World roundup: October 26 2021

Stories from Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, and more

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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

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 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 that crusade. We’ve seen how that eventually turned out.

Portuguese artist Alfredo Roque Gameiro’s 1917 The Conquest of Lisbon (Wikimedia Commons)

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.

October 26, 1185: A revolt over high Byzantine taxes breaks out among Bulgarians living in Moesia. This insurrection, known as the “Uprising of Asen and Peter” after its leaders—two brothers (identified as Vlach but probably with mixed Bulgarian heritage) who were named, you know, Asen and Peter—quickly led to a restoration of the Bulgarian Empire, which had been subjugated by the Byzantines in the 11th century. The restored empire is dated to the start of the uprising, though its independence wasn’t secured until around 1187 and technically its war with Byzantium continued all the way until the Fourth Crusade (temporarily) ended the Byzantine Empire in 1204. This “Second Bulgarian Empire” survived until it was eradicated by the Ottomans in 1396.

October 26, 1947: Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir signs the Instrument of Accession that brings his state into union with India. When British colonial authorities partitioned India and Pakistan, they decided to leave Kashmir’s fate up to Kashmir. The majority of the region’s population was Muslim, but was divided between those who wanted union with Pakistan and those who wanted independence. The region’s Hindu population supported union with India. Hari Singh was Hindu but initially had a mind to play the two countries off of one another and maintain independence that way. A Pakistani operation to infiltrate militants into Kashmir to force Hari Singh to agree to union with Pakistan worked, in the sense that it convinced him that independence was impossible, but it also totally backfired, in the sense that he agreed to union with India, not Pakistan. Obviously this continues to be an issue.

INTERNATIONAL

In today’s global news:

• Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.

• The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

In recent Syria news:

• The US military announced that it killed an “al-Qaeda senior leader” in a drone strike on Friday, near the town of Suluk in northern Syria. US Central Command even revealed the name of this “senior leader,” Abdul Hamid al-Matar. A quick Google search tells me that he’s famous for being killed in a US drone strike and that’s about it. But I’m sure his loss will cripple, um, whatever it is al-Qaeda is still doing in Syria. Kudos to the Pentagon and let’s see if we can’t find them another $50 billion or so for next year’s budget, as a tip.

• In what I’m sure will be as great a shock to you as it was to me, the latest round of discussions by the Syrian Constitutional Committee ended in what United Nations Syria envoy Geir Pedersen termed a “great disappointment” on Friday, without making any progress toward drafting a new charter. You may recall that Pedersen was very excited about this sixth round of deliberations just a few days earlier, having apparently developed selective amnesia about how the previous five rounds had ended.

• It seems likely that last week’s incident at the US military outpost in the southern Syrian town of Tanf, which was somewhere between a single drone strike (initial reports) and “a complex, coordinated, and deliberate attack” (the Pentagon’s description) in severity, was carried out by Iranian-backed militia forces. I say this because Iranian and Iranian-aligned media outlets are all but claiming responsibility for the attack and are characterizing it as the start of a campaign to get the US military to exit Syria. That could foreshadow more such attacks to come. The US military could evacuate the Tanf base, which was at one time involved in the anti-Islamic State mission but now basically serves to block transit between Syria and Iraq and thus to be a nuisance for the Syrian government, and eliminate most of the potential threat. But I’ll be surprised if that’s the direction Washington takes.

YEMEN

The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen says its forces killed 85 Houthi fighters over the past day in airstrikes south and northwest of Maʾrib city. The usual caveats about lack of confirmation still apply.

IRAQ

Islamic State fighters reportedly attacked a village in Iraq’s Diyala province on Tuesday, killing at least 11 people. Details are spotty but at least one account says that a local IS cell kidnapped two people from the village and then attacked after having its ransom demands rebuffed.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters on Tuesday that the Biden administration is “deeply concerned about the Israeli government’s plan to advance thousands of settlement units tomorrow, Wednesday, many of them deep in the West Bank.” This weekend the Israelis announced plans to build 1300 new settler homes in the West Bank and are in discussions about authorizing another 3000 on top of that. The Biden administration has mostly refrained from criticizing Israel, in part over concerns about undermining its tenuous coalition government and potentially putting Benjamin Netanyahu back in power. So this criticism, while meaningless in any practical sense, is somewhat noteworthy.

BAHRAIN

The Bahraini government announced on Sunday that it intends to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2060. So that’s nice. I’ll have more to say about this in a moment.

