TODAY IN HISTORY
March 13, 624: The Battle of Badr leaves Muhammad’s followers victorious in their first serious military engagement, against a small Meccan army.
March 13, 1591: The Sultanate of Morocco’s invasion of the Sahelian Songhai Empire culminates with a decisive victory in the Battle of Tondibi, just north of the city of Gao (in modern Mali). The victorious Moroccan army continued into Gao, the Songhai capital, and sacked the city, followed by the commercially important cities of Timbuktu and Djenné. The battle shattered the Songhai Empire, which had been around since the 1460s, causing it to break into several smaller kingdoms.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF), which has now killed at least 773 people in Lebanon in the first two weeks of the war, destroyed the Zrarieh Bridge over Lebanon’s Litani River on Friday while asserting that it was being used by Hezbollah to move fighters and materiel. This is civilian infrastructure obviously, but what is of particular concern here is that the IDF has been ordering residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate north of the Litani. In fact it’s now issued evacuation orders covering around 14 percent of Lebanon, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Ordering people to flee north of a river and then destroying the means by which they might do so seems incongruous if one were really trying to minimize harm to civilians.
