World roundup: October 26-27 2024
Stories from Iran, Japan, Sudan, and elsewhere
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I must release today’s roundup early due to an unanticipated obligation that has come up this evening. This also means that I am unable to send this roundup out with a voiceover attached but I am hoping to record one later this evening that will appear on the website, in the Substack app, and hopefully in your podcast feeds at that time.
THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
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 principals signed a truce that tacitly recognized a restored Bulgarian empire in 1187, though conflict continued beyond that. 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 region’s Muslim majority was divided between independence and union with Pakistan, while its Hindu minority favored union with India. Hari Singh seemed to favor independence, but conflict between Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus prompted him to turn to India for help and Kashmir thus joined India.
October 27, 1942: A Japanese fleet defeats a smaller US fleet in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, part of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign. Although the US took heavier losses in this engagement, with two ships sunk including the fleet carrier USS Hornet, Japan’s losses in aircraft and trained pilots proved to be more strategically significant in the long term and so this battle is regarded as a Pyrrhic victory.
October 27, 2019: During an overnight US special forces raid in the town of Barisha, in Syria’s Idlib province, Islamic State leader and would-be caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is killed. According to US officials Baghdadi attempted to flee, but upon being surrounded detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and two children.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military’s (IDF) extermination operation in northern Gaza continued with another apparent massacre on Saturday evening, this time in a residential part of the Beit Lahia area. IDF airstrikes killed at least 35 people in what Israeli officials claim was an attack on a group of Hamas militants in the area. On Sunday IDF attacks killed at least 43 people in northern Gaza and at least 45 in total across all of the territory. At least 20 of those deaths resulted from another airstrike on a residential part of Jabalia. In Israel, meanwhile, a truck driver rammed into a crowded bus stop in the city of Ramat HaSharon on Sunday morning, killing at least one person and injuring at least 29 others. It’s not entirely clear at this point but I think it’s reasonable to assume that this was an intentional attack.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said on Sunday that he has drafted a proposal for a scant two-day ceasefire in Gaza that also includes the release of four hostages and an unspecified number of Palestinians held by the Israeli government. If the parties agreed and all went well this would serve as a springboard to further talks on a longer ceasefire. It’s unclear whether he’s submitted this proposal to either the Israeli government or Hamas, but inasmuch as his government has been in contact with Hamas it’s unlikely he would have proposed something that was a total nonstarter for the group. There’s been no reaction from either party as yet.
According to Barak Ravid at Axios, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and finance ministers from Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday warning that his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is about to wreck the West Bank economy by cutting Palestinian banks off from the Israeli banking network at the end of this month. Why any of them would assume that Netanyahu cares is beyond me, although they are correct in noting that the blowback would impact the Israeli economy and that it could precipitate a governmental collapse within the Palestinian Authority that should very much concern the Israeli PM. Netanyahu can force Smotrich to maintain the banking ties with a cabinet vote.
SYRIA
The Turkish military attacked “multiple” sites connected to the Syrian Democratic Forces militia in northeastern Syria on Saturday, killing at least six people. The Turks have spent several days striking the SDF and the affiliated Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Iraq, following Wednesday’s PKK-claimed attack on the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) headquarters in Ankara.
LEBANON
An IDF airstrike killed at least eight people and wounded at least 25 more in a suburb of the southern Lebanese city of Sidon on Sunday, according to Lebanese authorities. Israeli forces have issued evacuation orders for much of southern Lebanon but had not issued one for Sidon or for this particular suburb prior to the strike.
IRAN
The IDF’s Saturday morning airstrikes on Iran seem to have been intended to deliver both a limited retaliation for the Iranian missile strike on Israel earlier this month and a message about what the next round of strikes might entail. We still don’t have full clarity as to what was hit and the past few rounds of this back-and-forth have shown that neither the Israeli nor the Iranian government is likely to be forthcoming with accurate information. What we do know is that four Iranian soldiers were killed, all apparently from the ranks of the regular Iranian military rather than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This makes sense as the IDF targeted Iranian air defense batteries, which are operated by the military, in the first of what proved to be three waves of strikes.
In particular the IDF seems to have hit several batteries near Iranian energy facilities, which goes back to the point about messaging. The Israelis may have been signaling that while they didn’t target energy facilities in this strike they have the capability to do so if there is another round of attacks. We don’t know the extent of the damage to these air defense units or any other the other targets for that matter, which apparently included an explosives testing facility (possibly linked to past Iranian nuclear weapons research) and facilities linked with the production of ballistic missiles and notably of the solid fuel those missiles use. If those facilities are heavily damaged it could impact Iran’s ability to replace the missiles it used in its previous attack on Israel.
