The cartel recruiter slipped onto campus disguised as a janitor and then zeroed in on his target: a sophomore chemistry student.

The recruiter explained that the cartel was staffing up for a project, and that he’d heard good things about the young man.

“‘You’re good at what you do,’” the student recalled the recruiter saying. “‘You decide if you’re interested.’”

In their quest to build fentanyl empires, Mexican criminal groups are turning to an unusual talent pool: not hit men or corrupt police officers, but chemistry students studying at Mexican universities.

People who make fentanyl in cartel labs, who are called cooks, told The New York Times that they needed workers with advanced knowledge of chemistry to help make the drug stronger and “get more people hooked,” as one cook put it.

The cartels also have a more ambitious goal: to synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.

If they succeed, U.S. officials say, it would represent a terrifying new phase in the fentanyl crisis, in which Mexican cartels have more control than ever over one of the deadliest drugs in recent history.

“It would make us the kings of Mexico,” said one chemistry student who has been cooking fentanyl for six months.

The Times interviewed seven fentanyl cooks, three chemistry students, two high-ranking operatives and a high-level recruiter. All of them work for the Sinaloa Cartel, which the U.S. government says is largely responsible for the fentanyl pouring over the southern border.

Those affiliated with the cartel put themselves in danger just by talking to The Times, and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Their accounts matched those of American Embassy officials who track cartel activities, including the role students are playing in cartel operations and how they are producing fentanyl. Times reporters spoke to a chemistry professor, who said the recruitment of his students was common.

The students said they had different jobs within the criminal group. Sometimes, they said, they run experiments to strengthen the drug or to create precursors. Other times, they say, they supervise or work alongside the cooks and assistants who produce fentanyl in bulk.

It’s unclear how widespread the recruitment of students has become, but the pursuit of trained chemists seems to have been influenced in part by the coronavirus pandemic.

A 2020 Mexican intelligence assessment, leaked by a hacker group, found that the Sinaloa Cartel appeared to be recruiting chemistry professors to develop fentanyl precursor chemicals after the pandemic slowed supply chains.

American law enforcement officials also said that many young chemists had been swept up in arrests at Mexican fentanyl labs in recent years. The arrested chemists told the authorities that they had been working on developing precursors and making the drug stronger, according to the officials.

A chemistry professor at a university in Sinaloa State said he knew that some students enrolled in chemistry classes just to become more familiar with skills needed to cook synthetic drugs. The professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had identified students who fit that profile by their questions and reactions during his lectures.

“Sometimes when I am teaching them synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs, they openly ask me, ‘Hey, professor, when are you teaching us how to synthesize cocaine and other things?’” he said.

Eager to preserve cooperation on migration, the Biden administration avoided publicly urging Mexico to do more to dismantle the cartels. President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised a more aggressive approach, threatening to deploy the U.S. military to battle the criminals, and vowing last month to issue a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods if the country doesn’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants across the border.

In response to the tariff threat, Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that “international collaboration” was needed to prevent the shipment of precursors to Mexico from “Asian countries.”

But as the cartels gain greater control of the fentanyl supply chain, U.S. officials say, it will become more difficult for law enforcement in both countries to stop the industrialized production of synthetic opioids in Mexico.

The cartels “know we are now focused on the illicit trafficking of these precursor chemicals around the world,” said Todd Robinson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Those efforts are driving the cartels “to try to bring this thing in-house,” Mr. Robinson said. “The practical result of that is their ability to more easily and quickly transfer those drugs to the United States.”

Mass producing fentanyl can be relatively straightforward if cartels are just mixing up imported precursors, experts said, because it’s easy to find instructions for producing the drug using those chemicals.

But trying to synthesize the precursors from scratch is a much more difficult process that requires a broader array of chemical techniques and skills, said James DeFrancesco, a forensic science professor at Loyola University Chicago who worked as a forensic chemist at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for 18 years.

The process is also dangerous. Cooks and students said that even though they wore gas masks and hazmat suits, the risks they face are many: toxic exposure to the lethal drug, accidental explosions, mistakes that enrage their armed and extremely violent bosses.

Yet the work pays more than many legal jobs in chemistry, and that’s often enough of a sell. The second-year student said the recruiter who visited the campus had offered him $800 up front, plus a monthly salary of $800 — twice as much as the average pay for chemists formally employed in Mexico, according to government data.

The 19-year-old, raised in one of the poorest parts of Sinaloa, said he had chosen to study chemistry because his father had cancer and he wanted to help find a cure.

