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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 15, 1529: The Ottoman siege of Vienna ends in failure. A substantially wetter than usual Balkan spring made the Ottoman march on Vienna extremely difficult and forced Sultan Suleyman I to leave his largest and therefore most effective artillery pieces behind. The army he finally brought to Vienna was simply not capable of breaching the city’s walls and taking it. Suleyman tried again to attack Vienna in 1532 but turned around midway after receiving word of a very large Habsburg army mustering to defend the city. The Ottomans wouldn’t make another attempt on Vienna until 1683, which again failed and marked the start of an imperial retreat out of central Europe.
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
LEBANON
Hezbollah is claiming ownership of a large supply of explosives that the Lebanese army seized last week, with one of the party’s elected legislators saying on Thursday that the munitions were intended for use against Israeli forces. It’s demanding the release of the explosives and this situation is shaping up as a potential confrontation over the Lebanese government’s project, at US and Israeli behest, to bring all weapons in the country under state control.
