World roundup: March 17-18 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, South Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

March 17, 45 BCE: Julius Caesar and his army defeat the remaining leaders of the rival Optimate faction in the Battle of Munda, located somewhere in what is now southern Spain. After Caesar had defeated the Optimates in Greece and North Africa his attention shifted to the west, where an army had seized the province of Hispania Ulterior and declared its allegiance to Gnaeus Pompeius (son of Ceasar’s former rival Pompey the Great). Munda is usually considered the last major battle of Caesar’s civil war. Several Optimate leaders were killed and while Gnaeus fled he was quickly tracked down and likewise put to death. Another son of Pompey, Sextus, survived and established himself on Sicily, where he held out into the Second Triumvirate period.

March 17, 1401: This is the generally established date for the sack of the city of Damascus by the “Turco-Mongolian” warlord Timur (“Tamerlane”). Despite resistance from the region’s Mamluk rulers, Timur’s army had by this point sacked multiple cities in what is now Syria and Lebanon before laying siege to Damascus in December 1400. After a three month holdout the city fell, at which point Timur’s forces slaughtered most of the inhabitants—artisans and others considered useful were enslaved and sent to Timur’s capital, Samarkand—and carried off anything movable of value. Timur’s conquest of Syria eventually brought him into conflict with the emerging Ottoman principality in Anatolia, leading to an encounter that suffice to say did not go well for the Ottomans. The siege is notable for a meeting between Timur and pioneering historian/social scientist Ibn Khaldun, who was sent as a Mamluk emissary and subsequently wrote about their interaction.

March 17, 1861: The first Italian parliament proclaims King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as king of a newly unified Italy. This was the culmination of a unification process (the Risorgimento) that began amid the Revolutions of 1848, though that process wasn’t completed until the Italians took Venice from Austria in 1866 and Rome from the Papacy in 1870.

March 18, 1921: The Peace of Riga formally ends the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War. The Poles emerged mostly victorious, regaining some of the territory that had been lost to the Russian Empire during the three 18th century partitions of Poland, and the outcome put a damper on Bolshevik plans to try to spread their revolution to other parts of Europe. Poland’s borders with what had by then become the Soviet Union were of course redrawn again during and after World War II.

March 18, 1965: During the Voskhod 2 space mission, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first person to conduct a spacewalk. Leonov exited the Voskhod spacecraft and spent 12 minutes, 9 seconds in space. The mission’s end the following day almost became a tragedy when weather forced the capsule to touch down off course, in the heavily forested Upper Kama Upland region. Leonov and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had to spend the night in the forest because the terrain made their planned airlift impossible and ground rescuers couldn’t reach them until the following day.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli government poured gasoline over whatever remained of January’s Gaza ceasefire agreement and lit it on fire overnight, when an intensive Israeli military (IDF) bombardment killed at least 404 people and wounded over 500 more according to local officials. Drop Site is reporting that the death toll included at least 174 children and 89 women. Israeli officials said they targeted “Hamas leadership” in an effort to pressure the group into releasing additional October 7 prisoners. In fairness they did apparently kill at least two Hamas leaders, Gazan head of government Essam al-Dalis and Interior Minister Mahmud Abu Watfa, and a spokesperson for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Overall, though, unless Hamas and PIJ are employing a lot of children in senior positions I’d say the IDF’s success rate on that front was probably fairly low. This attack is not a one-off, either—Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar made that clear on Tuesday.

When the first phase of the ceasefire agreement expired on March 1 Israeli leaders immediately resumed their effort to starve Gaza’s population and since then it’s only been a matter of time before they resumed the direct military portion of the genocide. As you peruse the many “what’s happening” and “why now” pieces that are already being rushed out by media outlets, you’ll undoubtedly hear that this renewal of full-scale hostilities is Hamas’s fault because it refused to extend the first phase of the ceasefire agreement. That’s apparently the US government’s official position.

