World update: February 27 2020

Stories from Syria, India, Bolivia, and more

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

February 26, 1233: The Mongols capture the Jin capital of Kaifeng after a several-month siege. The siege is notable in that it hastened the collapse of the Jin Dynasty and for its well-documented use of early gunpowder weapons.

February 26, 1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escapes his exile on the island of Elba in a bid to return to France and restore his empire. The erstwhile emperor entered Paris on March 20, chasing off the only just enthroned Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, and beginning the “hundred days,” his brief revival/reunion tour. Napoleon’s attempt at a second act came to an end on June 18 at the Battle of Waterloo, in which British and Prussian armies won a decisive victory. He withdrew to Paris to find that the city had already turned against him, and abdicated on June 22. His second exile, on the more remote island of St. Helena, would prove permanent.

French painter Joseph Beaume’s 1836 Napoleon I Leaving the Island of Elba (Wikimedia Commons)

February 27, 1844: A group of leading Dominicans called La Trinitaria declares independence from Haiti. Thus began the 12 year Dominican War of Independence, after which the Dominican Republic was established as an independent nation. Commemorated today as Independence Day in the Dominican Republic.

February 27, 1933: The Reichstag building in Berlin is set on fire one month after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor. Hitler and the Nazis pinned the arson on a communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, either alone or in collaboration with other communists, and used it as a justification for a widespread crackdown on communists that allowed the Nazi Party to tighten its grip on power. Some suspicion has lingered to the present day that the Nazis set the fire themselves as a “false flag” attack though ultimately no definitive answer as to the perpetrator has ever been found.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian state media is reporting that an Israeli drone strike on the Syrian side of the Golan killed one civilian on Thursday. Three Syrian soldiers were wounded in the same attack, though there appears to be some question as to whether it involved drones, helicopters, or both. If only the rest of the day had gone that smoothly.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly called an emergency meeting of his national security team late Thursday to discuss the most recent events in northwestern Syria. What events, you ask? Well, I’m going out on a limb here but I suspect it might have something to do with the reports that dozens of Turkish soldiers were killed Thursday in a Russian air attack. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that at least 34 Turkish soldiers were killed, while the governor of Turkey’s Hatay province, Rahmi Doğan, says that at least 33 were killed (“Mehmetçiğimiz” is a colloquialism that means “our soldiers”) in airstrikes he’s attributing to the Syrian military, not the Russians. That’s probably a deliberate misattribution meant to cool down Turkish-Russian tensions. Whatever the real figure is can be added to the 19 Turkish soldiers who have already been killed in Syria to date.

The lower casualty figure may just reflect that the Turks haven’t confirmed all the deaths yet, but I will tell you that delving into unconfirmed reports about this incident on Twitter will get you casualty claims far larger than the 34 the SOHR is citing and there are some reports that have the figure as high as 70. It’s also being reported, probably not coincidentally, that Twitter has been taken offline in Turkey. The question now is whether Turkey will continue to escalate or, having had its nose bloodied in a major way, will look for some not-too-humiliating way to deescalate the situation. It also remains to be seen how the US will respond, given that Washington has been egging on the fighting in northwestern Syria in order to create discord between Ankara and Moscow. So far it appears to be the latter, as Turkish forces have reportedly responded with artillery strikes against Syrian military positions.

Without more reliable reporting and a better sense of how Turkey plans to respond it’s hard to draw any conclusions as yet, but this is obviously a huge escalation in the conflict in northwestern Syria. It comes after reports earlier in the day via Russian state media that Turkish soldiers were using MANPADS devices to fire on Russian and Syrian aircraft, so conceivably these Russian strikes were in retaliation for that provocation. The Russian government has also accused Turkey of flying attack drones over northwestern Syria in support of its rebel proxy fighters, which is presumably a violation of Turkish-Russian deconfliction agreements.

