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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 3, 42 BC: An army led by two of Julius Caesar’s assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, meets the combined armies of Triumvirs Marc Antony and Octavian in the first round of the Battle of Philippi. Antony’s forces defeated Cassius’s, and Cassius subsequently committed suicide after hearing that Brutus had also been defeated. In fact Brutus’s portion of the army had been victorious in its part of the battle against Octavian’s forces. So the battle overall was more or less a draw. The two armies would meet again 20 days later, at which point the Triumvirs soundly defeated Brutus and he, too, committed suicide.
October 3, 1932: In accordance with the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, Iraq gains independence from Britain upon the expiration of its League of Nations Mandate, albeit with Britain retaining substantial political and commercial influence in the newly “independent” kingdom. Commemorated annually as Iraqi National Day.
October 3, 1990: The German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”) is merged into the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”) after a 45 year separation. Commemorated annually as German Unity Day.
October 4, 1957: The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1, putting the first artificial satellite in orbit and terrifying a whole bunch of people in Washington DC.
October 4, 1993: The two-day Battle of Mogadishu, later memorialized in the book/film Black Hawk Down, ends. The battle began with a calamitous US/UN mission to capture a couple of aides to self-declared Somali President Mohamed Farrah Aidid, which went south very quickly when Somali fighters shot down a US Black Hawk helicopter (they later shot down a second). In the end 21 international soldiers were killed (19 of them American) and one captured, while at least 200 Somalis (both civilians and militants) were also killed.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least three people and wounded at least 19 in multiple attacks across Gaza on Sunday. It also, according to Anadolu, “carried out large-scale demolitions of buildings and facilities in eastern Gaza City” in apparent furtherance of the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing agenda. The previous day, Israeli forces killed at least five people (four of them women) in an airstrike on a Gaza city apartment building. Saturday was the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attack according to the Jewish calendar, and the IDF claimed that it was targeting senior Hamas official Ali al-Amoudi in the strike. It is unclear if he was among the casualties.
In other items:
The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that people in Gaza are facing “devastating consequences” due to Israeli-imposed delays on medical supplies entering the territory. Aid is flowing only through one Gaza checkpoint and Israeli authorities have reportedly declared several medical items to be “dual use” goods, which allows them to restrict their entry.
You have undoubtedly seen or heard about the incident on Wednesday in which a FlyDubai copilot apparently attempted to seize control of a passenger aircraft that was flying to Israel and to crash it. I have nothing to add to the accounts that are already out there, except to note that there are a number of questions still swirling about this incident. Chief among them is the identity of the copilot, an Omani national named Hamam al-Hamami, and why he was able to get a piloting job with FlyDubai after being banned from flying by Oman Air for alleged radical tendencies. I will also note that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already incorporated the official narrative about this incident into his campaign ahead of Israel's October 27 Knesset election. He is certainly never one to miss an opportunity.
YEMEN
The head of the nominal Yemeni government’s presidential council, Rashad al-Alimi, announced on Sunday that his Saudi backed forces are beginning a new round of “military operations to retake the remaining territories of the republic and extend the authority of the state and its institutions across the entire national territory.” The main aim is to retake control of the country’s Red Sea coast, rolling back the gains that Ansarullah (“the Houthis”) made last month. Prior to that announcement, AFP reported that Ansarullah fighters had “effectively encircled” the government-held city of Taiz. The Saudi military spent the weekend conducting airstrikes across northern Yemen, with particularly intense focus on Taiz and Sanaa, killing at least 260 Ansarullah personnel by its reckoning. Ansarullah retaliated by striking a major Aramco facility in Riyadh.
It remains to be seen whether this new offensive is going to receive significant outside support. The three members of the Mecca defense pact (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) will hold a meeting on Monday where military options may be discussed, though Reuters suggested that they might also, or alternatively, discuss diplomatic outreach to Ansarullah. Donald Trump has twice refused a Saudi request to contribute to the kingdom’s Yemeni operations in recent weeks, though he did reportedly come close to agreeing to help out late last month. Then there is the UAE, whose relationship with Saudi Arabia is still not good but which may nonetheless be interested in contributing in Yemen. UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, and while there’s no indication that his visit dealt with Yemen specifically the fact that he made the trip at all is suggestive.