It seems clear that the Israelis held back in striking only a limited number of clearly military-linked targets. Axios is even reporting that they notified the Iranians of the strike ahead of time. Iranian officials say they’re “entitled and obliged” to defend their country but are also downplaying the attack, which suggests they’re setting expectations for a minimal response or none at all. This is good news from the perspective of avoiding a wider war but it’s ultimately ephemeral. Unless the underlying issue—Israel’s rampage through Gaza and now Lebanon—is resolved, there’s no reason to think we won’t be talking about another round of Israeli and Iranian strikes six months from now, and that round may well escalate.
Elsewhere, attackers ambushed a police convoy in southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province on Saturday, killing at least ten officers. The Baluch separatist/jihadist group Jaish ul-Adl claimed responsibility for the attack. Iranian officials claimed on Sunday that their security forces had killed at least four “terrorists” in a retaliatory operation.
ASIA
GEORGIA
The official results of Saturday’s parliamentary election have the ruling Georgian Dream party emerging victorious with 54 percent of the vote. That puts the party on track to hold 89 seats in the next legislative session, a net loss of one seat compared with its performance in Georgia’s 2020 election but still enough for a comfortable majority in the 150 seat parliament. GD has been in power since 2012 so this outcome is not terribly surprising, despite speculation that mounting tensions between the Georgian government and the EU might have voters looking to make a change. Equally unsurprising are opposition claims of election fraud, at least some of which may be true. Election observers from the EU and US—who in fairness are not exactly neutral given those aforementioned tensions—reported numerous irregularities, with the EU team lamenting what it called “democratic backsliding.”
UZBEKISTAN
Uzbek voters headed to the polls on Sunday for a parliamentary election of their own whose outcome, to be sure, promises to involve considerably less suspense than did Georgia’s. That’s because, of the five registered political parties in Uzbekistan, precisely none of them can be considered opposition parties. I suppose there is some possibility of a stray “opposition” candidate slipping into the legislature because, under electoral changes adopted last year, only half of the 150 seats in the body are elected on party lists while the other half are elected individually. But there’s no question this legislature will, as ever, be quite loyal to President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
PAKISTAN
A suicide bomber killed at least eight people (two of them civilians) and wounded five others at a security checkpoint in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Saturday. A group calling itself “Aswad ul-Harb,” presumably a Pakistani Taliban faction, claimed responsibility.
JAPAN
Exit polling from Sunday’s snap parliamentary election strongly suggests that Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party will, as expected, lose its majority. Without putting too much stock in what is admittedly an imperfect estimate, a survey from Japanese broadcaster NHK projected that the LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito, will emerge with anywhere between 174 and 254 seats in the next legislative session. As 233 seats are required for a majority in the Japanese House of Representatives, you can see the issue.
The same poll projects the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan to emerge with between 128 and 191 seats, leaving a slim possibility that it will have a larger bloc than the LDP and thus perhaps the inside track toward forming Japan’s next government. That seems like a long shot, and another exit poll by Nippon TV had the coalition ahead of the CDPJ, 198-157. Either way it would appear that some major negotiations will be forthcoming once the votes are counted. It’s conceivable with these numbers that new LDP leader and Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru will be forced to resign, which would make him the shortest-serving PM in Japanese history.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Details are still emerging in a very difficult environment for getting accurate information, but Rapid Support Forces paramilitary fighters reportedly swarmed through multiple villages in central Sudan’s Gezira province between October 20 and October 25, slaughtering scores of civilians and sexually assaulting women and girls in the process. Unconfirmed claims put the death toll across Gezira in the hundreds. As I say this story is still pretty piecemeal right now but the Sudanese Doctors’ Union is reporting that RSF fighters killed at least 124 people and wounded over 200 more in just the village of Sariha and it’s known that they attacked several other areas as well.
The trigger for this massacre appears to have been the defection of the RSF’s Gezira commander, Abuagla Keikal, over to the Sudanese military, which took place in the context of a handful of military advances in the province earlier this month. Frustrated over those setbacks, it seems RSF militants began attacking villages in areas known to be “loyal” to Keikal. The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, compared the attacks to the genocidal campaign that Arab Janjaweed militias conducted in Darfur in the early 2000s. Given that the RSF has its roots in the Janjaweed movement the connection is obvious.