“I want to help people, not kill them,” he said. The idea of making a product that would lead to mass death made him sick — and yet the treatment his father needed was impossible for the family to afford.

He told the recruiter he was interested, and five days later he was picked up by cartel members, blindfolded and driven to a clandestine lab hidden in the mountains, he said.

The Recruiter

Before the Sinaloa Cartel ever approaches a recruit, it scouts out its prospect.

The ideal candidate is someone who has both classroom knowledge and street smarts, a go-getter who won’t blanch at the idea of producing a lethal drug and, above all, someone discreet, said one recruiter in an interview.

In months of searching, he said, he’s found three students who now work for him developing precursors. Many young people just don’t meet his standards.

“Some are lazy, some aren’t bright, some talk too much,” said the recruiter, a lanky middle-aged man with square glasses, who has worked for the cartel for 10 years. He described himself as a fix-it man, focused on improving quality and output in the fentanyl business.

To identify potential candidates, the cartel does a round of outreach with friends, acquaintances and colleagues, the recruiter said, then talks to the targets’ families, their friends, even people they play soccer with — all to learn whether they’d be open to doing this kind of work. If the recruiter finds someone particularly promising, he might offer to cover the student’s tuition cost.

“We are a company; what a company does is invest in their best people,” he said.

When the cartel began mass-producing fentanyl about a decade ago, the recruiter said, it relied on uneducated cooks from the countryside who could easily get their hands on what people in the business call “recipes” for making the drug.

Compared to methamphetamine, a drug that requires more advanced equipment and expertise to manufacture at scale, fentanyl is straightforward to produce if precursor chemicals are available.

“It takes four steps,” said one longtime cook, laying out the process with the simplicity that might be found on the back of a box of cake mix. “You shake it up, mix it, dry it, wash it with acetone.”

But things got more complicated in recent years. China moved to restrict the export of fentanyl precursors, Mexico cracked down on imports of the chemicals and the coronavirus pandemic gummed up supply chains so that those ingredients became harder to find.

The recruiter and all three students interviewed said they hadn’t successfully produced precursors yet.

“We are close, but it’s not easy,” said one former student, a 21-year-old who started working in a lab this year. Baby-faced and bright-eyed, the student had dropped out of school to work for the cartel. “We need to keep doing tests and more tests.”

But the recruiter said the students had been helpful in one key respect: making the fentanyl even more potent.

Student No. 1

About a year ago, a relative approached a first-year chemistry student with a proposal: Wouldn’t she love to make real money as a fentanyl cook?

In an interview, the student said her relative had worked for the Sinaloa Cartel for years and knew exactly what to say to lure the young woman, the eldest of five siblings. Her mother was raising the children alone, cleaning houses 12 hours a day.

The cartel offered the student $1,000 as a signing bonus, the woman said. She was terrified, but she said yes. The lab where she works is about an hour’s flight from Sinaloa’s capital, on the small aircraft the cartel uses to transport cooks to work. Her bosses told her that her job was to manufacture more powerful fentanyl, she said.

The fentanyl coming out of Mexico has often been of low purity, a problem the recruiter attributes to the desperate rush to satisfy Americans’ appetite for the synthetic opioid.

“There was such an explosion of demand that many people just wanted to earn money, and those manufacturers just made whatever without caring about quality,” the recruiter said. But in a competitive market, he said, the cartel can win over more clients with a stronger drug.

The first-year student said she had experimented with all manner of concoctions to increase fentanyl’s potency, including mixing it with animal anesthetics. But none of her attempts at producing fentanyl precursors have worked.

“You’re starting from a blank page,” she said. “How do we create something we didn’t invent?”

Student No. 2

When he first arrived at work, the sophomore chemistry student who had been recruited on campus had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. He said the lab was in the mountains, in the midst of trees and covered by a tarp that had been painted to look like foliage, so it couldn’t be seen from a helicopter.

After three days of work, he said, one of the men in charge told him that he wasn’t there to make fentanyl. He was the newest member of a research and development lab, where everyone was working to figure out how to make precursors from scratch. He said he immediately started worrying about inadvertently causing an explosion.

“They don’t tell you how to do it — they say, ‘These are the products, you’re going to make them with this, it could go wrong, but that’s why you’re studying,’” he said.

The sophomore works with six others, three students from his class in university, and three older men who are not trained chemists. The work is a lot riskier than what he does in school, when he has time to attend.

“Here, if they don’t like what you produce, they can make you disappear,” he said.

