz li-Din Allah, putting the final symbolic touch on the Fatimid dynasty’s conquest of Egypt. The Fatimids had emerged in the North African region of Ifriqiya (roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia plus parts of eastern Algeria and western Libya) in 909 as a branch of the Ismaʿili Shiʿa line leading a predominantly Berber army. They made repeated attempts to take Egypt from the rival Abbasid Caliphate but were unsuccessful until the 960s, when the Abbasid polity had all but collapsed and the caliphs had fallen under the “protection” of the Iranian Buyid dynasty. The Fatimid caliphate eventually moved its capital from Ifriqiya to a new city that Jawhar began building near Fustat and eventually grew to encompass it: Cairo.

July 9, 1816: The United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata declares independence from Spain. As most of those provinces went on to form Argentina, this is commemorated as Argentine Independence Day.

July 9, 1944: In one of the more decisive engagements of World War II’s Pacific Theater, the United States emerges victorious from the Battle of Saipan. Control of Saipan, the largest of the northern Mariana Islands, put the US military in position to begin B-29 bombing attacks against Japan itself. The island served as a staging point for the US reconquest of the Philippines later in 1944. The defeat also led to the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō.

A unit of US Marines taking cover behind a tank on Saipan on July 8, 1944 (US Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The Trump administration’s Turkish ambassador/Syrian envoy, Tom Barrack, spent his Wednesday in Damascus trying to iron out disagreements between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces. He met with their respective leaders, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF leader Mazloum Abdi, and…apparently didn’t resolve anything. “I don’t think there’s a breakthrough,” he said after those meetings, “I think these things happen in baby steps, because it’s built on trust, commitment and understanding.” At least the two parties seem willing to continue negotiating despite the lack of major progress.

Although the Syrian government and the SDF did agree in principle on integrating the latter into the Syrian state back in March, they apparently remain at odds over the question of whether the SDF’s military arm would remain a cohesive unit under its own commanders with Damascus’s oversight (Abdi’s preference) or SDF fighters would be incorporated individually into the Syrian government’s security forces (Sharaa’s preference). That issue can be regarded as a proxy for bigger and potentially thornier questions about Kurdish self-rule in northeastern Syria, in the sense that if the two sides can’t resolve the former then resolving the latter is out of the question.