World update: March 17 2020 (part 1)
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Saudi Arabia, China, and more
So…hi. I realize it’s been a while, but on the plus side at least nothing serious happened while I was gone. I’m sorry, what’s that? The pandemic? What pande—oh, I see. Well, anyway, it’s nice to be back. Happy St. Patrick’s Day?
As usual after I’m away for a spell we’ll try to start relatively fresh rather than trying to cram almost two weeks of news into this one update. That may be difficult here under the circumstances but I’ll do my best to keep things brief. Even at that I expect we’ll be doing this in two parts tonight, because there’s a lot to cover.
You may also notice that our format has changed. Before I left we were covering most COVID-19 news under “China” even though it was increasingly clear that the main areas of concern were now outside of China. It just helped keep things orderly in terms of organizing the newsletter. Obviously that’s not going to suffice anymore. In fact as the coronavirus is pretty much dominating world news these days, we’re going to be dealing mostly with it. Please understand I am not a doctor nor am I an epidemiologist and I will not be trying to portray myself as one. I’m also just one guy with a very large RSS feed that’s currently about 85 percent COVID-19 news, so if I miss a story (pandemic or otherwise) that you think is important please let me know. OK, let’s go.
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
March 15, 44 BC: A group of Roman senators calling themselves “the Liberators” assassinates Julius Caesar due to fears that he had designs on ending the Roman Republic and making himself a monarch. Their actions ironically brought about the end of the Republic, sparking first the Liberators’ Civil War and then the civil war between Triumvirs Mark Antony and Octavian, which left Octavian victorious and in position to make himself the first Roman emperor.
Vincenzo Camuccini’s early 19th century painting The Death of Caesar (Wikimedia Commons)
March 15, 2011: Protests against the government of Bashar al-Assad that had begun in the city of Daraa earlier in the month spread to Damascus, the Syrian capital. This is usually the date marked as the start of the Syrian civil war. I’m reluctant to try to pass historical judgment on an event that hasn’t really ended yet, but it seemed important to note the anniversary.
March 16, 1527: Though outnumbered, the army of the early Mughal Empire, led by Babur, defeats a conglomeration of forces under Rajput leader Rana Sanga at the Battle of Khanwa in northeastern India. Babur made effective use of field artillery and wagon fortifications, as well as the defection of a large portion of Rana Sanga’s army, to win the battle. In defeat Rana Sanga’s alliance fell apart and Mughal control of northern India was secured, at least until they were temporarily ousted from power in 1540.
March 16, 1988: The Iraqi military massacres between 3200 and 5000 Kurds in the city of Halabja using mustard gas and an undetermined nerve agent. The attack was the gruesome centerpiece of Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Genocide, which targeted Iraqi Kurds who resisted Hussein’s government with Iranian assistance under a broader plan to “Arabize” northern Iraq.
March 17, 1452: The Emirate of Granada suffers a major defeat against Castilian forces in the Battle of Los Alporchones. The Castilians fought to stop repeated Granadan raids into Murcia, and their victory more or less brought an end to any further offensive Granadan military activity. From this point on the Granadans would mostly be on the defensive until their final defeat in 1492.
March 17, 1861: The first Italian parliament proclaims King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as king of a newly unified Italy. This was the culmination of a unification process (the Risorgimento) that began amid the Revolutions of 1848, though the process wasn’t completed until the Italians took Venice from Austria in 1866 and Rome from the Papacy in 1870.
COVID-19
As I have been for some time now I’ll be relying primarily on BNO News’s COVID-19 tracker for any figures you see here. And right now it’s reporting 199,493 confirmed cases of the virus worldwide, 110,247 of which remain active, with 7975 reported deaths. Bear in mind that those are confirmed cases and reported deaths—given the possibility of somebody remaining asymptomatic or only developing mild symptoms and the likelihood that governments are either missing cases/deaths or deliberately downplaying them, the actual numbers of both cases and deaths are likely higher (and in terms of the number of cases maybe much higher).