QATAR

Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani announced on Tuesday during the opening of his newly and mostly elected Shura Council that he would direct his cabinet to revisit the current definition of Qatari citizenship. Readers may recall that back in August we mentioned some unrest that had emerged over citizenship issues heading into the Shura Council election, as authorities had adopted a definition of “citizen,” for the purposes of determining voting eligibility, that excluded many members of the Al Murrah tribe. There are sordid and arguably somewhat petty political reasons for their exclusion, but with the election over Sheikh Tamim may now be of a mind to address this imbalance and put an end to any lingering tension.

SAUDI ARABIA

Bahrain’s “net zero” announcement came one day after, and was presumably made possible by, Saudi Arabia’s announcement that it intends to get to “net zero” emissions by 2060. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made the pledge in a televised address during his “Green Initiative Forum” and ahead of the COP26 summit in Glascow later this month, where presumably he’s hoping to greenwash away some of his more disreputable behaviors.

MBS didn’t do very much to explain how he’s going to turn the world’s gas station into a model environmental citizen, and this has unsurprisingly raised some questions about his actual commitment to the cause. But frankly it should raise questions about “net zero” as a concept. I try not to editorialize on these pledges because I’m not a climate expert, but my general sense is that they’re a scam and I think there’s some evidence to support that sense. “Net zero” as far as I can tell is a weasel term that elides the need to get to actual zero emissions through a somewhat fanciful notion that we can reduce emissions somewhat while also reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Since nobody in power really wants to reduce emissions by that much, since it would mean drastically altering our current oil/coal/gas-guzzling utopia, “net zero” depends heavily on its carbon removal piece. That, in turn, depends heavily on tactics that haven’t shown much effectiveness (tree planting, for example) or are still mostly (and may always be) science fiction (carbon scrubbers or other technology to suck carbon from the atmosphere.

Compounding the inherent wobbliness of “net zero” as a concept is that countries and companies routinely make these pledges and then do nothing to actually advance them, in part because they know nobody will be waiting to punish them in 2050 or 2060 when they fail to meet the goal. The general idea is to burn as much as we want now and hope that advanced technological woo-woo will let us clean up our mess in a couple of decades. And if it doesn’t, well, chances are the political and business elite will just declare an oopsie and move on. Again I’m no expert and I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.

IRAN

Iranian authorities say a cyberattack was responsible for shutting down payment systems at gas stations across the country on Tuesday. There are reports of hours-long lines to purchase gas in the wake of the attack, which has interfered with the cards most Iranians use to access government fuel subsidies. Stations that don’t accept the subsidy cards seem to have been unaffected. There’s no indication as to responsibility, though the attack bears some similarities to an attack on Iran’s rail network earlier this year that was later attributed to a hacker group called “Indra.”

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

In taking credit for its bombing of a mosque in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province earlier this month, the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch claimed that the bomber was a Uyghur and cited the Taliban’s rumored willingness to deport Uyghur militants to China as one of its grievances. The Taliban hasn’t actually announced any deportation plan but the idea that it will do so has nevertheless grown legs, particularly since the Taliban relocated militant members of the Uyghur separatist/jihadist Turkestan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement) away from Afghanistan’s Chinese border a few weeks ago. Prior to that, Taliban officials had made statements about the TIP that suggested it would be better if the group’s fighters left Afghanistan and stressing that it would not permit TIP fighters to use Afghanistan as a base for attacks in China.

The TIP has had cordial-to-close relations with the Taliban for years, even as the Taliban has tried to ease Beijing’s concerns about the potential for Uyghur militants to operate within Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But given the new Taliban government’s expectations for and dependence on friendly relations with China, the relocation has been viewed as one of potentially several Uyghur-related actions by Kabul to appease China, with deportation seen as a logical part of that process. Uyghur refugees who have fled Xinjiang into Afghanistan seem fearful that the Taliban will send them back to China at some point, and one assumes Uyghur militants have similar concerns. The Diplomat’s Nodirbek Soliev suggests that IS could be looking to adopt the Uyghur cause, as a wedge issue against the Taliban and/or more broadly as part of a turn toward confrontation where China is concerned.

PAKISTAN

The Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party has organized a march from Lahore to Islamabad, effectively blocking Pakistan’s Grand Trunk Road highway, to renew its demand that the Pakistani government expell the French ambassador over cartoon depictions of Muhammad in French media. TLP protests on this same subject back in April sparked violence that left over 25 people dead and resulted in the arrest of, among others, TLP leader Saad Rizvi. This time the group is demanding Rizvi’s release along with its other grievances. New TLP protests in Lahore on Friday resulted in the deaths of three police officers. Pakistani officials say they’re prepared to discuss the TLP’s demands but will not expel the ambassador.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

Meeting virtually with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations member states, Joe Biden said on Tuesday that he’s prepared to drop a cool $100 million in new aid in the region. Details are sparse but the plan apparently includes climate and pandemic-related spending. It is, of course, meant to win favor in a region that Washington views as a key part of its struggle with China for regional hegemony.