Prior to these apparent Russian airstrikes, Turkey and its rebel allies had made a huge advance, recapturing the town of Saraqib in central Idlib province. As we’ve noted previously, Saraqib sits at the juncture of Syria’s important M4 and M5 highways. With the Syrian military having redirected its focus south to seize the M4 highway, Turkey and the rebels have slipped in the back door, so to speak, retaking a sizable chunk of the M5. They’re trying to grab some significant piece of territory that could potentially be used as leverage in multiparty ceasefire talks, which are being discussed but are at a “may or may not happen” stage at the moment. They’ve become so desperate for a success that Turkish regular forces are now essentially fighting alongside the rebels, which is what made Thursday’s airstrikes possible, and in fact unconfirmed reports put the airstrike on the outskirts of the town. Presumably the Syrians will push hard to retake Saraqib, which will lead to more possibilities for similar incidents in the next few days.

TURKEY

Al-Monitor’s Semih İdiz views what’s happening in Syria as the “collapse” of Erdoğan’s approach to foreign policy:

Turkey is an isolated country today that has confrontational ties with the United States and Russia, as well as the Arab world and Europe. It is trying to ensure its vital security interests against this difficult backdrop.

But the few friends Ankara has left, such as Qatar, Pakistan or Azerbaijan, provide Turkey with no strategic value that could strengthen its hand against its adversaries.

The only option Erdogan has is to try and play the United States and Russia against each other, as he has been doing for some time now, but this approach seems to also have run its course.

Erdogan’s bellicosity in international relations and disdain for diplomatic niceties as well as the advice of professional diplomats may go down well with his die-hard supporters.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of Turkish analysts — including some former supporters of Erdogan — believe that the situation Ankara finds itself in Syria in particular is largely, if not totally, self-inflicted.

Erdoğan’s new solution to the bind in which he’s placed himself could involve sending a new wave of refugees into Europe. He’s reportedly decided to stop holding Syrian refugees in Turkey. At the same time he’s going to open the Syrian border to allow new refugees from the fighting in and around Idlib to cross into Turkey.

This represents an admission of defeat on Erdoğan’s part, since one of the reasons he sent his military into northeastern Syria in the first place was to halt the conflict and thereby stop the refugee flow, which is costing him politically as a huge majority of Turkish voters say they want the refugees already in the country to leave. He’s acquiesced to the inevitability that more refugees are going to enter Turkey, but the hope would be that more refugees leave Turkey to take their chances in Europe than enter Turkey from Idlib. His other hope would be that a Europe suddenly inundated with new refugees might come to his aid in the conflict he’s now started with Russia.

IRAQ

The Iraqi parliament was unable to form a new government on Thursday. Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Allawi has put together a cabinet, but when MPs met to approve it, there weren’t enough of the present to form a quorum. Kurdish and Sunni Arab parties were expected to boycott the vote because they’re angry over losing their cabinet ministries, but some Shiʿa MPs must have boycotted as well to drop attendance below what was needed for a quorum. Unless Allawi is able to get his cabinet past a legitimate confidence vote, the search for a prime minister to replace the outgoing Adel Abdul-Mahdi will continue.

LEBANON

Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Thursday inaugurated the country’s first offshore drilling rig, so that’s…nice? Beirut is counting heavily on gas and oil deposits under its segment of the Mediterranean to reboot the perennially weak Lebanese economy. The only problem is that it’s probably going to take a while to begin extracting those resources and getting them to market, and in the meantime that Lebanese economy is on the brink of a total catastrophe. Well, that and the whole “if we keep burning this stuff it’s going to kill most of us” thing.

