Damascus today looks like a city that survived a war but has not yet escaped it.

The signs are everywhere. Old taxis are held together with strips of duct tape. Police uniforms rarely match. Years of shortages and inadequate medical care have left their mark on the population. Armed patrols remain a common sight in the center of the capital.

But something else is visible too: life is returning.

Electricity is staying on longer. Visitors are beginning to appear again. Businesses are looking toward a country that, after years of sanctions and isolation, suddenly has a chance to reconnect with the outside world.

There is a strange optimism in Damascus, tempered by the feeling that everything could still fall apart.

Damascus Wants Normality

President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has spent much of its time trying to convince Syrians and the outside world that the country is moving on.

The approach has been more pragmatic than many expected. Al-Sharaa has tried to broaden the new government beyond the movement that brought him to power, including minorities and women in state institutions, even when doing so has angered parts of his conservative base.

But the biggest priority is economic. Damascus needs foreign businesses, investment, and tourists. After years of destruction and isolation, the government has few realistic alternatives if it wants to rebuild quickly.

That effort received a major boost this week when the U.S. formally removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, ending a decades-old designation that imposed severe economic restrictions and had remained one of the biggest obstacles to foreign investment.

Al-Sharaa described the decision as the beginning of a new chapter. “Today, Syria shakes off a dark stain and tears away a painful chapter of its past to embark on a path of development, reconstruction, and rebuilding,” he said Tuesday.

The effects were almost immediate. Just two days later, Visa and Mastercard processed their first international card transactions in Syria, reconnecting the country to two of the world’s largest payment networks after decades of financial isolation.

For ordinary Syrians, being able to use an international bank card may seem like a relatively small development compared with rebuilding entire cities. But it is exactly the kind of normality Damascus has been trying to restore. It also sends a much bigger signal to foreign companies: Syria is gradually reconnecting to the global economy.

The economic opening serves another purpose as well. Every foreign company that enters Syria raises, however slightly, the cost of destabilizing it. A Syria filled with international companies and investment carries a different political cost than an isolated country emerging from civil war.

In Damascus, the desire for that return to normality can sometimes be seen in surprisingly small ways.

Tourism police around landmarks such as the Umayyad Mosque or Khan As’ad Pasha Al-Azem eagerly approach the handful of foreign visitors who have returned, asking whether they need assistance. There are not enough tourists yet to keep them particularly busy, but Damascus clearly wants those who do arrive to leave with the impression that Syria is going through a new and open phase following the ouster of Al-Assad.

The improvement in electricity is even more noticeable. Shortly after Assad’s fall, parts of Damascus received barely two hours of power each day. Now the lights stay on longer, businesses can operate later, and evenings no longer disappear completely when the electricity cuts out.

None of this means Syria has recovered. It means recovery has finally become imaginable.

Then Come the Israeli Provocations

That fragile optimism exists alongside another reality. Israel continues to strike Syria.

The latest major confrontation came on August 18, when Israeli aircraft bombed Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib province. Israel said the attack was intended to prevent Türkiye from establishing a new military foothold there.

Damascus disputes that explanation. Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said Syria had already told Israeli officials that the airbase was being rehabilitated for Syrian use and that there were no plans for a permanent Turkish deployment.

U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack later made clear that the strike was not “a miscommunication.” He said Israel had raised concerns with Washington for five days before the attack, while Mossad Director Roman Gofman had opened a back channel with al-Shaibani.

Washington checked the claim with its intelligence agencies. “The answers we got were, ‘No, that’s not happening,’” Barrack said in an interview with Mario Nawfal. He noted that the U.S. knew it “was not the case” that there were Turkish military or military assets on site. Barrack added that Syria had also provided Mossad with information showing there were no Turkish troops, military convoys, or armaments at the airbase.

Israel struck despite those assurances.

Satellite imagery afterward showed several impacts on the runways, although hangars, warehouses, and other structures appeared to remain standing. The physical damage is therefore easier to repair than the message behind it. Syria is trying to rebuild its armed forces with foreign assistance, particularly from Türkiye.

The pressure has not been limited to airstrikes. On Friday night, Israeli forces shelled areas between Beit Jinn and the Red Hills in the western Damascus countryside. Israeli troops also entered the village of Rasm al-Ajraf in southern Quneitra, conducting house-to-house raids. Such incursions have become increasingly common in the Quneitra countryside.

Israel, meanwhile, has made clear that it is prepared to attack when it believes Turkish-Syrian military cooperation could threaten its “freedom of action” over Syria.

For Damascus, that creates a problem with no easy answer. The government wants stability and investment, but it also wants to rebuild the institutions of a functioning state—including its military.

Despite saying Damascus currently does not trust Israel, al-Shaibani has repeatedly stressed that Syria remains open to diplomacy and urged Israel to take advantage of what he called a “historic opportunity.” Washington, he said, is continuing efforts to bring the two sides back to negotiations.

Those talks had already made considerable progress. According to al-Shaibani, Syria and Israel had “agreed on paper to almost everything” earlier this year before the process stalled.

Damascus’ immediate priority, he said, is stopping Israeli attacks. If that can be achieved, broader issues—including peace and the occupied Golan Heights—could eventually be discussed.

A Country Coming Back Together

The Israeli strike came just as Damascus was making progress on another problem that had divided Syria for years. On August 20, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi announced that the Kurdish-led group’s military, security, and administrative institutions had completed their integration into the Syrian state.

The agreement effectively ends the separate power structure that governed much of northeastern Syria during and after the civil war. Government forces have entered Hasakah and Qamishli; Damascus has regained control of important infrastructure, and former SDF personnel have been incorporated into the new security structure.

For Al-Sharaa, bringing the northeast back under Damascus is one of his government’s biggest achievements so far.

One of the largest remaining territories outside government control has been reintegrated without another prolonged war. For Türkiye, meanwhile, the disappearance of an autonomous SDF military structure removes one of Ankara’s biggest concerns in Syria.

Netanyahu Can Bomb, but Syria Keeps Moving

Netanyahu can continue ordering strikes against Syrian military infrastructure. Israel remains overwhelmingly capable of doing so, particularly while Syria’s air defenses remain weak.

But airstrikes cannot determine what Syria becomes. The war with Iran showed the limits of military power: Israel could inflict considerable damage, but it could not dictate the political future of its adversary.

Türkiye’s relationship with Damascus continues to deepen. The northeast has returned to the state. International isolation is easing. Electricity and critical infrastructure are improving. Foreign visitors are returning. Damascus is trying to make itself investable again.

None of those developments guarantees success. The country is still battered. Much of what keeps it functioning is improvised. Nobody looking closely could mistake it for fully repaired.

But it is moving again. And for perhaps the first time in years, the question facing Syria is no longer simply whether the country can survive. It is whether it will be given enough time to recover before somebody tries to break it again.

The August 18 strike hit the airbase in Idlib province, roughly 70 kilometers from the Turkish border. At least eight bombs were dropped on the facility, damaging infrastructure that Syria had recently begun rebuilding. No casualties were reported.

Israel said the operation was meant to prevent Türkiye from establishing a new military foothold in Syria.

Israel repeated that claim on Friday. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a video accusing Türkiye of trying to expand its military presence in Syria closer to Israel and said Israeli intelligence had uncovered plans to deploy Turkish forces at Abu al-Duhur.

Netanyahu’s spokesperson said Israel repeatedly warned Damascus not to allow the deployment before it “delivered the message in another way.”

According to FM al-Shaibani, Israeli officials knew what was happening at Abu al-Duhur before the bombs fell. Syrian officials had explained that the work was intended to restore the airbase for eventual use by Syria’s own air force and that the facility would remain under Syrian control.

“There was no intention to establish a Turkish base there, nor to establish a permanent Turkish military presence or deploy Turkish forces at the site,” al-Shaibani said.

The disagreement over Abu al-Duhur comes as Israel grows increasingly concerned about Türkiye’s expanding military relationship with Syria. Ankara is one of Damascus’ most important security partners since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, providing training and other assistance as President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government rebuilds the Syrian armed forces.

The visible damage appears relatively limited. The runways were hit, but satellite imagery taken the following day showed several structures, including hangars and warehouses, still intact.

What Was Happening at Abu al-Duhur

Abu al-Duhur was heavily damaged during Syria’s civil war and remained largely empty when rehabilitation work began.

Al-Shaibani said the work was limited to repairing facilities so the Syrian Air Force could eventually operate from the base. It had not been fully restored and was not operational when Israel attacked.

Turkish officers had visited Abu al-Duhur several days before the strike, something Damascus does not deny.

But Syrian officials say that visit was part of military cooperation between Ankara and Damascus rather than preparation for a Turkish base. Türkiye has been involved in training and exchanges of military expertise with Syria, while Damascus maintains similar defense relationships with countries including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and Russia.

“There was no Turkish military build-up at the base in any sense that would justify such an interpretation,” al-Shaibani said.

Türkiye’s Defense Ministry also denied that Turkish troops were stationed at the facility.

That did not stop Israel from striking.

U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios that Israel informed the Trump administration that it was acting to prevent a Turkish military buildup at Abu al-Duhur.

Damascus says the opposite was true: Israel understood Syria’s plans for the airbase but chose to attack anyway.

Israel and Syria Were Already Talking

What makes the dispute more significant is that Israel and Syria were already in direct contact in the days before the strike.

Damascus had informed Israeli officials about the work at Abu al-Duhur and stressed that the base would remain Syrian territory under Syrian control, according to al-Shaibani.

There was also contact at a much higher level.

Reuters reported that Mossad chief Roman Gofman spoke by phone with al-Shaibani on August 14, four days before the attack. Three sources familiar with the conversation said Türkiye’s military role in Syria was one of the main subjects discussed.

Israeli questions went beyond Abu al-Duhur. According to the report, Gofman asked about Türkiye’s growing military presence in Syria, weapons transfers, drones, and other forms of assistance being provided to the new Syrian army.

One source described the conversation as centering on “Israeli inquiries about what Türkiye was doing” as it expanded its defense relationship with Damascus.

The call was itself unusual. Direct contact between the head of Mossad and Syria’s foreign minister represents one of the highest-level known exchanges between Israel and the government that replaced Assad.

It also means Israel had a direct channel through which to raise its concerns before resorting to military action. But they still decided to strike and violate Syria’s sovereignty.

A Broader Dispute Over Türkiye’s Role

Abu al-Duhur is only one part of a much larger argument over what Türkiye’s military presence in post-Assad Syria should look like.

Ankara has backed the new government in Damascus and has helped train and rebuild Syrian security forces. For Syria, Turkish assistance offers a way to reconstruct a military hollowed out by more than a decade of civil war and then transformed by the collapse of the former government.

A stronger Syrian military backed by Türkiye could change the balance that emerged after Assad’s fall, when Israel enjoyed broad freedom to strike Syrian military facilities and operate inside Syrian airspace. That freedom became particularly important during the war with Iran, when weakened Syrian radar and air defense networks left Israeli aircraft with relatively little resistance as they crossed Syrian airspace on missions toward Iran.

Israel has therefore drawn increasingly explicit lines around Turkish military activity, particularly the deployment of air defense systems or combat aircraft that could restrict Israeli operations over Syria.

Netanyahu has said Israel will not accept a Turkish military presence in parts of the country it considers important to its security.

Syria has continued to emphasize that military cooperation with Türkiye does not give Israel the right to decide how Syrian bases are rebuilt or who may visit them.

Washington Moves to Contain the Fallout

The strike also created a problem for Washington, which maintains close relations with both Israel and Türkiye while backing the new government in Damascus.

U.S. officials have been trying to prevent Israeli-Turkish competition in Syria from turning into a direct military confrontation.

President Trump said Wednesday that he had been briefed on the Abu al-Duhur attack but declined to say whether that happened before or after Israel carried it out.

Al-Shaibani said he was in contact with the Trump administration both before and after the bombing. Once the strike occurred, Damascus approached Washington and other governments in an effort to prevent additional attacks.

U.S. Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack has described the bombing as an “unnecessary escalation,” while Washington has pushed for a formal mechanism aimed at preventing military incidents involving Israel, Türkiye, and Syria.

For Ankara, the attack was a warning, but Türkiye stopped short of responding militarily. Turkish officials condemned the strike and rejected Israel’s claim that troops were being deployed at Abu al-Duhur.

It should be noted that Türkiye won’t abandon its defense relationship with Damascus, despite the Israeli actions.

Security Talks Continue Despite the Strike

The bombing happened against the backdrop of a separate effort to reduce tensions between Syria and Israel.

Al-Shaibani said the two countries had spent roughly a year in U.S.-mediated negotiations over a security arrangement. Those talks had advanced far enough to produce a written formula, he said, but the agreement was never implemented after Israel withdrew from commitments Damascus believed had already been settled.

Despite Abu al-Duhur, Syria says it remains willing to return to negotiations.

Al-Shaibani said Damascus had taken many Israeli security concerns into account during previous talks but expected Israel to address Syrian concerns in return.

The difficulty now is that the airstrike cuts against the purpose of those negotiations.

Damascus says it communicated directly with Israel, explained what was happening at Abu al-Duhur, and assured Israeli officials that no permanent Turkish deployment was planned. Israel struck the base regardless.

That leaves the dispute no longer centered simply on whether Türkiye was building a base at Abu al-Duhur. The larger question is how much Turkish military involvement in Syria Israel is prepared to tolerate — and how far it is willing to go to stop it.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to occupy the Syrian Golan Heights and parts of southern Syria, which they justify by calling them a “security zone.” Israeli forces continue to conduct patrols into nearby areas along the occupied territory, harrassing locals and establishing illegal temporary checkpoints.

The move closes one of the most consequential chapters of Syria’s civil war. The Syrian Democratic Forces, once Washington’s principal partner against ISIS and the military backbone of an autonomous administration stretching across much of the northeast, will no longer operate as a separate power structure outside Damascus.

“I want to say that the phase of integrating military, security, and administrative institutions into national state institutions is complete and finished,” Abdi said during an event in Qamishli on Thursday.

“From now on, we begin a new phase,” he added. “Our struggle will continue to cement our people’s rights in the constitution.”

