World roundup: November 24 2020

Stories from Syria, Ethiopia, Russia, and more

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Thanksgiving is a couple of days away and though we’re not going anywhere this year for obvious reasons, Foreign Exchanges is going to take a little time off. After tonight the newsletter will be a little quiet for the next few days and will return to regular programming next Tuesday. Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it!

Also, if you’re looking for more foreign policy coverage, check out Peter Beinart’s new Substack newsletter, The Beinart Notebook. You’ve probably seen Peter’s writing and commentary at multiple places—currently he’s a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a contributor at CNN, editor at large for Jewish Currents, and he’s a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He’s just getting off the ground here at Substack, offering his well-informed take on politics and foreign policy with a particular focus on Israel-Palestine. Check it out today!

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

November 23, 1248: The Muslim military commander in the city of Seville, Axataf, surrenders the city to King Ferdinand III of Castile (later Saint Ferdinand) in the capstone of the so-called “Early Reconquista.” Fueled primarily by the retreat of the Almohad Caliphate back to North Africa, the 20 years from 1228 to 1248 saw Christian kings conquer the entire Iberian Peninsula save for the Emirate of Granada, which was reduced to the status of Castilian vassal. Things remained relatively frozen that way until 1482, when Ferdinand and Isabella began the campaign that eventually eliminated Granada and left all of soon-to-be Spain in Christian hands.

November 23, 1934: British and Ethiopian (Abyssinian) officials discover an Italian-Somali fortress in the town of Walwal, which is well beyond the designated borders of Italian Somaliland. The ensuing “Abyssinia Crisis” led into the 1935-1937 Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Italian annexation of Ethiopia.

November 24, 1859: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Its theory of evolution by natural selection became a fundamental tenet of modern biology.

November 24, 1965: Congolese army chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko leads a bloodless coup that installs him as the unquestioned ruler of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu ruled his repressive totalitarian state, which he renamed “Zaire” in 1971, until he was overthrown in the First Congo War in 1997. He died several months later in exile.

INTERNATIONAL

Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for November 24:

• 60,088,110 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (17,131,983 active, +542,897 since yesterday)

• 1,413,790 reported fatalities (+11,710 since yesterday)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

• 7369 confirmed coronavirus cases (+74)

• 385 reported fatalities (+5)

Syrian media is reporting Israeli airstrikes on multiple targets south of Damascus late Tuesday. Details are unfortunately sparse. There’s no word of any casualties as yet but usually in these cases it takes at least several hours for information to filter out.

At least 29 people were killed in three separate incidents across Turkish-held northern Syria on Tuesday. By far the largest of these incidents involved a group of around 30 Turkish proxy fighters stumbling into a minefield planted by the Syrian Democratic Forces near the town of Ayn Issa. They were attempting to enter a village they’d just attacked with drones. At least 21 of those fighters were killed. At least five people (three police officers and two civilians) were killed in a car bombing in al-Bab and at least three were killed in a car bombing in Afrin. There’s been no claim of responsibility for either of the car bombings. Additionally, prior to the minefield incident the fighting between the Turkish proxies and the SDF around Ayn Issa on Monday night had killed at least 11 rebels and an unknown number of SDF fighters.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post reports on the ongoing, if not well publicized, campaign of violence in southern Syria’s Daraa province:

This month, at least nine former rebels who had agreed to join the Syrian army and seven others who had returned to civilian life were killed, according to Mohammed al-Sharaa, a member of the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office. The assailants were unknown, with suspicion falling in turn on government forces seeking to settle scores with former adversaries; opposition loyalists who feel betrayed by former comrades; and even Islamic State militants.

Reliable information about developments in Syria is often scarce because of the government’s tight media controls and widespread fear of the police state. But the documentation office, a Belgium-based monitoring group, has sought to chronicle the rising toll, reporting that 193 former rebel fighters who had put down their weapons have been slain in Daraa since government forces retook the city in July 2018, with the pace of killings accelerating each year. More than 200 other civilians have been killed, some under torture, the group reported.

YEMEN

• 2114 confirmed cases (+7)

• 609 reported fatalities (+0)

The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen reported Tuesday that its forces destroyed five mines allegedly laid by the Houthis in the Red Sea.

In somewhat related news, the Houthis have reportedly given the United Nations a green light to carry out repairs on the FSO Safer, an oil tanker that’s been moored near the port city of Hudaydah almost since the start of Yemen’s civil war. The vessel is deteriorating and threatening to spill its cargo into the Red Sea (perhaps explosively), which would be an ecological disaster. The UN could begin inspecting the ship early next year.

SAUDI ARABIA

• 355,741 confirmed cases (+252)

• 5811 reported fatalities (+15)

As for Monday’s Houthi cruise missile strike on an Aramco facility in Jeddah, company officials say the attack punctured an oil tank and that sparked the subsequent fire. There were no casualties and the facility, aside from the damaged tank, is apparently back to normal operations.

