World roundup: October 14-15 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 14, 1066: Duke William of Normandy’s army defeats the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson and his army at the Battle of Hastings. William claimed that he’d been promised the kingdom of England by Edward the Confessor (who’d died in January), but Godwinson was elected king by the Anglo-Saxon nobility. The Normans invaded and the two armies met outside of the town of Hastings. Accounts of the battle vary, but the general story seems to be that after repelling initial Norman attacks, the Saxons made the mistake of pursuing their retreating foe. At that point William rallied his men and turned the tide of the battle. The Norman victory, along with Godwinson’s death toward the end of the battle, ensured the Norman takeover of England and made Duke William of Normandy into King William I, the Conqueror.
October 14, 1322: A Scottish army under Robert the Bruce defeats the English army of King Edward II at the Battle of Old Byland. This was the largest Scottish victory in battle with English forces since Bannockburn in 1314 and helped secure Scottish independence.
October 15, 1529: The Siege of Vienna ends
October 15, 1979: A group of Salvadoran military officers ousts President Carlos Humberto Romero in a coup. Romero was himself the leader of the military government that had ruled El Salvador since 1931, but the Sandinista overthrow of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza in July raised fears within the Salvadoran military and the US government that Romero’s government might fall to left-wing rebels. Some of the coup plotters were themselves politically on the left, but the US worked with other elements of the junta to steer things in a right-wing direction. The junta’s violent suppression of public demands for reform sparked the 12+ year long Salvadoran Civil War, which pitted the military (with US support) against the leftist FMLN coalition and left hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans dead.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Drop Site’s Murtaza Hussain reports on the ever rising threat of disease in Gaza:
As the northern Gaza Strip is subjected to a fresh campaign of massacres and enforced starvation, doctors working elsewhere in Gaza say that a quieter threat is now sweeping across the territory: chronic disease and infection.
One year into the conflict, attacks on civilians in the territory have continued to escalate, including bombings of hospitals and schools in the north that have inflicted a staggering number of civilian casualties. While clinics in the north have been overwhelmed by traumatic injuries from aerial bombings and other attacks, medical facilities in other parts of the Strip that are not presently the focus of this campaign have seen a relative decline in such injuries, doctors in Gaza told Drop Site News.
Amid this lull in trauma cases in other parts of the Strip, the full impact of disease and malnutrition on the Palestinian population is becoming clear to medical authorities, as patients grow desperate for access to the meager healthcare infrastructure still operating in the territory.
As the Israeli military (IDF) continues to escalate its assault on northern Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Sunday reportedly assured his US counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, that Israeli leaders are not imposing the “generals’ plan” to starve the people in the area into either submission or eradication. Who are you going to believe, Gallant or your lying eyes? The Israeli minister then informed US ambassador Jack Lew on Monday that the IDF had allowed a small number of aid trucks to enter northern Gaza for the first time this month. Only 30 trucks entered, which is barely even a token gesture, and none entered the Jabalia area that has borne the brunt of the Israeli operation so far and where civilians remain—many unable for one reason or another to obey IDF evacuation orders.
The Biden administration deployed reliable Axios stenographer Barak Ravid on Tuesday to let the world know that Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had sent a letter to Gallant and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer giving the Israeli government 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or risk a reduction in the flow of US arms to the IDF. The letter demanded a number of things, but the main items seem to be a substantial increase in the amount of aid entering the territory as well as the implementation of regular “humanitarian pauses” to allow the distribution of that aid throughout Gaza. Ravid called the letter “the most wide-ranging and comprehensive list of U.S. demands from Israel since the beginning of the war,” which may well be true but that’s an incredibly low bar to clear. Until the administration actually imposes consequences for Israel’s failure to meet its conditions, its repeated threats to do so will carry no weight whatsoever.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Israeli leaders have assured the Biden administration that their forthcoming attack on Iran will not target Iranian oil and/or nuclear sites, the two most provocative options that seem to be on the table. Instead, the Israelis allegedly said they’re planning to target military and intelligence sites, which if true would potentially give the Iranians an opening to walk away without retaliation. Joe Biden has at least publicly urged the Israelis to avoid oil and nuclear sites in hopes of staving off further regional escalation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office threw some cold water on this report, saying that Israeli officials will “listen” to US opinion but “will make our final decisions based on our national interests.” Nevertheless, global oil prices dropped significantly on Tuesday in response to this report and politically that’s a win for the Biden administration.