Abdi’s announcement comes after months of negotiations and a gradual handover that has already brought Syrian government forces into Hasakah and Qamishli, placed key oil fields and Qamishli airport under Damascus’ control, and absorbed former SDF personnel into the country’s new security architecture.

It also marks the effective end of the political and military autonomy Kurdish forces carved out during the collapse of central authority in northern Syria more than a decade ago.

From Civil War to Kurdish Rule

The Kurdish-led project in northeastern Syria emerged from the upheaval of the civil war, when government forces withdrew from large parts of the predominantly Kurdish north in 2012.

What began as local Kurdish control expanded dramatically with the war against ISIS.

The SDF was established in 2015, bringing Kurdish forces together with Arab and other local factions under a U.S.-backed umbrella. Its Kurdish component became one of the most effective ground forces fighting ISIS, most famously during the battle for Kobani.

Backed by American air power, weapons, intelligence, and special operations forces, the SDF pushed ISIS from vast stretches of territory. By the time the group lost its final territorial stronghold in Syria in 2019, the SDF controlled much of the country’s northeast, including Raqqa, large sections of Deir ez-Zor and Hasakah, major oil and gas fields, and much of Syria’s border with Türkiye and Iraq.

Its political authorities built institutions alongside that military expansion: local councils, security forces, schools, and a separate administration that operated largely independently of Damascus.

At its height, Abdi said the SDF fielded roughly 100,000 fighters.

But its survival was always tied in part to American protection, and its position changed sharply after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in 2024 and the emergence of a new government in Damascus.

The Deal With Damascus

The balance shifted further at the beginning of this year.

Fighting between the SDF and forces loyal to President Ahmed al-Sharaa ended with Kurdish forces losing substantial territory, including their hold over Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. Arab fighters also defected from SDF ranks as Damascus advanced, further weakening the force as it lost control of predominantly Arab areas.

With military pressure mounting and Washington increasingly backing the consolidation of the new Syrian state, negotiations produced an agreement in January between Abdi and Sharaa.

The deal called for the integration of the northeast’s civilian and military structures into the state rather than the preservation of a separate Kurdish administration. Over the following months, government security forces deployed into Hasakah and Qamishli and around Ain al-Arab, better known as Kobani. Damascus also assumed control of Qamishli airport and important oil fields previously held by the SDF.

Former SDF personnel were incorporated into newly formed Syrian army units, with some senior Kurdish commanders receiving positions in the new military hierarchy. Sipan Hamo, one of the most prominent Kurdish military figures, was appointed regional assistant defense minister in March.

A month earlier, Noureddine Ahmed Eissa, a Kurd from Qamishli, was appointed governor of Hasakah.

Abdi’s announcement on Thursday confirmed that the process has now reached its conclusion.

What remains less clear is exactly how the former SDF’s command structure has been broken up and distributed inside the Syrian armed forces. Abdi did not provide details on the mechanism used to integrate either the SDF or the Kurdish internal security forces after months of disagreement over how much organizational cohesion they would retain.

Foreign Kurdish Fighters Leave

Another long-running source of tension has also begun to disappear.

Abdi said Kurdish fighters who traveled to northeastern Syria from Türkiye, Iraq, and Iran during the war have now left the country.

“On our call, our brothers from the other parts of Kurdistan came to help us,” Abdi said. “Thousands of boys and girls of Kurds stood alongside the SDF and protected this region.”

“The forces who helped us have now withdrawn from this region following a call and plan from us,” he added.

Their presence had been particularly contentious for Türkiye, which views the SDF’s dominant Kurdish component, the YPG, as inseparable from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Ankara has repeatedly demanded the dissolution of independent Kurdish armed structures in Syria and insisted that Damascus restore control over the entire country.

The departure of foreign fighters and absorption of SDF forces into Syrian institutions remove two of the most persistent points of dispute between Ankara and the Kurdish authorities.

Washington Changes Course

For the SDF, the transformation also reflects a fundamental change in its relationship with the United States.

Washington helped create the force in 2015 because it needed a capable local partner against ISIS. That partnership survived years of objections from Türkiye, a NATO ally, and gave the SDF the military support it needed to build and defend its territory.

The arrangement became much harder to sustain once the Assad government fell and Washington developed close relations with the new authorities in Damascus.

Rather than preserve a separate U.S.-backed military structure in the northeast, Washington supported an agreement bringing the SDF under the authority of the Syrian state, describing the January deal as “historic.”

More than 5,700 ISIS detainees previously held in Kurdish-controlled facilities were moved to neighboring Iraq with U.S. involvement, reducing Damascus’ dependence on the SDF for managing thousands of prisoners captured during the campaign against the group.

The SDF had spent years warning that an abrupt American withdrawal could leave detention facilities vulnerable and allow ISIS members to escape. The transfers removed part of that risk as the Kurdish military structure was dismantled.

Rights in Exchange for Integration

The end of autonomous institutions has not meant a return to the policies Syrian Kurds faced under previous governments.

For decades, Kurds were subjected to restrictions on their language, culture, and political activity. A controversial 1962 census stripped citizenship from a significant portion of Syria’s Kurdish population, leaving many stateless for generations.

The new government has taken a markedly different approach.

On January 16, Sharaa issued a decree recognizing Kurdish national rights and Kurdish as a national language — an unprecedented step in the Syrian state since independence in 1946.

Kurdish officials have also been brought into the state apparatus, including at senior levels in Hasakah and the military.

That compromise now forms the basis of Abdi’s next political fight.

His remarks in Qamishli on Thursday made clear that while the struggle to maintain separate institutions has ended, Kurdish leaders intend to push for guarantees that survive changes of government in Damascus.

“Our struggle will continue,” Abdi said, “to cement our people’s rights in the constitution.”

The distinction matters. Administrative and military autonomy can be dismantled through an agreement between leaders; constitutional recognition would place Kurdish rights inside the legal framework of the Syrian state.

A New Map of Syria

The integration also brings Damascus closer to something no Syrian government has possessed since the early years of the civil war: effective state authority across nearly the entire country.

The northeast had represented the largest remaining territory governed by institutions outside the central government. Its oil fields gave the region economic importance far beyond its population, while the SDF’s military strength made reunification impossible without either an agreement or another major war.

Damascus ultimately achieved much of that reunification through a combination of battlefield pressure and negotiation.

The agreement strengthens al-Sharaa’s effort to rebuild a unified Syrian state after more than a decade of fragmented rule. For Türkiye, it removes an autonomous Kurdish military structure along its southern border. For Washington, it allows a former counter-ISIS partner to be folded into a government with which the United States now works closely.

For Syria’s Kurds, the outcome is more complicated.

They leave the autonomous era with considerably greater formal recognition than they had before the civil war, but without the independent military and administrative structures that allowed them to govern themselves.

Abdi’s speech in Qamishli acknowledged that reality without presenting it as the end of Kurdish political ambitions.

The SDF’s fight for territory is over. What comes next will be fought inside the institutions and constitution of the Syrian state.

The shift was outlined publicly last week by Major General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figure and adviser to newly appointed IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi.

Speaking on Iranian state television, Naqdi described the changes as a transition from a military posture centered primarily on defending Iranian territory toward an “offensive doctrine” intended to give commanders greater freedom to take the fight to Iran’s adversaries.

“Whenever the conditions are favorable and the order is issued, we must be able to take the operation into enemy territory,” Naqdi said.

The comments provide one of the clearest explanations yet of the thinking accompanying a sweeping series of senior military and national security appointments ordered by Supreme Leader Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei. The changes have elevated veteran IRGC figures who have advocated a harder line in the war, opposed concessions to Washington, and defended Iran’s continued control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

From Defense to Offense

Iran’s military doctrine has historically placed heavy emphasis on deterring an attack and preserving the country’s ability to retaliate after absorbing an initial strike.

That model relied on Iran’s large ballistic missile arsenal, hardened and dispersed military infrastructure, asymmetric naval forces, and a network of allied armed groups across the Middle East.

The war with the United States and Israel appears to have accelerated a reassessment of that approach.

According to Naqdi, Iran’s previous doctrine was “primarily based on defense and the preservation of the country.” Under the emerging strategy, Iranian forces would instead be expected to shift rapidly onto the offensive when battlefield conditions allow.

That does not mean an Iranian attack is imminent. But it would give Tehran more options in a future confrontation, rather than leaving its forces organized primarily around absorbing an initial attack and retaliating afterward.

In practice, that could include faster retaliation and attacks against military infrastructure outside Iran. It may also give commanders greater latitude to act before an adversary has completed its own preparations, although Naqdi did not spell out how far the new doctrine extends toward preemption.

Naqdi is not the only senior IRGC figure publicly signaling such a shift. Yadollah Javani, the Guards’ deputy for political affairs, said Iran’s actions in the war had so far been defensive but warned that this could change.

“The enemy initiated the conflict,” Javani said on state television. “Iran’s actions have a defensive nature, although they may potentially take on an offensive character in the future.”

Javani said Iran’s armed forces had been instructed to adopt “transformative approaches” and would take whatever measures were necessary “at the appropriate time” to defend the country, ensure its security, and neutralize threats.

Javani also framed the confrontation in ideological terms, saying that “God has already closed” the path sought by President Trump and arguing that Iranian resistance had prevented renewed Western domination.

The changes also come after months in which Iranian commanders have had to coordinate missile strikes, air defenses, naval operations, and intelligence simultaneously across Iran and the Persian Gulf.

Tehran Rebuilds Its Command Structure

The doctrinal shift is being accompanied by a broader reorganization of Iran’s military leadership.

Among the most significant changes is the integration of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters into the Armed Forces General Staff.

Khatam al-Anbiya has functioned as the operational nerve center coordinating Iran’s major military campaigns. The General Staff, meanwhile, oversees broader strategy across the IRGC and the conventional Artesh.

“This move will certainly increase the speed of work and will help to implement the same offensive doctrine,” Naqdi said.

Naqdi also cited the need to integrate battlefield information in real time to improve coordination between conventional forces and the IRGC’s missile, drone and naval arms.

Hardliners Rise

Veteran former IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaee has been elevated to lead the Supreme National Security Council. Rezaee commanded the Revolutionary Guards from 1981 to 1997, including through most of the Iran-Iraq War, and is now back at the center of national security decision-making.

More consequential for military operations is the formal appointment of Ahmad Vahidi as commander of the IRGC.

Vahidi has emerged as one of the strongest advocates of continuing military pressure rather than accepting an unfavorable settlement.

He has repeatedly called for retaliation over the killing of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who died during the opening wave of Israeli strikes at the end of February, and has opposed ending the war without Iranian conditions being met.

Vahidi has repeatedly insisted the future of the Strait of Hormuz is tied directly to American actions, vowing that Iran would maintain its restrictions on the strategic waterway “as long as the United States continues to conduct hostile actions.”

Preparing for a Long Missile War

Much of Iran’s ability to sustain another round will depend on its ballistic missile arsenal.

Naqdi claimed that Iranian missile production is continuing at a rate “much greater” than the number of missiles being expended in combat.

“Even if the war continues for years, we’ll be firing missiles at the enemy to the very end,” Naqdi said.

He argued that Iran’s geographic size gives its missile industry considerable resilience, allowing production to be distributed across hundreds of existing or potential locations.

Iran has spent decades dispersing elements of its missile infrastructure, including through underground facilities and geographically separated production and storage sites, making it more difficult for attacks on individual factories or launch complexes to cripple the broader force.

That dispersal has complicated the U.S.-Israeli effort to suppress Iran’s missile force. Despite repeated strikes on production sites, launch facilities, and underground complexes, Iranian forces have continued launching missiles throughout the war.

Naqdi went further, suggesting that production is sufficiently high that Iran could potentially continue supplying missiles abroad while sustaining its own wartime requirements.

Whether Iran can actually sustain that production rate is another question. But Tehran is signaling to Washington and Israel that waiting for its missile stocks to run dry will not end the war. Attrition also cuts both ways.

Reuters has reported that the U.S. Army has used “virtually all” of the highly accurate land-based long-range missiles allocated to the Iran war, while CNN reported that the U.S. military had depleted nearly 80% of its THAAD interceptors and roughly half of its Patriot interceptor stocks compared with pre-war levels.

That creates an attritional problem for both sides. Iran does not have to overwhelm U.S. and Israeli defenses in every exchange to impose costs if it can keep producing missiles while forcing its adversaries to burn through expensive interceptors.

War Consolidates the IRGC’s Position

The war has also strengthened the IRGC’s already dominant position within Iran’s security establishment.

Its reach extends well beyond the battlefield. The Guards oversee major missile and drone capabilities, command their own naval forces in the Persian Gulf, maintain extensive intelligence operations, and wield considerable economic and political influence. The latest appointments put IRGC veterans even closer to the center of national security decision-making.

That matters for an offensive doctrine. The Guards have decades of experience operating beyond Iran’s borders, even if much of that was historically conducted through regional allies rather than direct Iranian military action.

Commanders are now describing a force expected to identify opportunities and conduct operations beyond Iranian territory rather than relying solely on the threat of retaliation.

Hormuz at the Center of the Strategy

The Strait of Hormuz remains one of Tehran’s most powerful instruments in that strategy.

Iran has repeatedly linked access to the waterway to the broader war with Washington, rejecting American claims that commercial traffic can simply return to normal regardless of Tehran’s position.

Despite U.S. claims that the strait is open, shipping data and continuing attacks suggest that traffic has not returned to anything resembling its pre-war pattern. Iran retains considerable leverage over traffic through the waterway and has continued threatening or attacking vessels it considers to be violating its restrictions, including with missiles and drones, despite the pause in wider fighting.

U.S. forces have meanwhile redirected, boarded, and struck vessels bound for Iranian ports. The maritime confrontation has therefore continued even during periods of reduced fighting elsewhere, with attacks by both sides causing casualties among civilian crews.

Hormuz also allows Tehran to spread the economic costs of the war far beyond the countries directly involved. Restrictions on shipping can pressure governments like Washington thousands of miles from the battlefield, making the Persian Gulf more than simply a defensive perimeter around Iran.

Preparing for the Next Round

Iran’s military overhaul comes at a moment when diplomacy and continued warfare remain possible outcomes.

Even if negotiations produce another ceasefire or political arrangement, Tehran’s latest decisions suggest its leadership does not expect the underlying confrontation to disappear.