A cartel boss recently visited the lab to praise his work, the student said, telling him that if he was able to help produce precursors successfully, the group would give him a house or a car, whatever he wanted.

The sophomore told them what he needed most was money for his dad. He kept his day job a secret from his father.

“When he asks questions, I lie and say I’m working at a company,” the sophomore said. “I think if he knew, he wouldn’t accept the money.”

The middle school students in Senegal listened quietly one afternoon this past week as their history teacher told a story most of them knew already.

In 1944, French colonial forces massacred West African soldiers who had returned from France after fighting in World War II, said the teacher, Aminata Diedhiou.

Their school, in the town of Thiaroye, stands near the site of the killings.

Why did the French massacre them, one student asked. How were they killed, wondered another.

“I want to know more,” said Amy Sall, 16.

So does Senegal.

Ahead of the 80th anniversary of what is known as the Thiaroye Massacre, Senegal’s government has pressured France to fully explain one of the most sinister episodes of its colonial rule in Africa.

And Senegal won’t let it go, the latest signal sent by an African government that the relationship with the former colonizer is up for reconsideration.

After President Emmanuel Macron of France last week referred to the events as a “massacre” in a letter addressed to his Senegalese counterpart — the first French president to ever describe it as such — President Bassirou Diomaye Faye had a blunt answer.

“That is not enough,” Mr. Faye said in an interview with Le Monde. “We still don’t know how many people were killed nor why, how and where they were buried.”

The calls for reparations echo campaigns demanding truth and justice for colonial-era crimes committed across the continent. In the former French colonies of West and Central Africa, where several governments have curtailed ties with France in recent years, few episodes resonate as much as the memory of Thiaroye.

“Thiaroye could be the foundation for a Pan-African consciousness shared by all African countries who have lost citizens in the tragedy,” said Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese historian and director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies.

Mr. Diouf, who was appointed by the Senegalese government this summer to lead a research committee on Thiaroye, called Senegal’s new attitude “indicative of a breakaway, a strong assertion of sovereignty.”

A 15-Second Blood Bath

On the morning of Dec. 1, 1944, French colonial forces gathered hundreds of West African men temporarily stationed at a garrison in Thiaroye, on the outskirts of Dakar, then the capital of French West Africa.

It was supposed to be their last stop before home: Hailing from a dozen African colonies, the men had fought for France in the war, been detained in Nazi-run camps for years and were now awaiting financial compensation for years of service.

The money wasn’t coming.

As tensions escalated between French and West African soldiers who had once been brothers in arms, French officers vowed to “bring back order,” according to a French military report written a day before the killings.

They brought machine guns to Thiaroye, two battalions, a tank and other military vehicles to “show so much superiority that the mutineers don’t think about resisting,” the report read.

Around 9:30 a.m., they fired more than 500 rounds of ammunition within 15 seconds, according to archives consulted by Martin Mourre, a French historian.

The first official death toll mentioned 35 West African deaths — an “indispensable surgical operation,” an act of self-defense against armed and aggressive men, claimed the French officer in charge, in a report written days later.

But historians from France and Senegal say that the real death toll is probably closer to 400, and that the West African soldiers were not armed.

They argue that discrepancies in military reports and the preparedness of French troops pointed to a premeditated massacre. The lack of information around the identities of the victims and the whereabouts of their remains are other signs that France tried to cover up a crime, they say.

“Hiding documents was a part of the imperial policy,” Mr. Diouf said. “We have the French version. We need to write our own narrative.”

Keeping ‘Thiaroye’ Alive

While much remains undisclosed about the events of 1944, Thiaroye has permeated Senegal’s public psyche in plays, poems and hip-hop songs. “Camp de Thiaroye,” released in 1988 by the filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, is a classic of Senegalese cinema.

Now, Senegal’s new pro-sovereignty government is making it a political issue.

Dozens of billboards commemorating the 80th anniversary of the massacre have been displayed along Dakar’s main avenues. In Thiaroye this past week, construction workers were renovating a military cemetery, which will be the site of the official commemoration ceremony.

At the middle school where Ms. Diedhiou gathered students, commemorations are held every year: Senegalese soldiers raise the country’s flag in the middle of the playground, surrounded by students donning uniforms similar to those worn in 1944.

“We are happy to pay tribute,” Awa Samateh, 17, said as she sat with half a dozen schoolmates under an orange tree between two lessons. “But it pains us because the white men killed them for no good reason.”