While we were away, the World Health Organization finally pulled the proverbial trigger, labeling the coronavirus a “pandemic” last Wednesday. The last WHO pandemic was the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people and may have killed 200,000 or more of them (this figure varies quite a bit—the CDC’s estimates run much higher while the WHO’s official count at the time was only around 18,000). While COVID-19 has a ways to go to reach those numbers, its mortality rate (especially among the elderly) is considerably higher than H1N1, which was roughly as deadly as the regular annual flu.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The first attempt at a joint Russian-Turkish patrol of a buffer zone corridor around Syria’s M4 highway in Idlib province fizzled out on Sunday when a group of Syrian rebels/Turkish proxies and civilians blocked the road to protest the ceasefire agreement that made the patrol possible. The protesters, many of whom have been displaced to Idlib from other parts of the country during the Syrian war, say they want assurances that they’ll be allowed to return home by Damascus. The Russian military called the incident a rebel provocation and implied that Turkey needs to get a handle on things or else their ceasefire isn’t going to last very long. The Turkish military, meanwhile, described the patrol as “successful.”
YEMEN
Serious fighting between Houthi rebels and pro-government forces in Marib province has killed at least 38 people over the past day or so. The fighting, over Marib’s Sorouh district, seems to have been inconclusive, with an initial Houthi advance wiped out in the face of Saudi airstrikes.
The Saudi military in Yemen said Tuesday that it had destroyed two presumably Houthi boats loaded with explosives in the Red Sea. The Houthis have used remote controlled “boat bombs” in the past to undertake attacks against ships or Saudi facilities.
TURKEY
(98 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 1 reported fatality)
The Turkish government has closed pretty much all venues where people might congregate—cafes, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, entertainment venues, etc.—in an effort to snuff out the coronavirus. It’s even ordered a cessation of large scale public prayers at Turkish mosques. It’s also doing what the Turkish government does best, arresting people for making posts. Turkish authorities have arrested at least 19 people so far for making “unfounded and provocative” social media posts that amount to criticizing the government response to the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is negotiating with European leaders on another bribe-er, I mean financial aid package to entice Erdoğan to once again keep Syrian refugees from attempting to cross into Greece. Erdoğan stopped interdicting migrants last month mostly to pressure Europe into supporting his military gambit in Syria, but as such support was never really on offer it seems he’s decided to accept the cash equivalent instead.
IRAQ
(154 confirmed cases, 11 reported fatalities)
Iraqi President Barham Salih dug deep on Tuesday to appoint a new prime minister-designate, plucking a former governor of Najaf named Adnan al-Zurufi out of semi-obscurity for the job. It appears that Salih has taken this step on his own after Iraq’s Shiʿa political parties failed to agree on a replacement for Mohammed Allawi, who was supposed to be the replacement for Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who sort of technically still has the PM job even though he’s largely stopped doing it. Zurufi has ties to former Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi and worked in the post-war US Coalition Provisional Authority, and if you think those two things aren’t already raising objections among Iraqi political leaders you don’t know Iraqi politics. He says his primary aim will be to organize a new election, although he also sounds like he’d try to rein in the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces and bring them under tighter state control, which won’t go over well with the militias or political leaders. He probably won’t be able to form a government, unless Iraqi party leaders are so exhausted by their ongoing back and forth that they just decide to give up and acquiesce to Salih’s choice.
Two rockets struck Iraq’s Basmaya military base, just south of Baghdad, late Monday. Basmaya is used for military training purposes so it houses NATO military personnel. That makes it the third rocket attack on such a base in less than a week, after two attacks on Iraq’s Taji base last week killed three coalition soldiers and wounded five more people. The first of those attacks, on Wednesday, prompted the US to conduct airstrikes on several facilities it says belonged to Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah militia on Friday. Iraqi officials said that those strikes killed five of its security personnel and a civilian while wounding five militia fighters. The US has decided to withdraw its forces from bases at Qaim, Qayyarah, and Kirkuk due to tensions with Kataib Hezbollah. Qaim is a region that still has a significant Islamic State presence so it will be interesting to see how the US redeployment affects anti-IS operations.
Two other rockets struck near Baghdad’s Green Zone on Tuesday, to no apparent effect.
