Briefing Room: Nicaragua Cancels Elections. And More.

Welcome to The Briefing Room, the weekly show designed to keep you up to date on all the other news happening in the world outside of Iran. I'm Simon, and this week we're checking in on Nicaragua, where longtime dictator Daniel Ortega has just cancelled elections.

Thousands of kilometers away, we're also looking at what's happening in Ethiopia, where the signs are that both the federal government and the Tigray region are still preparing for a renewed civil war in the near future.

But first, we're traveling to Mali, where an alliance between jihadists and insurgents is making life for the ruling junta and their Russian allies absolute hell. As always, thank you for subscribing. It's your subscriptions that allow us to make videos like this, covering the lesser-known things happening in the world.

Without you, our coverage of places like Mali, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua would look very different. Or Nicaragua, if you're feeling particularly American. People are going to talk about it in the comments, even though this is a fronts video, so there won't be comments.

Anyway, and with that done, let's head straight to Mali, where Russia's Afrika Korps is trying, and apparently failing, to contain growing chaos. For a few short days, it seemed as if the town of Anaphis in the nation of Mali would be immortalized as the site of a great victory for Mali's military regime and for their backers in the Russian Afrika Korps.

When, several weeks ago, Mali's al-Qaeda-linked insurgency, Janim, and its ethnic Taurag separatist movement kicked off a wave of joint attacks across the country, Anaphis came under a days-long siege where Malian soldiers and Russian paramilitaries were forced to hold out side by side.

Eventually, despite the insurgents' best efforts, the siege of Anaphis was broken, and Janim and the Taurag FLA organization were sent packing with their tails between their legs.

At a time when Mali's armed forces are in chronic disarray and the Afrika Korps have become the subject of international ridicule, the victory at Anaphis was a desperately needed boost for morale, a reminder that by working together, Mali and the Russians could still achieve something. By last Saturday, however, 18 July, the party was over.

On that day, the Janim and FLA forces that were supposed to have been successfully beaten back instead managed to carry out another attack, this time ambushing a convoy that was traveling from Anaphis to the city of Gao.

While sources from the region haven't definitively stated what the convoy's purpose was, we do know a bit about its structure, and we can hazard a guess at the rest. Riding at the front, with other units most likely traveling as an advanced party, were Russian paramilitaries, a relatively small number of them by all current indicators.

Behind them were a much larger number of Malian soldiers, along with a smaller group of government allied militiamen. While it's not known for sure whether the convoy was traveling with air support, it's relatively standard practice that there would be for a convoy of this size.

According to imagery that's come out south of the fact, the convoy appeared to have been organized, at least in part, to transport fuel tankers, although it may have also been transporting munitions, wounded fighters, or troops who'd been temporarily deployed to Anaphis during and after the attack. back to end the siege.

What is not in dispute, however, is what happened to the convoy once it departed the town. According to a range of local sources and confirmed by the Malian military afterward, the convoy was attacked by a combined force of Janim and FLA fighters while it traveled through a remote area.

According to one source, speaking to Reuters, over 50 government-aligned fighters were killed.

While a statement from the FLA indicated that Russian paramilitaries were among the dead, most sources indicated that because the Afrika Korps had been driving at or near the front of the convoy, they were able to flee the scene and reach Gao safely.

They could have doubled back, of course, and tried to help repel the attack on their Malian counterparts, but that doesn't seem to have happened. As one local community leader told the AFP, quote, no Russians were killed.

The dead are from the army and the state-backed militias. Footage from after the attack indicated that at least a few soldiers were taken captive, with local reports indicating that at least two dozen of them had chosen to surrender rather than die fighting. Their status, as of the time of writing, is unknown.

The Malian army indicated that it responded to the ambush in the following hours, with airstrikes that killed several insurgent fighters, although local reports agree that the damage wasn't anywhere close to what Janim and the FLA had achieved.