The school was built on the site of the military camp where the West African soldiers were slain. Ms. Diedhiou said she was haunted by the possibility of teaching close to where the victims may have been buried.

The nearby military cemetery contains 35 graves, the official death toll. But many in Senegal suspect that they are empty.

“These graves are a joke,” said Biram Senghor, whose father, Mbap, was killed in 1944. At 86, Mr. Senghor said he had little hope that he would ever learn the whereabouts of his father’s remains.

A Taboo No More

The economic, cultural and political ties between Senegal and France have run deep since Senegal’s independence in 1960.

For the sake of preserving those ties, Senegalese presidents never confronted France about the atrocities committed in Thiaroye, according to historians and intellectuals from both countries.

“Previous governments thought they had to beg France to commemorate,” said Boubacar Boris Diop, a writer and intellectual who has written a play on Thiaroye. “It is changing now.”

France has long maintained that it had given access to all its archives on the killings, but cracks in that assertion have begun to appear. For the 70th anniversary of the killings in 2014, the president then, François Hollande, said the death toll was more likely 70 — double the toll France had previously acknowledged, but still far below historians’ estimates.

“France isn’t itself when it looks away from events that may have tarnished its image,” Mr. Hollande said.

Last month, Senegalese archivists working for Mr. Diouf’s research group traveled to France to examine all of the archives that could contain information about the killings.

“We will be able to come up with some information that will allow people to ask for reparations,” Mr. Diouf said.

Only truth, President Faye said in his interview with Le Monde, will help Senegal and France move toward a partnership “ridden of painful remnants.” He also called on hundreds of French troops still in Senegal to leave. In another blow to France’s already-waning military influence in Africa, the government of Chad ended a longstanding defense partnership between the two countries last month.

Mr. Senghor, who was 6 years old in 1944, is still waiting for the financial compensation that France owes his deceased father for his service in France.

Mr. Macron said he wouldn’t travel to Senegal for the commemorations. Whether France will heed Senegal’s requests is also unclear.

While France has under Mr. Macron’s leadership returned looted artworks and acknowledged crimes committed in Algeria and Rwanda, acknowledging responsibility for the Thiaroye killings could fuel calls for reparations in other former colonies.

But, Mr. Senghor said, “If the French want to get well with Africans, they must apologize and pay.”

Babacar Fall contributed reporting from Thiaroye, and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.

They stood on a concrete platform over a cobblestone plaza as slave traders cast their final judgment, gazing westward at a bend in the mighty Cuanza River, where unknown horrors lay ahead.

For the ancestors of millions of African Americans, this slave market in Massangano, a village in Angola, was likely the place where they were sold into bondage. It was a point of no return.

Historians believe that people from the southern African nation of Angola accounted for one of the largest numbers of enslaved Africans shipped to the United States, including the first to arrive at Point Comfort, Va., in 1619.

That history has largely gone unnoticed in Angola and the United States, where many Black Americans often make pilgrimages to Ghana and Senegal in West Africa to trace their ancestors’ treacherous journeys but not to Angola.

Angola is trying to change that.

The country’s ministry of tourism is developing a global campaign to highlight the significance of Massangano. The ministry is also partnering with the United Nations Development Program and the American Chamber of Commerce in Angola to launch a crowdfunding campaign to rehabilitate the village and its historical sites. Angola’s president, João Lourenço, has asked his government to repair the lone dirt road to Massangano that becomes impassable with heavy rain.

The government has applied for the Cuanza River corridor to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. “This is the place where African Americans came from,” said Márcio de Jesus Lopes Daniel, Angola’s tourism minister. “Come and see where your roots are.”

There are also hopes that this history will draw the United States and Angola closer together diplomatically.

When President Biden travels to Angola this week, he is scheduled to visit the National Slavery Museum near the capital, Luanda, to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born out of slavery. A vast majority of African Americans have Angolan ancestry, said Stephen Lubkemann, an anthropology professor at George Washington University. In the battle for influence in mineral- and oil-rich Angola, that gives the United States an ability to draw historical and cultural ties to the country in ways that China, its rival, cannot.

Mr. Biden’s delegation is expected to include Wanda Tucker, whom Angolan government officials glowingly refer to as one of their own. She traced her ancestors to the first ship that docked at Point Comfort and has visited the country several times.

When he visited Angola last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first African American to hold the position, drew a blunt connection between himself and the Angolans he was addressing. “Four centuries ago, slavers from far away put the men and women and children of this country into shackles — people who looked just like you and me,” he said.

