World update: May 4-5 2019
Stories from Gaza, North Korea, Venezuela, and more
First of all, it looks like Ramadan is beginning at sunset this evening (or has begun, depending on where you are and when you read this), so Ramadan Mubarak to any readers who are fasting this month!
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MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Syrian and Russian strikes on the rebel-held pocket of Syria in northwestern Syria continued to escalate over the weekend, with locals and observer groups saying on Saturday that “dozens” of people have been killed. Artillery strikes landed close enough to a Turkish military position in the area to wound two Turkish soldiers, albeit not seriously. The escalation has naturally raised fears of a full-scale military offensive against the enclave, which is packed to the gills with displaced civilians to the tune of over three million people.
While this was going on, Turkey’s “Syrian National Army” proxies attacked a Kurdish-held region north of Aleppo on Saturday and seized control of three villages before being driven back. The Kurds claimed credit for forcing the Turkish-aligned forces to retreat, but the SNA says it was shelling from “pro-Damascus forces” (whatever that means) that did the trick. One Turkish soldier was killed on Saturday in an attack by the Kurdish YPG militia near the town of Tell Rifaat, also north of Aleppo. It’s unclear whether the Tell Rifaat incident was directly connected with the SNA offensive but given the proximity of these villages to Tell Rifaat, and the SNA’s stated desire to drive the Kurds out of Tell Rifaat, it’s hard to imagine they weren’t linked in some way.
YEMEN
The United Nations World Food Program was able to take control of its grain stores in Hudaydah on Sunday after apparently moving into the city via government-held territory in the south. Yemen’s Houthi rebels had previously blocked the WFP’s access to those facilities from its territory in the north. There are tens of thousands of metric tons of grain stored in Hudaydah, but some portion of it has been rendered useless by weevils and more is believed to have rotted. The WFP will need to fumigate the wheat and check it for rot, as well as doing maintenance work on milling equipment, before beginning to make flour to send to the millions of Yemenis in desperate need of food assistance. That could take weeks, and that’s a best case scenario assuming that the situation in Hudaydah remains stable.
The process of shipping that flour out to other parts of the country will be complicated by the fact that, while the fragile ceasefire in Hudaydah has drawn most international attention of late, fighting elsewhere in Yemen has escalated. Violence in Yemen’s Dhale province, for example, has blocked a major north-south artery through which goods entering the country via the seaport at Aden had been reaching critically affected areas further inland, and the fighting has also picked up in other places like Taiz. While none of this fighting directly threatens the Hudaydah ceasefire, it doesn’t exactly create a lot of goodwill as the Houthis and pro-government forces continue to negotiate the further implementation of the Hudaydah ceasefire.
TURKEY
In addition to the Turkish soldier killed in Tell Rifaat on Saturday (see above), three other Turkish soldiers were killed in Hakkâri province from shelling presumably conducted by Kurdish PKK fighters. The Turkish defense ministry said its forces conducted a “cross-border operation” into Iraq in retaliation, as well as a separate operation in northern Syria in response to the Tell Rifaat incident, killing a total of 28 Kurdish fighters. Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said on Sunday that in response to the Syrian incident Ankara is discussing its northern Syrian arrangements with Russia, which are supposed to leave Tell Rifaat off limits to Turkish forces. Turkish and Russian forces have been conducting “joint patrols” in that region but Turkey is likely to ask for a freer hand in northern Aleppo province to deal with the YPG.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas in Gaza has escalated precipitously over the weekend and there’s a very troubling possibility that the enclave could be on the brink of another war. Haaretz is running a live update on events, but the upshot is that at least 22 Palestinians have reportedly been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza, while a barrage of over 600 rockets fired by Islamic Jihad and Hamas have killed four Israeli civilians. Included in those Palestinians deaths was a major figure in Hamas’s financial bureaucracy, Hamed Ahmed Al-Khodary, killed in the first targeted Israeli strike in Gaza since the 2014 Gaza war. An Israeli strike on Saturday hit the building where Turkey’s Anadolu news agency has its Gaza bureau, prompting harsh criticism from Ankara.
The Israelis have closed the entry/exit points around Gaza and shut down Gaza’s legal fishing zone, as well as closing down operations at their Tamar offshore natural gas platform over concerns that the facility is in range of those Gazan rockets.
