World roundup: October 18 2022
Stories from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
October 17, 1437: The Battle of Tangier ends
October 17, 1973: OPEC imposes an oil embargo against countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War—Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The embargo immediately caused a spike in oil prices and contributed to shortages that led to gasoline rationing in the targeted countries. It notably did not cause any of the targeted countries to change policy.
October 18, 1009: Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim destroys the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
October 18, 1912: The Italo-Turkish War ends with a decisive Italian victory. The war not only brought Libya under Italian control—though that control initially didn’t extend very far inland—it also demonstrated the Ottoman Empire’s weakness and encouraged Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia to form an alliance (the Balkan League) and go to war with the empire. The First Balkan War led to a Second Balkan War when the league broke up, and that led (in part) into World War I.
INTERNATIONAL
In today’s global news:
Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.
A newly published study in the journal Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment finds that ocean heating is accelerating more quickly and penetrating more deeply than ever before. In addition to threatening ocean habitats, this trend is also exacerbating climate effects like heavy rain, intensified tropical activity, and increased polar ice melting.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
It would seem the Turkish military has finally stepped in to put a stop to days of fighting between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkey-backed “Syrian National Army” in Aleppo province. At least 58 people have been killed, ten of them civilians, since the two groups began battling one another on October 8. The Turks are apparently looking to keep HTS out of the border town of Azaz, which aside from being situated close to the Turkish border is also an administrative hub for the SNA and the Turkish presence in northwestern Syria more generally. They seem to be intent on restoring the HTS-SNA ceasefire agreement from Friday, under which HTS agreed to give back the territory it’s seized while the SNA agreed to bring those areas under a “unified command” led by HTS. The Turks seem comfortable with the unified command but have drawn a line with respect to HTS advancing on Azaz.
LEBANON
The Lebanese military has accused its Israeli counterpart of sailing into Lebanese territorial waters on both Sunday and Monday, an allegation that Israeli officials have denied. Nothing came of either of these incidents but they come at a time when both countries have verbally agreed to a US-brokered deal demarcating their maritime border. Any new tension around this issue could prevent that verbal agreement from becoming an actual agreement.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Australian government has walked back its predecessor’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. The timing of this move isn’t entirely clear. The Guardian reported on Monday that the Australian Foreign Ministry had very quietly removed language from its website referring to Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, but the ministry claimed initially that the website change did not signify a policy shift. Then on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong told reporters that, lo and behold, it did signify a policy change after all.
The move takes Australia back to its pre-2018 policy regarding Jerusalem, before former Prime Minister Scott Morrison changed that policy in light of the US government’s decision to move its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As you might expect, the reversal has been well received by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas but quite poorly received by the Israeli government. It’s also been well received by the government of Indonesia, whose relations with Australia soured somewhat over this issue back in 2018. In Israel, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu is already using the Australian shift to paint Prime Minister Yair Lapid as weak heading into next month’s snap election.
SAUDI ARABIA
US-Saudi relations may take another hit after a court in the kingdom sentenced Saudi-US dual national Saad Ibrahim Almadi to 16 years in prison on Tuesday for the horrifying crime of criticizing Saudi Arabia on Twitter. Almadi wasn’t even living in the kingdom at the time—he was in the US. Saudi police arrested him last November after he’d flown there for what was supposed to have been a two week visit. Almadi’s family has been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of his case—for example, it hasn’t designated him as “wrongfully detained,” which would seem to be an obvious step under the circumstances—but now that the case is getting some media attention the administration may feel compelled to take action.
Speaking of media attention, The Washington Post has published a new investigative report into the work retired US military officers have been doing for repressive governments around the world—and most particularly for the Saudis:
More than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression, according to a Washington Post investigation.
In Saudi Arabia, for example, 15 retired U.S. generals and admirals have worked as paid consultants for the Defense Ministry since 2016. The ministry is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, who U.S. intelligence agencies say approved the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist, as part of a brutal crackdown on dissent.
Saudi Arabia’s paid advisers have included retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and retired Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who led the National Security Agency under Obama and President George W. Bush, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Project on Government Oversight has conducted a similar investigation and also published its findings, focusing in part on the State Department’s willingness to grant the waivers necessary for all these folks to cash out in this manner.
IRAN
Somehow Iran has found itself at the center of the most recent phase of the war in Ukraine, as Iranian kamikaze drones appear to be among the primary weapons the Russian military has been using of late to pound Ukrainian infrastructure. On Tuesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he’s advised President Volodymyr Zelensky to sever Ukraine’s diplomatic ties with Iran altogether, while the previous evening a small crowd of demonstrators gathered outside the Iranian embassy in Kyiv to protest Tehran’s provision of drones to Moscow.