About a quarter of all enslaved Africans confirmed to have arrived in the United States came from a region that included Angola, according to SlaveVoyages, a digital database. That is more than anywhere else in Africa.

Because Massangano sits at the intersection of Angola’s largest river, the Cuanza, and a major tributary, it was the country’s main transit point for trafficking captives to the coast, scholars said. Today, Massangano is a quiet village of a couple of hundred residents.

Behind a wall made of mud blocks on the edge of the village is a large wooden deck covered by a thatched roof and surrounded by empty concrete bungalows — a restaurant and lodge that an Angolan businessman hopes to open by January.

Most residents live at the bottom of a hill in homes made of mud and logs. Some blast music at night, others gather beneath trees and play loto, a game similar to bingo.

At the top of the hill, European Renaissance-style stone buildings sit mostly in ruins. Each one features a hand-painted sign identifying its purpose: the old town hall, the fort of Massangano. The slave market, at the village’s highest point, is marked by a concrete cross standing about two stories tall, at the spot where enslaved people in shackles would have stood before being sold.

“They cry. Always cry,” Afonso Vita, a historian who works for Angola’s tourism ministry, said of African American visitors.

The effort to elevate Angola’s history in the slave trade has prompted new awareness and conversation nationally, local historians said. The legacy of the slave trade is rarely discussed in Angola, in part because its consequences are not as easily felt as in the United States, where many African Americans are aware of lingering racial disparities, said Vladimiro Fortuna, the director of the National Slavery Museum in Luanda.

Mr. Fortuna said that by next year he hopes to have a plan in place to construct a new, larger slavery museum. Visitors to Luanda are increasingly touring sites related to the slave trade. That includes the Street of Flowers, where slave traders once laid flowers to cover the blood of brutalized enslaved people.

Mr. Vita, the historian, said that when he gave lectures about the atrocities endured by the enslaved, Angolans became visibly angry. “The time is right,” he said, “for us to start a revolution to reclaim our history.”

Gilberto Neto contributed reporting from Massangano, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

Rebel forces advanced in Syria on Sunday amid fierce fighting, capturing the airport and military academy of the major city of Aleppo and attacking the outskirts of the western city of Hama, according to rebel officials and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Government troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad were trying to repel them, rushing reinforcements to the battle and launching airstrikes on Aleppo, the Observatory said.

The rebels had captured much of Aleppo a day earlier in a surprise offensive. They now control a broad stretch of land across the provinces of Hama, Idlib and Aleppo, in the west and northwest of Syria, according to information from officials from the rebel-linked administration and the Observatory, a Britain-based war monitor.

In a further sign of growing strength, the rebels also said they now controlled all of Idlib and issued a demand for Kurdish forces in Aleppo to leave with their weapons for the northeast.

The New York Times observed rebels in control of parts of Hama Province as well as neighborhoods in the east of the city of Aleppo and parts of the countryside beyond it that government forces had held only days earlier.

Outside the city of Hama, Syrian government military vehicles could be seen all over the roads, apparently abandoned by fleeing government troops after they ran out of fuel.

The Observatory said that government troops were battling to defend Hama from being overrun and that reinforcements had arrived to man defensive lines around the city and several nearby cities and villages. Syrian government warplanes were also bombing territory now held by the rebels, including targets across the city of Aleppo, causing dozens of civilian casualties, the monitor said.

It said that government forces were receiving support from Russian fighter jets, which were striking targets across the countryside near Hama and Idlib Province.

Russia, which is allied with Mr. al-Assad, has repeatedly come to his aid since early in the civil war that broke out in 2011, after protests over his autocratic rule drew a swift and bloody military crackdown. Russian warplanes are stationed in Syria and were instrumental to Mr. al-Assad’s retaking of Aleppo from rebel forces in 2016. Mr. al-Assad has also counted on military and political support from Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

The rebel alliance is led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was once linked with Al Qaeda but publicly broke with the terrorist group years ago. Turkish-backed rebel groups have also joined in.

The United States considers Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization, and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told CNN on Sunday that the administration has “real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization.”

“At the same time, of course, we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

A National Security Council spokesman, Sean Savett, said Saturday in a statement, “The United States has nothing to do with this offensive.”

Mr. Savett said, “The United States, together with its partners and allies, urge de-escalation, protection of civilians and minority groups, and a serious and credible political process that can end this civil war once and for all.”

