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TODAY IN HISTORY
November 19, 636: The Battle of al-Qadisiyah ends with the army of the Rashidun caliphate victorious over the forces of the Sassanid Persian Empire. Combined with its victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Yarmouk in August, Qadisiyah established the caliphate’s control over most of what is today considered the Middle East. For the Persians, the battle was essentially the end of their empire. The Arab armies seized most of Iraq, including the Persian capital Ctesiphon. Emperor Yazdegerd III attempted to reconquer the region but the Arabs defeated him again in 642, at which point he went on the run until he was murdered in Central Asia in 651.
November 19, 1256: The last Assassin imam, Rukn al-Din Khurshah, surrenders to the Mongols, who had besieged him at his fortress at Maymun-Diz. Realizing they could not hold out against a Mongol siege, Rukn al-Din surrendered at Maymun-Diz and ordered the surrender of the Assassins’ main fortress at Alamut in hopes of avoiding unnecessary deaths, including his own. The Mongols wound up executing him anyway. A branch of the Assassin order survived in Syria, which except for a brief interlude around 1260 remained outside Mongol control, but it was subjugated by the Mamluk sultanate and ceased to be an independent entity.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
TomDispatch’s John Feffer considers Joe Biden’s legacy when it comes to the Middle East:
President Joe Biden has now joined the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as a president whose Middle East policy crashed and burned spectacularly. Unlike Carter, who was stymied by the Iranian hostage crisis, or Bush, who faced a popular Iraqi resistance movement, Biden’s woes weren’t inflicted by an enemy. Quite the opposite, it was this country’s putative partner, the Israeli government, that implicated the president in its still ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as its disproportionate attacks on Lebanon and Iran, for which Biden steadfastly declined to impose the slightest penalties. Instead, he’s continued to arm the Israelis to the teeth.
Israel’s total war on Palestinian civilians, in turn, significantly reduced enthusiasm for Biden among youth and minorities at home, helping usher him out of office. It also created electoral obstacles for Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
Elsewhere, the Qatari Foreign Ministry on Tuesday finally acknowledged that it has closed down Hamas’s political office in Doha—but only temporarily. Spokesperson Majed al-Ansari linked the closure to the Qatari government’s decision to extricate itself from its role as mediator in Gaza ceasefire talks, arguing that “the [Hamas] office itself doesn't have any function other than being part of the [negotiating] process.” The suggestion, then, is that if negotiations resume the Qataris will allow Hamas’s political officials to return for that reason.
LEBANON
Biden administration Lebanon envoy/arsonist Amos Hochstein returned to Lebanon on Tuesday amid a new push to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Hochstein met with Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri, who’s been both speaking for the Lebanese government (alongside interim Prime Minister Najib Mikati) and mediating on behalf of Hezbollah, then told reporters that “we have a real opportunity to bring this conflict to an end.” Given Hochstein’s track record I can’t tell if he meant that positively or negatively. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem was supposed to deliver some sort of address on Tuesday but abruptly postponed it, so make of that what you will.
SYRIA
The BBC tallies up the Turkish military’s record of atrocities in Syria:
Turkish air strikes in drought-struck north-east Syria have cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people, in what experts say may be a violation of international law.
Turkey carried out more than 100 attacks between October 2019 and January 2024 on oil fields, gas facilities and power stations in the Kurdish-held Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), according to data collated by the BBC World Service.
The attacks have added to the humanitarian crisis in a region reeling from a years-long civil war and four years of extreme drought exacerbated by climate change.
Water had already been scarce, but attacks on electricity infrastructure in October last year shut off power to the region’s main water station, in Alouk, and it has not been working since. On two visits there, the BBC witnessed people struggling to get water.
IRAN
The European Union announced new sanctions on Monday targeting the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and several related individuals over the company’s alleged role in supplying Iranian weapons to Russia. The EU action was coordinated with similar sanctions imposed on Monday by the UK government.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear program reportedly finds that Tehran has increased its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium to 182.3 kilograms, up 17.6 kilograms from where it was for the agency’s August report. Uranium enriched to that level requires relatively little additional enrichment to get to “weapons grade” (90 percent or more) and really has minimal use otherwise. The finding will undoubtedly fuel a push among the “E3” (France, Germany, and the UK) and the US to pass a motion censuring Iran at this week’s IAEA board of governors meeting.
