World roundup: September 19 2024

Stories from Lebanon, South Korea, Mexico, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

September 19, 634: The siege of Damascus ends with the Arabs conquering the city, one of the most important in the Byzantine Empire at the time. One of the first major victories of the Arabs’ 7th century conquests, primary sources say that the siege ended when the Arab commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid, took advantage of a celebration inside the city to exploit an undefended portion of the wall.

September 19, 1356: An English-Gascon army under Edward, the Black Prince, defeats a substantially larger French army under King John II at the Battle of Poitiers. The battle ended with John a captive of the English army. Edward brought him to London where protracted negotiations with English King Edward III—sandwiched around England’s (largely unsuccessful) Reims campaign in northern France in 1359—eventually produced the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. That pact ceded about a third of modern France to the English along with a very large ransom for John’s return, in return for which King Edward gave up his claim on the French throne. The treaty was meant to be decisive and indeed ended the “Edwardian” phase of the Hundred Years’ War, but fighting resumed (the “Caroline” phase) in 1369.

French painter Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 The Battle of Poitiers (Louvre via Wikimedia Commons)

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

CNN has apparently confirmed, via “an Israeli official,” that the Israeli government has delivered hostage coordinator Gal Hirsch’s ceasefire concept to Hamas. Its basic structure is a one-stage prisoner exchange, along with a “permanent end” to the Israeli military’s (IDF) campaign in Gaza and safe passage for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar out of the territory and into some form of exile. The expectation is that Sinwar will reject it, because he won’t accept exile and/or because there’s no indication that it includes the IDF’s withdrawal from Gaza (making that “permanent end” bit somewhat dubious). There’s apparently been no discussion of this concept among Israeli negotiators and so it’s questionable whether it represents a genuine offer or a PR gesture to get advocates for a hostage deal off of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s back.

Elsewhere, Israeli authorities say they’ve arrested a businessperson named Moti Maman over his alleged involvement in an Iranian plot to assassinate Netanyahu and/or several other senior Israeli officials. Allegedly he demanded $1 million for helping to facilitate that plot, a figure the Iranians rejected though they supposedly told him that they would “remain in touch.” Your guess is as good as mine as to whether there’s anything to this story, along with Iran’s supposed plot to assassinate Donald Trump.

LEBANON

The Lebanese Health Ministry says that the two-day Israeli bombing campaign targeting consumer electronic devices killed at least 37 people and wounded 2931. Those figures reflect a slight increase in the number of deaths and a decrease in the number of wounded that had been reported on Tuesday and Wednesday as the campaign was taking place. While the intended target may have been Hezbollah, the nature of this operation has engendered (by design, presumably) widespread concern about the safety of other electronic devices in Lebanon. Authorities have reportedly been destroying “suspicious” devices and Lebanese civilians are ditching devices like two-way radios for fear that they may be rigged. There is a word for organized violence that intentionally causes panic within a civilian populace, but I digress. Whatever term one wants to use, Human Rights Watch noted on Wednesday that the use of such “booby traps” violates international humanitarian law—though at this point citing IHL with respect to Israeli actions seems almost quaint.

In other items:

• Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered an address on Thursday in which he characterized the bombing operation as “unprecedented in the history of the resistance movement in Lebanon” and accused the Israelis of having crossed “all red lines.” According to AFP Hezbollah is saying it lost 25 members in the bombings. Hundreds more were wounded and the destruction of so many pagers and radios will undoubtedly have a significant, though not insurmountable, effect on the group’s logistics. Nasrallah promised that Israel will face “tough retribution and a just punishment,” though he wasn’t forthcoming as to the specifics and Hezbollah still seems reluctant to do anything that might give the Israelis the war they keep trying to start.

• Speaking of said war, the IDF and Hezbollah continued to exchange cross-border fire overnight and into Thursday. I haven’t seen any indication as to casualties, but later in the day the IDF conducted at least 52 airstrikes in Southern Lebanon in what Lebanese sources called the “heaviest” Israeli bombardment they’ve seen since October 7. The IDF is also continuing to shift focus away from Gaza and toward a potential war with Hezbollah, though there’s no sign yet of an imminent Israeli move into southern Lebanon.

• The New York Times believes it’s figured out how the Israelis pulled off Tuesday’s mass pager bombing. Rather than sabotaging a shipment of pagers manufactured by a third party, in this case the Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo, the story now is that an Israeli “shell company” called BAC Consulting, based in Hungary and licensed to use the Gold Apollo brand, enabled the Israelis themselves to manufacture pagers whose batteries were laced with explosives.

ASIA

ARMENIA

Armenian authorities announced this week that they’d foiled what Eurasianet describes as “a Russian-sponsored effort to foment an uprising aimed at overthrowing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government and installing a more Kremlin-friendly leadership in Yerevan.” They’ve apparently arrested three suspects already and are looking for four more. According to Eurasianet they were “recruiting Armenian men” who would be “sent to a training camp in Russia” and then “join an armed group that would serve as the backbone of a coup attempt.” It’s unclear what “Russian-sponsored” means here but I gather there’s not yet any evidence connecting the alleged plot directly to the Russian government or else that would have been mentioned in the piece. Relations between Russia and Armenia are certainly poor at present, but I’m not sure there’s much to be made of this story as yet.

INDIA

According to Reuters, Indian-made artillery shells are finding their way into the Ukrainian military’s stockpiles, testing the historically close relationship between New Delhi and Moscow. India isn’t selling these shells directly to Ukraine, but it is selling them to European customers who are passing them along to Ukraine. The Russian government has on at least two occasions pressed Indian officials to stop these transfers, but so far the Indian government has refused to take action. The number of shells here seems to be pretty minute, but there’s a principle at stake for Russia versus some practical considerations for India—namely, a desire to improve relations with the US and to build up its arms industry.

