World roundup: October 24-25 2020
Stories from Azerbaijan, France, Chile, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
October 23, 42 BC: A Roman army jointly led by Triumvirs Marc Antony and Octavian defeats Brutus’s Republican army in the second phase of the Battle of Philippi. Brutus committed suicide after the battle and thereby cleared the Roman political field for the total takeover of the Second Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and the almost forgotten Marcus Lepidus.
October 23, 1942: The Axis Panzer Army Africa under Erwin Rommel and the British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery meet in the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. The Eighth Army won the battle and drove the Axis out of Egypt on November 11, pushing Rommel back into Tunisia and setting up the final phase of World War II’s North African campaign.
Montgomery watching the battle unfold in early November (Wikimedia Commons)
October 24, 1648: The Peace of Westphalia (mostly) ends the Thirty Years’ War under the tenet cuius regio, eius religio (“whose state, his religion”)—in other words, the principle that a ruler should be allowed to determine his/her nation’s religion. Many IR scholars trace the origins of a world order based on national sovereignty to Westphalia, with its emphasis on the sanctity of national borders and the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs—hence the term “Westphalian sovereignty.”
October 25, 1147: The Siege of Lisbon ends. This siege involved soldiers who had initially set out for the Holy Land to join what we now call the Second Crusade. And speaking of which, this is also the date on which the Second Crusade army of Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III was thoroughly defeated by the Seljuks At the Battle of Dorylaeum, removing it as a potential factor in the crusade. We’ve seen how that eventually turned out.
October 25, 1415: Henry V of England defeats a substantially larger and ostensibly better-armed French army at the Battle of Agincourt. Henry’s army, which was predominantly made up of archers, overwhelmed the French knights and men at arms, who had to charge through a steady hail of arrows across a long, muddy field and were unable to outflank the English army due to Henry’s decision to set up his line with forested terrain at either end. Henry didn’t follow up this victory immediately, but French political unity began to break down and so when Henry did resume his campaign it was against a much weaker French kingdom.
October 25, 1917: The Bolsheviks begin an uprising in Petrograd that would within a day see them overthrow the provisional Russian government of Alexander Kerensky and, after a lengthy civil war, establish communist control over Russia. This is the Old Style (Julian calendar) date of the revolution, which according to the Gregorian calendar actually took place on November 7. But since it’s called the “October Revolution” I feel weird commemorating it in November.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for October 25:
43,323,453 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (10,268,273 active, +404,793 since yesterday)
1,158,810 reported fatalities (+4498 since yesterday)
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
5408 confirmed coronavirus cases (+49)
269 reported fatalities (+2)
A fuel market in the city of Jarabulus was apparently the target of a missile or rocket attack late Friday in which at least one person was killed. Blame seems to be circulating around Russia, which is interesting because Jarabulus is controlled by rebels under Turkey’s protection. It’s rare for the Russians to strike parts of Turkey that are directly under Turkish oversight.
YEMEN
2060 confirmed cases (+0)
599 reported fatalities (+0)
The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen says its forces shot down a Houthi drone that was headed toward Saudi Arabia on Sunday. This report came after the Houthis claimed to have attacked the Saudi airports at Jizan and Abha as well as a Saudi military base at Khamis Mushait. Saudi media reported Saturday that the kingdom’s forces had shot down three other Houthi drones and there’s no confirmation of any successful strike inside the kingdom. But the Houthis did apparently attack a hospital in the city of Taiz over the weekend. Both Doctors Without Borders and a group called the Human Rights Information and Rehabilitation Center accused the rebels of shelling the facility. Taiz is on the frozen southern front line of the Yemeni war and civilians there have been targeted in Houthi attacks there from time to time.
