World roundup: March 26 2025

Stories from Syria, Pakistan, South Sudan, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 26, 1344: The kingdom of Castile captures the key port city of Algeciras from its Moroccan and Granadan defenders after a roughly 21 month siege. This was the third of four times that Algeciras came under siege during the “Reconquista”—it would return to Granadan control after the fourth, in 1369, and the Granadans would subsequently destroy it rather than lose it to Castile again. Algeciras was rebuilt in 1704 by refugees displaced by the British conquest of nearby Gibraltar.

March 26, 1945: One of the most celebrated battles of World War II’s Pacific Theater, the Battle of Iwo Jima, ends with a US victory. The battle is remembered primarily for the famous photograph it produced of a group of Marines raising the US flag atop Mount Suribachi and it remains remains a formative event in the US Marine Corps’ history. However, the importance of the battle to the US war effort has been disputed. There are commentators who regard it as a waste of resources and particularly of lives, as some 25,000 combatants (around three-quarters of them Japanese) were killed over the course of the month-long engagement. Iwo Jima’s airfield was at the time viewed as an important way station for long range US fighters, but its use in this capacity proved so impractical that only a handful of US aircraft ever stopped there. Depriving Japan of the facility did degrade its military capabilities, but only marginally. That said, the US military did take lessons away from this battle that informed its approach to the subsequent Battle of Okinawa.

March 26, 1971: Bangladeshi (or “East Pakistan” at the time) leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman issues a declaration of independence from Pakistan (“West Pakistan”), an act that marks the start of the Bangladesh Liberation War. That conflict ended in December, after an Indian intervention, with Bangladesh a newly independent state, and March 26 is annually commemorated as Bangladeshi Independence Day.

March 26, 1979: The governments of Egypt and Israel conclude a peace treaty with a signing ceremony at the White House. This was the culmination of the negotiating process that had begun about six months earlier at Camp David.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, US President Jimmy Carter, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the signing ceremony (US Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

According to Reuters, the Trump administration recently presented the Syrian government with “a list of conditions that it wants Damascus to fulfill in exchange for partial sanctions relief.” There’s nothing particularly surprising among those conditions as far as I can tell—they include the destruction of any remaining Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles, assistance with US counterterrorism operations, and help locating disappeared US journalist Austin Tice. But one, a demand that foreign militants be excluded from senior government positions, may be difficult to fulfill inasmuch as the Syrian government has already appointed foreign militants to some senior positions.