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TODAY IN HISTORY
March 7, 1573: The Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War ends with an Ottoman victory and a treaty that leaves the hitherto Venetian island of Cyprus under Ottoman control. Although this 1570-1573 war is best remembered for the 1571 naval Battle of Lepanto, which was a resounding victory for the Holy League, that victory came after the last Venetian city on Cyprus, Famagusta, had already fallen to an Ottoman siege. The treaty recognized the overall Ottoman victory and obliged Venice to pay a war indemnity on top of its loss of Cyprus and some territory in Dalmatia.
March 7, 1799: Napoleon’s army successfully captures the city of Jaffa after a very brief siege. Napoleon carried out a mass execution of the defeated Ottoman garrison, killing at least 2000 and by some accounts more than 4000 men. He was hoping to intimidate other Levantine cities into surrendering preemptively, but instead this seems to have motivated defenders in his next target, Acre, to resist more vigorously.
March 8, 1010 (or thereabouts): Persian writer Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi completes his monumental epic, the Shahnameh.
March 8, 1722: At the Battle of Gulnabad, a Ghilzai Afghan army under Mahmud Hotak defeats the Safavid army, inflicting heavy casualties. The Safavid defeat exposed their capital, Isfahan, to the Afghan forces, who then besieged it. The Safavids surrendered on October 23, and while they had a brief semi-revival in the early 1730s, for all practical purposes this defeat brought their dynasty—which had ruled Iran since the beginning of the 16th century—to a close.
March 8, 1963: Syria’s 8 March Revolution, a military coup with good branding, brings the Syrian Baath Party to power in a tenuous and very short-lived alliance with Nasserist elements.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) has now killed at least 394 people, including 83 children, in Lebanon since Monday, according to the Lebanese Public Health Ministry. Its attacks have displaced some 517,000 people. The casualty list includes at least four people in a hotel in Beirut’s Raouche neighborhood early Sunday morning in what appears to be the first time the IDF has hit Beirut’s urban area proper in this campaign. Its strikes have devastated the Dahieh area in southern Beirut but that is technically considered a suburb of the city. The hotel had become a makeshift shelter for displaced persons. Israeli officials claim they were targeting members of Iran’s Quds Force. Two Israeli soldiers have also been killed in Lebanon in unclear circumstances.
I want to mention one particular incident on Saturday in which the IDF carried out a raid on a cemetery in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley region. Israeli commandos encountered resistance, and when the fighting was over they’d killed at least 41 people including three Lebanese soldiers as well as an unknown number of “civilians, including children” according to the BBC. The target of the raid, in which children were apparently killed, was the body of an IDF air force officer named Ron Arad, who disappeared in Lebanon after ejecting from his plane in 1986. The commandos did not recover it.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The IDF killed at least three people in an airstrike in Gaza city on Sunday, asserting later that two of them were Hamas operatives who were planning attacks against Israeli forces. This strike came one day after an IDF drone killed a father and daughter in Khan Younis. Another strike on Saturday in the same area killed one person and wounded another. In the West Bank, an Israeli settler mob murdered three Palestinians near Ramallah on Sunday, one day after an IDF reservist killed one person in the Hebron Hills area.
IRAN
Donald Trump declared via social media on Saturday morning that “today Iran will be hit very hard!” It turns out he was talking about waging environmental warfare on the people of Tehran, as the IDF later bombed fuel depots near the Iranian capital. While the facilities themselves were ostensibly military targets, the strikes spewed thick, toxic smoke into the air over the Iranian capital and started fires that spread to several parts of the city. Fuel residue has been raining down on Tehran and residents have been advised to stay indoors if possible. The full extent of the contamination and environmental impact is not yet clear, and from a public health perspective could take years or even decades to manifest fully. It is the clearest example so far that when US and Israeli officials claim that this is not a war against “the Iranian people” they are lying through their teeth.
There’s been a bit of political fallout from this attack, as the Trump administration sent Energy Secretary Chris Wright out on Sunday to assure CNN watchers that “the US is targeting zero energy infrastructure.” Energy prices were already spiking before this incident and in its aftermath they’ve spiked further to more than $100 per barrel for several oil blends. To reinforce its position, the administration turned to reliable messenger Barak Ravid at Axios to stress how upset it is over what the Israelis did. This war is eight days old and they’re already falling back on the “mad at Bibi” routine.
In other items:
Iranian state media reported on Sunday that, as I suppose was expected, the Assembly of Experts has elected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, Ali, as Supreme Leader. I’m repeating something I wrote a few days ago but this is a pretty naked state takeover by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with which Mojtaba has a strong relationship and in which he has allegedly served as an informal leader under his father’s administration. It’s also an obvious act of defiance toward the US and Donald Trump, who openly opposed his appointment a few days ago. Mojtaba Khamenei lacks the religious qualifications for the role (as, admittedly, his father also did in 1989) and has never held major public office of any sort, there’s no indication that he’s a popular figure, and the image of hereditary succession may engender public resentment. So there wasn’t much else to recommend his candidacy.