IRAQ
451,707 confirmed cases (+2554)
10,623 reported fatalities (+55)
Thousands of protesters marched in Baghdad on Sunday to commemorate the anniversary of the start of last fall’s anti-government protest movement, and just like those protests this one turned violent. At least 39 people were injured, amid reports of police firing tear gas canisters at people and sketchy claims of people in the crowd of protesters throwing grenades at the cops.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
309,946 confirmed cases (+533) in Israel, 50,442 confirmed cases (+453) in Palestine
2397 reported fatalities (+25) in Israel, 448 reported fatalities (+5) in Palestine
An 18 year old Palestinian man died under questionable circumstances north of the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday. Israeli authorities are claiming that their security forces responded to reports of two men throwing rocks at an Israeli military vehicle, and that one of the suspects just suddenly lost consciousness while attempting to flee and died after striking his head on the ground. Palestinian officials are claiming that Israeli soldiers beat him to death. I don’t know what actually happened, but I know which one of those stories is more believable and it’s not the Israeli one.
EGYPT
106,540 confirmed cases (+143)
6199 reported fatalities (+12)
Egyptian officials say that at least 14 people near one northern Sinai town have been killed, and at least ten others wounded, by Islamic State booby traps over the past two weeks. The town in question is called Bir al-Abd, and IS fighters captured a number of villages in the vicinity earlier this year. Egyptian forces recovered those villages in August and residents have started moving back into their homes, only to find that some of them have been rigged as a little “IS was here” surprise.
ASIA
AZERBAIJAN
49,959 confirmed cases (+946)
671 reported fatalities (+7)
Fighting continued in and around Nagorno-Karabakh over the weekend, seemingly despite US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s diplomatic efforts on Friday. But abruptly on Sunday, the two warring sides and the US government issued a joint statement announcing yet another ceasefire, this one to begin Monday morning. To be legally precise, this is not a new ceasefire agreement so much as it’s an agreement to recommit to their October 10 ceasefire, to which they already recommitted once before, on October 17. There’s not a whole lot of reason to think the ceasefire will go any better this time than it has the last two times, though Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has hinted in recent days that he’s open to at least a pause in the fighting. That may be all talk, but on the other hand maybe not.
Most analysts have speculated that Aliyev’s aims in starting this latest round of conflict were limited to recovering some of the territory around Karabakh that had been occupied/cleared by Armenian forces during the Karabakh War in the early 1990s. And while, as I’ve said before, the fog of war is very thick in this region and nobody’s military claims should be considered inherently reliable, it does seem that Azerbaijani forces, relying mostly on drones and Turkish assistance, have been pretty successful. Baku says it’s retaken the entirety of its internationally recognized border with Iran. Karabakh officials dispute this and it may be an exaggeration, but probably not a big one. With Azerbaijani forces now poised to threaten the main/only real supply route connecting Karabakh to Armenia, and with their advances stalled in northern Karabakh, they may be satisfied enough to stop here, at least for the time being.
If, against the odds, the third time does prove to be the charm here, it’s going to be a diplomatic feather in Pompeo’s cap. But more than that it’s going to be another embarrassment for Moscow, which has already seen Turkey usurp its relevance in the southern Caucasus and now may have to watch Washington step in and usurp its role as mediator/peacemaker.
KYRGYZSTAN
55,750 confirmed cases (+606)
1134 reported fatalities (+4)
Kyrgyzstan’s Central Elections Committee on Saturday announced a new presidential election on January 10, which is cool but may not actually mean there’s going to be an election. The reason I say that is because not long after the CEC announced the January 10 vote, Kyrgyz Prime Minister/acting president Sadyr Japarov sent his security forces to raid its offices. Ostensibly the raid was due to allegations of irregularities in the since-annulled parliamentary election earlier this month, but the timing of the raid sure is a weird coincidence. Japarov has already made it clear that he prefers to amend the Kyrgyz constitution before any new elections, most likely in order to empower himself before he has to risk sharing power with somebody else.
AFGHANISTAN
40,833 confirmed cases (+65)
1514 reported fatalities (+3)
A suicide bomber killed at least 24 people and wounded at least 57 others in an attack on an education center in Kabul on Saturday. Most of the victims were reportedly between the ages of 15 and 26. The Islamic State’s Khurasan branch claimed responsibility for the attack while the Taliban denied involvement. Nine civilians were killed by a roadside bomb in Ghazni province, also on Saturday, and that attack has been blamed on the Taliban.