For whatever it’s worth the Russian government denies using Iranian drones, but images of the wreckage of these vehicles shows a strong resemblance to the design of the Iranian Shahed-136 drone—albeit with Russian markings. Reuters, citing “two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats,” reported on Tuesday that not only is Iran planning to sell additional drones to the Russians, it plans to expand these arms sales to include other armaments like short-range ballistic missiles. The US State Department on Tuesday suggested it’s trying to make it more difficult for Iran to sell arms to Russia, but given that both countries are already heavily sanctioned by the US it’s unclear what additional leverage Washington could try to apply.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
An NGO called “Afghan Witness” says it has confirmed that Afghan security forces summarily executed at least 27 rebel prisoners captured during an operation in the restive Panjshir Valley last month. Panjshir is still apparently home to some sort of resistance to the Taliban, though there’s been little indication of it in recent months save for a Taliban claim (which this report seems to bear out) that they’d killed some 40 rebels there last month. It would seem that most of those 40 had been taken prisoner before being killed. Afghan officials say they’re investigating the execution videos released by the NGO.
PAKISTAN
Pakistani authorities say their security forces killed four members of the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army during an operation in Baluchistan province on Tuesday. They didn’t go into much detail, beyond saying that the operation took place in Kharan, which lies in central Baluchistan.
INDIA
Indian police are blaming Kashmiri separatists for a grenade attack that left two day laborers dead in Kashmir’s Shopian district late Monday. The workers hailed from Uttar Pradesh state and join a growing list of individuals (primarily but not exclusively non-Kashmiris and/or non-Muslims) killed in apparently targeted attacks over the past year.
NORTH KOREA
The North Korean military fired artillery off of the country’s west and east coasts on Tuesday, yet another in a recent spate of such weapons launches. According to the South Korean military some or all of the shells splashed down in designated buffer zones between the territorial waters of the two Koreas. The North Koreans also fired artillery into those buffer zones on Friday. The US and South Korean militaries are engaged in exercises at present and those almost always draw some sort of response from Pyongyang.
AFRICA
TUNISIA
The southern Tunisian town of Zarzis saw another sizable protest on Tuesday. Residents there are angry at what they perceive to be an inadequate response from Tunisian authorities to the sinking of a migrant boat off the Tunisian coast last month. They don’t feel the government has done enough to recover or identify the bodies and, at a more fundamental level, they blame the government for creating the meager economic conditions that are prompting young Tunisians to attempt the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.
NIGERIA
Unknown gunmen attacked a hospital in Nigeria’s Niger state early Tuesday, apparently abducting at least ten hospital workers while killing several others. Banditry is a problem in Niger state as it is throughout much of northern Nigeria, but state officials have also alleged that Boko Haram has moved into the area and has been recruiting local residents to its ranks.
Elsewhere, you can add Nigeria to the list of countries suffering devastating flooding that is partly the result of climate change:
Nigeria is suffering its worst flooding in a decade, with vast areas of farmland, infrastructure and 200,000 homes partly or wholly destroyed.
Then there are the lives that have been lost.
At least 603 people have died, more than 2,400 other people injured and over 1.4 million displaced. For some states, more than a month of floods is likely still to come.
Residents of affected states carry their belongings up to the tops of their houses and get around by canoe on roads now deluged with water. Trucks full of food and fuel become stuck for days. In some areas, water levels are almost up to the eaves of the West African country’s distinctive pitched, painted metal roofs, making them appear to float. In other places, the tops of cars are just visible but the water around them ripples with raindrops, closing in fast.
In Nigeria’s case there’s at least one extenuating circumstance. Every year the Cameroonian government releases water from a dam on the Benue River, and that release causes flooding downstream on the Benue and the Niger River in Nigeria. The Nigerian government has been intending to build its own dam to control that flooding since the 1980s but has never done so. This annual flooding has been substantially exacerbated in recent years by climate change.
