🇩🇪⚡️ — Germany’s Bundeswehr is using branded Döner bags as recruitment advertising in Berlin, featuring camouflage designs and QR codes linking to its careers website, Berliner Kurier reports.

Kebab shops receive the bags for free, while the Bundeswehr says the campaign is intended to reach potential recruits in everyday settings, including young people, career changers, and skilled workers.

The military describes the initiative as an “ambient” advertising campaign, although it says the direct impact on recruitment applications is difficult to measure.

🇾🇪⚔️🇾🇪 Latest Updates from the Conflict Fronts in Yemen

🟡 Active engagements and artillery duels persist along the Al-Barah axis between Yemeni Armed Forces and Tareq Saleh's affiliated militias.

🟡 A Rajum hexacopter UAV operated by Yemeni forces struck a target in the Harib district south of Marib, inflicting one fatality among the Shabwa Defense Forces and multiple injuries.

🟡 The Saudi-led coalition has conducted artillery bombardments against the Al-Thabit enclaves in Qatabar, the Ghafirah sub-district in Al-Zahir, and the Al-Ghur locality in Ghamr district, all situated in Saada governorate.

🟡 Separately, the Saudi-backed government has alleged that a Yemeni (Houthi) ballistic missile barrage east of Al-Khokha, in southern Al-Hudaydah province, resulted in the deaths of two civilians described as farmers. This claim appears to be false. Attacks have been carried out against Saudi ships, and the two farmers mentioned were killed either by falling missile fragments or by artillery fire from forces loyal to Tariq Saleh.

🔗 IWN

🇦🇫❌🇦🇫 — Abdul Rahman Mansoor, the Taliban-appointed mayor for the town of Faizabad, the capital of the Badakhshan province, was assassinated by the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF) via an IED ambush.

🇦🇫❌🇦🇫 — The anti-Taliban Afghan United Front (AUF) killed 10 Taliban fighters and captured 3 others following a raid on their positions in Badakhshan.

🇦🇫❌🇦🇫 — Hasib Qoway Markaz, a key commander of the Anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF), was killed by Taliban special forces today.

🇨🇳🛢 Beijing Bets on Fossil Fuels Even as It Leads the World in Renewables

China's crude output hit a record 216 million metric tonnes in 2025, even as imports fell to their lowest level since 2017.

Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan targets 440 million tonnes of oil equivalent in domestic output by 2030, plus 20,000 km of new pipelines.

China has cut its reliance on Middle East crude, dropping the region's share of its imports from 55.4% to 44.6% in a single year.

China has become the world’s largest renewable energy producer by accelerating the rollout of solar, wind, and battery storage projects, while in recent years it has also increased its oil and gas output. Efforts to expand its fossil fuel industry are expected to boost China’s energy self-sufficiency over the coming decade, helping to reduce its dependence on other countries for oil and gas imports. The diversification of its energy sources will help ensure China’s energy security at a time when so many other countries are failing to diversify sufficiently.

In 2025, China’s crude output was a record 216 million metric tonnes, according to the National Energy Administration. Meanwhile, China’s natural gas output increased by 10 billion cubic metres last year. Chinese oil and gas firms also expanded the country’s reserves, adding 1.32 billion metric tonnes of oil equivalent of recoverable oil and gas volumes. Between January and July this year, China’s crude output increased by 0.9 per cent, to 4.42 million bpd, according to National Bureau of Statistics data.

The significant increase in China’s oil and gas output is down to government policies aimed at reducing reliance on energy imports. China has filled its strategic oil reserves with discounted Russian and Iranian crude in recent years as it works to increase its own production capacity. This helped isolate it from the price increases of recent months, driven by the ongoing Iran War and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

China plans to further strengthen its national petroleum reserves to shield the country from future global disruptions. The government aims to expand strategic overland import corridors to enhance connectivity. It will also diversify its oil and gas suppliers to reduce the threat of geopolitical disruptions.

China has already increased oil purchases from West Africa, Latin America, and Russia, helping it mitigate the disruption much of the world has faced due to constraints on oil exports from the Middle East. China reduced its crude imports from the Middle East from 55.4 per cent to 44.6 per cent from the first half of 2025 to the same period in 2026, according to calculations by S&P Global Energy.

🔗 https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Beijing-Bets-on-Fossil-Fuels-Even-as-It-Leads-the-World-in-Renewables.html

🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 USS George Washington (CVN-73) arrived in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility yesterday, the combatant command announced on social media.

The aircraft carrier, which was accompanied by cruiser USS Robert Smalls (CG-62) and destroyer USS Shoup (DDG-86), transited the Arabian Sea on Thursday, according to the CENTCOM post on social media site X. It is not clear how close GW is to the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.

The George Washington Carrier Strike Group is expected to relieve the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, but a Navy official could not say when USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and its escorts would head home. It could take a month or longer for Lincoln to travel back to the U.S. West Coast, based on previous carrier transits.

The GW CSG headed from the Indo-Pacific to CENTCOM, beginning last week, after families and sailors raised concerns about the quality of life aboard Abe, which has gone 252 days without a port call, the current record for most days at sea since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, Abe has been deployed for 272 days, according to USNI News carrier deployment database.

🔗 https://news.usni.org/2026/08/20/carrier-uss-george-washington-now-in-the-middle-east

🇺🇸🕊🇮🇷 The U.S. might not rebuild the bases destroyed by Iran during the 3rd Gulf War

The Pentagon is evaluating its military footprint in the Middle East in an early sign of the Iran war’s potential to transform the U.S. presence in the region, according to eight people, including officials and others familiar with the matter.

One of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America’s large overseas military bases have been battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing analysis said.

The damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild its bases as they were before the conflict.

The evaluation is being led by the Pentagon’s policy office, though a senior Pentagon official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive analysis, said that the Joint Staff and U.S. Central Command were also studying the issue.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had not yet ordered a formal review of U.S. posture in the region, the official said. Instead, the official cast the analysis as “prudent planning” that could eventually inform how the administration addresses whether to rebuild the bases damaged during the war.

“Decisions are going to have to be made on some of this stuff,” the official said.

U.S. Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East, normally stations about 40,000 troops across almost 20 sites in a 1,500-mile arc from Jordan to Oman.

Since early this year, the military has surged warships, fighters, air defense assets and other scarce military equipment to the region to defend U.S. forces and carry out more than 13,000 strikes against Iran.

People familiar with the Pentagon’s analysis said the issue is likely to intensify a debate between camps within the administration that support military interventions and others that have argued the Pentagon should curtail some of its security commitments to refocus on defending the U.S. homeland or deterring more powerful adversaries, like China.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/18/pentagon-evaluating-smaller-us-military-presence-persian-gulf-after-iran-war/

🔼 🇺🇸 🛢 US oil prices rise above $87/barrel for the first time since July 24th as President Trump says "Economic D-Day" is coming for Iran.

US Treasury Yields are rising as inflation expectations mount.

📎 KobeissiLetter

🇺🇸❌🇱🇧 The U.S. Treasury Department has introduced new sanctions on Hezbollah and weapons smugglers working with it

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is designating 10 individuals that are part of a network responsible for transferring cash to Hizballah. The network utilizes couriers travelling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, Turkiye, the UAE, and Iran to move up to hundreds of millions of dollars between jurisdictions, providing an avenue outside the formal financial system for Hizballah to obtain foreign currency and evade sanctions. OFAC is also re-designating Hizballah for service to the Iranian regime under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF).

🔗 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0611