The Taliban has been demonstrating the breadth of its reach lately, carrying out attacks all across Afghanistan as the organization tries to add to the leverage it already has in the stalled Afghan peace talks in Doha. And while the United States has stepped up its airstrikes against the Taliban in Helmand province, it’s also apparently helping some Taliban units in parts of Afghanistan where they’re engaged in fighting against IS. It should be noted that the line between IS and hardline Taliban factions, like the Haqqani network, isn’t always completely clear, especially in Kabul. But in places where the two groups are openly shooting at one another the line is somewhat sharper.
Also also on Saturday, Afghan security forces announced that they’d killed Abu Muhsin al-Masri, believed to be—all together now—the second in-command of al-Qaeda, AKA the worst job in the world. Theoretical statisticians estimate that at least 230 al-Qaeda seconds in-command have been killed since the US whacked Osama bin Laden in 2011 and bumped Ayman al-Zawahiri up from #2 to #1 in the organization. Estimates of the number of al-Qaeda thirds in-command who were killed prior to bin Laden’s death range from the low hundreds to well into the tens of thousands.
PAKISTAN
327,895 confirmed cases (+832)
6736 reported fatalities (+9)
A motorcycle bombing in Quetta killed at least three people in a vegetable market on Sunday at the same time as a rally organized by a new alliance of Pakistani opposition parties was taking place in another part of the city. It doesn’t seem likely that the two events were related. Baluch militants were likely responsible for the bombing but no group has yet claimed the attack.
INDIA
7,909,050 confirmed cases (+45,158)
119,030 reported fatalities (+463)
The US and Indian governments are expected to sign a new deal this week that will give the Indian military access to US satellite imagery and maps, as the two countries strengthen an alliance that is just about mutual respect and admiration and has nothing to do with China in any way. Narendra Modi seems interested in becoming a US military ally in all but name—he’s likely to stop short of an outright alliance because domestically there’s a good deal of political capital wrapped up in the notion of India as a “non-aligned” country. But the Indian military will continue to purchase large quantities of US weapons and now to avail itself of US intelligence.
THAILAND
3736 confirmed cases (+5)
59 reported fatalities (+0)
Protesters turned out in Bangkok on Sunday, after Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha ignored their Saturday deadline for his resignation. The demonstration seems to have gone peacefully, but a larger protest is scheduled for Monday evening outside the German embassy so we’ll see how that goes. The German embassy has become a target due to the fact that Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn spends more time in Germany than he does in Thailand, probably at the expense of Thai taxpayers. Prayut has expressed a willingness to address the protesters’ demands, though their main demand seems to be his resignation and he’s clearly not willing to give them that.
MALAYSIA
26,565 confirmed cases (+823)
229 reported fatalities (+8)
Malaysian King Abdullah has denied Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s request to declare a state of emergency. Muhyiddin made that request ostensibly over a surge in COVID-19 cases but probably wanted to use the pandemic as an excuse to suspend parliament before rival Anwar Ibrahim could make good on claims that he has enough votes to supplant Muhyiddin as PM.
AFRICA
SUDAN
13,742 confirmed cases (+0)
837 reported fatalities (+0)
The Israeli government plans to send a delegation to Sudan soon to formalize the diplomatic normalization agreement they (well, Donald Trump on their behalf) announced on Friday. Sudanese officials are already talking about a series of trade and migration agreements between the two governments. This is all nice for them. But while I don’t want to be a downer here, it’s still not clear to me how finalized this whole normalization actually is on the Sudanese side. A number of higher ups in Sudan’s interim government are saying that the deal won’t be completed until Sudan’s legislature votes to approve it, and the thing about that is that Sudan doesn’t have a legislature right now. It’s supposed to have an interim legislature to go along with its interim cabinet and interim executive council, but it hasn’t yet created one and hasn’t even really started any kind of process toward creating one. Now I’m no expert in politics, but it seems to me that the first prerequisite to getting legislative approval for something is to have a legislature. It’s not even clear when Sudan is going to have one, let alone whether it will vote to ratify this agreement.
