World roundup: October 11-12 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Madagascar, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Given that tomorrow is a holiday in the US I’m going to play it by ear as to whether or not we do a roundup tomorrow evening. The pending release of captives from Gaza and Donald Trump’s arrival in the Middle East will generate some news, but unless something unexpected happens around either of those things they will keep until Tuesday. I guess what I’m saying is that if there’s no roundup tomorrow evening rest assured we’ll pull double duty on Tuesday.
TODAY IN HISTORY
October 11, 1142: The Jin and Song monarchies ratify the Treaty of Shaoxing, establishing a formal boundary between the two Chinese kingdoms. The Song were obliged by the treaty to give up their dynastic claims on northern China, which they’d ruled from 960 until the Jurchen people rebelled and drove the Song south of the Yangtze River in the 1110s (historians sometimes refer to the dynasty moving forward as the “Southern Song” to mark this geographic shift). The treaty also required the Song to pay an annual tribute to the Jin, though a subsequent war in the 1160s ended with a Song victory that established a more equal relationship between the two dynasties. The Mongol invasions of the 13th century eventually did away with both kingdoms and reunified China.
October 11, 1899: The Second Boer War begins. Though the Boer states had some initial success, the war ended in May 1902 with an overwhelming British victory and the collapse of both the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Among the war’s many legacies was the popularization of the concentration camp, which Britain used to house large numbers of Boer civilians, many of whom died due to the treatment to which they were subjected.
October 12 (give or take), 539 BCE: An Achaemenid Persian army under dynastic founder Cyrus II (“the Great”) enters the city of Babylon, bringing the Neo-Babylonian Empire to an end and ushering in a (very long, as it turned out) period in which Mesopotamia was consistently ruled by outside powers. The conquest of Babylon was more or less a foregone conclusion after the Persian victory in the decisive Battle of Opis in September. Cyrus inherited the Babylonians’ conquests, including Judea, where he was later praised for allowing the exiled Judean population to return to its homeland.
October 12, 1492: Christopher Columbus’s first expedition makes landfall in, as it turned out, the Americas (as they’d soon be known). Columbus dubbed the island he’d encountered “San Salvador” and it’s believed to correspond with modern San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Mistakenly believing he’d sailed all the way to India, Columbus began the European practice of referring to the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere as “Indians” and spent the next three months exploring the region (losing his flagship, the Santa María, in the process).
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Juan Cole makes a comparison between the new and so far unrepresentative Syrian parliament and a previous attempt at transitional governance in the Middle East:
So here is what is alarming. This Syrian parliament is a mirror image of the Iraqi constituent assembly / parliament that was elected in late January 2005 under the Bush administration. The Iraqi parliament with 275 seats only had about 17 Sunni Arabs in it because the Sunni Arabs boycotted the elections, which were held under a proportional system. I figure Sunni Arabs in Iraq at something like 22% of the population, so they were a minority. But they had been in power for centuries and were a functional majority.
The Kurds, Alawites, Druze, Shiites and Christians who have such low levels of representation in the Syrian parliament probably come to 34% or so of the Syrian population. So the disenfranchised minorities in Syria are if anything a larger proportion of the population than in Iraq.
In Iraq in 2005, the lack of representation for Sunni Arabs in the constitution-writing constituent assembly that doubled as a parliament led to a Sunni Arab rejection of the new constitution in a referendum of October 2005. By February of 2006 a civil war had broken out that left 34,000 dead in 2006 alone and continued well into 2007. The civil war broke out despite the military occupation of the country by 140,000 US troops.
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) carried out what the AP called “intense airstrikes” on southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing at least one person and wounding seven. Israeli officials claimed that the target was storing equipment on behalf of Hezbollah.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
To I would imagine is no great surprise, The Washington Post reports that, according to leaked US documents, Arab governments actually intensified their collaboration with Israel even as the IDF was carrying out genocide in Gaza:
The documents show that the threat posed by Iran was the driving force behind the closer ties, which have been fostered by the U.S. military’s Central Command, known as Centcom. One document describes Iran and its allied militias as the “Axis of Evil,” and another includes a map with missiles superimposed over Gaza and Yemen, where Iranian allies hold power.
Five Centcom PowerPoint presentations, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and reviewed by The Washington Post, detail the creation of what the U.S. military describes as the “Regional Security Construct.” In addition to Israel and Qatar, the construct includes Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents refer to Kuwait and Oman as “potential partners” that were briefed on all meetings.
The presentations are marked unclassified and were distributed to the construct’s partners, and in some cases also to the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States. They were written between 2022 and 2025, before and after the launch of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.
Nobody will ever accuse the Arab states of giving a shit about the lives of Palestinians, that’s for sure, but it’s noteworthy to establish with evidence that their public denunciations of the carnage in Gaza were purely for show. The thing that seems to have upset all of this comity was the Israeli strike on Qatar last month, when all the joint planning and infrastructure meant to detect and prevent an attack from Iran turned out to be useless when the attack came from the opposite direction.
There may, to be fair, be some benefit to the maintenance of this Arab-Israeli relationship if it hastens the formation of the international force that Donald Trump’s ceasefire framework envisions taking over security operations in Gaza. But that remains to be seen. There are excellent reasons to be skeptical that such a force will ever materialize and, if it does, that it will be able to provide any real security inside Gaza. In the meantime, with the ceasefire holding ahead of Monday’s planned captive exchange and an international summit on Gaza’s future in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El Sheikh, both the BBC and The Financial Times are reporting that Hamas is filling the security vacuum. They are of course portraying this as a completely nefarious maneuver by a group that is intent on clinging to power and “[settling] scores,” as the FT put it.