The attack came as a shock to the Malian military, both for the speed with which Janim and the FLA were able to reconstitute their forces in the area, and for the results that they were able to achieve during the ambush.

Another AFP source, this one from the Malian army, explained, quote, we are trying to see what could really have made our men so vulnerable.

Some of our men were simply executed. After the fact, the conflict monitor Akhled confirmed as much, quoting West Africa senior analyst Heni Nsibir, the militants subsequently captured and executed many of the soldiers, demonstrating how exposed Malian forces become when operating without the support of their Russian partners. End quote.

Tactically speaking, the insurgent ambush is the latest proof that Janim and the FLA remain far more operationally flexible than their military adversaries, and that once they're outside of the military's immediate vicinity, Malian and Russian forces have basically no ability to monitor or intercept them.

The ambush also brought back very uncomfortable memories of the Battle of Tinzuaten in 2024, when dozens of Russian Wagner Group fighters and Malian soldiers were slaughtered in an exceptionally effective joint assault. Finally, this latest attack is just further confirmation that Janim and FLA have perfected their desert ambush tactics.

Their forces were able to ambush not one, but two convoys that tried to break the siege at Anefis while holding the siege simultaneously, and Janim has been able to rely on ambush tactics for many months now in its campaign against Mali's desperately needed fuel imports. Nor was the costly ambush the only Janim and FLA victory, even on that single day.

Elsewhere in central Mali, Janim overran a village military camp before they got to work booting out the locals and laying the groundwork for reprisals.

According to Akhled, Janim was then attacked by a trio of Russian-made Mi-24 helicopters, but managed to shoot one of the helicopters down, killing its crew. the process.

Quoting Akhled once more, the military relies heavily on aircraft, including helicopters and armed drones, and these losses are likely becoming increasingly difficult to absorb as this was the second helicopter shot down in just two weeks. Taken together, the Malian regime's defeats across the past week point to a difficult reality to stomach.

Even though Janim and the FLA have taken heavy losses at times, and even though they haven't enjoyed a perfect round of victories against defeats in their armed operations, they are still able to run a constant, coordinated insurgent campaign alongside each other.

They're still able to carry out near-simultaneous operations in areas hundreds of kilometers from each other with sufficient numbers and weaponry to wipe out soldiers, overrun military installations, and bring down helicopters in each of those areas simultaneously.

And when it comes time for Russian paramilitaries to step up and try to help the governments with which they're contracted, they hit the gas pedal and drive back to safety while the locals get the worst of what comes next.

For our next story, we turn our attention to Ethiopia, where it is becoming increasingly likely that one of the most destructive conflicts in recent history, the Tigray War, is about to reignite. And just calling it merely destructive feels like a gross understatement.

During the fighting, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, it's estimated that as many as 600,000 people died.

It was equally catastrophic for the nation's economy, with authorities estimating that it could have cost the country as much as $28.8 billion, while the post-war reconstruction bill was expected to reach $20 billion.

The war started primarily because the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, the political party that had dominated Ethiopian politics for decades, was pushed out of power once Abi Ahmed became prime minister in 2018.

The TPLF tried to maintain its political independence by refusing to join Abi's new prosperity party and holding their own elections after the national ones were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then came the first attack in November 2020, with Tigrayan forces launching what they called a preemptive operation against the Ethiopian army. Addis Ababa responded exactly as you would expect, with the full mind of its armed forces, supported by forces from the Amhara region, and crucially, Eritrea.

Assas Efwerki, Eritrea's long-time dictator, regarded the TPLF as an enemy following a border conflict at the turn of the century and saw an opportunity to both settle an old score and eliminate a major strategic threat.

The war ended after Emirati-supplied drones turned back a TPLF column that was threatening the capital, and the Tigrayan leadership decided it had few viable alternatives other than signing a peace deal known as the Praetoria Agreement. While the Praetoria Agreement ended the war, it didn't resolve the underlying issues that it caused it.