For decades, Iran built much of its deterrence around surviving the first blow and ensuring that an attacker would face retaliation afterward.

Statements from senior IRGC officials now point toward a different calculation.

The next time Tehran believes war is unavoidable and conditions favor it, Iran’s leadership wants its military prepared to carry the fight beyond its borders rather than simply absorb the opening blow.

The ruling is unprecedented. No party that had already been registered for a federal election in Russia had previously been removed from the ballot this way. Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov pointed that out in court, saying the plaintiffs had not cited any legal precedent for such a move. Rybakov said the party would appeal within the five-day window. He described the case as retaliation for Yabloko’s opposition to the authorities and its defense of residents.

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It was also controversial for several key reasons. For one, Rodina argued that information generated by AI could itself raise copyright issues. One of its complaints concerned images that Yabloko said had been generated using ChatGPT. The plaintiff argued that publishing them infringed the rights of OpenAI. That argument raises a much broader question about how Russian copyright law applies to AI-generated material, particularly when it is used in political campaigning. In practice, it could open a much bigger can of worms.

The defense argued that making such a radical decision about the legal status of AI-generated content would establish a dangerous precedent, given the wide range of applications for AI, from medical uses to music generation. As the defense outlined, if courts were to treat AI-generated works as belonging to the company that owns the underlying AI model, this could have far-reaching and potentially dangerous consequences.

Rybakov also challenged the broader logic behind the copyright claims. He argued that if permission were required every time someone else’s work appeared in publicly broadcast material, ordinary live broadcasts from museums or art galleries could become impossible. Broadcasters would potentially have to obtain permission for every artwork that happened to appear on camera.

To illustrate the point, Rybakov showed the court a hand-drawn mosaic of a pigeon. His argument was that, taken to its logical conclusion, the interpretation of copyright law being put forward by the plaintiff could mean that a broadcaster streaming live footage could face a takedown simply because the mosaic happened to appear in the frame.

How it got here

Rodina filed its lawsuit on August 7. It argued that Yabloko candidates had received money from abroad. Election officials supported the claim in court with data from Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial-crimes watchdog, showing transfers to several candidates. However, Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov rejected the allegations. According to him, the 16,900 rubles in question were transferred to the electoral account by Russian citizens residing abroad, specifically in Armenia and Azerbaijan. This is reflected in Rosfinmonitoring’s own report and does not constitute a violation of the law.

Rodina leader and State Duma deputy Alexei Zhuravlev also criticized Yabloko for not having candidates who had visited the frontline in Ukraine. He accused party members of working for the West during a heated debate at the CEC on July 29.

Less than two weeks earlier, on July 29, Russia’s Central Election Commission had registered Yabloko’s federal list. A ballot lottery gave the party the number two slot, directly behind United Russia.

A party gaining attention as war fatigue grows

Yabloko’s removal came after a period of rapid growth in its public profile.

Mentions of the party on Russian social media more than doubled in one week in late July, rising from 2,056 to 4,730 and generating more than 11.5 million views. By early August, Yabloko’s Telegram channel had become the largest among Russian political parties, with just over 107,000 subscribers. New People had about 97,000 and United Russia 48,000, according to 7x7.

Researchers with the Atlas of Elections project found that engagement with Yabloko-related posts increased about 4.5 times over a two-week period. That put the party ahead of A Just Russia in raw engagement, although United Russia and New People still had more.

Polling from state pollster VCIOM put Yabloko’s baseline electoral rating at 3% in March 2026, unchanged from the previous year. But 15% of respondents said they could imagine voting for the party, which has campaigned for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations.

Other polling suggests that attitudes toward the war have also shifted.

A July 2026 Levada survey released on August 7 found public confidence in the war at its lowest level since 2022. Only 8% of respondents described the campaign as “very successful.” The overall share calling it “successful” fell to 34%, also a four-and-a-half-year low. About 28% described the war as unsuccessful in some form.

Another question in the same survey asked respondents what they remembered most from the previous four weeks. Drone raids and “terrorist attacks” came first, at 17%. Domestic fuel shortages and rising prices followed at 13%, while strikes on Wildberries warehouses accounted for 10%. Refinery strikes were mentioned separately by 2%. Levada’s own summary puts the three types of drone-related incidents at 27% combined.

Only 6% mentioned the war in general terms, and just 1% mentioned specific military “successes.” Twenty percent said nothing in particular stood out, while 18% said they found the question difficult to answer.

Parliamentary parties turn against Yabloko

Russia’s parliamentary parties, often described as the “systemic opposition” because they broadly align with the Kremlin on major issues such as foreign policy and national security, mostly criticized Yabloko rather than defending it.

A Just Russia leader, Sergei Mironov, called on August 6 for Yabloko to be removed from the race. He accused the party of spreading “anti-Russian ideas” and asked the Justice Ministry and Prosecutor General’s Office to review its activities. He also accused Yabloko’s leadership of supporting people designated as “foreign agents.”

LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky condemned Yabloko that same evening and suggested designating it an “undesirable organization.” Sergei Malinkovich, head of the smaller Communists of Russia party, said Yabloko should either leave the race or adopt a “patriotic agenda.” The Russian Pensioners’ Party for Social Justice also criticized the party.

The Kremlin also dismissed Yabloko’s importance. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not consider it a “full-fledged” political force. In a later comment to the Washington Post, he went further and said he would not even call it a party but a “cell.”

A split among Kremlin critics abroad

Russia’s exiled opposition did not agree on how to respond.

Despite the longstanding feud between Yabloko and Navalny’s movement, including Navalny’s expulsion from Yabloko and repeated clashes between the two sides, Yulia Navalnaya released a video calling for support for Yabloko. She argued that this was the right moment for opposition groups that had spent years fighting one another to put their differences aside.

Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Lyubov Sobol, Maxim Reznik, and Oleg Orlov were among those who also backed Yabloko. Kara-Murza said it could be the broadest coalition of the Russian democratic opposition since 2011, or possibly since 1990.

Others refused to support the party.

The Forum of Free Russia, a Vilnius-based platform co-founded by Garry Kasparov, rejected the call to vote for Yabloko and maintained its boycott position. It described the September election as a Kremlin-managed spectacle designed to legitimize the war and Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory.

There were also reactions from Russian units fighting alongside Ukraine.

The press service of the Freedom of Russia Legion told SOTA that it respected Yabloko’s anti-war position and its calls for a ceasefire, provided that responsibility for starting the war was placed on the Russian state. The Legion said it would not lay down its arms until Russian troops had fully withdrawn from Ukraine and the current government in Moscow had been replaced.

The Russian Volunteer Corps, another Russia-linked unit fighting alongside Ukraine, took a different position. Its leader dismissed Yabloko’s supporters as being out of touch with the rest of the country, according to the same SOTA report. On his personal Telegram channel, Denis Kapustin, the founder of the RVC, also attacked Navalnaya and other members of the Russian opposition for promoting protest voting, calling the strategy a “superweapon” and describing the Russian opposition, including the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Ilya Yashin, as a “diagnosis.”

What happens now?

Yabloko says it will appeal the ruling. Rybakov has promised to do “everything possible” to keep the party on the ballot.

The ruling is unlikely to cause major upheavals in Russian society. But it is significant as a sign that anti-war sentiment remains a concern for the Kremlin, which appears increasingly determined to prevent it from developing into organized political opposition.

His politics moved in one direction for most of his life, then reversed. Liberalism first, then Marxism-Leninism in high school, before a slower shift toward libertarian socialism and anarchism as an adult — a trajectory he says was less abandoned than completed once he arrived in northern Iraq and encountered the ideology of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdish liberation movement, firsthand.

He joined the Yekîneyên Berxwedana Şengalê — the Sinjar Resistance Units, or YBŞ — an armed Yazidi group that traces its founding to the 2014 siege of Mount Sinjar, when Islamic State fighters surrounded tens of thousands of Yazidis with the stated intent to kill or enslave them. His year with the group placed him inside a live, low-intensity, three-sided conflict — against Turkish drones, Iraqi federal forces, and Iran-aligned militias — that most Western readers only encounter as wire-service casualty counts.

A note before any of it: this account leans harder on refusal than most interviews of its kind. A recurring pattern in the exchange below of the interview’s thirty-five direct questions, eight drew some version of “I cannot answer this” or “I can’t say” — either outright or as a partial refusal within an otherwise answered question — usually for stated security reasons, sometimes without explanation. That pattern is worth treating as data in its own right rather than skipping past. Where a claim can be checked against named public reporting, this piece checks it and says who did the reporting. Where it rests on him alone — his own role, his own reasoning, a friend’s story — that is marked too and not weighted.

Rejecting the Vanguard

Asked what specifically drove him from Marxism-Leninism, he goes to the theory rather than to any single disillusioning event. Marx treated the state as an instrument of class rule, he explains — the bourgeoisie’s under capitalism, the proletariat’s under socialism — and the trouble is what that logic requires in practice: an authoritarian transitional state built to abolish itself. He credits Bakunin, Marx’s great 19th-century rival, with calling the outcome in advance — that installing a new ruling class to represent the working class simply produces a new ruling class — and points to the Soviet Union’s own late-stage leadership, more interested in preserving privilege than building socialism, as the prediction validated.

Democratic confederalism, the model Öcalan developed from prison and the one the YBŞ formally follows, is his answer to that failure mode: hyper-local self-governance, a central authority reduced to defense and trade, and — in his account — no single office or body powerful enough to be worth seizing. “No single person or group could seize absolute power,” he said, “because absolute power in the form of a single all-powerful senate or presidency does not exist for them to seize.”

This is where the piece owes him a real counterargument rather than a pass, because the vanguard question is exactly what a serious literature on the PKK and its sister movements has spent two decades arguing about. Writing in Mediterranean Politics, political scientist Marlies Casier and others have made the case that the PKK-aligned party structure in Rojava — the same organizational family the YBŞ belongs to — functions in practice as tightly disciplined, single-party rule with little room for rival Kurdish factions, and have described the reverence around Öcalan inside the movement in terms borrowed explicitly from Stalinist personality cults. That is a direct rebuttal to his claim that no one could seize power: critics aren’t arguing that a president could seize the state, they’re arguing that a single imprisoned theorist and the party built around his writings already function as the thing democratic confederalism claims to have made structurally impossible.

His own framework has an answer to this, even if he didn’t raise it unprompted: democratic confederalists distinguish between ideological authority and administrative power, arguing that Öcalan’s influence runs through persuasion and writings that any local council is free to disregard, not through appointive power over cadres or budgets — the mechanism Casier’s critique actually targets. That distinction is real in theory. Whether it holds in practice is precisely the empirical question Casier’s fieldwork was built to test, and this piece has no independent basis for adjudicating it beyond noting that both claims can’t be fully right at once.

Sinjar, Not Qandil

He is careful to draw a line between the YBŞ and the PKK proper — related, not identical. “I cannot answer this question in full,” he said when asked directly whether he received ideological training from PKK cadres, but he was willing to describe the group’s origin: during the 2014 genocide, a small contingent of PKK cadres reached the Sinjar mountains to help organize and educate the besieged Yazidi population, forming the nucleus of what became the YBŞ. “The YBŞ today is an independent organization that shares the same goals and ideology of the PKK,” he said, “due to the influence of those who came to help the Yazidi people in their time of need.”

Public reporting complicates the founding-moment version of this story, though not necessarily the substance of his answer. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in 2007 that Yazidi leaders had organized a self-defense group they called the Malik al-Tawus Troop — “a troop of the brave and faithful from the Yazidi clan”, as one of its founders put it at the time — in response to a wave of bombings targeting religious minorities that year, seven years before the Sinjar siege. YPG Anas Hani’s 2014 reporting on the group’s training adds that hundreds of Yazidi recruits went through instruction under People’s Protection Units (YPG) officers at a base in Qamishli, across the border in Syria, before being sent back to the mountains. The 2014 siege was a rebranding and a massive expansion of an existing structure, not quite the founding moment his account implies. It’s a fine distinction, and one a fighter who arrived a decade later would have no particular reason to know in detail — but it’s a correction the piece owes the record rather than passing along uncorrected.

On language, at least, he offers no refusals. International volunteers aren’t expected to speak Kurdish on arrival, he said, but are expected to pick up functional Kurmanji quickly — helped along by isolation from cell phones in the group’s cave networks and by Kurds he calls unusually eager to bridge the language gap. Google Translate handles Kurdish poorly, in his experience; Arabic and Turkish translate better and are more commonly spoken regionally, so those became his fallback.

Three Fronts

Asked to rank his side’s adversaries — Iranian-backed militias, the Iraqi state, and Türkiye — he named the Iraqi state as the more immediate daily threat, with Turkish drones as the more constant background presence. “They are constantly patrolling the skies,” he said of the Turkish air campaign, describing recon drones as a near-daily fact of life and the group’s main defense as simply staying under cover — caves, and limiting movement whenever drones were overhead. Counter-drone capability, he admitted, is limited. He described one moment of real unease: an FPV drone over him near the international volunteers’ base, which he heard rather than saw and, in the moment, couldn’t place among the three rival forces in the area. When asked how he’d distinguish between them, he settled on an answer: given the short range of FPV drones, he now believes it was the Iraqi army.

He cited an October 2024 drone strike and a 2025 clash with the Iraqi army as events “detailed online,” and both are indeed on the public record — though the record reads rougher than his framing of “relatively limited” casualties on both. Medya News reported that six YBŞ fighters were killed and four wounded in Turkish airstrikes on Sinjar on October 24 and 25, 2024, the same window he was arriving in the country. On the Iraqi army clash, Kurdistan24 and PKK-aligned outlets reported a confrontation in central Sinjar in mid-March 2025 that left three YBŞ fighters and roughly five Iraqi soldiers and police wounded, followed by the arrest and detention of five YBŞ members and a 24-hour ultimatum from the group demanding their release; a negotiated Iraqi army withdrawal from the town center followed about a week later. His account — “they killed and captured a few of our guys, but after a few days a ceasefire was agreed to” — diverges from the contemporaneous coverage on one specific point: that reporting describes detentions and injuries on the YBŞ side in that particular round, not deaths.