I’m not sure how many of those pieces will mention that the agreement as negotiated in January included no provision for a formal extension. Instead it obliged the parties to negotiate on transitioning to a second phase that included an indefinite ceasefire and an IDF withdrawal from Gaza. The Israeli government flatly refused to engage in those negotiations, violating the agreement’s terms in a preview of things to come. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never had any intention of advancing to a second phase and said as much, openly, when the ceasefire agreement was reached. Had he managed to convince Hamas to agree to an extension of the first phase, when that extension lapsed he probably would have demanded another extension, and maybe another after that, until the remaining Gaza prisoners had been freed. Then he would have resumed the military campaign. This was, it seems clear, inevitable. Nothing short of ethnic cleansing will do, especially now that Donald Trump has offered a way forward toward that goal.

On a related note, extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Kahanist Jewish Power party rejoined Netanyahu’s ruling coalition on Tuesday. Ben-Gvir, who will presumably resume his former post as national security minister, quit the coalition in a performative huff over the January ceasefire deal but was always planning to return once Netanyahu started killing Palestinians en masse again.

SYRIA

The IDF carried out another round of strikes in southern Syria’s Daraa province on Monday, killing at least three civilians and one “member of the transitional government’s Military Operations Administration,” according to AFP. On Tuesday it sent ground forces into a village west of Daraa city and near the Jordanian border, as well as striking “two pieces of artillery” in Quneitra province and military outposts in central Syria’s Homs province.

Elsewhere, the Syrian Democratic Forces group is accusing the Turkish military of having killed nine members of a single family in an airstrike near the city of Kobani late Sunday. As far as I know there’s been no comment from Turkey.

LEBANON

Clashes between Syrian and Lebanese security forces that began over the weekend continued through Monday and left at least ten people dead in total until the countries’ respective defense ministers, Murhaf Abu Qasra and Michel Menassa, announced a ceasefire. Syrian officials had accused Hezbollah of abducting and executing three Syrian soldiers over the weekend, sparking the violence, but both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are denying that claim and Lebanese officials are saying that the soldiers entered Lebanon of their own volition and were then attacked by a local militia. Seven Lebanese people were killed and another 52 wounded in the ensuing fighting, though it’s unclear from the reporting how many were civilians vs. combatants.

The IDF also carried out another airstrike on southern Lebanon on Monday, killing at least two people it claimed were “Hezbollah terrorists.” Israeli airstrikes have killed at least five alleged Hezbollah members over the past three days, according to Reuters, and I think it’s fair to wonder whether the November Lebanese ceasefire is going the way of the January Gaza ceasefire.

YEMEN

Readers will no doubt be pleased to know that the latest iteration of America’s apparently unending war on Yemen, which has continued steadily through Tuesday evening, is “open-ended” according to the US military. Or, put another way, it will continue “until we achieve the president’s objectives,” which we can assume they won’t because a) what are those objectives, exactly? and b) we’ve seen this movie play out multiple times by now and it always ends more or less the same way. To wit, US airstrikes will kill a lot of Yemenis while the ostensible target, the Houthi movement, refuses to stop attacking Red Sea shipping and in fact sees an upsurge in public support as people in northern Yemen understandably grow to resent the country that keeps bombing them.

Thousands of Yemenis gathered for a pro-Houthi protest in Sanaa on Monday (Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)

The Houthis now say they’ve attacked the USS Harry S. Truman’s carrier group in the Red Sea three times in 48 hours. There’s no indication that any of those attacks had any effect. They also fired a missile at Israel’s Nevatim air base on Tuesday but indications are that Israeli air defenses intercepted it.

ASIA

MYANMAR

United Nations special rapporteur Thomas Andrews told journalists in Geneva on Monday that US foreign aid cuts are “already having a crushing impact on people in Myanmar.” Their effect has been exacerbated by a recently announced World Food Program cutback in Myanmar due to an overall lack of funding. Andrews, whose brief is the human rights situation in Myanmar, described the cuts as “unnecessary” and “cruel” and warned that they could increase displacement and human trafficking.

THAILAND

The Thai government sent a delegation of cabinet ministers to the Chinese region of Xinjiang on Tuesday to inquire as to the status of the 40 Uyghur men it repatriated to China back in February. Thai officials have faced a wave of international criticism over that act, including US sanctions, while insisting that they received assurances from Beijing as to the treatment of the Uyghurs prior to repatriating them. This trip is no doubt intended to prove that those assurances have been fulfilled or at least that Thailand Cares whether or not they’ve been fulfilled. Only five of the 40 men will reportedly be made available to the Thai delegation, which does not exactly instill a lot of optimism about how the rest of the group has been treated.

