World update: August 29 2019
Stories from Yemen, Peru, and more
THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
August 28, 1189: In an effort to find himself a new city, titular King of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan begins a siege of Acre. It took the armies of the Third Crusade, under Richard the Lionheart and Philip II of France, to finally conclude the siege and capture the city in July 1191.
August 28, 1521: Ottoman forces under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent capture the then-Hungarian city of Belgrade (Nándorfehérvár to the Hungarians) and destroy most of it. The Ottomans rebuilt the city and made it the capital of the Sanjak of Smederevo, and within a short time it became the largest Ottoman city in Europe after Constantinople.
August 29, 1526: The Battle of Mohács
August 29, 1842: Britain and Qing China sign the Treaty of Nanking, ending the 1839-1842 First Opium War. China was obliged to pay reparations to Britain and Hong Kong became a British colony, which it remained until 1997. The treaty also ended China’s “Canton System,” which had forced all foreign trade to run through the port city of Guangzhou (Canton) and was the means by which the Chinese government controlled those foreign commercial interactions, and forced the Qing to accept unequal conditions on Chinese-British trade.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The Syrian military reportedly captured several villages in southeastern Idlib province on Thursday while continuing to pound the city of Maarat al-Numan with airstrikes. At least 12 people were killed in the city on Wednesday. Once it’s done cleaning out areas around Khan Shaykhun, which it captured last week, Maarat al-Numan is likely the Syrian military’s next target since it sits along Syria’s M5 highway. Looking past that the city of Saraqib, which sits along both the M4 and M5 highways, is most likely a target as well.
Idlib as of Tuesday—the government’s advance on Thursday centered on Tamanah, on the southern edge of the green area above (MrPenguin20 via Wikimedia Commons)
YEMEN
Yesterday I wondered what the Southern Transitional Council was going to do given that its military forces had lost control of Aden. The answer, as it turns out, was that it was going to launch a counterattack. The STC pulled its forces back from other parts of Yemen, including Hudaydah, to bolster its remaining positions in Aden and other southern provinces, and it says it hasn’t lost Aden despite media reports to the contrary. Al Jazeera, which admittedly is not unbiased when it comes to this story, is reporting that the separatists retook Aden completely and have begun moving on Zinjibar, the capital of neighboring Abyan province, which they lost to the government earlier this week. The fighting on Thursday must have been heavy—Médecins Sans Frontières alone says it took in 51 casualties, and the Yemeni government is saying that hundreds more were killed in UAE airstrikes.
Yes, that’s right, the Yemeni government is accusing the UAE of bombing its soldiers. Verified information is hard to come by, but the Yemeni defense ministry is claiming that 300 (!) of its soldiers were killed and wounded in UAE strikes on Thursday. The situation is serious enough that the Saudi government pulled the duct tape off of aspirational Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi’s mouth long enough for him to condemn the UAE’s “blatant intervention.” Oddly enough he didn’t mind the UAE’s blatant intervention when it was on his behalf. This is actually not the first time the UAE has attacked Yemeni forces, but it is the largest such incident, and Hadi’s statement was forceful enough to make this feel like a clean break rather than another dust up between nominal allies.
In an effort to justify the strikes, UAE officials have said they targeted “terrorists” who had attacked “coalition” forces, but both the definition of “terrorist” and the categorization of who constitutes a member of the “coalition” are very much up for grabs. The UAE considers Islamists, like the Islah Party, “terrorists,” which is debatable, but as I’ve been suggesting all week I have a strong suspicion the Yemenis have enlisted al-Qaeda to help them battle the STC, and that’s not so debatable. It also no doubt considers the STC part of the “coalition,” even though STC forces have spent the past couple of weeks warring with the Yemeni government on whose behalf the “coalition” is supposed to be fighting.
TURKEY
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Wednesday that it’s not too late for Turkey to take back its purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system and rejoin the F-35 program. He reiterated that the US won’t allow Turkey to have both. The US has made this appeal before and it hasn’t budged Ankara. It’s hard to see why it would work now. The Turks seem to be shopping around for a new fifth generation aircraft and may very well wind up buying another Russian system, the Su-57.