On the Iraqi army generally, he was more expansive than careful, describing an institution he considers hollow: well-equipped but lacking the ideological will to sustain an assault, prone to disengaging once actual fighting starts, standing in for a state he calls essentially a holding company for tribes and sects stitched together by Ottoman collapse.

Jineology, in Theory and Practice

The YBŞ’s sister organization, the YJŞ — the Sinjar Women’s Units — handles the group’s female combatants entirely; by his account the YBŞ itself remains all-male, with the two organizations coordinating as equals rather than one subordinating the other. This structure follows from jineology, the strand of Öcalan’s thought that treats women’s full autonomy — not merely legal equality — as inseparable from the broader liberation project. “Beyond simply passing laws which grant women legal equality while society denies them equality and freedom de facto,” as he put it.

Concrete practice, by his description, includes shared cooking and cleaning duties regardless of gender and, in one town — Khanasor, which he named directly — a co-leadership model with one male and one female official of equal standing. He was careful to note the limits of his own visibility here: he spent little time in civil administration and said plainly he isn’t the best source on how leadership selection actually works in that town.

On reception among Yazidis themselves, he was unusually candid for an interview otherwise built around ideological confidence: “the unfortunate answer is not very.” The YBŞ is broadly respected for its record against ISIS, he said, but a clan-based social structure with limited individual autonomy — particularly for young women expected to marry early — has proven resistant to reform. He did not frame this as a contradiction so much as a slow, incomplete project: “progress is certainly being made, but it is slow.”

The Designation Gap

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, has been designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department since 1997 — a matter of public record. The YBŞ itself carries no separate U.S. designation, which is the distinction his answer rests on: he maintains that joining the YBŞ, as opposed to the PKK directly, does not constitute material support for a designated group under U.S. law, and says he was open with the State Department and FBI about his service on returning home without facing charges.

There is at least one named, public precedent for that outcome. Brace Belden, an American who served with the YBŞ’s parent organization the YPG from 2016 to 2017, was stopped and questioned by border officials on his return to San Francisco in April 2017 and was later profiled — along with several other returning American volunteers — in a leaked 2019 Department of Homeland Security intelligence report examining possible links between Kurdish-militia veterans and domestic protest movements. No material-support charges followed. That is one case, not a pattern, and it involved the YPG rather than the YBŞ specifically — so it corroborates the shape of his claim without confirming his own debrief, which this piece has no independent way to verify beyond his account of it.

Öcalan’s own biography sits in the background of all of this, and it is unusually well documented for a figure this present in the interview: captured in Nairobi in February 1999 in an operation Turkish intelligence carried out with reported assistance from U.S. and Israeli agencies, sentenced to death, then to life imprisonment after Türkiye abolished capital punishment, and held ever since on İmralı Island — the origin point, from a prison cell, of the ideology the fighter now describes as central to his own politics. The subject’s own description of this history is accurate as far as it goes; he simply says less about the U.S. and Israeli role than the wider historical record does.

After Şengal

Asked where he expects democratic confederalism to spread next, he pointed to Iran — “due to the widespread unpopularity of the Islamic Republic amongst the peoples of Iran” — while noting, in a detail that cuts against his own side’s recent interests, that the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign against Iran earlier this year had the paradoxical effect of stabilizing the regime by giving it an external enemy to rally against. He expects the same erosion of legitimacy that produced Rojava in Syria to eventually produce a “free Rojhilat” — a free Iranian Kurdistan — once, in his words, “the bombs stop falling” and the Islamic Republic’s own repression reasserts itself as the more visible enemy. His larger worry is less about toppling the Islamic Republic than about what replaces it: a scenario in which the ayatollahs are swapped for a Persian-nationalist state that continues repressing Iran’s Kurdish and other minorities under a different flag.

His own future is deliberately unresolved in the interview, and for reasons that are at least partly checkable: he says he cannot safely return to Iraq, Syria, or Türkiye, and cannot enter Iran at all as a U.S. passport holder — a real, standing restriction, not a rhetorical one. He describes his time with the YBŞ as most likely over permanently, and downplays his own importance to whatever comes next: “I doubt being a political agitator is in the cards for me. I’m not very charismatic or a particularly great organizer.” What he offers instead is closer to testimony than advocacy — pointing anyone interested toward Öcalan’s own shorter pamphlets rather than his denser theoretical writing, and mentioning, almost as an aside, an Antifascist International Front organized in Myanmar by a former YPG fighter, fighting the military junta there under a similar banner.

What This Account Can and Can’t Establish

Add up the refusals, and this interview tells you two different things at once. The operational picture — how he got to Sinjar, what he personally did there, what weapons and ammunition moved through the group, how many foreign fighters serve there now — is close to a blank, and by his own repeated choice rather than this piece’s reluctance to ask. What remains fully intact is the ideological and social picture: why he left Marxism-Leninism, what daily life in a communal Yazidi resistance unit looks like how Jineology functions as lived practice rather than doctrine and how a small multiethnic force understands its own war against three separate states at once.

That second picture is worth taking seriously even though — and in some ways because — the first one is withheld. A man willing to describe communal cooking rotations while declining to say how he crossed into Syria or Iraq in the first place is drawing a line he clearly considers important. Reading his account means respecting where he drew it, not filling in the blank on his behalf.

The Sudanese Armed Forces have recaptured the strategic border city of Kurmuk in Blue Nile State, ending more than three months of control by the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies.

The operation began at dawn on Wednesday as Sudanese military units advanced from multiple directions under heavy artillery and air support, targeting RSF defensive positions inside the city and along its outskirts.

Within hours, government troops had entered Kurmuk and begun street-by-street clearing operations.

RSF fighters and allied forces from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM–N) faction led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu subsequently withdrew from the city. Some retreated south toward Yabus, while others reportedly crossed the border into Ethiopia. Sudanese forces seized abandoned vehicles, weapons, and ammunition before deploying troops around Kurmuk to prevent a counterattack.

The victory ends an RSF occupation that began on March 24 and removes one of the group’s most important positions in southeastern Sudan.

A Strategic Gateway in Blue Nile

Kurmuk’s importance extends far beyond its position on the Ethiopian border.

The city sits along a major supply corridor from Ethiopia and had become a base for RSF and SPLM-N operations across southern Blue Nile. Its location also places it within reach of Damazin, the Blue Nile state capital, and the strategically important Roseires Dam, which supplies electricity to large parts of Sudan and supports major agricultural irrigation projects.

The RSF’s capture of Kurmuk in March raised fears that the group was attempting to establish a new eastern front after concentrating much of its military strength in Darfur and Kordofan.

The offensive also highlighted the growing military importance of Hemedti’s alliance with al-Hilu’s SPLM-N faction, which has long operated in parts of Blue Nile and South Kordofan. Thousands of fighters reportedly entered southeastern Blue Nile during the March offensive, advancing toward Kurmuk following weeks of military operations and drone strikes.

The city’s fall forced the Sudanese military to rapidly strengthen defensive positions around Damazin and the Roseires Dam.

Three-Stage Operation to Retake Kurmuk

According to military sources cited by Mada Masr, preparations to retake Kurmuk began almost immediately after the city fell.

The army initially focused on halting the RSF advance rather than launching a direct counteroffensive. Engineering and combat units reinforced positions along the southern and eastern approaches to Damazin while securing roads leading toward the Roseires Dam.

At the same time, Sudan’s air force launched repeated strikes against RSF supply routes, military vehicles, and logistical movements along the Kurmuk-Geisan road and near the Ethiopian border.

The military then shifted toward isolating RSF forces inside Kurmuk.

Ground troops gradually captured surrounding positions, including Khor al-Baraka, before advancing toward Sarkam and Magagga, described by one military source as Kurmuk’s outer defensive belt. Artillery and airstrikes targeted command centers, ammunition depots, and heavy equipment in an effort to restrict the RSF’s ability to maneuver or receive reinforcements.

The final phase began Wednesday morning with simultaneous ground advances from the south and west.

Under artillery and air cover, Sudanese troops breached the city’s defensive lines and entered Kurmuk, forcing RSF and SPLM-N fighters to withdraw.

The battle has also drawn renewed attention to the role of Sudan’s neighbors in the conflict.

Kurmuk’s proximity to Ethiopia made the city a strategically important logistical hub, as RSF supplies and reinforcements had moved through routes connected to Ethiopian territory.

Some withdrawing RSF fighters also reportedly crossed into Ethiopia following Wednesday’s assault. The claims have fueled longstanding suspicions inside Sudan over external logistical support for the RSF and allied armed groups.

Reports of South Sudanese and Ethiopian fighters operating alongside the RSF have circulated throughout the war, although the governments in Addis Ababa and Juba have publicly expressed neutrality or support for Sudanese stability.

Ethiopia has played an influential role in Sudanese politics since the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and previously helped mediate the country’s transitional political arrangements. Relations have since become increasingly complicated by border disputes, regional political rivalries, and disagreements over Sudan’s post-Bashir political order.

The battle for Kurmuk has consequently highlighted a broader strategic problem for the Sudanese government: securing a vast frontier while fighting the RSF across several distant fronts.

Nearly 100,000 Displaced

Although the military battle for Kurmuk has ended for now, Blue Nile authorities say the humanitarian consequences will be far more difficult to resolve.

“The military victory in Kurmuk places us now before the greater and more complex challenge: addressing the costly humanitarian toll left by the conflict,” a senior regional government official told Mada Masr.

Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced across Blue Nile since fighting intensified in late March, with most fleeing communities in the Kurmuk locality. Women, children, and elderly residents are now scattered across overcrowded camps, temporary shelters, and makeshift settlements throughout the state.

Around Damazin, tens of thousands of displaced families are living in and around the Karama camps, where existing facilities have exceeded capacity. Many families have established tents on low-lying ground surrounding the camps, creating further risks as Sudan’s rainy season intensifies.

The rain has also made humanitarian deliveries increasingly difficult and restricted access to healthcare.

Kurmuk Remains Unfit for Return

The recapture of Kurmuk does not mean residents can immediately return.

Assessments conducted after the fighting found extensive damage to electricity facilities, water networks, pumping stations, hospitals, and health centers. Neighborhoods also remain contaminated by landmines, unexploded ordnance, and other explosive remnants of war.

Blue Nile authorities have developed a phased plan to reopen the city. Military engineering units will first clear residential areas and key infrastructure. Emergency teams will then begin restoring drinking water, electricity, and basic healthcare services. The immediate objective is to restore safe water supplies and reopen at least one primary healthcare facility. Only after neighborhoods are declared secure will displaced residents be allowed to return in organized convoys overseen by local authorities and tribal leaders.

Officials acknowledge, however, that available humanitarian resources remain far below what is required.

Fighting Continues Across Sudan

The recapture of Kurmuk comes as Sudan’s military attempts to maintain pressure on the RSF across several fronts.

In North Kordofan, repeated RSF drone attacks have contributed to fuel and water shortages in Obeid, while a cholera outbreak near Bara is placing additional pressure on an already overstretched health system.

Farther west, the military’s recent capture of Kulbus in West Darfur has triggered a new RSF buildup near the Chadian border. RSF reinforcements, including allied tribal fighters, have reportedly moved from Nyala, El Fasher, and fronts in Kordofan toward the area as the group attempts to recover the strategic logistical hub.

The buildup has prompted civilians to flee across the border into Chad amid fears of renewed fighting. In North Darfur’s Ambro locality, RSF forces have also continued operations along supply routes connected to Chad and Libya.

Local emergency officials estimate that more than 40,000 people have been displaced in the area since June.

A Major Victory, but the War Is Far From Over

For Sudan’s military, retaking Kurmuk removes a significant threat to Blue Nile and frustrates an RSF attempt to expand the war toward the country’s eastern and central regions.

The victory also allows the army to maintain greater focus on operations in Kordofan and Darfur, where some of the war’s most important battles are now unfolding.

However, RSF and SPLM-N forces continue to control Yabus in the far south of Blue Nile and the Olo area in Bao locality. Further military operations may also slow as the rainy season makes movement increasingly difficult across a region with few paved roads.

Kurmuk therefore represents an important battlefield victory, but the battle has also exposed the wider challenge facing Sudan: securing its borders, preventing new external supply routes from emerging, and rebuilding communities devastated by more than three years of war.

For the tens of thousands who fled Kurmuk, retaking the city was the military objective. Making it safe enough for them to return may prove to be the longer struggle.

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For years, he followed the Syrian war from afar, translating reports from the Idlib front and closely monitoring developments across northern Syria. In 2019, however, he crossed the line from observer to participant.

He arrived in Syria as a medic, but the realities of the battlefield quickly pulled him into combat roles.

“In the first year, I wanted to participate in the clashes because the field was very fast,” he recalled. “When the war stopped in February 2020, I took the sniper course.”

Initially attached to foreign Turkish fighters operating in Idlib, he worked alongside members of the Imam Shafi Battalion, a largely Turkish-speaking formation that specialized in sniper operations and anti-armor weapons.

“When the war slowed down in 2020, I took a sniper course,” he recalled. “Most Turks in the field were snipers back then.”

That decision would shape the rest of his time in Syria.

Inside HTS: From Medic to Marksman

The Imam Shafi Battalion operated semi-independently but maintained connections with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the dominant armed force in northwestern Syria. He says those links eventually led him to join HTS’s Omar bin Khattab Brigade.

According to him, recruits completed a month of religious instruction followed by a month of military training before being assigned to combat roles. He was then posted as a sniper in western Aleppo.

Over time, he rose through the ranks, first commanding a squad and later a platoon. His units operated along some of the most active frontlines west of Aleppo, including the Kafr Taal, Atareb, and Kafr Nuran sectors.

In his telling, HTS differed from many Syrian opposition factions because of its emphasis on training and internal discipline. “Both religious education and specialist military training became mandatory,” he said, adding, “There were no exceptions, even for brigade commanders.”

Two Years in the Making

By his telling, the offensive that toppled Aleppo — and eventually Assad himself — was not the sudden collapse it appeared to be from the outside. It was the product of a planning cycle stretching back to late 2022, disguised for most of its life as routine defensive posturing.