GUINEA
11,635 confirmed cases (+0)
71 reported fatalities (+0)
The official results are in and, as expected, Guinean President Alpha Condé won a decisive victory in last Sunday’s election. The vote count has Condé winning 59.49 percent of the vote to 33.5 percent for runner up Cellou Dalein Diallo, roughly the same 26 point margin by which Condé defeated Diallo in 2015. Diallo is alleging fraud and plans to appeal the result to Guinea’s constitutional court, though his chances of getting relief there are probably slim. Tensions were high around this election because of Condé’s decision to seek a constitutionally questionable third term, but the official announcement does not appear to have triggered an escalation in unrest. Not yet, anyway.
CAMEROON
21,570 confirmed cases (+0)
425 reported fatalities (+0)
Gunmen attacked a school in Cameroon’s South West region on Saturday, killing at least six children and wounding at least 12 others. Cameroonian authorities are blaming anglophone separatist fighters for the attack but so far they haven’t offered evidence to support that accusation and there’s been no claim of responsibility.
ETHIOPIA
93,343 confirmed cases (+485)
1426 reported fatalities (+7)
For reasons that surpass my limited powers of comprehension, Donald Trump decided to tell reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that Egypt might “blow up” the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. He even, for good measure, suggested that Egyptian leaders were derelict in not blowing it up years ago. I assume Trump thought he was being helpful, offering friendly advice to Ethiopian officials to encourage them to negotiate a deal with Egypt—one brokered, of course, by Trump, because he’s evidently a fantastic diplomat. But the Ethiopians don’t seem to have taken his remarks in that spirit, go figure. Trump has been so obviously biased in Egypt’s favor in this dispute that he’s made it much more difficult for the US to serve as a credible mediator, and now he’s put the specter of a water war on the table and that’s likely to inflame, rather than calm, regional tensions. Especially because there’s no indication that Egypt is anywhere near the point where it might actually try to attack the GERD.
TANZANIA
509 confirmed cases (+0)
21 reported fatalities (+0)
Tanzanian authorities are reportedly refusing to accredit election observers ahead of Wednesday’s vote, in which President John Magufuli is looking to win reelection and to extend the dominance of his party, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi. CCM and its predecessors have ruled Tanzanian since independence, even after the introduction of competitive elections in the 1990s. Tanzania’s major opposition parties have managed to unite behind one challenger this time around, Tundu Lissu, and are feeling pretty good about their chances of finally winning the presidency. Or at least they would be feeling good if there weren’t a lingering feeling that Magufuli is planning to swipe the election. His government’s failure to approve observers isn’t helping to ease those concerns. He’s already taken so many steps to inhibit opposition political activities that even if the election itself is legitimate, the political process arguably is not.
SEYCHELLES
153 confirmed cases (+0)
No reported fatalities
Opposition leader Wavel Ramkalawan of the Seychellois Democratic Alliance has won the Seychellois presidential election, ousting incumbent Danny Faure and, more significantly, removing Faure’s United Seychelles party from the presidency for the first time since 1977. Ramkalawan’s party also won 25 of the 35 seats in the Seychellois National Assembly, extending what had been a relatively slim majority into an over two-thirds super-majority.
EUROPE
LITHUANIA
10,184 confirmed cases (+606)
134 reported fatalities (+5)
Lithuania held its parliamentary election on Sunday, and it looks like the conservative Homeland Union party has won the day, taking 50 of the 141 legislative seats up for grabs. Homeland Union leader Ingrida Šimonytė is thus in line to become Lithuania’s new prime minister, though she’ll have some coalition building to do first.