IRAQ
Gunmen killed four Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint in Anbar province on Thursday, while another group of gunmen wounded three police officers in a similar attack in Diyala province. The Islamic State is probably responsible though no group has claimed either attack.
LEBANON
The US Treasury Department sanctioned Lebanon’s Jammal Trust Bank on Thursday for alleged ties to Hezbollah. The move potentially puts Lebanon’s central bank at risk unless it cuts Jammal Trust off, which could put depositors in a bind. Treasury also sanctioned four individuals accused of funneling Iranian money to Hamas via Hezbollah.
The Israeli government on Thursday released details of what it claims is an Iranian-Hezbollah operation to produce guided missiles in Lebanon, potentially for use against Israeli targets. This is probably as close as Israel will come to outright claiming responsibility for this past weekend’s drone strike on southern Beirut, which allegedly targeted that operation. That strike, part of a recent flurry of Israeli attacks against Iranian interests around the Middle East, was likely meant more as a warning shot than an attempt to actually interrupt the alleged missile program.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Axios is reporting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “frantically tried” to call Donald Trump on Sunday in an effort to head off the possibility that Trump might meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the G7 summit in Biarritz. The nightmare scenario for Netanyahu is for Trump to suddenly open negotiations with Iran the way he abruptly did with North Korea last year, since that would deprive the Israeli leader of a vital bogeyman to demonize. It didn’t happen on Sunday, but Axios says that the Israelis are worried about a potential meeting between Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations General Assembly next month.
Hamas officials have arrested ten people in connection with Tuesday’s suicide bombings at two police checkpoints in Gaza. Among them were “current and former members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” which normally works with Hamas and whose leadership has condemned the attacks. It’s possible they were acting alone but it’s also possible they were working with another group like IS, which has occasionally tangled with Hamas in the past though it’s never placed a huge amount of emphasis on the Palestinian territories.
IRAN
Satellite imagery strongly suggests Iran attempted another space launch on Thursday and that it failed, badly. Photos of the Imam Khomeini Space Center that must have been taken shortly after the launch failure appear to show the smoking remains of a rocket on the launch pad. Heavy activity at the center over the past several days raised suspicions that a launch was imminent.
According to the New York Times, the US did some computer magic a couple of months ago to stop Iran from harassing oil tankers:
A secret cyberattack against Iran in June wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to covertly target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, at least temporarily, according to senior American officials.
Iran is still trying to recover information destroyed in the June 20 attack and restart some of the computer systems — including military communications networks — taken offline, the officials said.
Senior officials discussed the results of the strike in part to quell doubts within the Trump administration about whether the benefits of the operation outweighed the cost — lost intelligence and lost access to a critical network used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s paramilitary forces.
The Pentagon might as well etch “Compromising National Security to Protect Precious Oil” in stone over the main entrance to the building, so I’m not sure why anybody would question whether or not the operation was worth it. It’s just what we do.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Donald Trump, of all people, told Fox News Radio on Thursday that the US will still have a military presence in Afghanistan under the terms of a peace deal with the Taliban. Now it’s difficult to imagine that Trump actually knows the terms of the deal his negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, is hashing out with Taliban representatives in Qatar, but the Taliban has been pretty consistent that it wants the US out, completely. Trump himself has consistently said he wants the US out of Afghanistan. But more to the point, if the US isn’t leaving Afghanistan then what is everybody negotiating about?
Khalilzad could be leaving Qatar any day now to head to Kabul and try to convince Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that he’s negotiated a deal that doesn’t represent a US abandonment of its Afghan pals. That’s likely to be a tough sell, but not as tough as convincing Ghani to postpone next month’s presidential election, which Khalilzad will also probably try to do since the election will interfere with Afghan-Taliban peace talks. Ghani’s main competition, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, magnanimously indicated on Thursday that he would be willing to forego the election in the cause of peace. That’s probably a campaign tactic but it does put some pressure on Ghani to do likewise.