IRAN

The Trump administration on Thursday issued new waivers exempting some transactions in humanitarian goods from sanctions it’s levied against the Central Bank of Iran. This is meant to complement last month’s opening of a humanitarian trade “channel” via Switzerland and is…good, I think? I mean I’m no sanctions expert, but I don’t see any “other shoe” waiting to drop here or some hidden negative consequence from what seems on the surface like a way to spur more commerce in basic needs. It doesn’t go nearly far enough in ensuring foreign entities that they can trade in humanitarian goods with Iran free of consequences, but it does seem to mitigate the damage that sanctioning the CBI did to that trade. Which means the administration wouldn’t have needed to issue these waivers if it had just not sanctioned the CBI in the first place, which remains problematic for many other reasons.

ASIA

INDIA

Almost 40 people were killed and over 200 injured in this week’s clashes between pro- and anti-citizenship law factions in New Delhi—clashes that appear, at this for the moment, to have run their course. New Delhi police are now facing myriad accusations from both government officials and city residents that they largely stayed out of the worst of the violence rather than intervening to try to gain control of the situation. Worse, reports continue to circulate of police officers actually assisting pro-citizenship law mobs in carrying out acts of violence against Muslims and Muslim communities. Now the majority of residents who didn’t participate in the violence are attempting to return to normalcy:

MALAYSIA

Malaysian King Abdullah of Pahang has apparently been unable to decide who should be his next prime minister—incumbent Mahathir Mohamad or Mahathir’s former coalition partner, Anwar Ibrahim. So he’s letting parliament try to work it out on Monday. Abdullah has been consulting with MPs this week but came to the conclusion that neither Mahathir nor Anwar has majority support in the legislature at this point. So parliament will vote not on a coalition or a government, but to choose which of the two individuals (or I suppose other candidates that may emerge) it wants to try to form a government. That’s a bit unusual but it could help move things along. If Monday’s votes prove inconclusive, a snap election would likely follow.

CHINA

According to the BNO News tracker there are now 83,368 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (the Wuhan coronavirus) worldwide and 2858 known deaths. There was a small spike in the number of new cases in mainland China on Wednesday, but the number seems to have dropped again on Thursday. Nigeria announced its first confirmed case of the virus. It had been one of the largest countries in the world without a case. The largest remains Indonesia, though there are questions as to how thoroughly the Indonesian government has been able to track potential cases. Anyway I hope you’re all still enjoying the ride:

Source: Google

AFRICA

LIBYA

Tripoli’s Mitiga airport was shut down yet again on Thursday due to artillery fire from the “Libyan National Army.” That shelling is a violation of the ceasefire that’s supposed to be in place in Libya, but that ceasefire has been more aspirational than real since its inception last month.

TUNISIA

New Tunisian Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh isn’t expected to make any radical breaks with his predecessor, though he will be under tremendous pressure from both the Tunisian public and within his own coalition to do something to boost Tunisia’s ailing economy:

Nine years of democratic rule in the wake of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has failed to improve standards of living. Reforms by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seen as vital to turning around the highly centralized economy have made life much harder, which is why former Prime Minister Youssef Chahed, who advocated for them, received a huge drubbing in the polls.

Yet Fakhfakh is widely expected to stick with the IMF, and Chahed’s Tahya Tounes is one of four blocs that backed his government. “We know Fakhfakh is supportive of international assistance to Tunisia (this includes helping to combat groups linked to Islamic State and al-Qaeda), so I think he’ll almost certainly continue the IMF program,” Louise Keeler, an advocacy associate at the Program on Middle East Democracy, told Al-Monitor. “There don’t seem to be any viable alternatives, [and] no one has any other solutions they’re willing to stake their reputations on,” she added. Then again, as Sharan Grewal, a North Africa expert at the College of William and Mary observed in a tweet, “As a prelude to the internal divisions this future Fakhfakh government will face, there is already disagreement about whether to allow the privatization of state-owned enterprises.”

MALI

The African Union announced Thursday that it’s planning to deploy a 3000 person military force to the Sahel region to help combat Islamist extremist groups. The new deployment would complement the G5 Sahel counter-insurgency army already active (if underfunded) in the region as well as United Nations, French, and US military deployments. It could help make up for what’s expected to be a reduction in US forces in the region as the Pentagon rethinks its global deployments in order to focus on China and Russia.

