World roundup: March 24-25 2025
Stories from China, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
March 24, 1944: Dozens of prisoners at a German POW camp near the town of Sagan called Stalag Luft III escape in a daring overnight action. In total 76 prisoners escaped, but 73 of them were eventually tracked down and recaptured, and 50 of those were executed on Adolf Hitler’s orders in what was later deemed a war crime. The escape is best known as the inspiration for the 1963 film The Great Escape.
March 24, 1999: NATO begins its bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in an effort to force an end to the 1998-1999 Kosovo War. It took 78 days of sustained bombardment but the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milošević did ultimately agree to stop fighting and Kosovo became de facto independent. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, but that declaration is still not universally recognized. The campaign was conducted without United Nations authorization and its legality has been disputed.
March 25, 1821: Greek insurrectionists officially declare a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, marking the start of the Greek War of Independence even though the fighting had actually begun in mid-February. The war did of course end with Greece seceding from the empire and becoming an independent state, and so this date is commemorated annually as Greek Independence Day.
March 25, 1975: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia is shot and killed by his nephew, Prince Faisal bin Musaid, in the royal palace. Initially Prince Faisal was declared legally insane, but that diagnosis was overturned. It’s possible the insanity diagnosis was an error or a failed attempt at a coverup and that Prince Faisal acted to avenge the death of his brother, Prince Khalid bin Musaid, who was shot and killed by police during a 1966 protest. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the Saudis revoked Prince Faisal’s insanity diagnosis simply so that they could execute him under Saudi law. King Faisal was succeeded by his brother, Khalid bin Abdulaziz, in what remains the only violent succession in Saudi history.
MIDDLE EAST
TURKEY
Last week’s arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who despite his imprisonment is now also the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) 2028 presidential nominee, is continuing to reverberate across Turkish society. Most readily apparent are the mass protests in opposition to the arrest, primarily in Istanbul but also in other major cities like Ankara and Izmir, which are being held in defiance of a government ban on public demonstrations. Turkish authorities had arrested over 1100 people in connection with those events as of Monday. But the effects are also being felt economically, insofar as the Turkish stock market and the lira are both crashing. The Turkish Central Bank has intervened to bolster the lira and regulators have imposed brakes on stock activity to try to stem the tide but those measures are stopgaps and the downward pressure shows no sign of abating.
Regardless, it’s hard to envision a scenario wherein Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reverses course. If anything İmamoğlu is more popular now than he was before the arrest, and so Erdoğan is presumably committed to leaving him in prison regardless of the fallout.
SYRIA
Israeli military (IDF) artillery fire killed at least six people in the town of Koya in southern Syria on Tuesday. Israeli officials claim they targeted “terrorist elements” who opened fire on an IDF position, but the Syrian government characterized all six as civilians. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which put the death toll at seven, Israeli forces clashed with “armed civilians” as they attempted to enter Koya, at which point the shelling began. Koya lies along Syria’s border with Jordan, whose foreign ministry “condemned in the strongest terms the Israeli forces’ incursion and shelling.” Also on Tuesday, the IDF bombed two military facilities in Syria’s Homs province. There have been no reports of casualties as far as I am aware.
LEBANON
An IDF drone strike killed at least one person in southern Lebanon on Monday. As far as I know the Israelis haven’t offered a justification for this strike, though it’s not as if they’re under any outside pressure to explain their ceasefire violations.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The IDF killed at least 23 more people in Gaza on Tuesday, while expanding its evacuation orders to cover what sounds like nearly the entirety of the territory north of Gaza City along with parts of the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah. According to The Financial Times, the Israeli government has decided to just go for the gusto and place Gaza under an indefinite military occupation, with these evacuation orders meant to pack civilians into the Mawasi “humanitarian” zone while clearing out the rest of the territory. Donald Trump’s proposal to fully cleanse Palestinians from the territory has apparently opened up wide new vistas in terms of what Israeli leaders are prepared to do.