That said, the IAEA report also claims that Iran has “begun implementation of preparatory measures aimed at stopping the increase of its stockpile of uranum enriched up to 60 percent.” I am not sure what that means. Possibly the Iranians are planning to dilute some of their existing 60 percent enriched stockpile to lower levels of enrichment, but that’s my speculation.
ASIA
GEORGIA
The leader of Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia region, Aslan Bzhania, announced via Telegram on Tuesday that he’s resigning after several days of mass protest that culminated in the seizure of the Abkhazian parliament building in Sokhumi late Friday. Protest organizers have agreed to vacate those premises in return for Bzhania’s departure. The protests began in response to a piece of legislation under consideration that would allow Russian developers to buy property in Abkhazia, which apparently raised public fears that those developers would move in and begin constructing massive apartment complexes. Bzhania had offered to withdraw the legislation and even to call a snap election, but the protesters insisted that he resign. He is the third straight Abkhazian leader to resign amid public protests.
TAJIKISTAN
According to the Chinese Foreign Minister, someone attacked “the camp of a private Chinese enterprise” near the Afghan border in Tajikistan on Monday. The attackers, who as far as I can tell remain unknown, killed one Chinese national and wounded four others. The Chinese ambassador in Dushanbe has reportedly asked the Tajik government to “get to the bottom of incident as soon as possible.”
PAKISTAN
A suicide bomber killed at least ten soldiers and wounded seven others in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Tuesday. The attacker, later claimed by a Pakistani Taliban (TTP) faction called the “Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group,” targeted a security checkpoint in the Bannu district. The incident took place one day after a clash between soldiers and TTP-affiliated militants left at least eight of the former and nine of the latter dead in the Tirah district.
Meanwhile, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday approved a new military operation targeting separatist militants in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. The move comes ten days after the Baluchistan Liberation Army killed at least 26 people in a suicide bombing in Quetta and amid reports that the Chinese government has been pressuring Islamabad to Do Something about the BLA’s frequent attacks on Chinese nationals.
AFRICA
DJIBOUTI
The Djiboutian government is engaged in a massive experiment in the use of genetically modified mosquitoes to fight malaria. It, along with other governments in the Horn of Africa, has been dealing with a spike in malaria cases caused primarily by the arrival of a new species of mosquito from Asia that is resistant to insecticides. Now, building off of a similar project begun in Brazil to combat dengue fever, officials are releasing “tens of thousands” of male mosquitoes every week who have been modified to ensure that their progeny will die. Since males don’t bite they cannot contribute to the spread of malaria to humans, but they can potentially thin out the mosquito population within a few generations.
SOMALIA
Election officials in Somalia’s breakaway Somaliland region have declared opposition leader Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi of the Waddani Party as the winner of last week’s regional presidential election. He will succeed incumbent Muse Bihi Abdi, whose legacy at this point will probably revolve heavily around the port-for-recognition deal his government cut with Ethiopia earlier this year. Abdullahi’s party has questioned that deal, not on the recognition grounds but on the basis that Abdi negotiated it too hastily and without extracting enough concessions from Ethiopia.
While no country recognizes Somaliland’s independence, which the region asserted in 1991, this peaceful transfer of power does enhance its international standing—particularly when compared with the relatively frequent outbreaks of political turmoil in Somalia proper. Even the US embassy in Somalia praised Somaliland as “a model for the region and beyond” on Tuesday, and needless to say the US government is by far Somalia’s primary international patron. Somali officials expressed some hope that Abdullahi might look to improve relations with Mogadishu, but even if he does he’s not going to give up Somaliland’s claim to independence.
MOZAMBIQUE
Venancio Mondlane, the Mozambican opposition leader who claims he won last month’s presidential election and has fled to parts unknown to avoid government retribution, asserted in a Facebook video on Tuesday that security forces have killed 50 protesters—he called them “martyrs of the revolution”—since that disputed vote. That figure is unconfirmed and there’s been no comment regarding casualties from the Mozambican government. Mondlane called for further protests but also advised his supporters not to demonstrate publicly for fear that they’ll become targets for more state violence.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Ukrainian military reportedly fired US-made ATACMS missiles into Russia on Tuesday for the first time under their new, looser rules of engagement. Interestingly the Ukrainians did not use them against North Korean targets in Russia’s Kursk oblast. Instead, they struck at a “weapons depot” in Russia’s Bryansk oblast. Assessments of the attack’s effectiveness were unsurprisingly divergent. The Ukrainian military reported several explosions and “fire damage” to the depot, while Russian officials said that their air defenses had shot down five of the six projectiles used and “damaged” the sixth.
