World roundup: October 1 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Morocco, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 1, 331 BCE: This is the generally accepted date for the Battle of Gaugamela, in which Alexander the Great’s Greek-Macedonian army decisively defeated a larger Persian army and almost instantly gained control over the western half of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Persian Emperor Darius fled east hoping to recruit a new army, but he was murdered by his cousin Bessus, who proclaimed himself the new emperor. His reign was short-lived, and Alexander had conquered the whole empire by 329.

Italian painter Pietro da Cortona’s 1640’s Battle of Alexander versus Darius depicts the Persian ruler’s flight from the battlefield (Wikimedia Commons

October 1, 1827: An imperial Russian army defeats the Qajars at Yerevan during the 1826-1828 Russo-Persian War. The Russians followed up by capturing Tabriz, the largest northern Iranian city, at which point the Qajars surrendered. Under the terms of the ensuing treaty, they gave both the Erivan Khanate and the Nakhichevan Khanate to the Russians. This essentially created the modern nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan, respectively, and ended centuries of Persian domination in the southern Caucasus—which would henceforth be dominated by Russia instead.

October 1, 1918: Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force captures Damascus, effectively bringing World War I to an end in the Middle East.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Al-Monitor’s Jared Szuba is reporting that the US military’s planned drawdown in Syria has been put on ice “for several months” because the Trump administration is concerned about the “stability” of the Syrian government. Instability in that regime could create openings for less compliant jihadist groups (like Islamic State) to assert themselves and has derailed the process of negotiating some sort of modus vivendi between Damascus and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces faction. The Trump administration is aiming to reduce its military footprint in the region as evinced by its recent moves in Iraq (see below), so this pause is probably temporary.