With that in mind, The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the US National Intelligence Council concluded prior to the war that “even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment.” There’s no word as to whether any decision makers in the Trump administration read this report.
Now that the question of succession has apparently been answered (at least for the moment), that may clean up what’s started to look like undisciplined messaging from Iranian officials over the past couple of days. The most obvious incident involved President Masoud Pezeshkian offering an apology to “neighboring countries” on Saturday and suggesting that Iran might stop attacking them. It subsequently became clear that his message was intended for a couple of specific neighboring countries, Azerbaijan and Turkey, as Iranian forces continued to attack targets in the Gulf Arab states. Either Pezeshkian was clumsy in his remarks or he was later overruled by the IRGC, but the impression of confusion within Iran’s political establishment raised eyebrows.
In the Gulf states, a presumably Iranian projectile of some sort killed two people in Saudi Arabia’s Kharj province on Sunday. Iranian forces have been attacking Kharj though it is possible that this was wreckage from an air defense weapon rather than an Iranian device. Saudi officials have reportedly warned their Iranian counterparts that they will get involved in the war if Iranian attacks continue, but I can’t imagine that the Iranians find that prospect particularly worrisome under the circumstances. Apparent Iranian strikes also hit a fuel depot at Kuwait’s international airport and a Bahraini water desalination facility.
The Bahraini strike came after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the US of striking a desalination facility on Iran’s Qeshm Island. If that’s true, and the US military has denied it, the logic is hard to fathom. The Gulf Arab states are far more dependent on desalination than Iran and thus far more vulnerable if that’s the direction the war is now taking.
Speaking of energy prices, Kuwait Petroleum Company declared force majeure on Sunday and began cutting production. It joins Qatar, which cut gas production on Monday, and Iraq, whose oil production has reportedly been reduced by 70 percent. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and exports correspondingly reduced, Gulf countries are starting to run out of storage space for their oil and gas. This leaves them no choice but to start cutting production, which cannot easily or quickly be restored once this conflict is over. This means that high energy prices may be locked in for some time to come.
The New York Times points out that the Gulf is also massively important to global food production, as its fossil fuels are a primary source of nitrogen fertilizers. If the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed it will be impossible to get Gulf-produced fertilizers to market, and as with oil and gas production the facilities that make these products will be forced to go offline if their excess storage capacity is used up. This year’s Northern Hemisphere growing season could be severely impacted as a result.
Donald Trump appeared to put the kibosh on a US-sponsored Kurdish uprising on Saturday, telling reporters that he has “ruled that out, I don’t want the Kurds going in.” This feels a bit like a “you can’t quit, you’re fired” message given that some Iranian Kurdish faction leaders have been hedging about the idea of serving as shock troops for the US-Israeli war machine, though other faction leaders still seem eager to participate and Trump could always change his mind.
What about US and/or Israeli ground troops, you ask? Well, about that. There seems to be an emerging sense that the two may at some point insert special forces to try to secure Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which is stored underground at a nuclear facility in Isfahan. This would likely be an extremely difficult operation that could only be undertaken after further degradation of Iran’s military capabilities. Another theory being kicked around involves the US seizure of Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, which is home to a terminal that handles almost all of Iran’s oil exports. I have no idea how the US could put soldiers on Kharg without turning them into sitting ducks for the Iranians, but then again I have never hosted a morning gossip show on Fox News so I am obviously unqualified to discuss such matters. Also one assumes that the Iranians have contingencies for their oil if something happens to Kharg. At any rate, Van Jackson argues that ground troops are inevitable at this point because, as he notes, they are “cheaper than missiles.”
The US military announced the death of a seventh US service member on Sunday. This person was seriously wounded in an Iranian strike on a US base in Saudi Arabia last Sunday.
Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, claimed on Saturday that “it has been reported to me that several American soldiers have been taken prisoner.” The Pentagon is denying it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Iranians have been targeting the radar installations that support US air defense systems in the Gulf. It’s unclear how successful they’ve been though this may help explain why the US military is already considering transferring air defense units from the Pacific to the Gulf region. These devices are not easily or cheaply replaced so their loss could be a real hindrance to US operations. One tool that could be used for measuring the effectiveness of these Iranian attacks is no longer available, as Planet Labs has decided to stop releasing satellite imagery from parts of the Middle East in order to help the Pentagon cover up any battle damage to its facilities.
The UK government has given the US permission to use its military bases for “defensive” attacks on Iran. There is nothing about this war that can be construed as “defensive,” but anything for Keir Starmer to curry favor with a US president who despises him, I guess.
ASIA
NEPAL
Friday’s prediction that Balendra Shah and his Rastriya Swatantra Party were on their way to a landslide win in Thursday’s parliamentary election has been confirmed by further vote counting over the weekend. RSP has won “at least 117” of the 153 directly elected seats for which results are available and is leading in eight other races. The Nepalese House of Representatives is a 275 seat body, of which 165 seats are directly elected and the rest are awarded proportionally, so needless to say the party is in pretty good shape. The leader of Nepal’s Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist, former PM KP Sharma Oli, conceded on Saturday after Shah defeated him in their head-to-head district race.