LEBANON
(109 confirmed cases, 3 reported fatalities)
Like many other countries, Lebanon has entered a lockdown to contain the virus, closing stores and public venues while severely curtailing travel. Unlike most other countries, it’s taking these economy-shrinking measures having just defaulted on its foreign debt. The Lebanese government failed to pay a $1.2 billion Eurobond that matured on March 9, and it will presumably also be unable to make the roughly $1.3 billion in debt payments it’s due to make between now and June. Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab has said his government wants to restructure the country’s sovereign debt but it’s unclear how flexible lenders are going to be given the economic constraints that now face everybody due to the pandemic.
JORDAN
(48 confirmed cases, no reported fatalities)
Jordanian King Abdullah on Tuesday enacted new measures empowering his security forces to enforce a lockdown to limit the spread of COVID-19. The measures allow Prime Minister Omar Razzaz to take actions like closing businesses and forcing citizens to shelter in place if necessary. Jordan’s lockdown will go into effect on Wednesday, and soldiers have already begun deploying to major towns and cities to oversee enforcement.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
(337 confirmed cases in Israel and 39 in Palestine, no reported fatalities)
Without getting too far ahead of ourselves it looks as though Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz has managed to stitch together an unlikely coalition based on little more than shared hostility to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has tapped Gantz, not Netanyahu, to form a new government, after parties controlling 61 of the 120 seats in Israel’s Knesset expressed support for him as PM. Included in that number is the Arab Joint List, which never participates in the government formation process, and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, which as a right wing nationalist party is opposed to working with the Joint List on principle. However, it must be noted here that just because these parties expressed support for Gantz that doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to enter his coalition or support a Gantz-led minority government. It simply means they want to give him the chance to convince them to do so. He may very well fail.
Facing perhaps the most serious threat to his reign since he took power in 2009, one that could cost him his freedom if it prevents him from getting parliamentary immunity on his corruption indictment, Netanyahu has turned to COVID-19 for a way out. He’s calling for a national unity government (one that excludes the Arabs, of course, because “unity” is a subjective term even in matters of life and death) to provide stability in the face of the pandemic. Rivlin has similarly expressed a preference for such a government, which could in theory deal with the crisis without having to worry about collapsing. Of course, Netanyahu would remain PM in this scenario, though he promises he’d only hold the job for two years before giving way to Gantz. On top of the fact that this would force Gantz to go against a long-standing pledge not to serve in a cabinet under Netanyahu and thereby embarrass him, there’s also no particular reason to believe that Netanyahu would abide by the agreement when it came time to step down.
While he’s still in office, Netanyahu has decided to use the vast surveillance state his government has constructed to spy on Palestinians to spy on Israeli citizens who might be planning to violate official pandemic suppression efforts. He’s allowing security services to track Israeli mobile phones to enforce quarantines and to track people who have come into contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19. Needless to say, Israeli civil rights activists are sounding an alarm, but whether you agree with them or not such measures have been used in China and South Korea to help contain the pandemic.
EGYPT
(196 confirmed cases, 6 reported fatalities)
The Egyptian government announced Monday that it is shutting down all air travel from Thursday through the end of March.
BAHRAIN
(242 confirmed cases, 1 reported fatality)
The Bahraini government announced that one COVID-19 patient had died on Monday, marking the first fatality due to the infection in the Arab Gulf states. Several Gulf governments announced new containment measures in response, including the Saudis who are now asking people to remain at home.
SAUDI ARABIA
(171 confirmed cases, no reported fatalities)
The Saudis have suspended private sector jobs for 15 days except in the healthcare and food service sectors.
Saudi authorities arrested several members of the royal family last week in what seems either to have been a response to an attempted coup (of sorts) or just another move by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to consolidate power. The abrupt announcement of their arrests spawned a number of rumors, including one that King Salman had died that turned out to be untrue. The two most prominent princes who were detained are Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, King Salman’s brother, and former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and they may be the only ones still in detention though I’m not entirely sure about that.