I think it’s worth noting that at least some of that “score-settling” involves Israeli-backed factions that have already reportedly carried out their own attacks since the ceasefire came into effect, but however you or I (or anyone else) might interpret Hamas’s actions over the past couple of days the upshot is that a) its reemergence in this manner was inevitable without an alternative force ready to replace the IDF, and b) the Israeli government will probably not tolerate Hamas controlling Gaza’s internal security for very long. This could be a serious threat to the continuation of the ceasefire and further negotiations. It’s already threatening the peace pretty seriously, as fighting between Hamas and one of those factions, the Dughmush clan, left at least 27 people dead in Gaza city over the weekend. Dughmush fighters may have killed two Hamas members on Saturday, prompting Hamas to attack one of the clan’s strongholds in retaliation.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Escalating tensions over the presence of Pakistani militants based on the Afghan side of the border erupted into a major battle overnight that left at least 23 Pakistani and nine Afghan soldiers dead. Those are the self-reported death tolls but each side is claiming to have inflicted many more casualties on the other—the Pakistanis say they killed over 200 people on the Afghan side while the Afghans say they killed 58 people on the Pakistani side. This incident follows Pakistani airstrikes on Kabul and in Paktika province on Thursday and before that months of back and forth clashes both military and verbal, with Pakistani officials accusing their Afghan counterparts of harboring and supporting Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and other armed groups. Afghan forces appear to have fired the first shots, in retaliation for those airstrikes. The heaviest fighting seems to have ended by midday Sunday but the Pakistani government has now closed all of the crossing points along the border.
PAKISTAN
That overnight battle came after multiple TTP attacks from Friday night into Saturday that killed at least 23 people in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Those may also have been meant as retaliation for those Pakistani airstrikes, one of which (the one in Kabul) reportedly targeted TTP leader Noor Wali Mehsud.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces militants attacked a displaced persons center in the Sudanese city of Al-Fashir on Saturday with a barrage of drone and artillery strikes, killing at least 60 people according to the local resistance committee. Most, if not all, of the dead appear to be civilians, continuing a string of RSF attacks on civilian areas of the city. Al-Fashir remains the last city in Darfur to resist RSF encroachment and the militants are intent on capturing it.
NIGERIA
Islamic State West Africa Province fighters attacked an army base in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Friday, killing at least seven soldiers. The ISWAP fighters subsequently mined the main road connecting the capital of Borno, Maiduguri, to the capital of neighboring Yobe state, Damaturu. The Nigerian military seems to have cleared that road.
MADAGASCAR
Madagascar appears to be in the midst of at the very least a military mutiny, after army units joined with “Gen Z” protesters in Antananarivo on Saturday. Recently appointed Prime Minister Ruphin Zafisambo, himself an army general, called for calm and dialogue, but by Sunday the military’s elite CAPSAT unit had installed its own commander and announced that new military orders would come from its officer alone, not from Zafisambo or President Andry Rajoelina. Earlier in the day Rajoelina, whose ouster is one of the protesters’ chief demands, had accused unspecified elements of the military of attempting a coup. CAPSAT was integral to the 2009 coup that made Rajoelina president, so there is some precedent here, though at this point it’s unclear whether it is attempting to overthrow Rajoelina or has just stopped following his orders. Officers within CAPSAT are insisting that they are not trying to topple the government. Nevertheless Rajoelina’s position may become untenable if this continues.
SEYCHELLES
Former parliament speaker Patrick Herminie, who won the first round of the Seychelles presidential election last month but fell short of an outright victory, has now emerged victorious from the October 9-11 runoff against incumbent Wavel Ramkalawan. Herminie’s United Seychelles party also won the parliamentary portion of the election so he should have substantial latitude in terms of enacting his agenda.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
The ongoing saga around the provision (or not) of US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine opened another chapter on Sunday, when Donald Trump spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and then suggested to reporters that he’s going to present Russian President Vladimir Putin with an ultimatum: make peace or the Ukrainians get the missiles. Trump has been hedging about this for the past couple of weeks and this position allows him to continue to hedge while looking tough. Zelensky apparently promised only to use the weapons against military targets, which addresses one of Trump’s stated concerns.
The Financial Times reported on Sunday that the US is already providing intelligence support for Ukraine’s long-range strikes inside Russia. This is part of the explanation for the attacks that the Ukrainians have been able to carry out against Russian energy infrastructure over the past several months, attacks that have spiked energy prices and caused fuel shortages in parts of Russia. The seeds of this collaboration were planted during a Trump-Zelensky phone call back in July and may have really sprouted after Trump’s big Alaska summit with Putin in August failed to generate any momentum toward peace talks.
FRANCE
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu named his new cabinet on Sunday. I mention this only because the last time Lecornu named a cabinet he resigned a day later, and this cabinet appears to be pretty much the same as that one. Let’s see how Monday goes for him.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Intercept’s Alain Stephens reports that the US State Department is dodging its responsibility to inform Congress when US-provided weapons get misallocated overseas:
On paper, the guardrails are clear. When the U.S. ships weapons overseas, partner governments promise three things: That they’ll use them only for authorized purposes, keep them secure, and not hand them off to third parties.
If those conditions are violated or serious suspicions arise that they are, the State Department is obligated to investigate and, in many cases, alert Congress.
In practice, however, a new Government Accountability Office report shows the system is ad hoc, with little guidance or follow through.
The State Department largely relies on overseas Defense Department officials for tips about potential end-use violations.
Since 2019, the Pentagon has flagged more than 150 incidents that could be violations. But the State Department has reported just three end-use violations to Capitol Hill.
The report added that the State Department hasn’t informed Congress what merits reporting and that it investigates violations inconsistently.
Experts in the arms trafficking and conflict monitoring [communities] are dismayed, calling the reported gaps an affront to both national and global security.