THAILAND
World Politics Review’s Joshua Kurlantzick argues that the victory of Anutin Charnvirakul’s Bhumjaithai Party in last month’s Thai parliamentary election probably means continued conflict with Cambodia:
Now that Anutin has consolidated power in part because of this rally-around-the-flag effect, how will he handle tensions with Thailand’s neighbor? Last December, the two sides reached a second ceasefire in their conflict, which began in May and was halted by a ceasefire in July, only to flare back up again late last year. Despite the most recent agreement to end the fighting, violent incidents continue to break out along the border almost daily.
Anutin now has a mandate to continue the Thai military’s tough approach. Indeed, he has no incentive to do otherwise, as keeping the focus on Cambodia as a perceived security threat will continue to foster nationalist sentiments and distract from any mistakes he makes on the economy, as well as recent corruption scandals involving his Cabinet.
(Foreign Exchanges readers can sign up for WPR’s free newsletter here and try out an all-access subscription free for 30 days, then $35 off—$77/year—after that.)
AFRICA
SUDAN
Drone strikes on two markets in Sudan’s West Kordofan state killed at least 33 people and wounded another 59 on Saturday. Indications are that the Sudanese military was responsible, although its officials are denying that. Elsewhere, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North accused the military on Sunday of killing at least 17 civilians in another drone attack near the town of Dilling (or Dalang) in South Kordofan state. Another apparent military drone strike killed at least six people on Sunday in the city of Ed Daein, capital of East Darfur state.
NIGERIA
The Nigerian army says its forces killed at least 45 cattle rustling bandits in northern Nigeria’s Katsina state on Friday, after the bandits attempted to raid the same village twice in as many days. At least three Nigerian soldiers were also killed.
ETHIOPIA
According to The Wall Street Journal, there are new indications that another war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region may be “imminent”:
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has made no secret of his desire to restore his country’s access to the sea, which it lost in 1993 when Eritrea broke away after a 30-year war, taking 1,400 miles of prime coastline with it.
Now troops are massing near the border region, raising concerns that Ethiopia’s long-term ambitions will feed into a long-running conflict with ethnic Tigrayan rebels, who dominate the Ethiopian side of the frontier.
Backed by tanks and other heavy weapons, thousands of Ethiopian troops have taken position a few miles from the rebels. The government says the rebels are violating the terms of a 2022 truce that ended an earlier war in which some 600,000 people were killed. Eritrean infantry, supported by artillery and wary of Ethiopia’s intentions, are reinforcing the Tigrayans, according to diplomats and regional observers.
“There are indications that a renewed outbreak of hostilities may be imminent,” said Magnus Taylor, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Russian strikes killed at least 12 people and wounded at least 12 more across Ukraine overnight Friday into Saturday. A single missile strike hit an apartment block in the city of Kharkiv, accounting for ten of those deaths.
NORWAY
Norwegian authorities are treating an explosion at the US embassy in Oslo early Sunday morning as an act of terrorism possibly connected to the war on Iran. The blast caused “minor damage” and no casualties.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
According to Reuters, the Trump administration is blocking the publication of a federal security bulletin warning that the risk of a terrorist attack in the US may be rising as a result of the Iran war. Just something to keep in mind going forward.
Finally, presumably this comes as no surprise but a consensus is quickly emerging that the US was responsible for bombing an elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war. Now the focus appears to be shifting to how or why the US came to strike a school and whether artificial intelligence was responsible. It’s already been reported that Anthropic’s “Claude” large language model has been helping the US military draw up target lists and the pace of this war to date, as outlined in a new report by Airwars, makes it clear that the Pentagon couldn’t be doing what it’s been doing without AI. The Nonzero Newsletter’s Bob Wright considers the culpability of “Claude’s” creators:
All of which brings us back to Anthropic, whose Claude large language model is integrated into Maven, software that’s operated by Palantir and used by the Pentagon to identify targets. The Washington Post reports that “as planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.” Given that the Iranian elementary school was hit on the first day of the war, it seems fairly likely that Claude played a role in the selection of that target and thus in the death of more than 100 young girls—many times more kids than were killed in the worst American school shooting.
This might seem to vindicate [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei’s refusal to give the Pentagon carte blanche to use Claude in “fully autonomous” weapons systems. But before we give him the Nobel Peace Prize, note two things: (1) This kind of contractual carveout almost certainly wouldn’t have made a difference in this case even if honored. No doubt there was a “human in the kill chain”—someone who, at a minimum, scanned the list of targets generated by Maven and said, “Yep, looks like a list of targets. Let’s do it!” (2) Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder. More than 1,000 Iranian civilians have already been killed in this war—a war that flagrantly violates international law and continues to lack a coherently articulated rationale. Anyone who makes money by aiding endeavors like this has a lot to answer for.
Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.
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