Both Islamic Jihad and Hamas say they conducted these rocket strikes out of frustration over Israeli policy toward Gaza. They claim that the Israeli government has been stalling on fulfilling its obligations under a recent ceasefire agreement brokered by the Egyptian government that was to have led to a partial end to Israel’s brutal Gaza blockade. With Israel celebrating its independence day on May 9 and hosting this year’s Eurovision singing competition next week, it would appear that Hamas and Islamic Jihad decided this was the optimal time to send a message. The Israelis never acknowledged agreeing to such a deal in the first place, and their response indicates that whatever Hamas thought it was going to achieve here is probably not going to be achieved. Gaza has seen several violent flare-ups that have eventually calmed down short of war, but this one has escalated much further than any of those and may be close to a point of no return.
Now that the Trump administration has decided that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, period, it’s apparently going to start “reviewing” its relations with countries critical of Israel. I’m sure this new policy will be applied judiciously and won’t have any serious consequences.
SAUDI ARABIA
Airbus may be planning to sue the government of Germany for blocking its ability to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. The German government imposed a moratorium on weapons sales to the Saudis in October, in light of the murder of reporter Jamal Khashoggi. But because the arms manufacturing sector in Europe is so interconnected, that moratorium has had a far wider impact than even German officials probably intended. Among other things it’s prevented Airbus from completing a very large contract to develop a security system for the Saudis’ border with Yemen, costing it potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
IRAN
Powerful Iranian parliament speaker and maybe future presidential candidate Ali Larijani told reporters on Saturday that Iran will continue enriching uranium regardless of new US efforts to make that program more difficult for Tehran to manage. Another thing Iran plans to keep doing? Selling oil, according to Deputy Oil Minister Amir Hossein Zamaninia, via the “gray market.” It’s unclear what the “gray market” is, as such, but presumably it will mirror previous Iranian efforts to circumvent US sanctions. Those generally involved third parties surreptitiously selling Iranian oil at heavy discounts to entice otherwise reluctant buyers.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The Taliban attacked three police checkpoints in Badghis province overnight Friday-Saturday, killing at least seven Afghan police officers. Also on Saturday, coalition airstrikes reportedly killed at least 43 ISIS fighters in Kunar province. And civilians in Ghazni province angrily demanded an explanation for several civilian deaths during Afghan/coalition operations there late Friday. At least five and probably eight civilians were killed amid a battle in which Afghan officials say their forces killed 22 Taliban fighters. On Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked a police headquarters in the city of Pul-e-Khumri, in Baghlan province, killing at least 13 people and perhaps several more than that.
KASHMIR
According to Pakistani officials, Indian cross-border fire in Kashmir on Sunday killed two Pakistani civilians. Pakistani forces returned fire but there haven’t been any reports of casualties on the Indian side of the line.
SRI LANKA
The Sri Lankan government has imposed a curfew in the city of Negombo after the outbreak of what was probably inter-communal violence there on Sunday. It’s also reimposed a nationwide ban on social media in an effort to reduce the possibility of retaliatory attacks targeting Muslims and stemming from last month’s Easter Sunday terrorist bombings. Also on Sunday, Sri Lankan authorities said they uncovered a large militant training camp in the eastern town of Kattankudy where the Easter attackers apparently trained in shooting and bomb-making. Kattankudy is the home town of Zahran Hashim, a local Islamist leader believed to have been a key player (and one of the suicide bombers) in the Easter attacks.
THAILAND
Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn is in the midst of a multi-day, $31 million or so coronation festival that began on Saturday and will end on Monday. Vajiralongkorn has been king since December 2016 (though his reign is retroactively dated to the death of his father in October of that year), so the ceremony is purely a formality.
BRUNEI
Responding to a torrent of international pressure, the government of Brunei now says that it will not enforce the “death penalty for gays” portion of its Sharia-based legal system, which it rolled out last month. Brunei has been gradually shifting to a Sharia-based legal code since 2014, but it didn’t get to the “gays and adulterers should be stoned to death” bit until April, and while the legal burden for imposing capital punishment under Sharia is quite high, that’s not really much of a comfort and it certainly wasn’t enough to satisfy Brunei’s critics.