It also didn't create a new, stable political order in the Tigray region.

According to the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik Institut, the blame for this lies with both the Ethiopian government and the TPLF.

The former, because it has not done enough to facilitate the return of internally displaced persons, and restore Tigray's territorial integrity, and the latter because, after the peace deal, it became consumed by internal power struggles that culminated in a faction of the TPLF's seasoned control of key officers in the regional capital of Mekel.

This set the stage for an even bigger power grab that culminated in May this year, when the TPLF elbowed out the regional leader, Tudessa Wereida, who earned the blessing of Addis Ababa, replacing his administration with a regional council led by the TPLF chair, to Bretzian Gebremikal, who had led the region during the Tigray War.

Now, for observers of Ethiopia, the TPLF's power grab and the government's inability or unwillingness to resolve the underlying issues in the Tigray region, they're some of the clearest signs that the nation is once again headed down a dark path. Unfortunately for Addis Ababa, this time, it doesn't have the Amhara or Eritrea on its side.

While we'd need a whole other video to go into why this has happened, and there are a few on the main channel if you do fancy searching for them, suffice it to say that Ethiopia has managed to make both of its former allies mad enough that they would ally with the TPLF, the same guys they fought against just a few short years ago.

As part of its efforts to prepare for a war, which at this point feels close to inevitable, the TPLF has been rebuilding its forces through any means necessary. Local communities told Human Rights Watch that Tigrayan forces were abducting men and boys as young as 15 on the street, in offices, and in nighttime house-to-house searches.

They were also targeting them at gold mining sites, an important source of employment in the region.

Human Rights Watch also reported that security forces were punishing parents and young children of those evading mobilization, causing a displacement crisis as those opposed to mobilization have been forced to flee the region.

The Tigray forces are so desperate to fill out their ranks that not even the injured are being spared, with a former fighter telling D.W. Amharic that he was pressured to rejoin despite leaving the militia because of injuries sustained in the First War.

And the TPLF has gone to great lengths to give its forced recruitment drive a veneer of legal credibility.

In late June, the TPLF approved a law that critics have described as draconian, which says that individuals and media outlets in the region who oppose military mobilization criticize the armed struggle or are accused of obfuscating defense efforts would face harsh penalties, including a 25-year prison sentence.

While there have been protests, they have done little to convince the TPLF to change tag because they fundamentally believe that a war is on the horizon.

Most observers believe that the only reason both sides aren't already fighting is due to the Iran war causing a debilitating fuel shortage in Ethiopia. With the war restarting and the closure of the Bab al-Mandev Strait by the Houthis, a Yemeni group allied with Tehran, it seems like Ethiopia's fuel shortage will last a little while longer.

And that may be for the best, because it may allow cooler heads to prevail and avert the start of what promises to be another catastrophic war.

In the 21st century, it's not impossible for a head of state to become a dictator. But there's a certain set of expectations that an aspiring autocrat simply must... be able to satisfy.

They've got to land the support of at least one vetoing member of the UN Security Council to get around all the headaches that might come with a global resolution against them.

It would certainly help if they'd strike extraction or development deals with the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, or all three to buy a little bit of goodwill. And even when it's time for an authoritarian power grab, they've got to at least give a patina of democratic legitimacy.

But, like so many other informal rules that bind most of the modern world, all of this has a way of falling apart when it comes to the nation of Nicaragua.

This past Sunday, Nicaraguan dictator and co-president Daniel Ortega made the sort of announcement that even the most capital D dictators wouldn't dare to try. Ortega, speaking on behalf of himself and his wife and co-president, Rosario Murillo, declared that he would move to abolish Nicaragua's elections full stop.

Quoting Ortega, who spoke at a government rally commemorating the 47th anniversary of his political movement, there will never be elections here again.

As for why Ortega had made such a decision, the octogenarian autocrat made his case quite succinctly. According to him, the Nicaraguan opposition was going to try and use the nation's elections to, quote, seize the government to seize power.