On a possibly related note, Vladimir Putin signed into law on Tuesday a revised Russian nuclear weapons doctrine that makes a conventional attack carried out with the “support” of a nuclear power grounds for a potential nuclear retaliation. Putin first announced this policy change in September, likely to intimidate the Biden administration into not taking the step it just took over the weekend in giving Ukraine permission to use long-range US weapons in Russia. I guess the intimidation didn’t work. I gather some number of Russia Experts are now warning that Putin has all but decided to use nukes. I am not a Russia Expert but I’m skeptical that Putin will risk global annihilation over a weapons depot in Bryansk. I could of course be wrong. On the plus side, if I am wrong at least I won’t have much time to dwell on it.
UKRAINE
In Ukraine, meanwhile, the Russian military on Tuesday claimed the capture of another village, this one near the town of Kurakhove. Russian forces are encircling that town and now control territory to its north, east, and south. And an overnight Russian drone strike killed at least 12 people, one of them a child, in Sumy oblast. A Russian missile killed at least 11 people in Sumy city over the weekend.
GERMANY
Apparently two data cables have been cut beneath the Baltic Sea, not one as was reported on Monday. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius all but accused Russia of deliberately sabotaging those cables—one running between Finland and Germany and the other between Lithuania and Sweden—in remarks to reporters on Tuesday. While that accusation is certainly plausible there’s no evidence to support it as yet, and while Pistorius asserted that “no one believes these cables were severed by mistake” I’m not sure how anyone could have made that determination so quickly. The respective governments involved are investigating.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is reportedly under growing pressure to stand down as Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader in favor of Pistorius heading into a likely snap election in February. Polling suggests that the Scholz-led SPD could drop to third place or worse in that election, while a new survey released this week found that Pistorius is the most popular of “Germany’s top 20 politicians”—with Scholz polling slightly behind in 20th place. That said, Pistorius is more stridently pro-Ukraine than Scholz and opinion on the war is somewhat split within the SPD, which may hurt his chances of becoming party leader. Scholz’s phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin last week may have been intended to highlight that.
AMERICAS
HAITI
Haiti’s Viv Ansanm gang coalition launched another attack on a Port-au-Prince neighborhood on Tuesday, this time the relatively affluent community of Petionville. Coalition boss Jimmy Chérizier posted a video announcing the assault ahead of time. The militants were met by Haitian police and residents, who appear to have repulsed the attack and killed at least 28 gang members in the process.
UNITED STATES
Finally, at FOREVER WARS Spencer Ackerman warns that the Biden administration is about to bequeath a host of new spying powers unto Donald Trump:
SHORTLY AFTER DONALD TRUMP won the presidency the first time, I was working at The Guardian, and considering the same question as many around the country: What would he do with his newfound power? Applying that question to my beat, I contacted the White House to ask if soon-to-be-former President Barack Obama was going to curtail the drone strikes that he had expanded and institutionalized before they were in the hands of the Nativist-in-Chief. I thought this was a pretty reasonable line of inquiry.
The Obama team did not. There would be no post-election inhibitions on drone strikes or anything else. That, I was told, could not be how counterterrorism policy was made. The Obama team had to presume sobriety, probity and responsibility amongst their successor custodians of what they were no longer calling the War on Terror. We all know what followed.
I thought of that when I saw that President Biden's team cobbled together rules for "national security" usage of artificial-intelligence tools shortly before leaving office. That guidance, released in late October, had an annex for the intelligence agencies and the military about what to do when using Americans' data for training these AI tools. Charlie Savage of the New York Times, an excellent reporter and a friend of mine, got that annex and presented it to readers last week, leavened by an interview with Josh Geltzer, the legal adviser to the National Security Council.
I want to mention here that I've known Josh for years and consider him a responsible, forward-thinking person, whatever our disagreements. But when I read lines in Charlie's piece like "The Biden legal team, Mr. Geltzer said, worried that applying [existing surveillance] privacy rules at the point when A.I. systems are acquired would severely inhibit agencies’ ability to experiment with the new technology," I think: Here we go again.
The irony is that the text-to-speech pronounces “Derek Davison” in a very French way