Pakistan

Reporting this week by Drop Site News revealed that two supporters of imprisoned former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan have effectively disappeared for more than 7 months by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Imran Khan was the Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022 when he was removed from office in a US-backed coup. He has been imprisoned since 2023. The “crime” that Khan and the PTI party he founded were guilty of in the eyes of US imperialism was daring to assert the sovereignty of Pakistan, and plotting a foreign policy independent of US interests. The coup against Khan and the subsequent persecution of his supporters in the PTI is a message to the people of Pakistan: fall in line with the US-dominated global order… or else.

The Pakistani military, fattened by decades of US ‘anti-terrorism’ funding (while the US was carrying out a criminal occupation of neighboring Afghanistan), has asserted itself as the ultimate power in the country at the behest of its US patrons. Supporters of Khan and members of the PTI have been subjected to a campaign of harassment, murder, and torture that has expanded beyond the country’s borders. Activists overseas have had their family members inside Pakistan threatened, and kidnapped. Now that repression has even extended to collaboration with other reactionary states.

Two PTI supporters, Muhammad Junaid Jahangir and Syed Salman Raza, were arrested by the UAE (where they were living and working) in September of 2024. They have only been allowed brief phone calls with their families, which stopped in April 2025; their families have not been able to retain attorneys on their behalf, and they have not even had a court date. Effectively, the UAE has carried out a judicial kidnapping of two men, on behalf of the reactionary Pakistani government. The UAE itself has been more than happy to do the bidding of the US, from their gleeful participation in the US-Saudi war of aggression against Yemen to their 2020 normalization of relations with Israel.

Kenya

At the same time that Ruto, the “Puppet of the West”, was violently repressing righteous anger on the streets of Nairobi, he was deepening his ties to the US military. In June 2024, Ruto deployed 1,000 Kenyan police in a US-backed and funded “peacekeeping” mission to Haiti. This move allowed the US to have control over troops on the ground in Haiti without getting their hands dirty and allowing the US to distance itself from its previous disastrous and inhumane “humanitarian” missions that further destabilized Haiti. One year into the mission, Kenya’s police force has unsurprisingly failed to “restore order” in Haiti, just as they have brutally failed on the streets of Kenya.

Like other countries rich in natural resources, Kenya is increasingly squeezed by inter-imperialist competition. This current government has chosen to prostrate itself to the United States and has been rewarded with over $400 million in the last decade in counterterrorism aid. This makes Kenya the 3rd largest recipient of aid in Africa and a lapdog to the US military. That money might be enough to buy off the ruling elite of Kenya, but it has not quieted the just resistance of the masses.

Sixteen people have been killed in massive protests across Kenya. At least 400 have been wounded, 83 of which were treated for serious injuries, all becoming victims of the crimes they were protesting – police brutality and government corruption.

Demonstrations in June were held to mark the one-year anniversary of even larger, deadlier protests that were fighting the enactment the President William Ruto’s finance bill. The finance bill was set to raise taxes to cover the payments and interest of imperialist loans from China, the IMF, and the World Bank. Currently, 60% of Kenyans’ tax revenue goes toward paying these loans, leaving the masses without reliable sanitation, education, or transportation. While Ruto was claiming that the people of Kenya should be further strangled by debt, his government was unable to account for the $1.24 billion that was earmarked for these loans.

The outrage of the people was initially successful, forcing Ruto to abandon the bill. Yet only a few weeks later, taxes on daily goods such as plastic and sugar increased to equally untenable levels.

Congo/Rwanda

In March of 2022, the Rwandan-backed insurgent group, the March 23rd Movement (M23), began a new offensive in the Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu—once again escalating thirty years of aggression against the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Rwanda. Over 700,000 people were displaced, and thousands killed in what M23 claim was an attempt to dismantle the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). The FDLR was formed from a coalition of groups that perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide—it is not beyond comprehension why their presence along the Congolese-Rwandan border may be unsettling to Rwanda, but this was merely a casus belli – the actual objective was the cut-and-dry annexation of Kivu by Rwanda.

This human catastrophe came to a formal, conditional end on June 27th of this year; Donald Trump negotiated a peace agreement, signed in Washington. The terms are simple: The ‘phased’ withdrawal of M23 from Congolese territory, the dismantling of FDLR, the establishment of a joint security mechanism, increased cooperation with the UN, and—wait for it—the opening up of Kivu to foreign investment. Indeed, Trump emphasized, “We’re getting for the United States a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo.”​​​​​​

The Kivu region, like much of Africa, is home to dazzling natural resources, chief among them gold and coltan; both crucial to high-value-added manufacturing, electronics, and so on. Thirty years of war and insurgency and war again have wracked the region, leaving 10 million dead, 5.7 million displaced, and 26 million facing starvation – from an imperialist perspective, leaving the region without a workforce to exploit.

For the Congolese people, it’s out of the frying pan – into the fire; now that Kivu is free for Western exploitation again, they can only expect to face the genocidal working conditions faced by the rest of the Congolese people – they, along with their children, scraping the coltan from the rock with their bare hands—the very coltan in the phone you use every day.

As Pope Francis said when he visited the Congo in 2023: “Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa! Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered!”

Gaza

This Week, the Gaza Government Media Office announced that Oxycodone pills had been discovered in sacks of flour distributed by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—a US-Israeli front group that poses as an aid organization—but is in actuality a scheme to further the genocide of the Palestinian people – by machinegun fire from IDF “security” pickets, now by slow, subtle poisoning as well.

This duplicity has been revealed amidst ongoing ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas—another ceasefire, the third now. This is the second ceasefire this year; like the first, it will entail a sixty-day pause to the slaughter of Gazans, an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian political prisoners, an increase in aid supplies—apparently to be distributed by the UN and Palestinian Red Crescent, and the beginning of negotiations for a permanent ceasefire. Unlike the first, the draft terms of the ceasefire stipulate that the IDF will withdraw from Gaza to positions along the border with Israeli-occupied pre-1948 Palestine; Trump has declared that he will personally announce the ceasefire, apparently to assuage Hamas’ anxieties of Israeli perfidy.

It is unknowable at this point how many more Palestinians have been butchered—thousands, tens of thousands—they lie buried under the shattered remains of homes, schools, hospitals, and bakeries. Famine has long since arrived, with virtually all Gazans not receiving enough daily intake of food to sustain life. There are no longer functioning hospitals or clinics in Gaza.

We will not make predictions as to the outcome of the negotiations; it is possible the genocide will end, as it is possible Hamas will disband and Gaza will fall under US-Israeli administration, as it is possible that negotiations will fail and the annihilation of the Palestinian people will resume unabated. What can be said is that the lives of Gazan men, women, and children mean nothing to Donald Trump, nor to any US politician – whatever US-brokered ceasefire comes will bring no justice to the lives lost, the families destroyed, the nation slaughtered.