Reconnaissance tours ran every month or two, he said, each one probing a different sector along the western Aleppo line. Troops were rotated forward in small increments — a pattern repeated, by his estimate, roughly ten times over two years — until the buildup itself became camouflage.

“Even mid-level commanders and soldiers thought that the operation was only a defensive build-up,” he said. Only in the final days did the signature of something larger emerge — phones confiscated across the ranks, a security precaution that told veteran fighters this alert would not end, as the others had, with a week on the line and a quiet return home.

Even the machinery of governance, he claims, was rehearsed in advance rather than improvised after the fact — a lesson carried over from HTS’s earlier administration of Afrin. He would not detail the specifics — no ledger of pre-selected governors or judges — but insisted the planning for Aleppo’s civil administration was as deliberate as the planning for its capture. None of this — the ten recon tours, the two-year timeline, the phone confiscation — appears in outside reporting in this level of detail; it is included because it is plausible and consistent with the broader picture of a planned rather than improvised offensive, not because it has been independently confirmed.

Ankara’s Reluctant Hand

If the operation’s internal logic was disciplined, its external politics were anything but settled. Turkish intelligence, by the fighter’s account, actively opposed the launch — not out of hostility to HTS, but out of fear of what failure would cost.

“They were afraid that Idlib would become a second Gaza,” he said.

The warnings reportedly came from the top. Months before the offensive, President Erdoğan had placed a call to Assad, floating renewed negotiations. When the operation nonetheless moved forward, Turkish intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın is said to have phoned HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa — known then as Mohammad al-Julani — directly, delivering an ultimatum stripped of ambiguity: stop the operation, because “if you fail, we cannot help.”

HTS went ahead regardless. What followed was less a green light than a retroactive one, extended in stages as the battlefield made the decision for Ankara. Support hardened after Aleppo fell, hardened further once Hama followed, and became unequivocal — full backing, in his words — once the offensive’s momentum made retreat costlier than continuation.

“When the attack began, they had to help,” he said. “Because if the operation failed, the entire region could collapse.”

Türkiye’s practical contribution, once committed, ran through intelligence-sharing, ammunition resupply, and electronic warfare — jamming regime communication channels on the offensive’s opening day, while HTS units continuously relayed their own positions forward to avoid friendly fire along a rapidly shifting front. When the first neighborhoods of Aleppo fell, Ankara released Syrian National Army (FSA) units to reinforce the push — after which, he says, Türkiye’s role receded from the battlefield into something more political: keeping Iran, Russia, and Iraqi militias boxed out of a war Ankara had never fully sanctioned but could no longer afford to see lost.

Ankara officially denied involvement throughout the offensive. However, several published investigations paint a more complicated picture. Turkish Minute, citing Russian analyst Kerim Has, argued HTS’s advance would have been “unthinkable” without Turkish logistical support, while New Lines Magazine reported that Ankara effectively approved the operation after reconciliation talks with Damascus collapsed. Those accounts suggest a more proactive Turkish role than the fighter describes. His perspective may simply reflect the limits of his position on the front line: he coordinated ammunition, communications, and troop movements, not the political negotiations taking place behind closed doors.

The Israeli Shadow

Running parallel to Türkiye’s ambivalence was a quieter, harder pressure campaign the fighter attributes almost entirely to Israel — one he describes not as direct battlefield support but as an air siege that hollowed out the regime’s capacity to be rescued.

“Israel was constantly hitting Iranian military experts and missile production workshops,” he said, citing the Zeyneb district and southern Aleppo as recurring target zones through 2023 and into 2024.

The effect, in his framing, was to sever the regime and Hezbollah from reinforcement by air and by land simultaneously — degrading both at once, in the same stroke. Israel’s separate ground campaign in southern Lebanon pulled Radwan Force fighters and allied militiamen back across the border just as the Aleppo operation opened, a sequencing he calls political timing but not coincidence: “The Israeli army was still working in southern Lebanon the day before. No one can say that this didn’t help.”

He is careful, though, to draw a line between attrition and alliance. Israel never directly coordinated with HTS; he insists, “They just watched” even as the war’s arithmetic quietly favored the same outcome both sides wanted.

“They just watched” is also the point where his account is thinnest against named reporting. The Stimson Center, citing Israeli press coverage, reported that Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar met Turkish intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın in Ankara on November 19 — roughly a week before the offensive launched — in a meeting described publicly as covering hostages and Iranian-backed militants, not Aleppo. That doesn’t prove Israel coordinated with HTS itself, and his insistence that Israeli involvement stopped at airstrikes on Iranian targets is broadly consistent with the public record on that narrower point. What it does undercut is the picture of Israel as a passive bystander whose interests simply happened to align — a documented Israeli-Turkish channel was open at the exact moment the operation was being finalized, which differs from the claim “they just watched.”

A separate claim is more contested than reconcilable. He maintains HTS built its drone and training programs without outside assistance beyond commercial hardware purchases. The Washington Post reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with Ukrainian military activity, that Ukraine’s intelligence directorate sent roughly twenty drone operators and about 150 FPV drones to an HTS-linked headquarters in Idlib four to five weeks before the offensive; Kyiv Post separately named a Ukrainian HUR unit it said had trained HTS fighters in Ukrainian-style drone tactics. But this is not settled reporting — Middle East Eye quoted a Turkish source and a Ukrainian official downplaying the assistance as marginal, and independent analysts have compared the story to earlier, similarly overstated claims about Ukrainian involvement with anti-Wagner rebels in Mali. So the honest state of this claim is multiple named outlets reported it, it was disputed by named sources on both sides, and his flat denial — no outside help at all — is the one position the reporting makes hardest to sustain. If any version of it is accurate, the same institutional apparatus he later enlisted with in Ukraine had a hand in the war he fought in Syria before he ever crossed that second front.

For the sake of clarity, one claim falls outside the scope of the reporting and verification supporting the remainder of this article and is considered separately below. He says the one point where the two worlds touched ran through a single wounded friend: injured near Dar’a with no functioning hospital nearby, the man was smuggled into Israel disguised as an FSA fighter — a fabrication some FSA units reportedly tolerated for wounded Nusra-linked fighters passing through their custody, without Israel’s knowledge. He woke from surgery in an Israeli hospital, treated by Arab doctors and nurses, and — by his own telling — began smoking on the spot, reasoning that a devout non-smoker was the kind of anomaly Mossad screening might notice. “Some intelligence organizations are not as strong as we think,” he said. “Most things can escape their eyes.” There is no public record to check this against one way or the other; it rests entirely on his account of a friend’s account. It is included here as a story he told, not as a verified event — a different category from the meeting and the drone reporting above it, even though it’s told with the same confidence.

Building an Army, Not a Militia

What separated the 2024 offensive from the fractured opposition campaigns of years past, in his account, was less firepower than architecture — a deliberate, years-long effort to convert HTS from an insurgent faction into something closer to a conventional force.

The list he offers reads like a doctrine memo. Night-fighting became standard, with thermal optics issued army-wide so operations would no longer pause at dusk. Drone units — a mix of commercial DJI airframes and homegrown fixed-wing and rotor platforms, built without Turkish or foreign assistance — were scaled up and combat-tested well before the offensive, including in the 2023 strike on a regime military academy graduation in Homs that killed more than a hundred cadets. “HTS carried out this operation,” he confirmed. “They always try an operational concept before war.”

A dedicated infiltration unit, which he refers to as Asaib al-Hamra, ran a parallel track: turning defectors and sympathetic soldiers inside regime operations rooms into a standing intelligence pipeline, one he says fed field commanders in something close to real time. He commanded a small piece of this world himself — ten men, all Syrian Arabs, split between infiltrators, snipers, and a single drone operator — after taking over when the unit’s previous commander was killed by a mine mid-infiltration.

Electronic warfare listened in on Russian sorties out of Khmeimim and regime command nets across every active front; artillery was expanded and, for the first time, synchronized to move with the infantry rather than behind it; and a network-centric command structure tied tactical, operational, and strategic layers together in ways the opposition had never managed before. Suicide-bomb tactics — inghimasi assaults, in the movement’s own vocabulary — were formally retired in favor of maneuver warfare, with officer training brought up to what he calls NATO standards.

Even logistics carried an ideological argument. “While the regime soldiers were eating potatoes and eggs at the front, our soldiers should have access to hot food,” he said — a lesson drawn, he adds, from the earlier war against the Free Syrian Army in Afrin. Each brigade fielded its own media team alongside a five- or six-man religious support cell, which he describes as indispensable to morale rather than ornamental to it.

Twelve Days to Damascus

The regime’s much-discussed elite units, he argues, were mostly myth by the time the offensive reached them. Neither the 4th nor the 5th Division carried real weight in his account; the actual core of Assad’s remaining force was the roughly 25,000-strong 25th Division, of which perhaps 5,000 men were committed to the counteroffensive that mattered — figures that come from him alone and are not independently corroborated here. HTS had studied that force in advance, matched it, and broke it at Hama — the last place, he says, the regime seriously tried to hold a line. “If the front had two or three thousand Hezbollah militias,” he added, “they could have resisted more.” Hezbollah, tied down in Lebanon, was not there to give it.

The push was not improvised into a multi-front collapse so much as coordinated into one. HTS maintained a standing relationship with Ahmad al-Awda’s Southern Operations Room, moving fighters south to open a second axis as Aleppo fell — a pincer, in effect, that closed on Damascus from two directions at once. Command friction with the newly released FSA units in Aleppo — real in the first days, by his admission — never escalated past disagreement, because the war itself did not last long enough to let it: Damascus fell in twelve days, a timeline that froze every unresolved rivalry in place rather than forcing it to a head.

Rival factions, meanwhile, had effectively stopped operating independently years earlier. Since HTS’s 2020 war with Hurras al-Din, groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Liwa al-Tawhid had folded into partnership or pledged outright allegiance — leaving no faction capable of freelancing a rival offensive even had one wanted to.

Engineering the Interior

Perhaps the most revealing thread in his account has nothing to do with the battlefield at all. Long before Aleppo fell, he says, HTS was running a quieter campaign inside its own ranks — managing the deep social fault lines that had fractured the Syrian opposition for a decade.

Urban and rural Syrians inside Aleppo, he explains, carried real cultural and economic friction; expand that lens outward, and Hama-Homs and Damascus-Aleppo rivalries became sharper still, occasionally destructive, and often driven less by ideology than by the ambitions of local commanders running informal courts of loyalty beneath the main hierarchy. “They play Game of Thrones behind the backs of other groups,” he said flatly.

HTS’s answer was deliberate dispersal: fighters from Hama and Homs were distributed piecemeal into other units rather than left to consolidate under their own commanders. Damascus-aligned fighters were split in two, their leaders reassigned elsewhere. Aleppo’s networks were pruned in the same manner. It reads less like troop rotation than counterinsurgency turned inward — an organization that treated its own internal cohesion as a battlefield requiring the same discipline it applied to the regime’s.

Identity, Faith, and a New Flag

He picked his own call sign — Shamil, after Imam Shamil Basayev, drawn by the resemblance of his own long beard and by Shamil’s defiance of Russian imperial power a century and a half earlier. It is a detail that says more about his self-conception than any answer about tactics does.

Of his adoption by Syrian fighters who owed him nothing by blood or birth, he is unambiguous: “They count me like their own family. We ate and drank together. We cried and laughed together.” It is the one note in the interview delivered without qualification or hedge.

That same instinct — protection of the innocent, framed explicitly through the Prophet’s protection of the Bani Khuza’a tribe — is what he now cites for a war that has nothing to do with Idlib. Russia, in his framing, is a civilizational adversary of the Islamic and Turkic world regardless of the specific conflict; Ukraine, in that light, is less a departure from his Syrian war than a continuation of it under a different flag. “Whether for ideological reasons or revenge,” he said, “there’s a great opportunity on the ground.”

When invited to define himself — mercenary, jihadist, nationalist or avenger — he rejected the labels altogether: “an adventurer or a traveler. A curious student, a war enthusiast, or a self-sacrificing individual, sometimes a traitor, sometimes loyal, sometimes an infidel, sometimes a believer.” At twenty-nine, he says, that character is still being written.

The Infantry Lesson

The broader military lesson he draws from the war is something closer to a doctrine paper than a war story — adaptability, not mass, as the opposition’s defining edge over a larger and more bureaucratic regime army.

Small-unit initiative let junior commanders act faster than the chain of command above them could react. Drones, in his telling, migrated from a strategic asset held at headquarters into an infantry tool used directly at the front. Mobility replaced static defense as the war matured, trading the vulnerability of fixed lines for infiltration and rapid exploitation. And years of continuous fighting produced, almost as a byproduct, a genuinely professionalized infantry force — proficient in urban combat, trench warfare, and combined-arms coordination in a way the opposition’s earliest, most fragmented years never were.

Put plainly: he saw the jamming, not the phone call that may have authorized it; the airstrikes, not whatever passed between Ankara and Tel Aviv the week before. That doesn’t make him unreliable — every frontline account has that shape — but it does mean the confident tone of his answers outruns what a soldier in his position could actually have known about the politics above him. The claims this piece could check against named reporting, it did. The ones it couldn’t are marked as his alone.

What survives that filtering is still substantial: an infantry account of how a fragmented insurgency turned itself into an army capable of taking a country in twelve days and of a man who went looking for a second war on the strength of what the first one taught him. Whatever else in this account is unverified, that transformation — from insurgent group to army, and from medic to platoon commander — is the part he lived through directly, not the part he heard about secondhand. It’s also the part that needs the least outside checking to be worth reading.

“A force does not necessarily collapse when it loses territory,” he said. “It collapses when its soldiers lose confidence in their ability to resist.” Whether every strategic claim in his account survives future scrutiny remains to be seen. But the lesson he draws from years of war is harder to dismiss: armies often fail long before they run out of men or ammunition.

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A new book by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, released on June 23, offers a detailed look inside Donald Trump’s second-term White House, revealing private rivalries, Situation Room crisis meetings, personal grievances, and a White House increasingly shaped by loyalty, revenge, and expanding presidential power.

Regime Change draws on extensive interviews with people close to the president and describes a White House where Trump operates with far fewer restraints than during his first term.

The book covers a wide range of internal episodes, including the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, closed-door discussions over the war in Iran, tensions between Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government around his personal authority.