BELARUS
92,823 confirmed cases (+845)
957 reported fatalities (+4)
Over 100,000 protesters clashed violently with police in Minsk on Sunday, the 11th week in a row that the Belarusian capital has been filled with people demanding the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko. This time around, the protesters gave Lukashenko an ultimatum: resign or potentially face a national strike come Monday. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to resign, in case you were wondering. The provocative threat of a mass strike, as articulated by opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, will be a bit of a “put up or shut up” moment for the opposition—if they can’t deliver a major work stoppage then Lukashenko will likely emerge strengthened.
FRANCE
1,138,507 confirmed cases (+52,010)
34,761 reported fatalities (+116)
French President Emmanuel Macron is having some issues with Muslims lately. After the heinous murder of French teacher Samuel Paty by Islamist extremists earlier this month, Macron, probably thinking about his upcoming 2022 rematch with xenophobe Marine Le Pen, decided not to limit himself to denunciations of violence or extremism but to instead pontificate on the “crisis” of Islam, whatever he imagines that to be, and to try to bring Islam in France under the direct control of the French government. As I’ve noted before, this may be a good way to appeal to French racists but it’s a profoundly stupid thing to do if one actually cares about combating Islamist violence, because it inevitably alienates Muslims.
Macron has done such a good job of alienating Muslims, in fact, that his government is now plaintively whining over a growing movement in the Islamic world to boycott French products. Macron now finds himself accused of “attacking Islam” by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, and has added his feelings on Islam to the long list of grievances between himself and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Turkish leader spent the weekend lambasting Macron again (and again) over his comments about Islam, at one point suggesting that the French leader needs “mental checks.” That remark prompted the French government to recall its ambassador to Turkey for consultations.
AMERICAS
COLOMBIA
1,015,885 confirmed cases (+8174)
30,154 reported fatalities (+154)
Chilean security forces have reportedly killed Andres Felipe Vanegas Londoño, a National Liberation Army (ELN) leader who goes by the name “Uriel.” Details of the operation in which he was killed are not clear, other than that it took place in Colombia’s northwestern Chocó province.
CHILE
502,063 confirmed cases (+1540)
13,944 reported fatalities (+52)
Preliminary results from Sunday’s referendum show that Chilean voters have overwhelmingly chosen to rewrite the country’s Augusto Pinochet-era constitution. As it stands now, over three-quarters of voters opted for a do over. Full results, which include a second question about whether the rewrite should be handled by the Chilean congress or a bespoke assembly, are not yet available. More details tomorrow, probably.
UNITED STATES
8,889,179 confirmed cases (+60,889)
230,510 reported fatalities (+442)
Finally, with data showing that the Trump administration’s big plan to revive US manufacturing by slapping tariffs on Chinese imports has mostly failed, tech companies are warning that a congressional push to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US for national security reasons is inadequate to the task:
To lure back some of the semiconductor and microelectronics manufacturing that in the last three decades has fled to Asia, especially China, lawmakers are turning to incentive grants. What began as several separate congressional bills ended as a section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would offer companies up to $3 billion to build new, U.S.-based semiconductor fabrication plants. Congress hopes to agree on a final version of the defense funding bill ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election and vote on it soon after.
But there’s one big problem, say companies that build the specialized semiconductors used by the U.S. Defense Department in, for example, radiation-hardened chips on space satellites, anti-jam GPS receivers, and the F-35 fighter. The bill’s current language focuses too much on state-of-the-art commercial chips and not enough on the application-specific, small-order chips that the Pentagon needs to build directed energy weapons, they argue.
More than a dozen companies—concerned less with what could power your laptop and more on what might steer that cruise missile—are lobbying Congress to change the defense bill’s language to include “mission-critical and integration-level semiconductors” before the compromise language is finalized. This addition would put a spotlight on Pentagon-qualified semiconductor manufacturing and integration and help secure an increasingly fragile global supply chain. Without it, their collective employees’ livelihoods—about 50,000 jobs across the country—are at stake, those companies said.