Now, particularly askew viewers of the briefing room may already be aware that for a political opposition to try and use elections to seize power, well, it's quite literally the point of an electoral system, isn't it?

But as the New York Times succinctly explained, quote, the pronouncement was an explicit end to any pretense that Nicaragua still had a democracy, end quote. The decision came just one year before Ortega was to face an electoral challenge at what would be the 20-year mark of his rule over the country.

After the announcement was made, Nicaragua's Congress acted quickly.

By Wednesday, they'd started the process to create a, quote, work plan so that Ortega's decision could be put into effect. As of the time of writing, the specifics of the work plan have yet to be disclosed. The idea that Ortega and Murillo would try to lock down power in this way is not altogether that surprising.

In their time as a ruling family and then as co-dictators at the head of the Nicaraguan regime, the Ortegas have gone to great lengths to rule over their population of about 7 million with an iron fist.

As of 2026, over a million Nicaraguans have been forced into exile under their rule, and many thousands of dissidents and members of the political opposition have been disappeared into the country's opaque detention system.

Quoting from the New York Times again, their government has rigged elections, dismantled institutions, killed protesters, targeted dissidents, and jailed critics, journalists, religious figures, opposition politicians, and even long-time loyalists, according to human rights groups, and the United Nations, end quote.

But even for the Nicaraguan dictatorship, it's still a hell of a statement to abolish elections outright, and it's a decision that speaks to the immense self-assuredness that's defined the latter stages of their rule.

The Ortegas have already proven that they can manipulate elections or even fabricate results. meaning that the outcome of a vote is hardly in question. And Ortega himself is 80 years old, far from the picture of health, so with Nicaragua's presidential terms recently extended to six years, Ortega's 2027 re-election might have been his last anyway.

For Ortega to go to such extremes, to remind Nicaraguans and the world about a reality that was already well understood, speaks more to a display of sheer dominance than a shrewd political maneuver. What Ortega's announcement did accomplish, however, was to draw the ire of the United States. In 2026, that's no small thing for a Latin American dictator.

Just look at what happened to Nicolas Maduro back in January, or what's happening on the island of Cuba, as we speak.

The United States is home to more than 800,000 Nicaraguan expatriates, including hundreds of thousands of voting citizens who the Trump administration counts on, and to American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, oh, sorry, excuse us, Gaius Marcus Rubius Augustus, King of Kings, would very much like to defend.

Predictably, Rubio took to the diplomatic stage on Tuesday, calling for an international isolation campaign against Nicaragua, and pointing out, quite accurately, that the Ortega's move, quote, lays bare their true authoritarian nature.

In comments online, Rubio alleged that Ortega's decision is a threat to American national security, although he didn't specify exactly how U.S. security would come under threat. America's willingness to engage on the issue would seem to suggest that Ortega is playing a very dangerous game.

On the one hand, Ortega justified the ban on elections in explicitly anti-American terms, quoting, The days when parties backed by the Yankees and Somersistas would return to power are over.

Never again. During the same speech, he lambasted Washington's decision to capture Nicolas Maduro, calling the operation, quote, monstrous. Now, as ever, the United States is a very effective bogeyman for Ortega to draw upon as a source of political strength.

Washington has a long and complex history in Central and South America, including in Nicaragua, and Ortega's movement can find plenty to criticize in either American administration's past or in the Trump administration of today. On the other hand, what happened to Nicolas Maduro could very easily happen to Ortega if the United States so wished.

For all the problems and glaring inadequacies of the Venezuelan military, it was far more formidable than Nicaragua's.

So if Ortega wants to roll the dice and see whether he can get away with the ultimate power grab at Washington's expense, then he's in a decent position to try. But if the plan backfires, then it will backfire in a major way, and Ortega may spend the final years of his life in a U.S. prison cell. Thank you for watching.

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