EUROPE

UNITED KINGDOM

In his latest attempt to create leverage against the European Union where none exists, Boris Johnson is now threatening to walk out of talks on a free trade arrangement before they’ve even started:

The government said it hoped to achieve “the broad outline” of an agreement by June, with the aim of finalising a deal by September. If not enough progress had been made by June, the government would “need to decide whether the UK’s attention should move away from negotiations and focus solely on continuing domestic preparations to exit the transition period in an orderly fashion”.

The threat sets the UK on course for leaving the transition period on World Trade Organization (WTO) terms at the end of the year unless either or both sides make major concessions within four months.

Johnson says he wants a free trade deal along the lines of what the EU has negotiated with Canada, but the EU has said it won’t do a carbon-copy of that deal because the fact that the UK is in Europe raises issues of proximity that need to be addressed. London wants free access to the European market without any requirements to maintain parity with the EU in terms of regulations, corporate subsidies, and other issues, which needless to say is not a position Brussels is likely to accept. While the EU would prefer to negotiate a deal, under the principle of “this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me” it has no reason to cave to Johnson’s demands.

AMERICAS

BOLIVIA

Hey, you know how Bolivia had a presidential election in October, and the official count showed that Evo Morales won but there were questions about the count, and then the Organization for American States popped in and declared, without any real evidence, that Morales in fact hadn’t won and the whole election was fraudulent? And then after days of turmoil the Bolivian military cleared its throat and Morales had to flee the country to avoid something much worse? All because everybody had decided his election win was fake? Hey, so about that:

The OAS report is in part based on forensic evidence that OAS analysts say points to irregularities, which includes allegations of forged signatures and alteration of tally sheets, a deficient chain of custody, and a halt in the preliminary vote count. Crucially, the OAS claimed in reference to the halt in the preliminary vote count that “an irregularity on that scale is a determining factor in the outcome​” in favor of Morales, which acted as the primary quantitative evidence to their allegations of “clear manipulation of the TREP system … which affected the results of both that system and the final count.”

We do not evaluate whether these irregularities point to deliberate interference — or reflect the problems of an underfunded system with poorly trained election officials. Instead, we comment on the statistical evidence.

Since Morales had surpassed the 40-percent threshold, the key question was whether his vote tally was 10 percentage points higher than that of his closest competitor. If not, then Morales would be forced into a runoff election against his closest competitor — former president Carlos Mesa.

Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote. Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round.

Ha ha, oopsie! This piece, by two MIT statisticians, gives the OAS a lot of credit for actually having a justification for making its call and simply making some honest mistakes in its interpretation of the results. I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. It seems pretty clear to me that the OAS, a right-wing institution, wanted Bolivia’s leftist president out of office and seized on what looked like a good opportunity to make that happen, without any real thought as to what the results actually were. Their interpretation of the results can’t be supported by statistical analysis because it wasn’t a rigorous interpretation, it was a political gambit. One that has already paid off, since it’s not as though anybody in Bolivia’s ruling junta is suddenly going to have second thoughts and restore Morales to office.

UNITED STATES

Finally, at OtherWorlds the Center for International Policy’s William Hartung proposes a radical rethinking of the Pentagon’s budget:

Despite hopes to the contrary, the Pentagon’s new, $740 billion-plus budget will waste scarce tax dollars while making America less safe. With the presidential primaries accelerating, it’s time for the candidates to address this urgent issue.

This extraordinary spending has a direct impact on American taxpayers when it comes at the expense of diplomacy, education, and anti-poverty programs that can improve people’s lives. These programs create more jobs than buying weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, but they’re facing deep cuts.

There is a better way to protect the nation without breaking the bank.

The Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force has created a blueprint for defense that would save $1.25 trillion from current Pentagon plans over the next decade — while providing a greater measure of security, not less.