In other items:
Haaretz reported on Monday that the Egyptian government has advanced a new proposal that calls for the release of five October 7 prisoners over the course of a new 50 day truce, one for every ten days. While that’s going on the idea would be for Israel and Hamas to negotiate, finally, a progression to the second phase of the January ceasefire agreement. This report claims that the Israelis are demanding the release of 11 living hostages rather than five, though I doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu would enter into that agreement with any intention of negotiating on the second phase in good faith. Reuters, interestingly, reported on a different Egyptian proposal that would see five prisoners released per week but would oblige the Israelis to implement the second phase after the first week. I can’t imagine Netanyahu would be interested in that either.
As the IDF expands its Gaza presence the United Nations is shrinking the size of its contingent there, with plans to pull around 30 of some 100 foreign staff. An Israeli tank shelled a UN compound last week, killing at least one aid worker and prompting a reconsideration as to how safe UN workers are. In theory these workers could return to Gaza in the event of a new halt in fighting, but if the Israeli government is committed to reoccupying and administering the territory it seems unlikely that there will be an ongoing role for the UN.
IDF airstrikes on Monday killed two journalists, including an Al Jazeera correspondent named Hussam Shabat. Israeli officials are claiming, without offering any evidence of course, that Shabat was a “sniper” for Hamas. Reporters Without Borders has rejected that allegation while condemning the continual Israeli targeting of journalists in Gaza. Shabat was a contributor for Drop Site, which issued a statement praising his “remarkable courage and tenacity” and criticizing the Israelis’ “unprecedented killing campaign against journalists” amid “the silence of so many of our colleagues in the Western media.”
YEMEN
Another round of US airstrikes killed at least one person and wounded 13 others in Sanaa on Monday. Additional strikes were reported in Saada, Hudaydah, and Maʾrib. The Trump administration continues to insist that this latest US air campaign against northern Yemen’s Houthi movement has been a great success, without offering much in the way of evidence to support that assertion.
IRAN
The Trump administration on Tuesday blacklisted three Iranian intelligence officials allegedly connected with the disappearance of former FBI agent Robert Levinson back in 2007. The US government believes that Levinson, who was in Iran on some sort of undisclosed private job, was taken into Iranian custody and has since died.
Elsewhere, the Iranian rial dropped to its lowest ever value on Tuesday, when it traded at over 1 million per US dollar on the black market. By comparison, it was trading at around 584,000 per dollar when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian took office last July. The reimposition of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign appears to be weighing heavily on its value.
ASIA
INDIA
The Indian government has reportedly expressed a willingness to reduce tariffs on some 55 percent of the goods it imports from the US, in hopes of avoiding new US duties on its goods when the Trump administration’s “reciprocal tariff” program goes into effect on April 2. That would cover around $23 million in US products. New Delhi is worried that new US tariffs could affect some $66 billion in Indian exports and is hoping to have a new trade deal in place before the April 2 deadline.
MYANMAR
According to AFP, Myanmar’s military killed at least 11 people, including a doctor, in an airstrike that hit a medical clinic in the Magway region on Saturday. Myanmar’s ruling junta has increasingly come to rely on its air power as it continues to lose territory to various rebel groups around the country, which corresponds with an increase in civilian casualties.
THAILAND
Opposition parties on Monday brought forward a no confidence motion against Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, asserting that she’s essentially a cutout for her father, former PM Thaksin Shinawatra. The opposition argues that she’s failed to manage the country’s problems, ranging from a weak economy to corruption and crime. She’s also been accused of falsifying information on her asset disclosure, a charge she denies. The vote will be held on Wednesday and as the ruling majority still seems solid it’s unlikely that this effort to oust it will succeed.
CHINA
Reuters published a big EXCLUSIVE on Tuesday warning that a “network of companies operated by a secretive Chinese tech firm” is trying to recruit former US government workers who were recently sacked under Co-President Elon Musk’s glorious downsizing project. I don’t want to make too much of this because part of the story is based on work from the despicable Foundation for the Defense of Democracies advocacy group. But it is entirely plausible that people who have been targeted in Musk’s purges could be of interest to any number of governments, not just China’s. That might be something worth considering as the purges continue.