AFRICA

SUDAN

The Rapid Support Forces militant group shelled the city of Omdurman on Monday, killing at least ten people. That attack took place amid the Sudanese army’s ongoing advance through neighboring Khartoum, where the RSF’s presence has gone from “controlling” to “barely hanging on” in recent weeks. Two army columns were able to link up in central Khartoum on Monday, which will allow them to advance on the RSF-controlled Republican Palace from two sides. Outside the capital region, RSF shelling also killed at least two people in the city of El Obeid on Monday.

MALI

A rebel alliance in northern Mali called the “Collective for the Defense of the Rights of the Azawad People” is alleging that a Malian military airstrike killed at least 18 civilians in a market in Mali’s Timbuktu region on Sunday. Malian officials are rejecting this claim and say instead that their strike hit a “refuge” for “terrorists,” killing 11 of them. Notably even that alternative explanation doesn’t necessarily rule out the strike having hit a market and killed civilians.

Meanwhile, Mali’s ruling junta has withdrawn the country from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, a group of countries who share notable ties to France, the French language, and/or French culture. Its mates in the “Alliance of Sahel States” confederation, Burkina Faso and Niger, announced their departure on Monday. All three countries had their memberships suspended while under military rule and their relationships with France are in tatters.

SOUTH SUDAN

The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in Opposition (SPLM-IO) party of South Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar announced on Tuesday that it is suspending its participation in the 2018 peace agreement that was supposed to end its civil war against the main SPLM party headed by President Salva Kiir. That agreement was already hanging by a thread after weeks of clashes between South Sudanese security forces and a rebel group known as the “White Army,” which is allegedly tied to Machar. Kiir has been purging his government of Machar loyalists in response.

Fighting between the South Sudanese military and the White Army continues to rage, centered predominantly on the city of Nasir in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state. A military airstrike on Nasir killed at least 19 people overnight Sunday into Monday according to local reports, and authorities on Monday ordered civilians to evacuate Nasir county due to the violence. The UN is estimating that the conflict has displaced some 50,000 people so far.

SOMALIA

A roadside bomb exploded in Mogadishu on Tuesday in what seems to have been an attempted assassination of Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. The blast occurred near a convoy that was transporting him to the airport. There’s no official word as to casualties but the AP is citing witnesses who report at least three deaths (Mohamud himself was unharmed). There’s also been no claim of responsibility as far as I know, but it would be surprising if this were not an al-Shabab attack.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame met in Qatar on Tuesday, after which they and their Qatari mediators issued a joint statement calling for an “immediate and unconditional” ceasefire between the Congolese military and the M23 militant group. There is no indication as to whether M23 is amenable to a ceasefire. On the one hand M23 depends on Rwandan support, so Kagame should be able to dictate terms to the group’s leaders. On the other hand, Kagame has consistently and dubiously maintained that Rwanda has no direct involvement with the militant group, and what better way to “prove” that claim than to arrange for Kagame to agree to a ceasefire that M23 leaders then reject?

Regular readers may note that there was supposed to be a meeting in Angola between Congolese and M23 representatives on Tuesday, but that, uh, didn’t happen. M23 announced on Monday that it was pulling out of that event after the European Union sanctioned several of its top officials, including leader Bertrand Bisimwa, along with three Rwandan military officers and one Rwandan civilian official.

RWANDA

On a related note, the Rwandan government severed diplomatic relations with Belgium on Monday over the M23 conflict. The Rwandan Foreign Ministry complained that “Belgium has clearly taken sides in a regional conflict and continues to systematically mobilize against Rwanda in different forums, using lies and manipulation to secure an unjustified hostile opinion of Rwanda, in an attempt to destabilize both Rwanda and the region.” The Belgian government responded in kind.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone on Tuesday to discuss Trump’s proposed 30 day ceasefire in Ukraine. Putin, who reacted coolly to that idea last week, instead talked Trump into a 30 day cessation of attacks on energy infrastructure only, according to the Russian government’s description of the call. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to signal his own agreement with that idea, which after all is much closer to the plan he brought to Saudi Arabia last week before the Trump administration strong-armed him into going along with a full ceasefire, though he also availed himself of the opportunity to criticize Putin for rejecting the full ceasefire.