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham began as what was then called the Nusra Front, an extremist rebel faction formed as a Qaeda affiliate that gained prominence early in Syria’s civil war. But by 2017, it had begun to embrace a more pragmatic approach than other hard-line groups, choosing to prioritize securing its grip on Idlib instead of continuing to launch major offensives against Mr. al-Assad’s forces, analysts said.

The group framed its moves as a true break with Al Qaeda, going so far as to arrest some Qaeda-linked people, according to experts who have studied the group.

It engaged with Western aid groups, journalists and researchers. It also sought to link Idlib’s economy to that of the outside world, develop the region’s agriculture and industry and build a government that provided limited services to residents.

Abandoning its rhetoric about establishing an Islamic state in Syria, the group’s leadership said it wanted to replace the Assad government with one more loosely inspired by Islamic principles. But while its interpretation of Islam remained deeply conservative, the group’s governance was significantly less brutal and dogmatic than that of the Islamic State, analysts said.

It now appears to be seeking to extend that control to Aleppo.

A Syrian government statement said that Mr. al-Assad had spoken to the leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Iraq on Saturday, vowing that Syria would “defeat the terrorists, regardless of the intensity of their attacks.” Syrian officials routinely refer to rebels as terrorists.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, referred to the situation in Syria in Parliament on Sunday, saying that “Islamic countries must intervene to prevent America and Israel from exploiting the internal conflicts of countries and prevent the continuation of these crises.”

And the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, headed to Damascus on Sunday. Ali Moujani, an Iranian diplomat, said on X that the foreign minister was making the trip in a show of support for the Syrian government.

The Syrian military said in a statement on Saturday that its operation to push back the rebels was “successfully” progressing and that it would soon initiate a counterattack. It tried to discredit reports about rebel advances, saying that the armed groups were spreading “false news” to “undermine the morale of our people and our brave army.”

Across the territory that had flipped back to the rebels, people could be seen tearing up Syrian government flags and pictures of Mr. al-Assad, including fighters and former Aleppo residents who were returning to their homes for the first time in years. Photos taken in Aleppo also showed the toppling of a statue that had apparently depicted Bassel al-Assad, the president’s elder brother.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and Jacob Roubai from Beirut, Lebanon; Rania Khaled from Cairo; and Leily Nikounazar from Brussels.

A former Israeli defense minister has accused Israel of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, a rare critique from a member of the security establishment at a time of war.

The comments by Moshe Yaalon — first on Saturday, and then multiple times on Sunday, including in an interview with one of Israel’s biggest television channels — came amid mounting criticism of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza. They were swiftly denied and condemned by allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, saying that they would hurt the country and help its enemies.

Mr. Yaalon served as the Israeli military’s chief of staff during the second intifada and as Mr. Netanyahu’s defense minister during the 2014 war in Gaza, the longest conflict between Israel and Hamas before the current war. But he broke with Mr. Netanyahu in 2016 and has since become a critic of the Israeli leader.

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Voters in Ireland have set the stage for a return of the grand coalition government that has led their country since 2020, resisting an anti-incumbent wave that has swept across the United States and Europe.

The vote count was close on Sunday evening, two days after voters went to the polls, but the trend suggested that Ireland’s two main center-right parties had performed strongly enough to enter coalition talks — a process that could take weeks before the full shape of the government is clear.

Sinn Féin, the flagship Irish nationalist party, was on track to finish slightly behind the incumbents, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, a lackluster showing that will probably consign it to several more years in opposition.

At one level, the vote was an endorsement of continuity, delivering a result not unlike that of four and a half years ago. But the stability in Ireland’s political center ground masked volatility on the fringes, where anxiety over immigration fueled bids by several independents and other insurgent candidates.

With none of Ireland’s parties projected to gain enough seats to win an outright majority, a period of intense political horse-trading was always the most likely outcome of the vote.

The drama in the election, such as it was, was supplied by Sinn Féin, which had seemed a governing-party-in-waiting before collapsing in the polls earlier this year. It recovered some of its lost ground in the voting but fell short of a breakthrough and seemed likely to remain on the sidelines.

Ireland’s results, at the end of a record year of elections across the globe, underscored both how Irish voters are caught up in broader political currents and how their country remains somewhat distinctive.

Blessed with a prosperous economy, Ireland was not seized with the anti-incumbent fervor that toppled governments in Britain and the United States. Yet the fragmentation of politics throughout Europe has hit Ireland, too, leaving its three major parties unable to govern on their own.