INDONESIA
Protesters are reportedly setting fires in the city of Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, and those fires have forced authorities to cut electricity to parts of the city. Protests over discrimination and the region’s push for independence have been going consistently across Papua and West Papua provinces for a couple of weeks now. At least three people were reportedly killed when gunshots (and at least one arrow) were fired during a protest in the town of Deiyai on Wednesday.
Although the Indonesian government is planning to relocate to a new capital city on the island of Borneo, it’s not just going to leave Jakarta to sink into its rapidly emptying aquifers. Indonesian Planning Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro told Reuters on Thursday that the government is preparing to spend more than $40 billion over the next decade to clean up and modernize the city’s infrastructure. Included in that rebuild will be a new sewage system and, more critically, new water infrastructure so people can stop tapping underground wells and hopefully arrest the city’s sinkage.
CHINA
Hong Kong police have reportedly arrested activist Joshua Wong, one of the most prominent figures in the region’s pro-democracy movement. Details are still sketchy as to the charges he’s facing.
The Chinese government moved new military forces into Hong Kong on Thursday, but insists that it was only undertaking a routine rotation of those forces, not preparing to crack down on protesters. Protesters are planning another major rally on Saturday, though they haven’t been able to get permission from authorities yet. The Chinese defense ministry did say that its forces will “protect and defend Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability,” and you’ll notice it didn’t say anything about “Hong Kong’s people” there, so make of that what you will.
AFRICA
UGANDA
Ugandan officials say that a nine year old girl who arrived in the country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Wednesday has been diagnosed with Ebola. Authorities quarantined her at a border crossing and do not believe she was able to pass the disease to anybody else in Uganda, but even if that’s true the situation illustrates the risk the ongoing Congolese Ebola outbreak poses to the region.
EUROPE
BELARUS
John Bolton visited Minsk on Thursday, where President Alexander Lukashenko suggested “closing this bad page and turning over a new leaf” in the US-Belarusian relationship. Lukashenko from time to time expresses a desire to improve his country’s relations with the West, mostly to keep Russian president Vladimir Putin from taking their alliance for granted, but it’s possible this time could be different. After all, Lukashenko is just the kind of human rights-violating arch-conservative strongman dictator that Trump seems to really appreciate, and the Putin-Lukashenko relationship has been showing strains over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and Putin’s desire for greater Russian-Belarusian integration.
UKRAINE
Ukraine has a new prime minister—Oleksiy Honcharuk, previously the deputy director of Zelenskiy’s presidential office. Prior to that, the closest Honcharuk had come to electoral politics was a stint as an adviser to Ukraine’s ecology ministry and a failed run for parliament in 2014. He wants to boost economic growth and looks like he’s going to approach the International Monetary Fund about a new aid package. This is the first time in Ukraine’s admittedly brief history that the president’s political party has won an absolute majority in parliament and been able to form a government without coalition partners, so in theory that should minimize gridlock.
GERMANY
With the far-right Alternative for Germany party expected to win three state elections in the next couple of months and with its popularity rising especially in the eastern part of Germany, journalist Paul Hockenos argues that the party’s appeal is rooted not just in racism but also in resentments stemming back to Germany’s reunification:
At rallies, AfD politicians hammer home the message to their core constituency that they’ve been betrayed by the Federal Republic, which promised them prosperity and delivered 20 years of sky-high unemployment: “This isn’t what we made the Peaceful Revolution for. We never want to experience anything like this again!” said Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia and point person of the party’s exceptionally hard-line right.
From the AfD and its members’ perspective, they are the dissidents now: courageous, righteous, clearsighted, and persecuted. In the place of Soviet communism, Berlin’s “democratic” political elite has imposed a new soft dictatorship on them, they infer. It treats the easterners, above all, like subjects, telling them what they can and can’t say and do, the AfD claims.
