TODAY IN HISTORY
May 18, 1291: Among several other notorious Crusades anniversaries, May 18 was the date on which the city of Acre, the last Crusader state in the Levant, fell to the besieging Mamluks. It would take several more days to clear out the city, whose fall marked the end of the main Crusading movement.
May 18, 1974: The Indian military successfully detonates the country’s first nuclear weapon in a test ironically (I assume) code named “Smiling Buddha.” The test made India the world’s sixth acknowledged nuclear weapons state after the US, USSR, UK, France, and China. In reality it’s widely believed that Israel already had nuclear weapons by this point as well, but since the Israelis refuse to acknowledge their nuclear weapons program its origins remain somewhat murky.
May 18, 2009: The nearly 26 year long Sri Lankan Civil War ends with the government’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or the “Tamil Tigers”) rebel group. Sri Lankan authorities had declared victory on May 16 and the LTTE had acknowledged its defeat on May 17, but it was on the morning of May 18 when LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was caught and killed by government forces while attempting to flee the final LTTE-controlled enclave. The war is estimated to have killed upwards of 100,000 people in total and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least seven people in multiple attacks across southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, three days after the Israeli and Lebanese governments extended their “ceasefire.” Among the dead was a senior figure in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, killed along with his 17 year old daughter in an airstrike in the Baalbek region. I think it’s important to point out that strikes that kill senior militant leaders (like the one that killed Hamas’s Izz al-Din Haddad in Gaza on Friday) are still ceasefire violations, unless the Israelis have evidence that those individuals are about to attack Israel. There’s no “but we really wanted to kill this guy” exception to the ceasefire. Overall the IDF has now killed over 3000 people in Lebanon (3020 to be more precise) since it resumed its conflict with Hezbollah on March 2.