IRAN

• 880,542 confirmed cases (+13,721)

• 45,738 reported fatalities (+483)

Retired Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general and former Iranian defense minister Hossein Dehghan on Tuesday became the first person to announce his candidacy ahead of June’s Iranian presidential election. Dehghan’s credentials make him a strong candidate on paper. Although he explicitly rejects categorizing himself as a member of Iran’s major political factions (reformists, moderates, and conservatives), his image as a “military man” will likely get at least some conservatives behind him, and his attempt to portray himself as above politics might appeal to moderates and even to reformists, depending on how the rest of the presidential field looks.

Dehghan also has some clear disadvantages. One is that there’s no evidence he can actually appeal to people in a campaign setting, though maybe he’ll surprise on that front. The other is that he would really be Iran’s first explicitly “military” president—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ran as the mayor of Tehran, not as a guy who (allegedly) served in the Basij, and while Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani did spend the last year of the Iran-Iraq War as chief of the Iranian military’s general staff, he was a civilian politician, not a real military man. One of the major underlying political trends in Iran over the past several years has been the growing influence of the IRGC, and having one of their alums elected president would be in keeping with that trend. But it remains to be seen whether Iranian voters will be comfortable with it.

ASIA

ARMENIA

• 127,522 confirmed cases (+813)

• 2002 reported fatalities (+26)

France 24 has a new report on Armenian accusations that the Azerbaijani military used internationally proscribed weapons—white phosphorus and cluster bombs—in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict:

AZERBAIJAN

• 98,927 confirmed cases (+3646)

• 1194 reported fatalities (+34)

The Azerbaijani military said early Wednesday that it’s taken control of the Kalbajar region, the second of three major areas surrounding Karabakh that Armenian forces occupied in the 1990s but agreed to forfeit in the wake of the war the two sides just fought. The third area, Lachin, is to be handed over by December 1.

This map offers a pretty clear look at the post-war situation in and around Karabakh; Kalbajar is the large light green area west of Karabakh (Emreculha via Wikimedia Commons)

AFGHANISTAN

• 45,280 confirmed cases (+292)

• 1712 reported fatalities (+17)

A bombing in the city of Bamiyan killed at least 14 people and wounded 45 others on Tuesday. Authorities say two roadside bombs “exploded in quick succession,” so there’s a possibility the attackers intended this as a “double tap” strike, with one bomb going off a short time after the other in order to target emergency responders. If that was the case it sounds like the second bomb may have exploded too quickly to achieve that result. The Taliban denied involvement in the attack so suspicion naturally falls on the Islamic State, though it hasn’t claimed the attack as yet.

AFRICA

MOROCCO

• 331,527 confirmed cases (+3999) in Morocco, 10 confirmed cases (+0) in Western Sahara

• 5469 reported fatalities (+73) in Morocco, 1 reported fatality (+0) in Western Sahara

The Moroccan military says it’s secured access to the Guerguerat border post, restoring road traffic between Western Sahara and Mauritania. Guerguerat is where the recent and ongoing Western Sahara flareup began, after separatist fighters aligned with the POLISARIO Front blocked the highway and left dozens of cargo trucks stranded. The Moroccan government sent its security forces into Western Sahara earlier this month, prompting POLISARIO to declare an end to the ceasefire that’s been in place there since 1991. Since then there have been reports of clashes between POLISARIO and Moroccan forces but the scope of the violence has been hard to ascertain.

ETHIOPIA

• 106,591 confirmed cases (+388)

• 1661 reported fatalities (+10)

Speaking of conflicts in places from which it’s hard to get solid information, the Ethiopian military and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front continue to offer wildly differing accounts of their civil war. Ethiopian officials say their forces are continuing to advance on the Tigrayan regional capital, Mekelle, and claim that TPLF units are surrendering to them along the way. The TPLF, meanwhile, continues to insist that the Ethiopian army’s southern approach on Mekelle has been stopped and says that, among other successes, their forces “destroyed” the Ethiopian 21st Mechanized Division. As always, neither of these narratives can be verified.

There may be some new clarity with respect to the massacre of over 600 people in the Tigrayan town of Mai Kadra earlier this month. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has determined that it was the TPLF that carried out the atrocity, which targeted ethnic Amhara seasonal laborers. However, the EHRC is a quasi-independent creation of the Ethiopian government, so its objectivity may be questionable.

The UN Security Council on Tuesday held its first closed door session on the situation in Ethiopia, but it does not appear to taken any substantive steps with respect to the conflict. The session was almost postponed when several UNSC members, led by South Africa, requested a delay to give the African Union a chance to send observers into Ethiopia to assess conditions in Tigray, but it was restored to the schedule at the behest of the council’s European members. It’s unclear whether, or when, the AU might be allowed to send a delegation, but as the Ethiopian government has now apparently expelled the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst in Ethiopia, that suggests it’s not terribly interested in accommodating outside observers.