Since the founding of the modern Irish state at the start of the last century, the two traditional parties — Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael — have governed during alternating periods. But after the last general election in 2020, neither won a big enough majority to govern alone, forcing them to enter a first-ever grand coalition, which also included the Green Party.

Their union resulted from the refusal of either party to enter into a government with Sinn Féin, which had won the popular vote for the first time. Once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, Sinn Féin had long been on the fringes, seen by the political establishment as unpalatable. But the 2020 election underscored a deep well of popular support for the party and cemented its position as the largest opposition party in the Irish Parliament.

The leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael reaffirmed their ostracism of Sinn Féin before this election, even as polls showed that the three parties were on relatively even footing when it came to public support.

With nearly three-quarters of the seats announced by Sunday evening, Fianna Fáil had won almost 22 percent of first-preference votes, Fine Gael nearly 21 percent and Sinn Féin around 19 percent.

Ireland’s proportional representation balloting, in which voters can rank their preference of candidates, often insulates it from the wild swings seen in other democracies — and in this election, that played out once again. But the fragmentation of the parties, and a restive public, opened the door to an array of fringe candidates.

In Dublin, for example, Gerry Hutch, a man prosecutors have described in court as the head of a crime family, narrowly avoided winning a seat. Mr. Hutch, known as The Monk for his ascetic lifestyle, ran in an urban district that was roiled by anti-immigrant riots last year. (Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, reclaimed her seat in the district.)

On Saturday, in Dublin’s central vote counting center, dozens of poll workers shuffled through long paper ballots, which were brought in sealed brown envelopes and dumped onto long tables to be tallied.

The flick of paper ballots, the scratch of pens on tally sheets and the chatter from activists who discussed the results in real time echoed through the large convention center hall.

“It’s particularly interesting to see democracy in process,” said Gerry Kearns, 67, who was volunteering to monitor the ballot tally. “And here, it’s so interesting to observe the count because of the transferable vote system.”

Mr. Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University, chatted with an activist for Sinn Féin about the way the votes were playing out. They parted with a friendly farewell.

Lisa Keenan, an assistant professor of politics at Trinity College Dublin, said that in the run-up to the election, voters were clear that the rising cost of living was their main concern, an issue that has been animating electorates across Europe this year.

In the short three-week campaign period, the Irish electorate showed a remarkable degree of stability in its opinion of the major parties. As the last days of the campaign unfolded, however, Fine Gael’s support wobbled, amid a misstep by that party’s leader, Simon Harris, who is the taoiseach, or prime minister.

After a tense encounter on the campaign trail with a woman who protested that his government was not doing enough to support those who work with disabled people, as she does, Mr. Harris was forced to issue an apology.

Still, since taking up the leadership role in April after his predecessor unexpectedly stepped down, Mr. Harris, 38, had been seen as injecting energy into the party, and when he called the snap election early last month, Fine Gael had been enjoying renewed support.

Half of Fine Gael’s previous parliamentary party members chose to step down in this election, making the party’s fight for support an uphill battle. For a potential returning coalition government, there will be some immediate challenges.

The election of Donald J. Trump in the United States could threaten one of the sources of Ireland’s recent prosperity — its status as a low-tax European outpost for American multinational corporations — if Mr. Trump follows through on policies he has been weighing, like imposing tariffs or trying to repatriate money that comes from U.S. companies into Ireland.

Sinn Féin’s continued inability to vault into the government also underscores the relative quiescence of its core issue: unification of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic. While a solid majority of people in the south favor unifying, according to polls, it scarcely figured as an issue in the campaign, falling far behind economic concerns and anxiety about immigration.

Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late into the night on Sunday during the fourth consecutive day of demonstrations over the recently elected government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.

The Black Sea country of 3.7 million has been rocked by protests since Thursday, when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced the government would stall the process of E.U. accession — a goal enshrined in the country’s Constitution — until 2028. He also said the government would refuse all grants by the 27-member bloc, which are usually worth tens of millions of dollars annually.

As on previous nights, thousands of demonstrators, many clad in the country’s red-and-white flag, gathered in front of the Georgian Parliament building, pointing green lasers and expressing their opposition to the new government’s policy.

Later on Sunday, the police used water cannons and water from fire hydrants to disperse protesters, who shot off firecrackers and other fireworks in response, according to videos shared from the scene.

Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.

More than 150 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers and 42 of its employees had been hurt since the protests began.

The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters had been injured.

Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged, seeks closer ties with the West.