IRAQ
The US military announced on Wednesday that it had fully withdrawn from Iraq, some 12 years after it redeployed to that country as part of the anti-Islamic State mission. The Biden administration had reached an agreement to withdraw US forces from the country back in 2024 and the Trump administration stuck to that deal. Both countries hailed the withdrawal on Wednesday, with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi particularly gushing about what it means for “Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends.” He will still need to walk a very thin line under pressure from both the US and Iran.
IRAN
The possibility of US intervention in Yemen cannot be entirely ruled out as Donald Trump’s braintrust (I use the term loosely) met at Camp David on Friday to discuss possible military options in the Middle East. It is more likely that they were there to discuss the situation with respect to Iran, which (a great deal of media attention notwithstanding) doesn’t seem to have changed very much from where we left it. The US still claims to be relying on economic pressure to bring Iran to heel while it is still manifestly clear that Trump does not have the patience for such a strategy, hence the meeting at Camp David and his recent decisions to send additional Patriot air defense batteries to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and to deploy a third aircraft carrier group and a second amphibious assault group to the region.
There was a brief flurry of diplomacy over the past week or so that came to nothing, with Trump rejecting an Iranian offer for a seven day ceasefire leading to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and reportedly telling the aforementioned braintrust that he expects to resume the war in earnest after the midterm election in the US. As rapidly as Trump is vacillating these days he could go through another dozen rounds of war-sanctions-diplomacy before that election takes place next month, though the Iranians appear to be forcing the issue somewhat by escalating their attacks on commercial ships in and around the strait.
In additional news:
The status of the strait has been the focus of much of the media coverage over the past couple of weeks. Multiple analysts are claiming that oil flows through the waterway are back up to what they were before the war, minus (I guess) Iranian oil exports. US efforts to degrade Iranian monitoring capabilities while guiding commercial vessels through the strait are supposedly the reason for this increase, fueling a narrative that Iran has “lost control” of the waterway. I have no reason to doubt that oil flows are up. However, the reasons why they’re up remain somewhat unclear. Perhaps the Iranian see no need to intervene with oil prices, and especially fuel prices, still pretty high. There are also rumors that Gulf Arab states are paying the Iranians to allow their oil shipments to pass through the strait. Whatever may be going on, those recent Iranian attacks on commercial ships in and around the strait suggest that Tehran’s comfort level with the current state of affairs may be diminishing.
The latest round of US “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, aiming to ground the country’s airlines, kicked in last month leading to bans on Iranian flights to several countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, and Oman among them. However, within a few days, the Trump administration had already issued a waiver to allow Iranian flights to continue to the Iraqi city of Najaf, a holy city and site of pilgrimage for Iranian Shiʿa. It would appear that Iraq’s Kataʾib Hezbollah militia successfully pressured Baghdad into requesting the waiver and the administration agreed, lest Iraq pull out of the flight ban altogether. Despite the sanctions Iranian commercial flights still appear to be traveling to several countries, including Afghanistan, China, and Turkey.
The Washington Post reported last month, based on interviews with several “officials familiar with the Defense Department’s internal casualty accounting data,” that at least 22 US military personnel have died amid the Iran war to date, plus at least three “contractors.” This is more evidence that the Pentagon is manipulating its casualty figures, which officially listed 18 deaths in the conflict when that report was published. The Intercept’s Nick Turse is continuing to cover the department’s sleight of hand efforts in detail.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
The Pakistani military reignited its conflict with Afghanistan last month, killing at least four civilians amid a substantial barrage on September 24. Pakistani officials claimed that they were targeting drone facilities, following what they said was an attempted drone strike the previous day. The following day Pakistani officials claimed that their forces thwarted a border attack, killing an unspecified number of Afghan military personnel in the process.