ETHIOPIA
The Ethiopian military said on Tuesday it’s seized control of three towns in the Tigray region and it appears to be encircling the regional capital, Mekelle. This includes the town of Shire, which it and/or its Eritrean allies reportedly took on Monday. The rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front has acknowledged pulling out of Shire but has said nothing yet about the other two towns, both of which are located south of Mekelle. Ethiopian officials are spinning their latest advances as humanitarian operations, claiming they intend to coordinate with relief agencies to bring aid to the areas they’ve captured ASAP. That remains to be seen.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Human Rights Watch on Tuesday accused the Congolese military of collaborating with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militant group that traces its origins back to the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in its recent struggles against the Tutsi M23 militia in the eastern DRC. While Congolese officials have accused the Rwandan military of supporting M23’s activities (a charge that a United Nations investigation has corroborated), M23 and the Rwandans have been accusing the Congolese military of working with the FDLR. Congolese authorities have denied that allegation. Based on the reporting it sounds like HRW has found that the Congolese military turned to the FDLR along with other local militias as proxies against M23, which could, but doesn’t necessarily, indicate a preexisting relationship between the two entities.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Russian authorities have reportedly determined that the two men who shot up a military training ground in Belgorod oblast on Saturday were Tajik nationals. It is unclear how they came to be…oh, let’s say “recruited” into the Russian military but there are indications that they were in Russia on ordinary work permits and may have been press ganged into service. That would correspond with claims made by rights organizations that Russian authorities are coercing and/or duping foreign nationals into serving in Ukraine as part of their recent partial mobilization. It’s unclear whether the manner of their recruitment contributed to the shooting.
Elsewhere, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented on Tuesday that Moscow may reduce its diplomatic “presence” in Western countries with which it is now at odds over the war in Ukraine. Somehow I guess we’ll have to find a way to keep on keeping on despite this calamitous news.
ESTONIA
The Estonian parliament voted on Tuesday to declare the Russian government a “terrorist regime” and to denounce its recent annexations of Ukrainian territory. The Latvian and Lithuanian governments have made similar designations with respect to Moscow over the past few months.
UKRAINE
The Russian military focused on destroying Ukrainian power and water infrastructure again on Tuesday. This has become a theme over the past week-plus, reflecting either an extended retaliation for Ukraine’s bombing of the Kerch bridge earlier this month or the adoption of Russia’s long-awaited (by hawkish commentators, at least) escalation against Ukrainian civilians. Zelensky said in his evening address on Tuesday that Russian bombardment has destroyed roughly a third of Ukraine’s power plants, causing nationwide blackouts, and with winter approaching this sort of damage could pose serious risks to the civilian population. Also on Tuesday, the Russian military claimed that its forces seized a village in the eastern part of Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast, which if true would be the first territory Russia has clawed back since the Ukrainian military more or less drove it out of that province last month.
FRANCE
The French cement manufacturer Lafarge has agreed to accept some $780 million in fines and asset forfeitures levied by US prosecutors while admitting that it paid off designated terrorist groups in Syria (including Islamic State) to keep its Syrian operations running amid that country’s civil war. The company had previously acknowledged that its Syrian affiliate paid protection money to those groups but this admission seems to implicate figures higher up in the company and concerns not just protection for its workers but payment for keeping its plants running.
At least 107,000 French workers participated in Tuesday’s planned national strike and demonstrations, organized by the CGT trade union. I say “at least” because that’s the official French government figure, which counted some 13,000 demonstrators in Paris. CGT estimated that number was closer to 70,000. Tuesday’s action was relatively small by French standards but it’s the largest such action since President Emmanuel Macron’s reelection earlier this year and, amid challenging economic conditions throughout Europe, could be a harbinger of things to come.
AMERICAS
CHILE
There have been reports of isolated violent encounters between police and protesters across Chile on Tuesday as demonstrators marked the third anniversary of the massive 2019-2020 protests that sparked Chile’s now-in-limbo constitutional reform process. I have not seen any indication as to casualties.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Kendrick Lu of Foreign Exchanges “Week in Review” has a new piece for Jacobin on the Biden administration’s recently released national security strategy:
In the past century, there have been two major shake-ups in the global order: the first following World War II and the second following the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of World War II, Washington fashioned an anti-communist, liberal internationalism to box out the Soviet Union in an attempt to shape the new world. It was an inherently colonial internationalism, with the United States holding a disproportionately powerful position in the United Nations. Throughout the Cold War, the United States flouted its ostensible guiding principles as it undercut the right to self-determination that colonized peoples were fighting for — often toppling democracies to achieve strategic ends.
Then, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a new consensus emerged. With its archnemesis gone, Washington was free to export capitalist democracy across the world, with the twin goals of cementing the United States’ dominant role and fashioning a global order in its image. It was this vision that guided the country’s Forever Wars, “humanitarian interventions,” and evolution into a global police power.
Today, Biden sees the world as at a new “inflection point,” and his NSS reveals his own brand of American hegemony: one that says the right things about global collaboration, but neglects to challenge the fundamentals of the foreign policy status quo. Gone are previous visions of anti-communist internationalism or frictionless globalization. In their place, Biden’s NSS offers a vision of transnational cooperation — but one that the United States’ hegemonic instincts easily overwhelm.
Congrats to Kendrick!