World roundup: June 2 2025

Stories from Iran, Mali, Russia, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 2, 1098: The army of the First Crusade captures Antioch after an extended siege. They were subsequently besieged themselves by a Muslim relief army.

A 15th century illustration of the siege by French miniaturist Jean Colombe from a manuscript of Sébastien Mamerot's Les Passages d’Outremer (Wikimedia Commons)

June 2, 1896: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi files a British patent application for his radio telegraphy device, titled “Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor.” When it was awarded the following year it became the first patent awarded for a communications system utilizing radio waves.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Thomas Barrack, who is currently pulling double duty as US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, told Reuters on Monday that Syria’s interim government and the Trump administration have reached an “understanding” regarding the disposition of foreign jihadists in Syrian security services. The administration has previously pushed for the exclusion of foreign fighters, who fought alongside the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group that now heads the government, from those services—as a condition for sanctions relief, for example—but now apparently feels it would be better to “transparently” incorporate those fighters into state institutions than to leave them meandering around Syria potentially massacring minority groups (just hypothetically speaking). As a side benefit for the US the first cadre of foreign fighters to be incorporated into the state is mostly Uyghur, from the Turkistan Islamic Party. That could sour relations between the interim government and China.