LEBANON
An IDF airstrike killed at least 21 people and wounded eight others in a predominantly Christian village in Lebanon’s North governate on Monday, prompting calls for an investigation from the United Nations human rights office. The strike hit a residential building in a place that is nowhere near the Lebanese-Israeli border and has no obvious connection to Hezbollah. If the Israeli aim here is to encourage Lebanese society to rise up and eliminate Hezbollah, attacks like this are probably counterproductive. On the other hand if the aim is just to maximize casualties then I guess one part of Lebanon is as fertile as any other. Hezbollah’s acting leader, Naim Qassem, pledged on Tuesday to expand the group’s rocket attacks further south into Israel in response to this strike, though he’s also reiterated Hezbollah’s openness to a ceasefire (that Netanyahu continues to reject).
Reuters is reporting that the IDF is demining parts of the occupied Golan region and erecting fortifications instead, suggesting that it intends to deploy forces there to carry out operations in Lebanon. That could expand the conflict deeper into eastern Lebanon, possibly along the Lebanese-Syrian border. It also threatens to bring Syria into the conflict in a bigger way than it’s been involved so far.
IRAN
The European Union on Tuesday blacklisted seven Iranian officials, including a deputy defense minister, and three airlines over Iran’s alleged support for the Russian military. Evidence suggests that the Iranians have been providing Russia with drones and missiles for use in Ukraine, though the Iranian government has repeatedly denied that allegation. The airlines are accused of ferrying those munitions to Russia.
Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani finally made a public appearance on Tuesday, turning up at a memorial service for Abbas Nilforoushan, the Quds officer who was killed alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike last month. Qaani had not been seen publicly since another Israeli airstrike in Beirut (probably) killed Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine earlier this month, leading to speculation either that he’d been caught in that strike or that he’s under suspicion within Iran over the security failures that keep getting senior Hezbollah figures killed. His appearance should quash the former theory but doesn’t say much as to the latter.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Monday, killing at least four officers. Five militants were killed and it sounds like the death toll could have been higher but police forced the bombers to detonate their devices prematurely. Personnel in the station were holding a memorial for another officer who’d been killed in a militant attack the previous day when the bombers struck.
INDIA
The Canadian and Indian governments reciprocally expelled each others’ ambassadors as well as five additional diplomatic staffers on Monday, in the latest fallout from the Indian government’s alleged involvement in the assassination of a Sikh activist in Canada last year. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly accused New Delhi of refusing to cooperate with the investigation into that murder and suggested that the six Indian personnel expelled from Canada were all persons of interest in the case.
CHINA
The Chinese government blacklisted a Taiwanese businessperson and a Taiwanese lawmaker on Monday over their alleged involvement in “separatist” activity. At the same time, the Chinese military was busy undertaking what seems to have been one of its largest exercises ever around Taiwan, deploying among other things a “record” 153 aircraft around the island. Beijing was sending a message, after Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te used his National Day speech last week to defend Taiwanese autonomy. All things considered his address was fairly tame inasmuch as he didn’t make any overt comments about independence, but apparently it wasn’t tame enough to avoid this reaction.
On a nicer note, the Chinese government sent two new giant pandas to the National Zoo in Washington DC on Monday. The zoo returned its previous pair to China back in November and at the time there was some question as to whether Beijing would replace them. But Xi Jinping announced during his visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco that new pandas would be sent to the US, and San Diego received the first of those earlier this year. This is a small thing in the bigger picture of US-Chinese relations but it is at least an indication that they haven’t completely soured.
NORTH KOREA
The North Korean military on Tuesday blew up portions of road and rail lines that cross between the two Koreas, as its government had promised to do. The South Korean military responded to the blasts by firing “warning shots” along its side of the Demilitarized Zone but that was the limit of the festivities.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Washington Post assesses mounting evidence of the UAE’s involvement in the war between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces:
Sudanese military officials in the city of Omdurman recently allowed Washington Post journalists to inspect a drone that the officials said had been captured from the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces along with munitions for the drone. The officials provided photos of the crates they had captured, including one with labeling that indicated the munitions had been manufactured in Serbia and sent to the UAE Armed Forces Joint Logistics Command.
This apparent evidence of UAE involvement aligns with the findings of the Sudan Conflict Observatory, a group funded by the U.S. State Department that tracked Emirati flights. In an assessment shared exclusively with The Post ahead of publication on Tuesday, the group said it tracked 32 flights between June 2023 and May 2024 and concluded with “near certainty” that they were weapons transfers from the UAE to the RSF.
The RSF has denied receiving military support from the UAE, and UAE diplomats strenuously rejected such allegations when they were raised by United Nations officials earlier this year. “The UAE is not providing any support or supplies to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) or any other warring parties,” the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement to The Post.
If anybody ever believed those denials we’ve long since passed the point where they had any plausibility. The Post piece also discusses Iran’s drone support for the Sudanese military, the evidence for which is more circumstantial but still pretty compelling. Iran reportedly sought to trade its drones for the right to build a naval base along Sudan’s Red Sea coast, but has settled for simply selling drones to the Sudanese military for badly needed cash.