In more tangible bad news, Beijing has apparently fallen behind in its carbon reduction goals. China’s carbon intensity (basically carbon emissions divided by GDP) dropped by 3.4 percent in 2024, under the Chinese government’s goal of a 3.9 percent decrease. The country is also lagging behind its goal to reduce carbon emissions by 18 percent between 2020 and 2025, calling into question its ability to hit “carbon neutral” (whatever you might make of that dubious standard) by 2060. Chinese carbon reduction is essential if humanity is to avoid cooking itself, though with the US now operating under the principle that it’s Woke to not burn coal it may not matter what any other country does.
The Trump administration added some 80 entries to the US Commerce Department’s “entity list” on Tuesday. The designation forces anyone attempting to sell US products and/or technology to those entities to obtain permission from Washington beforehand. The new additions include firms from the UAE, Iran, and China, all for a variety of reasons, but the main focus seems to have been on entities with ties to Chinese high tech and particularly artificial intelligence research and development.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers war monitoring organization reported on Tuesday that a military airstrike killed scores of people in a market in North Darfur state. There’s no definitive casualty figure at this point but local witnesses were putting the number of dead at 270 or more with some 380 wounded. There may have been Rapid Support Forces militants among the casualties but the vast majority appear to have been civilians. The Sudanese military hasn’t confirmed the airstrike but did issue a statement complaining that “false claims such as this arise whenever our forces exercise their constitutional and legitimate right to engage hostile targets” while denying that it would ever target “innocent civilians.” After nearly two years of war there is now substantial evidence to disprove that last bit, but I digress.
RSF shelling hit a mosque in Khartoum on Monday, killing at least five people. The RSF lost much of central Khartoum last week but has not been completely driven out of the city. The previous day, a senior military general named Yasir al-Atta delivered a speech in which he threatened to attack both Chad and South Sudan over their alleged (and in some cases substantiated, let’s be honest) support for the RSF. Officials in both countries denounced his remarks and promised to retaliate if attacked.
NIGERIA
AFP is reporting that Boko Haram fighters killed at least 20 Cameroonian soldiers in a Thursday morning attack on the Nigerian border town of Wulgo. The Cameroonian and Nigerian governments collaborate on operations against Boko Haram and its Islamic State West Africa Province offshoot in the border region so the presence of Cameroonian soldiers in a Nigerian town is not as unusual as it might first seem. The militants reportedly used the cover of night and disguised themselves as herders in order to infiltrate the Cameroonian position before they attacked.
Bandits reportedly ambushed a state militia force in northern Nigeria’s Zamfara state over the weekend, killing at least ten militia fighters. The state government established the “Zamfara Community Guards” last year to augment its existing security forces in light of the state’s ongoing banditry crisis. The unit that was attacked was reportedly returning from what authorities called a “hugely successful” operation with the Nigerian military that targeted bandits in the Sunke forest.
SOUTH SUDAN
The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in Opposition (SPLM-IO) is claiming that one of its military outposts near Juba was attacked on Monday. Details beyond that are sparse but the South Sudanese military is claiming that SPLM-IO forces in the area were “scaling up their movements” prior to the attack. The SPLM-IO is also complaining that its political officials are still being purged from the South Sudanese government, a process that’s been going on for several weeks now. The UN’s lead South Sudan envoy, Nicolas Haysom, warned on Monday that this situation was verging on a return to civil war and I’m not sure “verging on” is accurate anymore.
BURUNDI
Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye claimed in a BBC interview on Tuesday that “credible intelligence” shows that the Rwandan military is preparing to invade his country. From what I can tell he did not offer much additional detail. Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe called Ndayishimiye’s comments “unfortunate.” Burundi and Rwanda have had a tense relationship for several years and are on opposite sides of the M23 uprising in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has added to their own bilateral problems.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Speaking of the M23 conflict, whatever “ceasefire” seemed to be emerging in recent days appears to be hanging by a thread at best, as M23 militants still have not withdrawn from the recently conquered town of Walikale as they promised to do over the weekend. The Congo River Alliance, the rebel umbrella group that includes M23, is claiming that the Congolese military has not withdrawn its drones from the region, making a withdrawal impossible. Further compounding this situation, Angolan President João Lourenço announced on Monday that he’s quitting his role as would-be mediator between the DRC and M23/Rwanda. “Frustration” over last week’s thwarted negotiations in Luanda appears to be the primary cause. Southern and eastern African leaders will attempt to select a new mediator.