While everything that happens within the Saudi royal family is opaque, there are reports that the two conspired to maneuver Ahmed into the currently vacant role of chairman of the Allegiance Council, whose job in theory is to ratify the succession of a new king when the time comes. Although the council has in practice never really exercised much independent power, in theory Ahmed could have interfered with MBS’s eventual succession from that post.
While we were on hiatus you may have also noticed that the stock market…oh, let’s say it’s having a bit of a correction. This is not simply because of the coronavirus—it’s also because the bottom is dropping out of the oil market, though that phenomenon is itself due to the pandemic. When we left off, OPEC had agreed to cut global production by 1.5 million barrels per day to accommodate weakening demand due to the coronavirus, but that was dependent on Russia and the other members of the expanded OPEC+ group agreeing to make up a third of that cut.
Well, funny story—the Russians told OPEC to get bent and the Saudis responded by not just canceling the cutback, but ramping up their own production. The two countries are now deep into a good old fashioned price war, each betting the other is going to have to cave first, with the side effect (or maybe main effect) of knocking some US shale oil producers out of the market. Both countries will suffer heavy economic blows, and there’s little reason to think that US shale producers won’t come back online when prices rise again. In the meantime, the budding Saudi-Russian alliance would appear to have taken a significant hit.
IRAN
(16,169 confirmed cases, 988 reported fatalities)
Iran has been hit hard by the coronavirus and has taken drastic measures to prevent its continued spread, including the temporary release of tens of thousands of mostly political prisoners. Tehran has also taken the radical step of requesting a loan from the International Monetary Fund, something it hasn’t done in 60 years. The $5 billion Iran is requesting would significantly increase the country’s ability to battle the pandemic and help stabilize its economy, which is why there’s a decent chance the Trump administration will block it.
While the IMF loan would help, sanctions analyst Tyler Cullis argues that what Iran really needs (and is even less likely to get) is emergency relief from US sanctions:
In normal times, this has tragic consequences for the average Iranian. It is not hyperbole to state that U.S. sanctions since the end of the Bush administration have caused a “lost generation” in Iran, as an entire group of young people, as talented and cosmopolitan as any in the Middle East, have been cut off from the outside world, have had their economic prospects undermined at every turn, and remain stymied from fulfilling their full human and economic potential. As much as those responsible for instituting U.S. sanctions wish to blame Iran for these consequences, the fact is that Iran’s “lost generation” is a consequence of the U.S.’s policy choices, not Iran’s.
But in times like these, where an epidemic has caused Iran to be lit afire with suffering, U.S. sanctions will be a significant added stress for the average Iranian in the days ahead. There is no doubt that Iran’s government failed in its response to the epidemic, but — contrary to what we may have thought not long ago — its response was not so unlike those in the West, including the U.S., which itself appears mere days or weeks from the same tragic circumstances as those that face Iran today. But even if Iran’s government wanted to make the right choices in the days ahead, it is unable to do so, as U.S. sanctions prevent Iran from providing the kind of economic and social safety nets that will become a routinized action for governments around the world. Even if it were a bastion of beneficence, Iran’s government would still remain barred from ensuring the average Iranian — who will face enormous deprivation as the country shutters what remains of its economy — has the economic and social support necessary to sustain day-to-day life.
ASIA
ARMENIA
(52 confirmed cases, no reported fatalities)
The Armenian government on Monday imposed a one month state of emergency. Among its measures: a general school closure, shutting down major public venues, closinig Armenia’s borders with Georgia and Iran, and restrictions on incoming travel.
AFGHANISTAN
(73 confirmed cases, no reported fatalities)
The prospects for Afghan-Taliban peace talks remain slim at this point, as the two sides are still far apart on the issue of a preliminary prisoner release. The Afghan government says it will free 1500 Taliban prisoners, but the Taliban is demanding the release of 5000 prisoners as described in the ceasefire agreement it signed last month with the United States. Kabul is miffed that it wasn’t consulted about that prisoner release and has been unwilling to go that far both to demonstrate independence from Washington and because there’s really no way to insure that those 5000 prisoners wouldn’t simply rejoin the Taliban’s war effort.