A central theme of the book is that Trump’s second term has been defined by a different kind of White House than his first: one staffed less by officials trying to contain him and more by loyalists trying to carry out his wishes.

According to one quote highlighted in the book, Trump summarized the difference himself.

“In the first term, you were always after me. I had to be careful. I was the hunted. Now I’m the hunter,” Trump reportedly told reporters outside the White House.

The article is based on excerpts and reporting published by The New York Times and CNN.

Vance, Rubio and the Question of Succession

One of the book’s most closely watched sections focuses on Trump’s relationship with two of the most important figures in his administration: Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

According to the book, Trump has developed stronger personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance, even though Vance is widely viewed as Trump’s natural political heir.

The authors describe Rubio as more relaxed around Trump and better able to adapt to his style, while Vance is portrayed as more willing to express his own views even when they conflict with the president’s instincts.

Trump has reportedly asked allies which of the two men they prefer. At a White House dinner in October 2025, he posed the question to media mogul Rupert Murdoch while both Vance and Rubio were sitting at the table.

Murdoch reportedly offered a diplomatic answer, saying Vance had “the potential to be great,” before describing Rubio more directly as “brilliant.”

The book also describes tensions over the U.S. strike on Iran. Vance reportedly advised Trump to avoid saying Iran’s nuclear program had been “wiped out” or “obliterated.” Trump rejected the advice.

“I know what I’m doing,” Trump reportedly replied. According to the book, Trump later became frustrated when Vance appeared on ABC News and did not repeat the phrase.

“Everyone needs to say” the word ‘obliterated,’ Trump reportedly said. “That’s the word. Everyone just needs to copy what I say.”

The book also claims Trump was initially reluctant to become involved in a war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. According to Haberman and Swan, Trump told one Israel skeptic early in his second term that he wanted no part of a war with Iran driven by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s attitude toward Netanyahu shifted during the recent war. At one point, he reportedly described the Israeli prime minister as “a con man”—a term the book characterizes as one of the strongest insults in Trump’s vocabulary.

Epstein Case Reaches the Situation Room

The book also describes how senior Trump officials held several meetings in the White House Situation Room to discuss the fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein case, treating it as one of the most serious political threats facing the administration.

According to the authors, one major meeting took place on July 17, 2025, after a Justice Department and FBI memo concluded there was no Epstein “client list,” a finding that triggered backlash among parts of Trump’s MAGA base. Vice President JD Vance reportedly told officials, “This is a huge problem,” and pushed for the administration to release all Epstein-related files before Congress forced its hand.

Vance even floated the idea of having Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison if she were willing to publicly state that Trump had not been involved in wrongdoing. Other officials argued that offering Maxwell anything in return—including a pardon or sentence reduction—would trigger an even bigger political backlash.

One official said, “We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything,” warning that any deal would only fuel conspiracy theories.

The book also describes a later Situation Room meeting in which officials debated whether creating a searchable Epstein database could surface uncorroborated allegations involving Trump. One official warned, “They’re going to make a huge scene of this, even though it’s not true and everybody knows it.”

For Haberman and Swan, the episode illustrated the administration’s core problem: the Epstein files contained millions of pages of raw material, much of it unverified but politically impossible to ignore. The book says the crisis consumed Trump’s senior team for months and exposed a rare issue that the president could not easily dismiss or control.

A Second Term With Fewer Restraints

A major argument of Regime Change is that Trump’s second term differs sharply from his first because the people around him are more loyal and less willing to challenge him.

The book portrays an administration staffed largely by loyalists who work to fulfill Trump’s wishes rather than restrain them.

Trump reportedly spent the years outside office reshaping the Republican Party, weakening internal opposition and ensuring that many of his former critics were pushed aside.

That transformation left him with what critics describe as a much more compliant governing apparatus.

The book also includes Trump’s own explanation for why his family resumed foreign business deals during his second term, despite having avoided some of them during his first.

“Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to,” Trump reportedly said.

Revenge and the Use of Federal Power

The book includes several episodes illustrating Trump’s focus on personal grievances and revenge.

In one account, Trump reportedly struggled to remember the name of Chris Krebs, the former cybersecurity official who publicly rejected claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“I remember there was this lawyer who was in the administration who said the election was fair and there’s no fraud. Who was he?” Trump reportedly asked aides.

Once advisers identified Krebs, Trump responded:

“Yeah, Chris Krebs. Whatever happened to him? He was a bad one. Take a look at him.”

Days later, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate Krebs.

Other passages describe Trump’s hostility toward former Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his determination to pressure him over renovations at the Federal Reserve building.

“I want to bust his fucking balls, honestly,” Trump reportedly said of Powell during a staff meeting.

The book portrays those episodes as part of a broader willingness to use the machinery of government against individuals Trump believes crossed him.

The book also depicts Trump as increasingly fascinated by his own historical power.

During an interview with Haberman and Swan, Trump showed them a document comparing his power to figures such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

The document argued that those leaders lacked the global reach available to a modern U.S. president.

Trump recited some of the names before saying that those leaders “maintained power through fear.”

“Who would ever do a thing like that?” Trump reportedly said. “Right?”

The book later revealed that the author of the document was not a historian, as Trump had claimed, but a longtime caddy and confidant of golfer Gary Player.

Reaction Inside the White House

The book has also sparked concern inside the White House over how Haberman and Swan reconstructed highly detailed accounts of private meetings.

According to Axios, senior administration officials privately questioned whether the journalists had obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings because of the book’s detailed, near-verbatim accounts of conversations involving the Iran war and the Epstein crisis.

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” one administration official told Axios.

However, there is no evidence Haberman and Swan relied on recordings. Haberman and Swan have said their reporting is based on more than 1,000 interviews conducted over several years with people close to Trump and his administration. The White House has not disputed the authenticity of the conversations described in the book, while Axios reported that Trump was “furious” over the detailed accounts of private Situation Room meetings.

A White House Built Around Loyalty

Regime Change also details the growing influence of senior adviser Stephen Miller, who is described as one of the most powerful figures in the administration.

Miller is portrayed as overseeing large parts of the federal government, including immigration policy, executive orders, legal strategy, and domestic security initiatives.

The book argues that Trump’s inner circle has become more disciplined and ideologically aligned than during his first term, allowing the president to act more quickly and aggressively.

The result, according to the book, is a presidency built less around institutional restraint and more around personal loyalty, spectacle, grievance, and direct control.

For Washington, Regime Change has become more than another political book. It offers one of the clearest portraits yet of how Trump’s second administration operates behind closed doors—and how it has evolved into a far more centralized and loyalist White House than his first.

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The U.S. government lifted export restrictions on Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence models on Tuesday after the company agreed to strengthen security safeguards and expand cooperation with federal authorities, allowing the company to restore global access after weeks of restrictions.

Anthropic announced that access to its Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 models would begin returning on Wednesday after the U.S. Department of Commerce removed export controls that had been imposed on June 12 over national security concerns.

The restrictions forced Anthropic to suspend access to the models for all users after the government concluded that real-time nationality verification was not feasible.

Restrictions Reversed After Security Agreement

According to a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Anthropic no longer requires an export license after agreeing to strengthen protections against misuse of its AI systems.

The company committed to proactively detecting and addressing security risks, sharing information on malicious activity with the U.S. government, participating in the development of security standards for future frontier AI models, and expanding pre-release testing with government agencies.

The Commerce Department said it reserves the right to reimpose restrictions if Anthropic fails to meet its commitments or if circumstances change.

Anthropic said Fable 5 will immediately return to users worldwide across Claude.ai, the Claude Platform, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, while access through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry will be restored as quickly as possible.

Security Concerns Centered on AI Safeguards

The export controls were introduced after researchers identified a method of bypassing some of Fable 5’s cybersecurity safeguards.

According to Anthropic, the reported technique allowed Fable 5 to identify software vulnerabilities and, in one case, generate proof-of-concept exploit code for a specific vulnerability.

Internal testing later found that multiple competing AI models—including earlier Claude models, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could perform similar tasks. Anthropic said the findings showed the reported vulnerability did not expose any capabilities unique to Fable 5 or Mythos 5.

Anthropic responded by deploying an upgraded AI safety classifier designed to block the reported jailbreak technique in more than 99% of tested cases while increasing monitoring for potentially harmful cybersecurity requests.

Expanding Government Cooperation

The agreement marks a significant expansion of cooperation between Anthropic and the U.S. government.

The company said it will provide designated government agencies with expanded pre-release access to future frontier AI models for independent security testing. It also pledged to rapidly share information on newly discovered jailbreak techniques, dedicate technical teams to joint AI security research, and work with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other industry partners to develop common standards for evaluating AI jailbreaks and security vulnerabilities.

Anthropic said the goal is to create consistent industry standards that can guide both developers and regulators as increasingly capable AI systems are released.

Growing Government Oversight

The announcement comes amid growing federal oversight of advanced AI models.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order encouraging frontier AI companies to cooperate with the government before releasing highly capable models.

Anthropic has had a contentious relationship with the administration in recent months, including a dispute with the Department of Defense after the company was designated a supply chain risk.

The decision offers an early indication of how Washington may regulate future frontier AI systems, pairing broader access with closer government oversight.

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U.S. President Donald Trump reported more than $2.2 billion in income during 2025, with cryptocurrency ventures accounting for over $1.4 billion as his financial portfolio shifted dramatically toward digital assets during his first year back in office.

The nearly 1,000-page financial disclosure, released Tuesday, marks a sharp increase from the more than $600 million in income Trump reported for 2024 and highlights the growing role of cryptocurrency, licensing deals, and overseas business ventures in his finances.

Crypto Becomes Trump’s Largest Revenue Source

The disclosure shows that Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures generated approximately $1.4 billion in reported income during 2025.

Among the largest sources of income was Celebration Coins, which paid Trump roughly $635 million in royalties through a licensing agreement widely linked to the $TRUMP memecoin launched shortly before he returned to office.

Trump also reported more than $525 million in proceeds from World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company founded alongside his sons, as well as an additional $65 million from an equity sale and approximately $196 million in proceeds from a stablecoin transaction.

The filing shows that cryptocurrency has overtaken Trump’s traditional real estate business as his largest source of reported income.

Real Estate and Global Business Remain Strong

Despite crypto dominating his earnings, Trump’s golf courses, resorts, and international licensing agreements continued generating hundreds of millions of dollars.

Trump National Doral in Florida reported approximately $121 million in revenue, while Mar-a-Lago generated around $77 million.

International licensing agreements across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, India, Türkiye, Romania, and Indonesia generated tens of millions of dollars in additional income during 2025.

The president’s disclosure estimates his total assets at more than $2.4 billion, though the actual figure is likely higher because federal disclosure forms only require assets exceeding $50 million to be reported as “over $50 million.”

Ethics Questions Persist

Trump’s expanding cryptocurrency empire has renewed debate over potential conflicts of interest, particularly as his administration has adopted one of the most crypto-friendly policy agendas in U.S. history.

After previously criticizing Bitcoin as a “scam,” Trump has embraced the digital asset industry since returning to office, signing legislation and executive actions designed to position the United States as a global leader in cryptocurrency.

The White House rejected suggestions that the president’s business interests influence government policy.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, adding that Trump had helped make the United States “the crypto capital of the world.”

Trump rejected the criticism, telling reporters on Wednesday that he does not personally manage his finances and that investment managers oversee his assets independently.

Other Income Sources

Beyond crypto and real estate, the disclosure lists millions of dollars in royalties from Trump-branded products, including watches, branded Bibles, fragrances, guitars, and sneakers.

Trump also reported $86.5 million in legal settlements involving lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, YouTube, and X.

The filing further shows that First Lady Melania Trump earned approximately $10.7 million from a licensing agreement tied to her documentary, along with roughly $6 million from NFT sales.

The disclosure underscores how dramatically Trump’s financial portfolio has shifted since returning to office, with cryptocurrency replacing real estate as his largest source of reported income while continuing to fuel debate over the relationship between presidential policymaking and private business interests.

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Danish police have concluded that months of investigations found no conclusive evidence of illegal drone activity during a wave of reported incursions over airports and military facilities in late 2025, contradicting a new Danish Defence assessment that says several of the incidents did involve drones.

Following a wave of reported drone sightings between late September and early October 2025, police districts across Denmark launched extensive investigations into incidents involving airports, military bases, and other sensitive sites.

The reports prompted temporary airspace closures at Copenhagen Airport, Billund Airport, Aalborg Airport, and several other locations, disrupting air traffic while authorities attempted to determine the source of the sightings.

After reviewing witness statements, radar data, telecommunications records, video surveillance, and other technical evidence, police districts across the country have largely reached the same conclusion: they cannot confirm that illegal drones were present.

Copenhagen Police stated that investigators were unable to prove drone activity over Copenhagen Airport on September 22, 2025, although they also could not rule it out and acknowledged that unexplained aerial activity had occurred.

Police in North Jutland, South and South Jutland, Central and West Jutland, East Jutland, Southeast Jutland, Funen, Zealand, Bornholm, and other districts similarly concluded that investigations either found alternative explanations for many sightings or were unable to determine with certainty what had been observed.

In Central and West Jutland alone, police received more than 900 reports from members of the public during the period but said technical investigations could neither confirm nor deny drone activity.

Danish Defence Reaches Opposite Assessment

The Danish Defence, however, has reached a markedly different conclusion.

In an evaluation presented last week, the Defence Command concluded that several of the reported incidents did involve drones based on technical information and observations made by military personnel.

Defence Minister Jeppe Bruus said the military’s assessment found that “in several cases it was drones.”

Chief of Defence Michael Hyldgaard said around 200 aerial observation reports were submitted by military units during the period. He noted that soldiers at the Borris military training area even fired small arms at unidentified aerial objects, emphasizing that they were not engaging manned aircraft.

Hyldgaard argued that, when combined with intelligence assessments and the pattern of reported activity, the incidents appeared consistent with a broader hybrid influence campaign targeting Denmark.

Neither Hyldgaard nor Bruus identified who they believe may have been responsible for the alleged drone activity.

Part of a Wider European Pattern

The Danish incidents occurred amid a broader surge in drone-related disruptions across Europe during late 2025.