TAIWAN

Speaking of pivots toward confrontation with China (see above), The Wall Street Journal reports on a trend that’s been gaining traction among Central and Eastern European states to boost their engagement with Taiwan. Czechia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia have all taken recent friendly steps toward Taipei, which necessarily means angering Beijing. At least some of this impulse seems to be currying favor with the United States, which would like its European allies to chill their relations with mainland China but hasn’t had much luck getting countries that are heavily involved with China commercially (Germany, for example) to go along. But this also seems to be good politics, as polling indicates that China is unpopular with the Czech and Slovak peoples, at least.

CHINA

Given the discordant tones the Biden administration has been striking with regards to China—we want to work together with them on climate change but also it’s time for Cold War 2.0 baby—it is perhaps not a surprise that The Washington Post’s John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima are reporting on discord within the administration:

The desire to make progress on climate change has led to tensions among Biden’s top aides over how to manage Washington’s competing priorities with Beijing.

Kerry has repeatedly pushed for direct diplomacy between Biden and Xi, believing that an improved bilateral relationship can produce better outcomes in Scotland. White House aides, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, are more skeptical that the United States alone can coax China into reducing emissions. Just as Washington would be averse to overhauling its energy policies on the basis of foreign pressure, so too would Beijing.

“They’re going to make their decisions based on their national interest,” said a senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The standoff with China, the world’s largest carbon emitter and home to half the world’s coal-fired power plants, has presented a significant challenge for the Biden administration, which has identified both climate change as an “existential threat” and China as “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.”

Despite the administration’s repeated assurances to the contrary, those two policy principles cannot coexist. It is certainly true that the United States cannot “coax” China into reducing emissions. But a hostile policy that puts both nations on a military footing is the surest way to limit or prevent cooperation on a threat that demands as much global cooperation as possible if humanity has any hope of mitigating its effects.

AFRICA

SUDAN

In a development that’s been weeks, if not months, in the making, the Sudanese military on Monday launched a coup against the civilian portion of the country’s interim government, ousting Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and his cabinet and declaring a nationwide state of emergency. The coup sparked immediate protests in Khartoum and Omdurman, to which security forces responded with enough violence to kill at least seven people and leave some 140 more wounded. Tensions between Sudan’s civilian and military leaders had grown in recent weeks to the point of unworkability, with the final straw coming last week with a military-organized protest in Khartoum calling for precisely this outcome. That demonstration gave the Sudanese military its justification to act. Some members of Hamdok’s government have been arrested but the specific details are not known as far as I can tell. Protester organizers say they’re prepared to continue protesting for the restoration of civilian leadership, but rather than Hamdok’s return what they’re likely to get is a new nominally civilian government that is more fully under the military’s control.

The coup drew immediate international outcry as well from several corners—including the United States, which condemned the move and announced it was suspending some $700 million in Sudanese aid. Under that international pressure, the junta on Tuesday released Hamdok, who’d been under “house arrest” in junta leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s house, to his own home in Khartoum (still, of course, under house arrest, but at least in his own house now). Burhan has defended his actions as necessarily to prevent a “civil war,” though it’s unclear frankly what he’s talking about and the ease with which his military effected this coup kind of undermines his narrative.

The US and other international actors are demanding the restoration of the civilian government, though it should be noted that US Horn of Africa envoy Jeffrey Feltman met with Burhan in Sudan over the weekend and reportedly urged him not to do the thing he did anyway pretty much as soon as Feltman left the country. Which means either Feltman didn’t really argue very strenuously against the idea of a coup or that he did and Burhan decided to ignore him. Neither scenario suggests that the US is going to force a restoration of Hamdok’s government.

The only thing that seems clear for the moment is that Sudan’s transition to civilian governance is kaput. Burhan insists that the junta intends to shepherd the country through elections in 2023 as has been the plan since the ouster of former dictator Omar al-Bashir back in 2019. But the fact is that he couldn’t even bring himself to hand nominal control over the transition to a civilian government he put in office, as he was supposed to do in July 2022. That looming deadline almost certainly factored into the decision to undertake this coup. The Sudanese military has ruled the country since Bashir overthrew its then-elected government in 1989 and while he’s no longer in charge, it’s pretty clear that Burhan and his fellow generals aren’t terribly keen on losing their status anytime soon.

BURKINA FASO

Unspecified attackers struck a military unit in Burkina Faso’s southwestern Comoé province on Monday evening, killing at least three soldiers and wounding seven others. This incident appears to be part of a growing trend whereby apparent jihadist violence has been expanding out of northern and eastern Burkina Faso—regions near the Malian and Nigerien borders—and into more southern and western parts of the country.