CHINA
So this was kind of a Sunday surprise:
There had been some indication that the US and China were approaching a new trade accord, so there’s a possibility that this is a negotiating ploy to drag China over the finish line. If not then I guess it’s back to square one on the trade war.
NORTH KOREA
North Korea hasn’t test-fired a missile since November 2017, part of its efforts to reduce tensions with the United States and explore diplomacy with the Trump administration. Or, at least, it hadn’t test-fired a missile until Saturday. The North Koreans sure as hell tested something this weekend—overseen by Kim Jong-un himself, of course—though it’s not entirely clear what exactly it was. North Korea says it tested multiple rocket launchers, but the available evidence hints at a short-range ballistic missile.
Either way this was a weapon that couldn’t possibly threaten the US, and perhaps that explains why the Trump administration’s response has been so…muted? I know, it seems weird to me too. But here’s Donald Trump tweeting about the whole thing:
Mike Pompeo echoed his boss’s restraint on the Sunday talk show circuit, basically acknowledging in one interview that the US doesn’t care if Pyongyang tests short-range weapons. So while provocative, this test may not impact the chances for diplomacy—provided, of course, that it doesn’t mark the beginning of an escalation on North Korea’s part:
Actually it’s been the South Korean government, which in general has been more conciliatory toward Pyongyang than Trump and his people have been but which very much does care about North Korea’s short-range weapons program, that has responded most forcefully to this test. Seoul called it a violation of an inter-Korean agreement and its foreign ministry issued a statement in which it said “we expect North Korea to actively join efforts towards the fast resumption of denuclearization talks.”
OCEANIA
AUSTRALIA
New polling shows this month’s Australian parliamentary election tightening, but still has the Labor party in the lead:
The Ipsos poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age on Sunday night had Labor ahead 52-48, a one-point drop from the result a month earlier.
Newspoll, also released late on Sunday and published in the Australian, put the figures the same as a week ago, at 51-49 to Labor, but with a one-point fall in its primary vote to 36%.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The military junta currently ruling Sudan says it plans to unveil a new transition plan on Monday in an attempt to end the country’s ongoing political crisis. Opposition leaders have presented the junta with an outline for a transitional council that would assume executive responsibilities alongside a civilian cabinet and legislature until elections are held at some point down the road. So this will be the junta’s response. The main disagreement is over the composition of that transitional council, which the opposition wants to be civilian-controlled. The military, shockingly, wants it to be military-controlled.
LIBYA
The internationally recognized Libyan government says that by its count 187 people have been killed and over 1150 wounded since Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” began its assault on Tripoli one month ago. Though Haftar’s offensive has stalled he’s shown no sign of pulling back (in fact he’s apparently ordered his forces to fight harder during Ramadan), even though he’s beginning to suffer elsewhere. On Saturday, a group of fighters later claimed by ISIS attacked an LNA base in the southern city of Sebha, killing at least nine of Haftar’s forces. The LNA also implicated “Chadian” fighters in the attack, though it apparently uses that term to refer to any southern tribal forces that aren’t aligned with Haftar.
Meanwhile, in eastern Libya, the head of Libya’s oil workers union, Saad Dinar, was reportedly abducted near his home outside of Benghazi on Monday. Libya’s National Oil Company called on Saturday for his return. Haftar has been trying to increase his control over Libya’s oil industry of late, so his forces may have been behind the kidnapping. If they weren’t then that poses other problems for Haftar because his big selling point as a national leader is that he’s brought order to eastern Libya.
TUNISIA
The Tunisian government claims that its security forces killed three Islamist militants in the city of Sidi Bouzid on Saturday. There’s been some unrest in Sidi Bouzid this week over the weak Tunisian economy and other issues, so it’s possible the militants were looking to take advantage of that.
ALGERIA
Algerian authorities have arrested Said Bouteflika, the younger brother of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the man though to have been running the Algerian government behind the scenes since his brother’s 2013 stroke. The younger Bouteflika was picked up along with a former head of Algerian military intelligence and a former head of Algeria’s state security service on Saturday, as part of an ongoing corruption crackdown that seems designed to save part of Algeria’s ruling elite by offering up other parts to protesters demanding political reform. The architect of these arrests appears to be Algerian army boss Gaid Salah, who is trying to preserve and even enhance his place in the ruling establishment by pretending he’s not part of it.