ITALY
With leaders of the Five Star Movement and Italy’s Democratic Party coming together to form a new governing coalition, at least one obstacle remains that could still force a new election. Five Star, in keeping with its populism, won’t enter a new coalition without first putting that decision to an online vote of party members. And it’s far from a sure thing that it will pass. The Democrats are the epitome of the Italian establishment that Five Star formed to oppose, and while party leaders may be willing to overlook that there’s no guarantee that a majority of its rank-and-file will feel the same. A poll issued on Sunday showed a hefty plurality of 43 percent of Five Star members supporting a coalition with the Democrats with another 19 percent undecided. But none of the details of the online vote have yet been determined, like when it will be held or how the question will be worded. So there’s a lot that’s still up in the air.
UNITED KINGDOM
Boris Johnson’s move to prorogue parliament in order to undercut its ability to block a no-deal Brexit doesn’t really mean he wants a no-deal Brexit. By cutting parliament out of the process and thereby increasing the threat of the no-deal scenario, Johnson undoubtedly thinks he’s also increased his ability to leverage a new withdrawal deal out of the European Union. But German historian Helene von Bismarck argues that he’s misreading the room:
If this really is Johnson’s hope, then he has not only caused constitutional outrage at home—he has also misread the EU’s position. No-deal is not in its economic or political interest, but it is preferable to abandoning its key principles. The reason why the rest of the EU has held firm on the main point of contention, the Irish border, is not that it is comfortable that a no-deal Brexit could never happen. It is their resolve that the integrity of the single market and solidarity with Ireland must be paramount.
From the remaining EU members’ perspective, it makes sense to provide Johnson with an opportunity to prove his bold claim that there are workable alternatives to the Irish backstop. The last chance of rescuing the withdrawal agreement is to keep the U.K. at the negotiating table, which the EU will likely do until the very end. And, should the negotiations ultimately fail, its congeniality toward to Johnson will have served another purpose: to shift the blame for a no-deal Brexit straight back to him. The fact remains that any proposals the U.K. puts forward will have to work. Until now, nothing of substance has emerged. The suggestion by Johnson that the remaining EU members should trust him is laughable, and the prorogation of Parliament, whether it is technically legal or not, will have done nothing to improve his reputation.
AMERICAS
PERU
Fire isn’t the only thing threatening the Amazon rain forest. In Peru, in fact, fire may be the key to protecting it:
For a fourth consecutive week, global attention has fixed on the fires ravaging the Brazilian Amazon. In neighboring Peru, though, it’s the government—not ranchers or loggers—setting the blazes, and the fires here are part of a massive effort to save the rain forest. For the last seven months, the Peruvian military and police have used gasoline-fueled burns and dynamite to drive out illegal gold mining.
At the heart of this destruction is La Pampa—a barren, contaminated plain stretching for 100 square kilometers next to one of Peru’s natural reserves. The site has been a gold mining hub since 2007, when miners set up the first camps. Soon, they became a series of gold-rush towns, plagued by human trafficking, child labor, and hired hit men. Until last February, 25,000 illegal gold miners occupied the area.
The search for gold can turn habitats into wastelands. Gold seekers cut down trees, dig out the underlying soil, and use high-powered hoses to blast the alluvial-rich earth. The remaining sediment is mixed with mercury—which binds with gold—and then torched, leaving pure gold and mercury waste, which forms toxic fumes and pollutes the land for generations.
COLOMBIA
Two former FARC leaders, including one—“Iván Márquez”—who was involved in negotiating the group’s 2016 peace deal with the Colombian government, have released a video in which they announce they’re resuming their insurrection. “Márquez,” whose real name is Luciano Marín Arango, referred in the video to “the betrayal of the state of the Havana peace accords,” reflecting a growing frustration on the part of many former FARC fighters that the Colombian government has reneged on parts of the deal—especially since the election of President Iván Duque, who ran for office on the idea of doing just that. The government has short-changed programs intended to reincorporate ex-rebels into society, and the murders of many ex-FARC members has raised suspicions that the government isn’t doing anything to protect them. It’s unclear how many people “Márquez” et al have with them or whether they’re going to try to reform FARC itself—in the video he talked about working with the ELN, another leftist militant group that’s been trying to fill the vacuum left when FARC closed down its operations.