MALI
Mali’s ruling junta is claiming that its security forces destroyed a jihadist base and killed some 30 fighters in Ounguel on Thursday and killed another 10 militants in another operation on Friday. Details beyond that are unclear and it’s probably best to take any claims made by the junta with a grain of salt.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Wall Street Journal has published a new piece claiming that long-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russia are beginning to have a material impact on the Russian military. I don’t know how much credence to give this report, which reads variously like a press release for the Ukrainian military and a plea for the US and other Western governments to give Kyiv more latitude to use Western-made munitions in Russia, but it does seem like Ukraine’s domestic drone and missile capabilities are improving as the number and success rate of its strikes deep inside Russia is increasing. Along those lines, the piece says that the Biden administration—which still views the overt use of US-made arms in these sorts of strikes as too risky from the standpoint of escalation—is preparing a new $800 million aid package focused on further developing Ukraine’s drone industry.
The WSJ also reported last week that US oligarch Elon Musk “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.” This is really more a domestic story and outside my purview, but insofar as Musk’s various companies regularly do business with the US government (frequently in areas related to national security) and he’s likely to have a significant if unofficial role in a potential Trump administration, his interactions with Putin will presumably draw some interest from federal authorities.
UKRAINE
The Russian military says its forces captured the eastern Ukrainian village of Izmailovka on Sunday. That puts them just eight kilometers outside of Kurakhove, an industrial town that’s been one of several Russian targets in Donetsk oblast.
BULGARIA
Bulgaria held its seventh parliamentary election since April 2021 on Sunday, and exit polling suggests it may be no more decisive than any of the others. A survey from Alpha Research puts the conservative GERB party in the lead at 26.4 percent of the vote, which translates to 74 seats in the 240 seat National Assembly. That’s marginally better than GERB did in the 2022, 2023, and June 2024 elections, which it also “won,” but perhaps not enough to enable the formation of a stable government. The big shift appears to have come for the runner-up “We Continue the Change” party, which projects again to have finished second but with only 42 seats, down from the 64 it won in June. It’s unclear where its support went.
AMERICAS
URUGUAY
Rounding out this weekend’s flurry of elections, Uruguayan voters headed to the polls on Sunday for what appears to be, against the prevailing international current, a fairly non-polarized general election. Polling suggests that Yamandú Orsi of the center-left Broad Front is likely to lead the presidential election but fall short of an outright first round win, which would force a runoff with the runner-up on November 24.
BOLIVIA
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales is claiming that the vehicle in which he was traveling came under attack in Bolivia’s Chapare region on Sunday in what he’s terming an “assassination attempt.” He’s released cell phone video that appears to show the car taking gunfire. Morales is blaming former ally turned rival Luis Arce, Bolivia’s current president, for orchestrating the alleged attack, while Arce’s government is insinuating that Morales staged it in an attempt to play on public sympathy. The two men are vying for the nomination of their Movement for Socialism party in next year’s presidential election, though at this point Morales remains legally barred from running.
HAITI
The AP reports on the deteriorating situation in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Solino, which has been under sustained gang attack for a bit over a week now:
Gang assaults on Solino and other neighborhoods have displaced an estimated 10,000 people since they began earlier this month.
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Intercept’s Sam Biddle reports that the US military is eager to bring AI to its African operations:
Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI’s technology is “essential” for its mission.
The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM’s rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market. “The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives,” the document reads, including “its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises.”
The document, labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, is marked as FEDCON, indicating it is not meant to be distributed beyond government or contractors. It shows AFRICOM’s request was approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency. While the price of the purchase is redacted, the approval document notes its value is less than $15 million.
Like the rest of the Department of Defense, AFRICOM — which oversees the Pentagon’s operations across Africa, including local military cooperation with U.S. allies there — has an increasing appetite for cloud computing. The Defense Department already purchases cloud computing access from Microsoft via the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project. This new document reflects AFRICOM’s desire to bypass contracting red tape and buy immediately Microsoft Azure cloud services, including OpenAI software, without considering other vendors. AFRICOM states that the “ability to support advanced AI/ML workloads is crucial. This includes services for search, natural language processing, [machine learning], and unified analytics for data processing.” And according to AFRICOM, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which includes a suite of tools provided by OpenAI, is the only cloud provider capable of meeting its needs.
What could go wrong, really?