SRI LANKA

Sri Lankan voters will head to the polls on Saturday to choose a new president, and I do mean “new” because polling suggests that they will not be reelecting incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe. Economic weakness appears to be the main issue. The Sri Lankan economy has shown a bit of positive change in the two years since a popular uprising forced then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and left Wickremesinghe in charge. But conditions are still trying and International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity has proven unpopular.

SOUTH KOREA

While North Korean leader Kim Jong-un officially abandoned the goal of Korean reunification last year, the South Korean government has continued to push a pro-unification message. Foreign Policy’s Lami Kim argues that this discrepancy could worsen inter-Korean relations:

In a speech last month marking the 79th anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol called for the establishment of “a unified, free, and democratic nation, rightfully owned by the people … across the entire Korean Peninsula.” He argued that Korea’s liberation remains incomplete as long as North Koreans are deprived of freedom. This was a stark difference from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s recent statement about the issue in December 2023, when he renounced unification and said it was no longer viable.

The two Koreas now find themselves at a somewhat awkward crossroad on the issue of unification. On the surface, Seoul’s position seems benign, while the specifics of Pyongyang’s rhetoric appear aggressive and provocative. Upon closer examination, however, Pyongyang’s stance could suggest an attempt to coexist with the South—a two-state solution—whereas Seoul’s call for a unified, democratic Korea might be perceived by the North as a denial of the Kim regime’s legitimacy and an incitement of popular uprising. This could intensify the concerns that led Kim to renounce unification in the first place.

In this interpretation, Kim may have renounced unification because he believes that Pyongyang has lost “the contest to be the legitimate government to unify Korea,” so South Korean calls for unity start to sound more like calls for conquest.

AFRICA

SUDAN

After Joe Biden earlier this week called on Sudan’s warring parties to “re-engage in negotiations” to end their conflict, each of the groups’ leaders has now chimed in to insist that they’re all about peace, voluminous evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Sudanese military commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan issued a statement on Wednesday insisting that he’s “ready to work with all international partners in pursuit of a peaceful resolution that alleviates the suffering of our people and sets Sudan on a path towards security, stability, the rule of law, and the democratic transfer of power.” On Thursday, Rapid Support Forces commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo took to social media to “reaffirm our commitment to ceasefire negotiations…to secure a future free from fear and suffering for all Sudanese civilians.” Both of them are full of shit, of course, but clearly they still find some value in pretending otherwise.

MALI

AFP, citing “a security source,” is reporting that the attack by Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin fighters on Bamako earlier this week left at least 77 people dead and 255 wounded. It’s further reporting that “an authenticated confidential official document put the toll at around 100, naming 81 victims.” The main target of the attack was a gendarmerie (military police) training facility and unsurprisingly some 50 of the dead were trainees at that site. Mali’s ruling junta has yet to release any official casualty data.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

The Russian military reportedly captured another village in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast on Thursday. This one, Heorhiivka, is located a bit west of the Russian-controlled town of Marinka and its capture continues a string of Russian seizures to the west of Donetsk city. The front line had been stationary in that region for some time as the Russians focused their attention on Pokrovsk, to the north, but it seems to have become un-stationary over the past few days.

GERMANY

World Politics Review’s Alex Clarkson takes a dim view of the German government’s recent embrace of what he calls “migration theater”:

For anyone who has followed German politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, watching Germany’s current coalition government embrace populist talking points and policy priorities over the past few weeks in response to another fraught debate about migration has elicited an eerie sense of déjà vu. This sudden pivot is partly a product of desperation among Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, and the opposition center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, in response to recent electoral gains made by the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in eastern Germany.

Yet Scholz’s decision to deploy border patrols to all of Germany’s frontiers this week in response to a knife attack in the town of Solingen by a Syrian asylum-seeker on Aug. 27—as well as the CDU’s strident calls to put the measure in place—also symbolized how both parties are still in thrall to flawed policy responses toward migration that have repeatedly ended in failure over the past 30 years.

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

The European Parliament on Thursday voted to recognize the newly-exiled Edmundo González as Venezuela’s legitimate president. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. González’s story is starting to take on shades of the Juan Guaidó affair, though at least in González’s case he has a plausible claim to have won an election and didn’t just appoint himself president as Guaidó did.

COLOMBIA

The Colombian government announced on Wednesday that it is suspending peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group, following an ELN attack earlier this week on a military outpost in Colombia’s Arauca department. ELN fighters killed two soldiers and left more than 20 others wounded in that incident. The government and ELN allowed their ceasefire to lapse at the end of August, largely over a dispute regarding the rebels’ practice of kidnapping for ransom, but had still maintained at least some pretense of negotiations.

MEXICO

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is blaming the US government for a recent escalation in violence in northern Mexico’s Sinaloa state. More than 40 people have been killed over the past couple of weeks in what is surely a factional war to fill the vacuum created by the US arrest of Sinaloa cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada back in July. Zambada was delivered into US custody by the son of former Sinaloa boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Joaquín Guzmán López, who also turned himself in as part of a plea deal. A faction aligned with Guzmán’s other sons is believed to be battling a rival faction aligned with Zambada. US authorities don’t have to worry about any of this, leaving the Mexican government to deal with the mess.

UNITED STATES

Finally, at TomDispatch Juan Cole considers the tattered remnants of the Biden administration’s plans for the Middle East:

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.