ZIMBABWE
Al Jazeera reports on the massive drought that continues to batter Zimbabwe and much of the rest of southern Africa:
Millions of people across Southern Africa are going hungry due to a historic drought, risking a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe, the United Nations has warned.
Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have all declared a state of national disaster in the past months as the drought has destroyed crops and livestock. Angola and Mozambique are also severely affected, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said in a briefing, warning that the crisis is expected to deepen until the next harvests in March or April next year.
“A historic drought – the worst food crisis yet – has devastated more than 27 million lives across the region,” said WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri. “Some 21 million children are malnourished.
“October in Southern Africa marks the start of the lean season, and each month is expected to be worse than the previous one until harvests next year in March and April. Crops have failed, livestock have perished, and children are lucky to receive one meal per day.”
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Ukrainian military’s foothold in Russia’s Kursk oblast seems increasingly precarious in the face of an intensifying Russian counteroffensive:
Russia has recaptured a few villages in its western borderlands that Ukraine invaded over the summer, threatening Kyiv’s hold on territory it views as crucial leverage for pushing Moscow toward negotiations to end the war.
In recent days, Russian troops have intensified efforts to dislodge Ukrainian forces from the bulge of territory they seized in Russia’s western Kursk region, launching several assaults spearheaded by armored vehicles. Battlefield maps compiled by independent groups using satellite images and combat footage indicate that Russian forces have driven a wedge into the western edge of the Ukrainian bulge, recapturing at least three villages.
“In general, the situation in Kursk is not so good,” DeepState, a group with close ties to the Ukrainian Army that analyzes combat footage, said on Sunday. Ukrainian forces “are taking stabilization measures, but it is extremely difficult to reclaim what has been lost.”
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst for the Finland-based Black Bird Group, said that some elements of Russian units had “managed to advance relatively far into the Ukrainian rear, which caused issues and losses for Ukraine.”
It seems like this operation may be approaching a point where the Ukrainian government is going to have to decide whether clinging to a relatively insignificant stretch of Russian territory is worth risking the loss of some of the Ukrainian military’s most seasoned and best equipped forces. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks as though the Kursk operation is part of his endgame plan, so that may make him reluctant to give it up.
HUNGARY
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was scheduled to send a delegation from its “Working Group on Bribery” to Hungary this week to talk about strengthening the Hungarian government’s legal restrictions against foreign bribery. But the OECD announced on Tuesday that it was canceling the mission, due to Hungarian officials’ failure to respond to its previous recommendations in this area. The organization described the cancellation as an unprecedented step.
AMERICAS
BOLIVIA
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales is reportedly close to being arrested in connection with charges that he raped and trafficked a 15 year old girl who was a “member of his political youth guard” back in 2015. She gave birth to a child, allegedly fathered by Morales, the following year. Morales’ possibly pending arrest does not directly stem from this allegation but rather from his decision to ignore a court summons in the case on Thursday. The (alleged) victim’s father, accused of trafficking her to Morales, received four months’ pretrial detention on Friday for ignoring his own summons. Morales supporters clashed with police on Monday as they attempted to blockade roads into his home region of Cochabamba and there will likely be more unrest to come related to this case.
UNITED STATES
Finally, at Foreign Affairs the Carnegie Endowment’s Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim consider the prospects for change in a US foreign policy establishment that seems highly resistant to it:
As the world evolves, the United States must adapt or suffer the consequences. The process of adaptation, however, is usually plodding, if it happens at all. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden each attempted to steer U.S. foreign policy in new directions but met resistance from both domestic and foreign actors. The difficulty they encountered is no surprise. Since World War II, many U.S. leaders have attempted to change the country’s foreign policy, and their efforts have often fallen short. Inertia is a powerful force.
Take the two-decade war in Afghanistan as a recent example. For years, the U.S. operation was failing, with little prospect of stabilizing the country and securing a democratic government. Yet bureaucratic and political interests in Washington obstructed efforts to change course. President Barack Obama and his successor, Trump, both talked about ending the war, but ultimately just reduced troop levels. Biden finally completed the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, honoring a deal Trump had made with the Taliban. When the withdrawal got messy, however, Biden ended up paying a political price, even though the policy had high public support.
But the war did end, showing that meaningful shifts in U.S. foreign policy are not impossible. This is good news, because large adjustments are now needed. The era in which the United States could police the world is over, and Washington finds itself embroiled in conflicts it has diminishing capacity to resolve. Many analysts are thus calling for a major strategic reorientation—whether, for example, by enlarging the U.S. military so that it can sustain fights in multiple theaters or by handing off some burdens to U.S. allies and partners. Come January, Trump or his opponent in the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris, could try to make big changes. Any effort to steer U.S. foreign policy in a new direction is sure to encounter formidable obstacles, however, and the new president will need a plan to overcome them.
“Inertia”