UGANDA

• 18,406 confirmed cases (+241)

• 186 reported fatalities (+5)

Although he’s since been released, the arrest earlier this month of popular musician and opposition politician Bobi Wine led at last count to the deaths of at least 45 people in clashes between protesters and Ugandan security forces. Over 800 people were arrested in two days of unrest sparked by the detention. Ugandan authorities insist Wine violated COVID-19 protocols, but seeing as how he’s probably the strongest challenger to President Yoweri Museveni heading into January’s election, the arrest certainly has a political feel to it.

ZIMBABWE

• 9398 confirmed cases (+90)

• 274 reported fatalities (+1)

A new report from the International Crisis Group looks at the challenges facing Zimbabwe’s gold mining sector:

Development of the gold sector is crucial if Mnangagwa’s government is to salvage prospects for Zimbabwe’s economic recovery from decades of stagnation under the late President Robert Mugabe. Gold is Zimbabwe’s largest foreign exchange earner and the country is desperately short on hard currency. It is also Zimbabwe’s only major export commodity that has not dropped radically in price during the worldwide pandemic.

The gold sector is compromised on several fronts, however. First, Zimbabwe’s centralised gold buying scheme underpays producers, a practice that encourages smuggling and erodes industrial mining profits, leading companies to close mines. Idle industrial mines become targets for intrusion by artisanal miners. Secondly, such encroachment by artisanal miners, at times with the connivance of actors linked to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, feeds an elaborate patronage economy, found in many African resource-rich countries, which can give politicians an incentive to protect the status quo. Thirdly, Zimbabwe’s legal system is unpredictable: artisanal miners have no collective rights under the law and in case of disputes authorities often apply the law unevenly, failing to hold politically connected parties to account and playing havoc with mining companies.

Gang violence flourishes around gold mining sites where the rule of law is weak. Disputes about mining site ownership are frequent, and police often do not act against intrusions upon mining sites or mining-related violence, particularly when gangs or artisanal miners are politically connected. The security forces recently have mounted major operations to stop killings, but in making arrests they often make no distinction between gang members and non-violent artisanal miners. Their sweeps have likely deprived thousands of miners of their livelihoods without making the sector appreciably safer.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

• 2,138,828 confirmed cases (+24,326)

• 37,031 reported fatalities (+491)

A Russian destroyer, the Admiral Vinogradov, had a tense run-in with the USS John S. McCain during what the US Navy categorized as a “freedom of navigation” mission in the Sea of Japan on Tuesday. The Admiral Vinogradov ordered the John S. McCain to leave what it characterized as Russian territorial waters and even threatened to ram the American vessel, at which point the John S. McCain apparently withdrew to less provocative waters. The US says that Russia’s maritime claims in the region are “illegitimate” and denied that the John S. McCain was forced to withdraw.

AMERICAS

UNITED STATES

• 12,955,007 confirmed cases (+175,047)

• 265,891 reported fatalities (+2187)

Since tonight is our last one of these for a few days, there are a couple of pieces that might interest you that I might otherwise have saved for a future newsletter. First is Andrew Bacevich’s latest TomDispatch piece, which considers whether Joe Biden is really the man to end the Afghanistan war. You may also want to check out Sarah Lazare’s newest at Jacobin, which takes a very dim view of Biden’s initial foreign policy appointments and in particular notes some interesting details about UN ambassador-designate Lin­da Thomas-Green­field’s stint at the disturbingly secretive Albright Stone­bridge Group and about incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s time at another “strategy firm,” Macro Advi­so­ry Part­ners.

Finally, I’ll leave you with Danny Sjursen at TomDispatch, wondering whether The Most Important Election Of Our Lives is actually going to have any substantive impact on US foreign policy:

For nearly two years, We the People were coached to believe that the 2020 election would mean everything, that November 3rd would be democracy’s ultimate judgment day. What if, however, when it comes to issues of war, peace, and empire, “Decision 2020” proves barely meaningful? After all, in the election campaign just past, Donald Trump’s sweeping war-peace rhetoric and Joe Biden’s hedging aside, neither nuclear-code aspirant bothered to broach the most uncomfortable questions about America’s uniquely intrusive global role. Neither dared dissent from normative notions about America’s posture and policy “over there,” nor challenge the essence of the war-state, a sacred cow if ever there was one.

That blessed bovine has enshrined permanent policies that seem beyond challenge: Uncle Sam’s right and duty to forward deploy troops just about anywhere on the planet; garrison the globe; carry out aerial assassinations; and unilaterally implement starvation sanctions. Likewise the systemic structures that implement and incentivize such rogue-state behavior are never questioned, especially the existence of a sprawling military-industrial complex that has infiltrated every aspect of public life, while stealing money that might have improved America’s infrastructure or wellbeing. It has engorged itself at the taxpayer’s expense, while peddling American blood money — and blood — on absurd foreign adventures and autocratic allies, even as it corrupted nearly every prominent public paymaster and policymaker.

This election season, neither Democrats nor Republicans challenged the cultural components justifying the great game, which is evidence of one thing: empires come home, folks, even if the troops never seem to.

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See you in a few! Happy Thanksgiving!

PICTURED: a massive birdbrain, and also the turkey that was pardoned by the president on Tuesday (White House photo via Flickr)