Halting attacks on energy facilities is a deescalation, assuming it actually holds, though as a gesture it’s not as impactful on the brink of spring as it would have been before the onset of winter. There may be a complication here, though. The Trump administration has been referring to an agreement to halt attacks on “energy and infrastructure” as opposed to halting attacks on “energy infrastructure.” Maybe this is just the administration’s typical obtuseness at work, but that “and” represents a huge potential difference between the US and Russian interpretations of Tuesday’s call.

UKRAINE

Russian forces captured a village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia oblast on Monday, bringing them within around 50 kilometers of Zaporizhzhia city. If we can assume that an eventual ceasefire will freeze the front line of this conflict wherever it might be at the time the agreement comes into effect, clearly the Ukrainians are going to want to stop Moscow from taking the city before that happens.

Meanwhile, Semafor reported on Monday that Trump may agree to recognize Crimea as Russian territory as part of an eventual peace deal. It’s unclear whether he’s considering similar steps for the other Ukrainian provinces that are now either partially or entirely under Russian control, like Zaporizhzhia. On the one hand recognizing Crimea as part of Russia could be viewed as simply bowing to reality at this point, but on the other hand it can and will be viewed as the US president ratifying territorial conquest, something that was supposed to be out of bounds in the post-World War II world order. Fortunately Trump has already violated that norm at least once, when he recognized the Golan as Israeli territory in 2019, so it’s not like he’ll be setting a precedent with Crimea.

POLAND

The governments of Poland and the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) announced on Tuesday that they intend to withdraw from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which calls for the elimination of anti-personnel mines. I’m sure you’ve already guessed why they want to withdraw from that accord—because they want to mine (or at least threaten to mine) their respective borders with Russia.

AMERICAS

PERU

The Peruvian government declared a state of emergency for at least the next 30 days in Lima on Monday over a spike in violent crime. According to the AP, “police reported 459 killings” in the city just this year (through March 16) along with 1909 claims of extortion. The situation reached a crescendo over the weekend when gunmen killed popular singer Paul Flores aboard his band’s tour bus.

UNITED STATES

Finally, at Foreign Affairs Tuft University’s Monica Duffy Toft wonders whether the forthcoming effort to end the war in Ukraine will mark the resurgence of “spheres of influence” as a core facet of world affairs:

Even though another world war is not yet on the horizon, today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II, when U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to divide Europe into spheres of influence. Today’s major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map at the Yalta negotiations in 1945. Such negotiations need not take place at a formal conference. If Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping were to reach an informal consensus that power matters more than ideological differences, they would be echoing Yalta by determining the sovereignty and future of nearby neighbors.

Unlike at Yalta, where two democracies bargained with one autocracy, regime type no longer appears to hinder a sense of shared interests. It is hard power only—and a return to the ancient principle that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In such a world, multilateral institutions such as NATO and the EU would be sidelined and the autonomy of smaller nations threatened.

It is no accident that over the past two decades, the nations now driving the return of power politics—China, Russia, and the United States—have all been led by figures who embrace a “make our country great again” narrative. Such leaders dwell on a resentful comparison between what they perceive to be their country’s current, restricted position—a constrained status imposed by both foreign and domestic adversaries—and an imaginary past that was freer and more glorious. The sense of humiliation such a comparison generates fuels the belief that their country’s redemption can come only by exercising hard power. Commanding and extending spheres of influence appears to restore a fading sense of grandeur. For China, Taiwan alone will not suffice. For Russia, Ukraine can never be adequate to fulfill Putin’s vision of Russia’s rightful place in the world. The United States begins to look toward annexing Canada.

Another trajectory remains possible, one in which the EU and NATO adapt rather than wither. In such a scenario, they could continue to serve as counterbalances to U.S., Russian, and Chinese efforts to use hard power to achieve narrow state interests, threatening the world’s peace, security, and prosperity in the process. But those potential counterbalancing forces will have to fight for such an alternative—and take advantage of the obstacles that a more globalized world poses to great powers’ wish to carve it into pieces.