CHINA
Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House for a full state visit/dinner on September 24. The trip seems to have gone well, inasmuch as they didn’t start World War III, though the major agreements they reached—modest tariff reductions, extending the current “economic detente” between the two countries through at least January 10, establishing an artificial intelligence “channel”—were more of the “maintaining the status quo” sort than any big breakthroughs.
That’s not to diminish their importance, to be clear. The last item seems particularly noteworthy following reports that an AI system being used by a Pentagon analyst recently hallucinated a Chinese maritime shipment of “components of a nuclear weapons program” to some unspecified destination (you can probably hazard a guess) in the Middle East. The US military made preparations to intercept the vessel, which could easily have triggered a conflict. Recent AI doomsaying of the “Skynet” sort probably downplays the chances that those systems could simply “oops” humanity into armageddon.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese military (SAF) claimed on Friday to have seized the town of al-Mazroub in North Kordofan state. This was reportedly the Rapid Support Forces militant group’s main “stronghold” in the province and seizing it may allow the SAF to cut off the remaining RSF fighters in North Kordofan from their supply lines in neighboring West Kordofan. On Saturday the SAF claimed that its forces had repelled a major assault by RSF and Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North militants in Blue Nile state, near the Ethiopian border. And on Sunday a drone strike hit a United Nations World Food Program convoy in South Kordofan state, killing at least one aid worker. There does not appear to be any indication as to which side carried out the strike.
MOROCCO
Morocco held a parliamentary election on September 23 that resulted in a pretty conclusive victory for the center-right Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) led by former Marrakesh mayor Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri. PAM took 97 of 395 seats in the Moroccan House of Representatives, 31 more than the runner-up National Rally of Independents (RNI) party. I referred to Mansouri as “former” mayor above because King Mohammed VI named her as prime minister a few days after the vote, making her the first woman to hold that office in Moroccan history. She still has some work to do in terms of forming a governing coalition. At his newsletter, Alex Thurston characterizes the outcome as more or less a reshuffling of the previous coalition, with PAM leading it instead of the RNI. Notably, the Islamist Justice and Development Party gained some ground, but not enough to make it a factor in forming the next government.
ETHIOPIA
The most significant global event while I was away was surely Ethiopia’s collapse back into civil war. The long-festering possibility of conflict became full-blown conflict after a group of seven broadly anti-government entities announced the formation of a coalition, the “Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival,” on September 21. The group features three large regional militias—the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Fano militia in Amhara, and the Oromo Liberation Army—alongside four smaller entities. That the TPLF and Fano are now formally allied is interesting inasmuch as those groups were on opposite sides of Ethiopia’s 2020-2022 civil war, the Fano fighting alongside the Ethiopian federal military. They are still not on the same page with respect to the status of the region known as Western Tigray, which Amhara also claims. But apparently that dispute is less immediate than their shared antipathy toward Addis Ababa.
Ethiopian officials are accusing the governments of Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan of backing the rebels. Eritrea’s links to the TPLF and Fano are pretty well established at this point and the Sudanese government would more or less be retaliating for Ethiopia’s support-er, I mean alleged support-for the Rapid Support Forces militant group. Egypt’s beef with Ethiopia stems mainly from disputes over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and Cairo has been marshaling regional support against Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for some time now. The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have already severed diplomatic ties and Ethiopian-Egyptian relations appear to be trending in the same direction.
The question isn’t so much whether these entities are supporting the Ethiopian rebels as whether that support could extend to more direct involvement in the conflict. The potential for regional escalation is considerable, particularly if Saudi Arabia and the UAE get involved—the Emiratis support Abiy and the Saudis are generally aligned with Egypt, et al.
On the other hand maybe the renewed war will flame out quickly. I doubt that, but it must be noted that the federal Ethiopian military has made substantial gains over the past few days. Its Tigrayan militia auxiliaries are now apparently in control of the regional capital, Mekelle, after the TPLF and allied forces withdrew sometime between Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless the likelihood is that Ethiopia is now facing another extended and in all probability quite bloody war. I have not seen any updated casualty figures either for combatants or civilians in several days—at least 52 of the latter were killed in the initial days of fighting but that was over a week ago.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Trump administration is reportedly “monitoring” reports that an employee of a Russian plague research center may have died of pneumonic plague late last month. Russian authorities have not confirmed that diagnosis. Anyway, with Donald Trump and company on the case I’m sure everyone in the US is breathing a sigh of relief.