NIGERIA

Another group of unspecified attackers killed at least 18 people in an attack on a mosque in Nigeria’s Niger state on Monday morning. Another 20 people were wounded in the attack and ten appear to have been abducted. The attackers are being labeled “bandits” as usual, though earlier this month authorities said they had reason to believe that Boko Haram had established a foothold in Niger state.

Elsewhere, Nigerian authorities say their security forces have killed Malam Bako, who is/was believed to have succeeded the also-possibly-deceased Abu Musab al-Barnawi as the leader of the Islamic State West Africa Province group. As was the case with the announcement of Barnawi’s alleged death, there’s no confirmation as yet and officials didn’t go into much detail about where/when/how Bako was supposedly killed.

SOMALIA

The Somali military has been battling a former ally, the Ahlu Sunna Waljamaʿa militia, in Galmudug state over the past several days, with at least 120 people killed and 600 wounded as of yesterday. The UN reports that some 100,000 people have been displaced by the conflict. Earlier this month the Somali military attacked militia positions in Galmudug after accusing the group of operating autonomously and planning attacks against Somali security forces. That attack backfired badly, leaving the militia in control of two towns. Many people in Galmudug appear to favor the militia over the government, which they contend has failed to protect them from al-Shabab.

UGANDA

A suicide bomber attacked a bus outside of Kampala on Monday evening, wounding several people. Ugandan authorities have now attributed that attack to the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist militant group that formed in western Uganda in the 1990s but has done most of its work across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They’re likewise blaming ADF for a bombing on Saturday that killed one person and wounded three more. The ADF is linked with Islamic State through its “Central Africa Province” affiliate, though the extent of that link is unclear.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

In a decision that’s sure to go down badly in Moscow, a Dutch appeals court ruled Tuesday that a collection of Crimean artifacts that the Ukrainian government had loaned to the Netherlands several years ago should be returned to Ukraine, not to Russia. The reason this is an issue is because in the time since Ukraine loaned those artifacts to the Netherlands, Crimea has since been seized and annexed by Russia. The court decision is another indication that the international community has not recognized that annexation, much as Vladimir Putin might prefer it.

POLAND

The Polish government’s latest spat with the European Union, over questions surrounding the primacy of EU law, is not doing it any favors with Polish voters. The results of a new survey from the pollster IBRiS shows only 23 percent of Poles supporting Warsaw’s unwillingness to compromise on the EU’s demand that it undo recent reforms that arguably undermine the independence of the Polish judiciary. In contrast, 40.8 percent want the government to fold and meet the EU’s demands and another 32.5 percent want it to find some sort of compromise with Brussels. There’s been some evidence that the far-right Polish government is out of step with most Poles on the subject of the country’s EU relationship for a while now, but this poll makes clear just how out of step it is.

AMERICAS

BRAZIL

A Brazilian Senate committee voted 7-4 on Tuesday to recommend that criminal charges be brought against President Jair Bolsonaro, based on the findings of their investigation into his management of the COVID pandemic. The most serious charge is “crimes against humanity,” which is admittedly somewhat vague, but then the chances of Bolsonaro actually facing charges is nil so specificity isn’t really all that important.

ECUADOR

Indigenous protesters blocked several major Ecuadorean roads on Tuesday to protest fuel subsidy cuts that have raised the price of diesel to around $1.90 per gallon and gasoline to $2.55 per gallon. Organizers are demanding price caps of $1.50 and $2 per gallon, respectively.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Nick Turse argues that Joe Biden’s sophisticated-sounding “over the horizon” plan for counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan is just some repackaged “war on terror” slop:

For months, the White House and Pentagon have been touting the efficacy of “over the horizon” warfare — purportedly an accurate and effective targeting of terrorists in nations where the United States has few or no boots on the ground. “Terrorism has metastasized around the world,” said President Joe Biden in August. “We have over-the-horizon capability to keep them from going after us.”

While peddled as innovative, experts say that over-the-horizon warfare is effectively a rebranding of the drone campaign that has been employed for almost 20 years in places like Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. It is also, they told Responsible Statecraft, likely to fail.

“This idea that over-the-horizon strikes are going to solve all the problems is absolute horseshit,” said Marc Garlasco, who served for seven years at the Pentagon, including as chief of high value targeting during the Iraq War in 2003.

Luke Hartig, who worked on drone strike policy for the Obama administration as a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, was less colorful but similarly dubious. “I’ve been skeptical of ‘over the horizon’ as the means to conduct counterterrorism strikes since it first started being discussed,” he said. “I’m highly skeptical that maintaining a steady pace of counterterrorism operations — meaning mostly drone strikes — against al Qaeda and ISIS-K is absolutely necessary to keep our country safe.”