World roundup: June 14 2024

Stories from Lebanon, Indonesia, Sudan, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE: The newsletter will be taking a break this weekend and will return to our regular schedule on Tuesday. Happy Father’s Day!

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 14, 1325: A young Moroccan man named Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta sets out from Tangier on the Hajj, a journey that typically took about 16 months round-trip. But Ibn Battuta spent the next 24 years traveling throughout the world, visiting Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and China. After returning to Morocco briefly in 1349 he spent five years traveling through Spain and the Sahel. These journeys would make Ibn Battuta the most widely traveled pre-modern explorer—assuming he actually made all of them. Scholars have questioned the historicity of segments of his journey but even so his travelogue, The Rihlah, became an important account of the period that is still widely read today.

June 14, 1821: Badi VII surrenders Sudan’s Sennar Sultanate to Egyptian forces under the command of Ismail Pasha. Sudan would remain Egyptian until it gained independence in 1956, though to be fair after 1899 it was really governed more as a separate British colony than as part of Egypt.

June 14, 1830: The French army lands at Sidi Fredj, beginning France’s invasion of Ottoman Algeria. Algiers fell on July 7 and France formally annexed the country, though it would take decades for French colonial rule to really take hold. Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Hamas, without going into much detail, is claiming that Israeli airstrikes killed two October 7 hostages in the southern Gazan city of Rafah earlier this week. As I say they didn’t go into specifics, so the identities of the hostages allegedly killed and even when these fatal strikes allegedly took place is unclear. On a related note, a Hamas official based in Lebanon named Osama Hamdan told CNN in an interview that aired on Friday that “no one has an idea” how many October 7 hostages are actually still alive. It seems unlikely that the group wouldn’t have at least some basic sense of the number of surviving hostages, though of course it likely doesn’t have perfect real-time knowledge as to their whereabouts given conditions in Gaza. But that information has clear implications for any effort to try to salvage ceasefire talks, and comments like Hamdan’s will undoubtedly fuel suspicions that fewer hostages have survived than US/Israeli estimates might suggest.