Elsewhere, the Russian government threatened last month to use nuclear weapons in response to any NATO attempt to cut off access between Russia proper and the Kaliningrad exclave. I guess this is helpful to know, but if NATO is planning anything like that it’s done a very good job of keeping its preparations ultra secret so perhaps this was just Moscow reminding everybody of its capabilities. The alliance issued a statement in response criticizing the Kremlin’s “irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.”
LATVIA
Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs’ United List party appears to have won Sunday’s parliamentary election with more than 40 seats in the country’s 100 seat legislature. That’s shy of a majority but it’s a hefty victory by Latvian standards—as far as I can tell no single party has even topped 30 seats since 2011. The outcome should leave the country’s pro-European Union/pro-Ukraine foreign policy basically intact.
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Bosnian voters headed to the polls on Sunday for a general election including the country’s tripartite presidency. With most of the results in, the outcome seems to comport with polling that showed Bosniak incumbent Denis Bećirović of the leftist Social Democratic Party retaining his office along with Serb nationalist Željka Cvijanović, with Croat nationalist Darijana Filipović joining as the third member. Savo Minić, who’d been endorsed by Serb secessionist leader Milorad Dodik as the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party’s candidate, appears to have won the presidency of the Republika Srpska region.
UNITED KINGDOM
The US military has withdrawn its B-1 bombers from the UK’s RAF Fairford airbase after a recent “suspicious incident” that authorities have tried to characterize as an attempted Iranian-backed attack on the facility. UK authorities arrested five people in connection with that alleged plot last Sunday but then released them on bail, which doesn’t seem like something one would do if the threat were as serious as US and UK officials have made it out to be. Oh well, what do I know?
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
Sunday’s most significant election took place in Brazil, where the far-right Bolsonaro movement surged back into a seemingly dominant position in national politics. The night was headlined by the first round of the country’s presidential election, and as expected that contest is heading to a runoff later this month. Somewhat unexpectedly, challenger Flávio Bolsonaro outperformed polling to win the first round with around 47 percent of the vote, against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 45 percent (give or take). Polling of a Bolsonaro-Lula runoff has tended to show a dead heat, but those same polls generally had Lula winning the first round narrowly so if they’re off in the same way for the runoff then Bolsonaro could win fairly handily. Whatever else happens, the far right appears to be doing quite well in congressional races so the legislative environment will likely skew that way regardless of who is president.
This election has been marked by fairly open US interference on Bolsonaro’s behalf, including an essentially unexplained suspension of US consular services in Brazil on Friday (citing unspecified “security concerns”) that was later joined by the Australian government for equally inscrutable reasons. It’s unclear how much of an effect this meddling had on the outcome but it will presumably continue through the runoff.
NICARAGUA
The Nicaraguan government announced on Sunday that it is quitting the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), a regional integration body that was formed in 1991. The move appears to have been a response to a resolution on Friday from the Organization of American States calling on Nicaragua to release “political prisoners” and “restore civil liberties.” This leaves PARLACEN with five members: the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.
GREENLAND
Finally, Donald Trump announced back on September 18 that his administration had reached a new agreement with the government of Denmark regarding the US military presence in Greenland. It reportedly makes that presence permanent, binding it on even an independent Greenlandic government, as well as banning non-NATO members from establishing military facilities on the island (something that I’m not sure was a realistic concern outside of Trump’s decaying brain). It also gives the US preferential treatment for any commercial arrangements in Greenland and some veto power over commercial deals with other countries (i.e., China).
This is not annexation and it’s not even clear how much this arrangement increases US rights to operate in Greenland, which were already substantial. The US military will, for example, presumably open new bases on the island now, but it already arguably had the right to do that under previous arrangements. Still, at least at the margin the Danish and Greenlandic governments may now have less of a say in how the US operates.