MOZAMBIQUE
Mozambican opposition leader Venancio Mondlane met with President Daniel Chapo in Maputo on Sunday and announced the following day that the two men had agreed to “end all violence” related to October’s disputed election. That apparently includes violence both by and against police, the former of which has been a particular hallmark of the pro-Mondlane protest movement that has emerged since the vote. More than 360 people have been killed to date, most of them demonstrators. Mondlane continues to insist that he won the election and it’s unclear whether he’s going to call for an end to the protests altogether or try to continue them under more peaceful conditions.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Several days of back and forth discussion in Saudi Arabia have produced an agreement that should halt attacks on both Ukrainian and Russian energy infrastructure and impose a conditional ceasefire in the Black Sea. I say “conditional” because, according to the Russian government, the Black Sea arrangement will come into effect only upon the rescission of international sanctions that are blocking the sale of Russian agricultural products (including fertilizer) on the global market. As part of the agreement, the Trump administration pledged to work toward lifting those sanctions, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is insisting that the Russians are mischaracterizing the deal and that the Black Sea ceasefire should take effect regardless of any sanctions considerations. The Russian and Ukrainian governments may also have wildly different ideas about what would constitute a violation of the Black Sea ceasefire, but only time will tell whether that’s the case.
DENMARK
The Trump administration is dispatching a very high profile delegation to the US military’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland later this week, and that has drawn a sharp rebuke from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. In comments to Danish media on Tuesday, Frederiksen criticized the “unacceptable pressure being placed on Greenland and Denmark” by the US visit, which will include Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha along with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede previously characterized the visit as a “provocation,” and ordinary Greenlanders don’t seem terribly thrilled about it either. Looming in the background is of course Donald Trump’s stated desire to annex Greenland, an ambition he reiterated on Monday.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
The Trump administration has decided to extend a sanctions waiver that allows the Chevron company to extract and sell Venezuelan oil through May 27. It had previously intended for that waiver to expire on April 3. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has reportedly been speaking with Donald Trump to try to convince him to let the company continue operating in Venezuela and this would seem to be the first fruit of that effort. It’s also tempting to speculate that this extension is part of a quid pro quo, given the Venezuelan government’s recent acquiescence to repatriation flights from the US. However, Trump quashed any speculation of that kind on Monday when he declared that the US will now impose across the board 25 percent tariffs on any country that purchases Venezuelan oil or gas. The US, as it happens, buys oil from Venezuela but I assume it will be exempt from these duties. The Trump administration will presumably create a carveout for Chevron while seeking to discourage any other Venezuelan oil and gas exports.
UNITED STATES
I’m sure most (if not all) of you have by now read or seen something related to the ridiculous security breach that took place a couple of weeks ago, when someone in the Trump administration (Waltz, apparently) added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a group Signal chat discussing the US military plan for attacking the Houthis in Yemen. I have to admit that my initial reaction to that story, based solely on social media chatter and my own loathing for the awful Goldberg himself, was that the administration had accidentally-on-purpose included him in the group chat as a way to pre-launder its talking points. I’ve since come around to the position that they’re all just that fucking stupid. At any rate Donald Trump seems to be taking the embarrassment in stride, though I suspect he may eventually take it out on Waltz at some point.
Finally, Trump’s plan to impose broad “reciprocal” tariffs on a range of US trading partners on April 2 may be in flux as his administration searches for the right legal justification for those duties. According to The Financial Times it’s run into a bit of trouble mostly because it still hasn’t agreed internally on what these tariffs are supposed to achieve. There’s one position within the administration that views tariffs as leverage to extract concessions from other countries on trade or other issues. In that case it would make sense to impose the tariffs quickly so negotiations on those concessions can begin in earnest. But increasingly it seems the administration is coming around to the idea that tariffs can be a major revenue source, in which case it makes sense to the time to ground them in the strongest and most durable legal terms possible and the issue of negotiations becomes more or less irrelevant.