SENEGAL
The Senegalese parliament on Saturday overwhelmingly approved a constitutional change that would eliminate the position of prime minister. Opposition leaders say the change is part of an attempt by President Macky Sall to increase his authority, and it’s probably worth noting that Sall just won reelection in February after a campaign in which he, uh, never said anything about doing something like this.
MALI
A series of inter-communal attacks in central Mali reportedly killed at least 18 people this week, according to United Nations peacekeepers. Most of the victims were from Mali’s Dogon community, which has had a running conflict with Mali’s Fulani community for some time now, though one Fulani civilian was also killed. The attacks against the Dogon may have been retaliatory for March’s massacre of almost 160 Fulani in the same region. That attack was probably carried out by a Dogon defense force.
NIGERIA
ISIS claims that its fighters killed 10 Nigerian soldiers on Friday in an attack on the town of Magumeri in northeastern Nigeria. Reuters has confirmed that the attack did take place though the actual death toll may still be up in the air.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Journalist Anchal Vohra argues that Russia is expecting payback for its investment in keeping Bashar al-Assad in power, in the form of Syrian reconstruction contracts. The problem is that Assad’s government doesn’t have any money to pay for reconstruction and is unlikely to get any in the near future unless it manages to regain control of its eastern oil fields. And even then that’s probably not going to be enough. Moscow’s solution? Get Europe to pay for it. But how could you get Europe to finance Syrian reconstruction? By convincing European leaders that rebuilding Syria will allow Syrian refugees to leave Europe and go home, that’s how.
Client and patron in perhaps happier times back in 2015
Unfortunately for the Russians, there’s a problem there as well, which is that Assad doesn’t want most of those Syrian refugees, most of whom left in part because they oppose him, to return at all. And now that the Russians have put Assad back in control of most of Syria, he’s not really interested in compromising with the opposition. The Russians could approach the Gulf Arab states about financing reconstruction, but there too Assad would need to compromise with them, probably in terms of his relationship with Iran. It’s unclear he’ll be willing to do that either, and even if he is the Gulf states may be reluctant to get involved without Western approval.
REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA
North Macedonian presidential hopeful Stevo Pendarovski appears to have won Sunday’s runoff against nationalist Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova. Pendarovski was the candidate of the country’s pro-European Union governing coalition and this election was seen as a (second) referendum on the coalition’s agreement with Greece to change the country’s name to incorporate the geographic designation “north.” That agreement got Greece to drop its objections to Macedonia’s entry into the EU and NATO. So while the Macedonian presidency isn’t a particularly powerful gig, this result is good news for the coalition and if you’re a fan of EU/NATO expansion.
UNITED KINGDOM
On the subject of EU contraction, it appeared on Saturday as though British Prime Minister Theresa May’s negotiations with Labour Party head Jeremy Corbyn over a compromise Brexit plan were actually on the verge of a breakthrough that would have seen Labour supply May with enough votes to get her plan through parliament. However, that now looks like a long shot. A group of 104 MPs, mostly from Labour but also from a number of other center-left UK parties, are reportedly demanding that any agreement May and Corbyn reach involve a second Brexit referendum, which would probably sink the deal in parliament. On the other side, May could be facing a revolt within her Conservative Party should she cut a deal on terms that appear favorable to Corbyn.
Both Labour and the Conservatives lost ground—the Conservatives were really walloped, in fact—in elections for local councils on Friday. Labour had a net loss of 63 council seats and the Tories a net loss of 1269 seats. The Liberal Democrats, who have unambiguously opposed Brexit unlike Labour, were the big winners with a net gain of 676 council seats. Draw your own conclusions, I suppose, but I think the safest one is that voters, regardless of their positions on Brexit itself, are thoroughly angry with all the ongoing Brexit turmoil.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
Jair Bolsonaro was supposed to receive a major award from the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce in New York later this month. He’s now canceled his planned trip in the wake of criticism from environmental and LGBT groups as well as New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. Several sponsors had pulled out of the event and its original venue, the American Museum of Natural History, withdrew as host due to the negative response. This was embarrassing enough, and Bolsonaro decided to spare himself the additional embarrassment of protesters at his big event.