An analysis by Euronews’ fact-checking unit, The Cube, found that drone-related disruptions at European airports increased fourfold between January 2024 and November 2025, with the sharpest increase beginning in September 2025.

Belgium experienced the largest concentration of incidents, with repeated disruptions at Brussels Airport over just eight days in November.

Germany’s air navigation provider recorded 192 drone-related airport disturbances in 2025, compared with 141 the previous year, while Sweden also reported multiple cases in which drone sightings temporarily halted air traffic.

In Denmark, official data from the Danish Civil Aviation and Railway Authority recorded 107 reports of illegal drone flights near Danish airports during 2025, up from 92 the previous year.

The most disruptive incident occurred on September 22–23, 2025, when reported drone sightings forced Copenhagen Airport to suspend operations for approximately four hours, resulting in more than 100 flight cancellations and dozens of diversions. Simultaneous reports near Oslo Airport affected more than 20,000 passengers, making it one of Europe’s largest airport disruptions linked to suspected drone activity.

Questions Remain Unanswered

While Danish police have concluded they lack sufficient evidence to prove illegal drone activity, they have also stopped short of ruling it out entirely.

The Defence, meanwhile, continues to maintain that several incursions did occur and may have been part of a wider hybrid campaign targeting Denmark.

The differing conclusions leave unanswered questions about what was observed during the weeks of heightened alerts, who may have been responsible, and whether Denmark was the target of a coordinated hybrid operation. With police unable to confirm the incidents and the military convinced that at least some of them involved drones, the events remain one of the country’s most significant unresolved security episodes in recent years.

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A coalition of international legal and human rights organizations has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate senior officials from the United Arab Emirates and several regional countries for aiding and abetting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Sudan.

The request was submitted on Monday as an Article 15 communication by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) and a coalition of legal, investigative, and civil society organizations. The filing urges ICC prosecutors to examine the role of foreign officials accused of providing military, financial, and logistical support to parties involved in Sudan’s civil war.

The submission argues that accountability should extend beyond those directly carrying out atrocities to include the international networks allegedly enabling the conflict.

According to the filing, both the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have received sustained foreign assistance throughout the conflict.

The coalition alleges that outside actors have supplied weapons, drones, mercenaries, equipment, financing, and logistical support that have helped fuel atrocities committed by both sides despite a long-standing United Nations arms embargo on Darfur.

The communication asks ICC prosecutors to investigate potential criminal responsibility under Articles 25(3)(c) and 25(3)(d) of the Rome Statute, which cover individuals accused of aiding, abetting, or knowingly contributing to crimes committed by others.

The filing names the United Arab Emirates as well as officials and intermediaries from Libya, Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda as supporters of the RSF. It also refers more broadly to Iran, Türkiye, and Egypt in connection with support provided to the Sudanese Armed Forces.

The coalition has not publicly identified the individual officials named in the submission.

Supply Networks Detailed

According to the filing, arms shipments originated from airports in the United Arab Emirates before being routed through transit hubs in Chad, Libya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia, eventually reaching Darfur despite a long-standing United Nations arms embargo.

The coalition argues that these supply routes formed part of a broader network providing the RSF with weapons, equipment, financing, and logistical support that helped sustain military operations and carry out atrocities throughout the conflict.

The UAE has repeatedly denied providing military assistance to the RSF. However, the submission cites investigative findings and confidential evidence that document covert arms transfers and other forms of support continuing since the outbreak of the war in April 2023.

Expanding Calls for Accountability

The ICC already has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Darfur through a 2005 referral by the United Nations Security Council, allowing prosecutors to investigate individuals of any nationality for crimes committed in the region.

Irwin Cotler, founder and international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, said accountability should extend beyond those directly carrying out atrocities.

“The suffering of the Sudanese people will not end so long as the perpetrators of atrocity crimes—and the networks of impunity that enable and sustain them—continue to act without consequence.”

The filing follows a separate Article 15 communication submitted earlier this month by Sudanese survivors seeking investigations into senior Emirati officials and business figures over their role in the war.

Conflict Continues Without Arrest Warrants

The ICC confirmed earlier this year that it is actively investigating crimes committed in Darfur since April 2023, including allegations involving attacks on civilians, gender-based violence, and crimes against children.

In its most recent report to the UN Security Council, the Office of the Prosecutor described the humanitarian catastrophe surrounding El Fasher as ‘entirely manmade’ and warned that continued material and financial support from regional and international actors was prolonging the violence.

Despite ongoing investigations, the ICC has not yet issued arrest warrants related to the current phase of Sudan’s war.

The coalition behind the latest submission argues that pursuing those enabling the war from abroad is essential if efforts to end the conflict and establish accountability are to succeed.

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Norway has awarded the construction contract for the Stad Ship Tunnel, a landmark infrastructure project that will become the world’s first full-scale tunnel built specifically for maritime traffic.

The Norwegian Coastal Administration selected AF Gruppen to design and construct the project under a turnkey contract worth approximately NOK 5.6 billion ($565 million). The contract is expected to be signed in August following the mandatory standstill period, with construction scheduled to begin in early 2027.

The Stad Ship Tunnel will cut through the Stad Peninsula on Norway’s western coast, creating a protected passage between Kjødepollen in Vanylvsfjorden and Moldefjorden near Selje. Once completed, the tunnel will allow freight and passenger vessels to bypass one of the country’s most hazardous stretches of coastline while remaining within sheltered fjord waters.

A Historic Maritime Engineering Project

Measuring 1.7 kilometers in length, the tunnel will be approximately 50 meters high and 36 meters wide, making its cross-section roughly 20 times larger than a typical road tunnel. It is designed to accommodate ships with a draft of up to 12 meters, allowing freight and passenger vessels to travel safely year-round between the Norwegian Sea and the North Sea.

The tunnel will pass beneath a 645-meter mountain, eliminating the need for ships traveling between Bergen and Ålesund to navigate the notoriously rough waters surrounding Stadlandet, an area long considered one of Norway’s most dangerous coastal passages.

AF Gruppen, working alongside engineering consultant Norconsult, developed the final proposal in cooperation with the Norwegian Coastal Administration during the tender process.

“It is rare for us, as a design and build contractor, to have the opportunity to take on such a unique infrastructure project, attracting significant local, national, and international interest,” said AF Gruppen CEO Amund Tøftum.

Construction will begin with a collaborative planning phase between AF Gruppen and the Norwegian Coastal Administration. During this period, the two organizations will spend several months finalizing engineering designs, construction procedures, and technical solutions before excavation begins.

Preparatory work during late 2026 will include upgrading roads, establishing temporary access routes, building project offices and worker accommodation, and relocating existing infrastructure. Separate contracts covering water pipeline diversions and demolition work are also expected to be awarded later this year.

Beyond excavating the tunnel itself, the project includes the construction of navigation structures, approach channels, commercial facilities at both tunnel entrances, permanent rock stabilization, dredging operations, fender systems, and all technical installations required for maritime traffic.

Construction is expected to take approximately five years.

More Than a Century in the Making

The idea of constructing a ship tunnel through the Stad Peninsula dates back more than 150 years, first appearing in Norwegian newspapers in 1874.

The concept gained political momentum in 2013 when it was incorporated into Norway’s National Transport Plan. The government formally announced plans for the tunnel in 2017, while the Norwegian Parliament approved state funding in 2021.

After several revisions to the project’s budget and schedule, Parliament approved a revised NOK 8.588 billion (approximately $867 million) cost framework in June 2026, allowing the Norwegian Coastal Administration to proceed with construction.

Once completed, the Stad Ship Tunnel will become the world’s first full-scale ship tunnel, marking a historic milestone in maritime engineering while providing a year-round safe passage through one of Norway’s most dangerous coastal waters.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called for the creation of an “unconditional” NATO security and defense network stretching “from Texas to Ankara,” urging allies to fully integrate Türkiye into European defense initiatives as geopolitical tensions reshape the alliance’s security priorities.

Speaking at the NATO Parliamentary Summit at Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace, Erdoğan told lawmakers from the alliance’s 32 member states that NATO must adapt to an increasingly unstable international environment and strengthen cooperation ahead of the alliance’s summit scheduled to take place in Ankara on July 7–8.

Erdoğan argued that the Euro-Atlantic security environment has entered a historic turning point, citing conflicts, terrorism, irregular migration, and instability along NATO’s eastern and southeastern borders.

“The threats of war, crisis, terrorism, and irregular migration occurring particularly along our alliance’s eastern and southeastern borders make it necessary for us to reshape our understanding of security,” Erdoğan said.

He described the current international environment as one in which traditional assumptions about global politics no longer apply.

“As old patterns and old assumptions collapse one by one, it is not yet clear what will replace them,” he said, adding that today’s international system is increasingly characterized by uncertainty, rising tensions, and declining predictability.

Erdoğan also argued that the wars in Gaza and Lebanon have damaged confidence in international institutions and exposed the limitations of existing global security frameworks.

“From Texas to Ankara”

A central theme of Erdoğan’s speech was Türkiye’s demand for full participation in European defense initiatives.

He urged allied lawmakers to support Ankara’s inclusion in defense and security projects announced by the European Union, arguing that Türkiye’s military capabilities should not be excluded for political reasons.

“Excluding the capacity Türkiye possesses in the field of defense due to narrow political interests benefits no one,” Erdoğan said.

“At this point, we must build an alliance-wide security and defense network stretching from Texas to Ankara, with no ifs or buts.”

The remarks come as Ankara continues to press European partners to grant Türkiye a greater role in the continent’s evolving defense architecture despite longstanding political disputes between Türkiye and several EU member states.

Defense Industry and NATO Contributions

Erdoğan also highlighted Türkiye’s expanding defense industry ahead of the NATO Defense Industry Forum, which will be held alongside next week’s summit in Ankara.

He said the forum would provide an opportunity to showcase Türkiye’s advances in indigenous defense technology while strengthening cooperation among NATO allies.

“Our allies and guests will see the significant progress Türkiye has made in the field of defense industry in a short period of time,” he said.

The Turkish president added that Türkiye has increased defense spending in line with commitments agreed upon at the recent NATO summit in The Hague and now ranks among the alliance’s five largest contributors to NATO missions and operations.

Seeking Greater European Integration

Although Türkiye has played a central role in NATO for more than 70 years and possesses the alliance’s second-largest military, Erdoğan argued that Ankara’s contributions to European security are still not fully recognized.

He said Türkiye expects stronger political support for its participation in European defense initiatives, stressing that closer integration would strengthen both NATO and Europe’s broader security architecture.

The speech underscores Ankara’s efforts to position Türkiye as an indispensable security partner as NATO places greater emphasis on collective defense, defense-industrial cooperation, and strengthening its eastern and southeastern flanks amid growing geopolitical competition.

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Russia’s domestic fuel crisis is deepening as sustained Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries, fuel depots, and supply infrastructure continue to disrupt gasoline and diesel production, forcing authorities across the country to ration fuel sales and consider new export restrictions in an effort to stabilize domestic supplies.

Fuel purchase limits are now in place across at least 56 Russian regions, while residents elsewhere report rapidly rising prices, empty filling stations, and long queues. The shortages have begun affecting transportation, agriculture, emergency power generation, and the cost of everyday goods.

Fuel Shortages Spread Across Russia

Regional governments and fuel retailers have increasingly imposed purchase limits on gasoline and diesel as repeated Ukrainian strikes reduce refining capacity and strain Russia’s distribution network.

The restrictions now stretch from major oil-producing regions such as Tatarstan and Khanty-Mansiysk to remote territories including Tyva, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, illustrating how widely the disruptions have spread.

In several regions, authorities have limited purchases per vehicle, while elsewhere shortages have sparked panic buying as motorists rush to fill their tanks before supplies tighten further.

The crisis has hit Russia’s more isolated regions particularly hard. In the Siberian republic of Tyva, where fuel must be delivered almost entirely by road or air because the region lacks railway connections, gasoline prices have climbed to the highest level anywhere in Russia.

Residents say soaring fuel costs are driving up the price of nearly every essential good transported into the region.

One resident told The Moscow Times that years of rising prices had already forced families to stockpile food and household supplies, warning that conditions could deteriorate significantly by the autumn and winter.

In neighboring Khakassia, residents say fuel prices have become so expensive that some have sold their cars altogether while cutting spending on food, fruit, and other basic necessities.

In Russia’s border regions, fuel shortages are creating additional security challenges.

Residents in parts of the Kursk region say gasoline rationing has made it increasingly difficult to operate backup generators during repeated power outages caused by Ukrainian drone attacks.

Local fuel limits have also complicated evacuations during air raid alerts, leaving some residents concerned about their ability to respond during emergencies.

The shortages have also reached some of Russia’s largest energy-producing regions.

Authorities in Khanty-Mansiysk, one of the world’s most productive oil regions, introduced fuel restrictions at several filling stations despite the area’s vast crude oil production.

Residents questioned how one of Russia’s richest energy regions could experience gasoline shortages while oil production continued.

In Tatarstan, authorities imposed fuel rationing after a Ukrainian strike on Tatneft’s Taneco refinery earlier this month disrupted production and triggered panic buying throughout the republic.

The attack forced Tatneft to introduce purchase limits at filling stations across its national network.

Agriculture Comes Under Pressure

Russian officials are also becoming increasingly concerned that fuel shortages could disrupt this year’s harvest.

Tatarstan Agriculture Minister Marat Zyabbarov has advised farms to maintain fuel reserves sufficient for at least 10 days to two weeks, warning producers not to rely on immediate deliveries as they had in previous years.

President Vladimir Putin similarly instructed officials to prioritize fuel supplies for the agricultural sector, saying maintaining deliveries would be critical to ensuring this year’s harvest.

The growing shortages have prompted Moscow to consider additional intervention.

During a meeting with senior officials on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that motorists and businesses continue to face fuel shortages despite government efforts to stabilize supplies.

“You are well aware that problems for drivers and for businesses persist,” Putin said. “Unfortunately, there are still queues at gas stations too.”

He confirmed that the government is considering a complete ban on diesel exports, alongside existing restrictions on gasoline and jet fuel exports, in an effort to increase domestic supply.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has also confirmed that additional export restrictions remain under discussion.