PAKISTAN
(236 confirmed cases, 1 reported fatality)
The number of COVID-19 cases has begun to rise alarmingly in Pakistan and really across all of South Asia, which at the latest count collectively has 463 confirmed cases and four deaths. Those figures may be wildly undercounted, as none of the countries in the region has been testing patients at anything close to the necessary frequency and in India especially record keeping when it comes to people dying is not great. A lot of things are unknown about this virus in terms of the conditions in which it thrives, but the density of the population across South Asia and the lack of medical resources makes this a region that could be at major risk of a very serious outbreak.
THAILAND
(177 confirmed cases, 1 reported fatality)
The offices of Thailand’s Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center in Yala province were hit with two bombs on Tuesday. Nobody was killed but 18 people were reportedly wounded in the blasts, which coincided with a government meeting on pandemic response. The SBPAC is responsible for administering Thailand’s majority Malay/Muslim southern provinces, which have been in a low-level uprising since 2004.
INDONESIA
(172 confirmed cases, 7 reported fatalities)
Indonesian President Joko Widodo says his government isn’t yet considering a lockdown despite a surge in reported cases there. Indonesia has closed schools and many businesses are following work-from-home procedures, but that’s about it. Officials are understandably reluctant to kneecap their own economy, but as with South Asia there are serious concerns about the lack of preparation in Southeast Asia, another densely populated region that lacks the healthcare capacity to handle a serious outbreak. Governments in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere have been slow to react to the pandemic (apparently believing that the virus wouldn’t survive a tropical environment) and could be in serious trouble if it really takes off in their countries.
PHILIPPINES
(187 confirmed cases, 14 reported fatalities)
Things have moved a little faster in the Philippines, though that’s raised its own set of problems. President Rodrigo Duterte, who’s inclined to favor martial law anyway, abruptly imposed a form of it over the country’s main island, Luzon, on Monday, placing the island of around 58 million people under strict quarantine. His decision was apparently so abrupt that workers who depend on suspended public transit were left scrambling to find ways to return home and wondering how they were going to make ends meet with the island largely shut down. The quarantine will be in place until April 12 at the earliest.
CHINA
(80,881 confirmed cases, 3226 reported fatalities, 68,869 patients recovered)
I suppose there’s some irony in the fact that in mainland China, where the pandemic began, the big concern has become people entering the country from abroad and bringing the virus with them. That especially includes Chinese nationals, hundreds of thousands of whom have decided to return home where the infection has been contained and where they don’t have to navigate the perils of healthcare shortages and for-profit providers to get medical treatment. The number of new COVID-19 cases entering China is now regularly exceeding the number of new cases developing in China, and officials have begun imposing quarantines on people arriving in the country. Other governments in East Asia are adopting similar policies as this shift in concern from homegrown to imported cases is not just limited to mainland China.
This is not to say that China’s COVID-19 outbreak is nearing an end. Beijing will still have to live with the economic ramifications of the pandemic, which are expected to shrink the Chinese economy by as much as nine percent this quarter. Even once economic activity in China has rebounded, slowdowns overseas will likely reduce demand for Chinese exports.
Meanwhile, in what is definitely a smart use of everybody’s time, the Chinese and US governments are each blaming one another for causing the outbreak. Donald Trump likes to call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” I guess because he thinks it will help distract from his administration’s failures to manage the pandemic, while some Chinese officials are apparently working on a conspiracy theory that has the US bringing the virus to China somehow. This is all very helpful.
Similarly helpful was Beijing’s decision Tuesday to kick out US nationals working for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post within ten days. The expulsion also applies to Hong Kong, which typically sets its own rules about such things. The Chinese move is a retaliation for the Trump administration’s move last month to declare five official Chinese news outlets as agents of the Chinese state, imposing restrictions on their staffing levels in the US.
SOUTH KOREA
(8413 confirmed cases, 84 reported fatalities)
The South Korean government is likewise imposing more restrictions on people coming into the country as it seems to be bringing its domestic outbreak under some control. Seoul’s quick and aggressive response to the pandemic marks it as one of the few countries whose response can be considered successful and contrasts it sharply with the response in other COVID-19 hotspots like Italy, Iran, and—increasingly—the United States.
Part 2 can be found here.