VENEZUELA
You know, I’m starting to think that Juan Guaidó might not know what he’s doing:
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó on Saturday acknowledged errors made in attempting to stir a military uprising, and did not discard a U.S. military option in Venezuela alongside domestic forces — saying he would take any such offer from Washington to a vote in the country’s National Assembly.
After a dramatic week that saw a clandestine plan to oust President Nicolás Maduro fall apart on Tuesday, Guaidó conceded that the opposition had miscalculated its support within the military.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, Guaidó suggested that he expected Maduro to step down amid a groundswell of defectors within the military. Instead, Guaidó’s call for the rank and file and senior brass to abandon Maduro did not produce mass defections. Maduro’s security forces then quelled street protests and left Guaidó’s U.S.-backed opposition on its heels.
“Maybe because we still need more soldiers, and maybe we need more officials of the regime to be willing to support it, to back the constitution,” Guaidó said. “I think the variables are obvious at this point.”
Call me nuts, but “eh, let’s wing it and see what happens” doesn’t strike me as a viable coup plan. The variables were obvious a week ago too, and yet here we are. It’s not so much that it matters what happens to Guaidó himself. But the more he tries these big stunts and the more they wind up collapsing, the closer we get to the point where Guaidó just decides to ask his patrons in the Trump administration to invade Venezuelan and put him in power. I’m sorry, what’s that? We’re already at that point?
Mr Guaidó has the support of more than 50 countries, including the US, UK and most Latin American nations - and he has told the BBC that US support for him has been “decisive”.
“I think President [Donald] Trump’s position is very firm, which we appreciate, as does the entire world,” he said.
Asked whether he would like Mr Trump and the US military to intervene, he responded it is “responsible to evaluate” the possibility of international intervention, adding: “I, as the president in charge of the national parliament, will evaluate all options if necessary.”
Well, maybe we’re not quite there just yet, but you can definitely see where things are heading. The Trump administration would probably be happy to destroy Venezuelan on Guaidó’s behalf, though if it does come to that it will be important to note that it didn’t care enough about the Venezuelans it claims are suffering under Maduro to offer them an easy path to asylum in the US. It’s refusing to invoke Temporary Protected Status or the Deferred Enforcement Departure program to allow Venezuelans already in the US to remain, and it’s refusing to prioritize Venezuelan asylum requests. Apparently it’s one thing to starve Venezuelans to death or kill them in a kinetic military action—for their own good, you see—and quite another to let them live in the US for a little while.
PANAMA
Panamanian voters picked a new president on Sunday, and while the votes are still being counted, center-left candidate Laurentino Cortizo of the Democratic Revolutionary Party has gotten out to a slim lead over center-right candidate Rómulo Roux of the rival Democratic Change Party. Both candidates have based their campaigns on combating money laundering and other forms of corruption in order to keep Panama off of the Financial Action Task Force’s blacklist. The Panamanian economy is growing quickly but much of that growth has been in finance, and a negative ruling from the FATF would be a huge setback.
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz argues that one of the obstacles standing in the way of eliminating nuclear weapons is the fact that the nuclear weapon industry is immensely profitable:
A new report from PAX, a Dutch peace organization, both illuminates how profitable it can be for multinational corporations to manufacture Armageddon and provides a roadmap for taking the money out of mass death.
The PAX report identifies a total of $116 billion in current contracts between governments and the private sector to design, build, and maintain the world’s nuclear arsenals. The actual amount may be significantly higher, since all nine nuclear powers maintain some degree of opacity about their nuclear programs. “We know what we can trace,” says Susi Snyder, the report’s principal author, “but there’s definitely more out there.”
Many powerful corporations therefore have incentives to push governments to expand their nuclear stockpiles. At a recent investor conference, a managing director of the investment bank Cowen Inc. questioned the CEO of Raytheon, one of the nuclear contractors listed by PAX. “We’re about to exit the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] with Russia,” the managing director said, and excitedly asked if this means that “we will really get a defense budget that will really benefit Raytheon.” (The planet may be destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, they will have created a lot of value for shareholders.)