Ukraine’s Energy Strategy

Ukraine has steadily intensified its campaign against Russia’s energy infrastructure, targeting refineries, storage facilities, pumping stations, and fuel logistics hubs with long-range drones.

Rather than focusing solely on symbolic strikes, Kyiv has increasingly sought to disrupt Russia’s refining capacity and fuel distribution network, raising economic costs far beyond the battlefield.

Energy analyst Sergey Vakulenko said Russia’s domestic gasoline supply now depends on whether repair crews can restore damaged facilities faster than Ukraine can strike them again.

“The amount of gasoline available in Russia at the moment is determined by a race between Ukrainian drones and Russian repair teams,” he said.

Beyond disrupting fuel production, the strikes have increasingly brought the effects of the war deeper into Russia, reaching major cities including Moscow and exposing civilians to frequent drone alerts while highlighting Kyiv’s strategy of imposing economic and psychological costs far from the front lines.

Growing Pressure on Russia’s Economy

Long queues at filling stations, higher transportation costs, rising food prices, and growing concern among regional officials all point to mounting pressure on Russia’s domestic economy.

The impact has been particularly severe in Crimea, where repeated Ukrainian strikes have contributed to fuel shortages, rolling power outages, black-market gasoline sales, and a sharp decline in tourism during the peak summer season.

While Putin has insisted that Ukrainian attacks “have absolutely no effect on the battlefield,” the expanding fuel shortages illustrate how Kyiv’s long-range strike campaign is increasingly targeting Russia’s economic resilience as well as its military infrastructure.

As Ukraine continues targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure and Moscow weighs additional emergency measures, the fuel crisis is emerging as one of the clearest examples of how long-range strikes—what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described as “long-range sanctions”—are extending the costs of the war far beyond the battlefield, placing growing pressure on Russia’s economy, industry, agriculture, and everyday life.

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Denmark’s new left-wing government plans to negotiate expanded foreign policy powers for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, a move that could significantly reshape the Kingdom’s international representation and mark one of its most important constitutional developments in decades.

The proposal, outlined in the government’s political platform, calls for a “modernization of the Realm,” including discussions on granting both autonomous territories greater authority over foreign affairs and international representation. The initiative comes as Greenland and the Faroe Islands seek a more equal role within the Kingdom amid growing geopolitical attention in the Arctic.

Greenland and the Faroe Islands Seek a Stronger Voice

Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen welcomed the government’s proposal, arguing that Greenland should be able to represent itself more independently in international affairs.

“We do not have full powers in our foreign affairs today, and I think it is positive that the government is indicating that it would like to look at how to create more equality on that front,” Nielsen said.

The announcement has also been welcomed in the Faroe Islands, where newly elected Prime Minister Beinir Johannesen said there is broad political support for expanding the islands’ foreign policy authority.

Johannesen said greater autonomy would allow the Faroe Islands to pursue membership in international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Nordic Council, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and fisheries organizations including NEAFC and NAFO, enabling the islands to represent their own economic and political interests more directly.

A Changing Diplomatic Landscape

The proposal follows a year in which Greenland became the focus of heightened international attention.

Nuuk has hosted visits from senior officials and ministers from countries including France, Germany, and Canada, reflecting Greenland’s growing strategic importance amid increasing competition in the Arctic.

Under the current constitutional arrangement, visits by foreign heads of state are typically accompanied by senior Danish officials. Nielsen indicated that expanded foreign policy powers could eventually allow Greenland to host such visits independently.

Johannesen expressed a similar vision for the Faroe Islands, saying that foreign leaders visiting the islands on Faroese matters should be able to meet directly with Faroese representatives without Danish ministers necessarily participating.

Constitutional Questions Remain

While the Danish government has committed to opening negotiations, significant legal questions remain.

Denmark’s Constitution reserves overall responsibility for foreign and security policy to Copenhagen, although both Greenland and the Faroe Islands already exercise substantial authority in areas they have assumed under their self-government arrangements. Existing legislation also allows them to negotiate certain international agreements and participate in organizations where constitutional arrangements permit.

A Danish Supreme Court ruling last year concerning Faroese participation in the WTO has strengthened arguments that additional international powers can be granted without fundamentally altering the constitutional framework.

Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), said the government is likely to continue relying on judicial assessments to determine which additional foreign policy competencies can legally be transferred on a case-by-case basis.

Modernizing the Kingdom

The initiative reflects a broader shift in the relationship between Copenhagen, Nuuk, and Tórshavn.

For years, both Greenland and the Faroe Islands have argued that the Kingdom should evolve into a partnership based on greater equality rather than one centered on Danish oversight.

Those discussions have gained urgency amid heightened Arctic security concerns, growing international engagement with Greenland, and renewed debate over how the Kingdom should adapt to an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.

Although negotiations are only beginning and no constitutional changes have yet been agreed upon, Copenhagen’s willingness to formally consider expanded foreign policy powers marks a significant political shift. If implemented, the reforms would substantially expand Greenlandic and Faroese diplomatic autonomy while preserving the Kingdom of Denmark, effectively redefining how the three parts of the Danish Realm engage with the international community.

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The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has filed a request with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking the arrest and criminal prosecution of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ahead of his expected visit to New York on July 7–8.

The complaint, submitted on June 27, urges U.S. authorities to open a criminal investigation, issue an arrest warrant, or otherwise prevent Ben-Gvir from leaving U.S. jurisdiction while the case is examined.

HRF argues that the United States has jurisdiction under the U.S. War Crimes Act and the U.S. Genocide Statute, alleging that Ben-Gvir bears responsibility for war crimes, acts of genocide, direct incitement to genocide, torture, murder, rape, sexual abuse, and cruel or inhuman treatment against Palestinians. The organization also claims some of the victims are U.S. citizens, which it says creates an additional obligation for American authorities to act.

According to the filing, Ben-Gvir has used his position since becoming National Security Minister in late 2022 to implement policies that significantly worsened conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. HRF cites reports from Palestinian organizations, international bodies, and human rights groups alleging detainees have been subjected to starvation, beatings, denial of medical care, sexual violence, sleep deprivation, and other forms of abuse.

The foundation also accuses Ben-Gvir of responsibility for the treatment of international activists detained after Israeli forces intercepted Gaza-bound aid flotillas in 2025 and 2026. HRF cites testimonies from participants that say they were subjected to beatings, psychological abuse, denial of food and medical care, and, in some cases, sexual violence while in Israeli custody.

In addition to allegations of abuses in detention, HRF cites Ben-Gvir’s statements that incite to genocide. The filing cites his calls for the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, support for executing Palestinian prisoners, advocacy of starvation policies, and recent remarks directed toward Lebanon.

Based on these allegations, HRF has asked the Department of Justice to formally investigate Ben-Gvir, initiate criminal proceedings, and fulfill what it describes as U.S. obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention to prosecute individuals accused of grave breaches of international humanitarian law.

The complaint comes amid continued international legal scrutiny of Israeli officials, including the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the war on Gaza.

Israeli officials have repeatedly rejected allegations that Israel is committing genocide or systematically violating international humanitarian law in Gaza, describing such accusations as false and politically motivated.

Whether the complaint will result in action by U.S. authorities remains uncertain. The Department of Justice has not publicly responded to the filing, and there is no indication that a criminal investigation has been opened. Ben-Gvir has not publicly commented on the complaint.

Iraqi security forces launched one of the country’s largest anti-corruption operations in recent years on Sunday, carrying out coordinated dawn raids across Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone and several other governorates that resulted in the arrest of dozens of politicians, lawmakers, and senior government officials.

The operation, led by Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service and supported by the Iraqi Army, the Integrity Commission, and other security agencies, acted on judicial warrants targeting suspects accused of financial corruption.

The raids began before sunrise inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of Iraq’s political leadership, government institutions, and foreign diplomatic missions, including the U.S. Embassy.

Authorities temporarily closed access to the Green Zone while security forces searched government buildings, private residences, and other locations believed to be linked to the investigation.

Operations were also conducted in several other parts of Baghdad and additional governorates as authorities pursued suspects who had reportedly fled.

According to Iraqi state media, the campaign stems from testimony provided by former Deputy Oil Minister Adnan al-Jumaili following his arrest in May on corruption charges.

Investigators say al-Jumaili’s testimony implicated a broader network of politicians, lawmakers, and senior officials, prompting prosecutors to expand the investigation.

Iraqi state media reported that 47 suspects have now been arrested, including members of parliament whose parliamentary immunity had been lifted.

Among those reported detained was Muthanna al-Samarrai, leader of the Al-Azm Alliance. A member of the party confirmed to Al Jazeera that al-Samarrai and his office manager were arrested during a raid on his residence inside the Green Zone.

Authorities have also announced one of Iraq’s largest corruption-related asset seizures as part of the investigation into al-Jumaili.

Investigators say they have confiscated more than 98 billion Iraqi dinars, approximately $86 million in cash, an additional $11 million in U.S. currency, nearly three kilograms of gold, 70 residential and commercial properties, 21 vehicles, between 70 and 85 firearms, hundreds of ammunition magazines, and dozens of ammunition crates and equipment cases.

According to Iraqi authorities, part of the cash was discovered buried nearly four meters underground on farmland.

The operation represents the most significant anti-corruption initiative undertaken since Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi took office in late April.

Al-Zaidi has repeatedly pledged to confront the corruption networks that have shaped Iraqi politics for decades and has made government accountability a central priority of his administration.

Abdul Rahman al-Jazaeri, a leader within the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), told Rudaw that further arrests are expected and claimed the campaign will continue until al-Zaidi’s scheduled visit to Washington on July 17.

Although Iraqi authorities have yet to issue a comprehensive official statement on the campaign, state media reports that additional arrests are expected in the coming days as investigators pursue suspects identified during the expanding corruption probe.

At the time of writing, Iraqi security forces were continuing operations as investigators pursued additional suspects while searching for assets linked to the corruption network, underscoring what has become one of Iraq’s most ambitious anti-corruption campaigns in years.

An unprecedented heatwave sweeping across Europe is breaking temperature records, overwhelming healthcare systems, disrupting transport, and forcing the cancellation of major public events, as scientists warn the extreme conditions would not have occurred without human-driven climate change.

From the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia, millions of people are enduring temperatures far above seasonal averages. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and several Balkan countries have all reported record-breaking heat, while authorities continue issuing warnings over growing risks to public health, infrastructure, and energy systems.

Record Temperatures Across the Continent

Germany provisionally recorded its highest temperature ever when thermometers reached 41.3°C in Saarbrücken on Friday, while Belgium unofficially registered 40°C near the Dutch border. The Netherlands recorded 39.4°C in Limburg, and the United Kingdom reached a provisional June record of 37.1°C.

Denmark also experienced historic conditions. Overnight (June 27) temperatures on the island of Fanø never dropped below 22.5°C, making it the warmest June night ever recorded since Danish records began in 1874. Today, temperatures climbed to 37°C in both Ødum and H.C. Andersen Airport near Odense, repeatedly surpassing Denmark’s previous national heat record of 36.4°C set in 1975.

France is one of the countries worst hit, with temperatures soaring to well over 40°C in some areas. It has seen a surge in heat-related deaths over the past few days, with dozens of people dying from drowning as they seek to escape the soaring temperatures, while others have died in hot cars or from heat stress.

Meteorologists estimate that more than 150 million people across Europe have faced temperatures exceeding 35°C during the latest phase of the heatwave

Daily Life Disrupted

The prolonged heat has begun affecting infrastructure across the continent.

In Switzerland, operators shut down both reactors at the Beznau nuclear power plant after the River Aare became too warm to provide sufficient cooling. In France, reactors at the Nogent plant on the Seine and the Bugey plant on the Rhône were also temporarily taken offline as river temperatures approached legal limits, preventing excessively warm cooling water from being returned to the rivers and harming aquatic ecosystems.

Transportation networks have also struggled. A Eurostar train traveling from Cologne to Paris broke down near Brussels, leaving around 400 passengers stranded in extreme temperatures, while several people required medical treatment.

In Denmark, high temperatures disrupted public transport after multiple Odense Light Rail vehicles broke down on Saturday, forcing services to be suspended across the entire network. Authorities in Aarhus also reported that several traffic lights malfunctioned because of the heat.

Across Europe, numerous outdoor events have either been cancelled or postponed. Organizers called off the Defqon.1 music festival in the Netherlands following an unprecedented Code Red heat warning, while Paris Pride and the Solidays music festival were postponed after French authorities warned hospitals were already under severe pressure.

Beyond disrupting daily life, the prolonged heat is placing mounting pressure on healthcare systems across the continent. Hospitals across several countries have reported increasing numbers of heat-related medical emergencies.

French Health Minister Yannick Neuder warned that deaths occurring at home were becoming an increasing concern even as temperatures began easing in parts of the country.

Older adults, young children, and people with underlying medical conditions remain particularly vulnerable, although health authorities have stressed that prolonged exposure now poses risks to the general population as well.

Beyond the immediate health risks, the heatwave is placing additional strain on agriculture, water resources, and electricity networks. Farmers across parts of southern Europe are facing growing concerns over crop stress and water shortages as prolonged high temperatures increase demand for irrigation while reducing soil moisture.

The World Meteorological Organization warned the heatwave will have “major impacts” on public health, agriculture, ecosystems, and labor productivity.

“We need to get used to it, unfortunately,” WMO spokeswoman Clare Nullis said, reflecting concerns that such extreme events are becoming increasingly common.

Researchers from the World Weather Attribution consortium concluded that the current event is the most severe and widespread June heatwave ever recorded across the region studied. Their analysis found that the heatwave would not have occurred without climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

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Europe’s Fastest-Warming Continent

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest-heating continent on Earth.

Scientists attribute the current conditions to a persistent high-pressure “heat dome” trapping hot air over Western Europe while drawing additional warm air northward from the Sahara. Although similar weather patterns have occurred in previous summers, researchers say today’s significantly warmer climate is amplifying their intensity.

Climate experts warn that unless global greenhouse gas emissions decline substantially, heatwaves comparable to this year’s event could become increasingly frequent, longer-lasting, and more intense.

For Europe, a continent already warming faster than any other, the current heatwave is increasingly viewed not as an anomaly but as another benchmark in a rapidly changing climate.