Georgia’s Constitution stipulates that the government “shall take all measures” to “ensure the full integration” into the European Union and NATO. The official powers of the country’s president are nominal, since the prime minister runs the government, but President Salome Zourabichvili has become a vocal supporter of the opposition and has accused the government of committing a “constitutional coup.”

She has said that she will not leave office at the end of the month, when her term expires, and that last month’s elections must be rerun. The European Union has not recognized the elections, which handed Georgian Dream a majority in the vote. The opposition, which won 61 of 150 seats in the legislature, has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament.

An aerial view of the protest in Tbilisi on Saturday. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China.

The opposition favors closer ties with the West.

Protesters burned an effigy of the prime minister on Saturday in front of the Parliament building.

Riot police officers were on the streets, and the police used a water cannon.

Protesters in Tbilisi ducked behind a makeshift barricade on Sunday.

Demonstrators set off fireworks from behind a makeshift barricade. Officials say several police officers and dozens of Interior Ministry employees have been hurt since the protests began.

One of the scores of protesters who had been detained by Saturday night.

Clashes continued into early on Sunday and resumed on Sunday night.

A masked protester by a makeshift barricade early Sunday.

The flags of Ukraine, Georgia and the European Union were displayed at the protest. The European Union has not recognized the October elections.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, the war in Gaza has been dogged by a persistent question: What happens after the conflict ends?

Recent events point to one worrying possibility: Gaza, without a centralized governing authority, could be dominated by warlords and organized crime.

Wartime is notorious for giving rise to black markets and criminal gangs, and the conflict in Gaza is no exception. In one troubling episode last month, armed gunmen looted a convoy of 109 United Nations aid trucks. Over the last year, a contraband trade in tobacco has become a particular problem for humanitarian aid convoys, with organized gangs ransacking aid shipments for cigarettes smuggled inside them that can sell for $25 to $30 each.

The Israeli military is determined to wipe out Hamas, but Israel has not laid out a plan for the day after the conflict stops. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resisted calls for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza.

Hamas was a repressive regime that used violence against its own people. But because it also ran the local government in Gaza, its weakened condition threatens to leave the territory without any governing institutions.

Such power vacuums create ideal conditions for so-called criminal governance, in which criminal mafias, sometimes linked to families or tribes, take over much of the traditional role of a government within their territories, competing with weak official institutions. It may even devolve into outright warlordism, in which territory is carved up between armed groups into self-governing fiefs.

Such groups are difficult to dislodge, often fueling long-term cycles of violence in countries like Haiti, Somalia and Afghanistan. I talked to experts on organized crime and warlordism who described how a grimly predictable pattern had played out around the world — and the risk that something similar might unfold in Gaza.

War creates black markets

“Basically, every single country that’s under a war footing creates a black market immediately,” as soon as there is any kind of rationing or other restrictions, said Benjamin T. Smith, a professor at Warwick University in England who studies the history of organized crime.

Black markets enrich and empower the groups that control them, fueling the rise of strong organized crime networks. In some cases — such as in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Sicily after World War II — they evolve into quasi-political entities.

Gaza may have had a head start on that process. Even before the current conflict, longstanding Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on imports created shortages of basic goods and a thriving black market for them. Some of Gaza’s clans, which are extended family groups connected by blood and marriage ties, have long been deeply involved in that trade, said Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Kent in England who studies the roles of tribal militias and other armed groups in the region.

“They’ve always been involved in the trafficking economy, human trafficking, drug trafficking, but also commodities that couldn’t cross the border with Israel,” Voller said.

Some of the raids on convoys could have been carried out by desperate people simply trying to obtain food and other necessities. But my colleagues Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman reported in June that it was primarily armed criminal gangs that were attacking convoys daily, not desperate Gazan civilians spontaneously looting.

And it is likely that the armed gangs raiding convoys have ties to Gaza’s clans, according to Voller. “I can imagine that you have Hamas leftovers also involved, but it’s primarily the clans,” he said.

From filling a vacuum to ‘criminal governance’

In Gaza, the Israeli military campaign has toppled the Hamas government, but there is no civilian administration or other authority to take its place. And because Israel often raids specific areas and then withdraws, it leaves a power vacuum, leading to widespread lawlessness and crime (and sometimes the return of Hamas to those areas).

It is possible, of course, that Hamas may survive the war with enough strength to reestablish at least partial control in Gaza. But if Israel succeeds in its goal of destroying or neutralizing the group, then it is “inevitable” that Gaza’s clans would step in to fill the governmental void as some of the only organized forces left on the ground, Voller said. Something similar happened during wartime in Iraq and Syria, he noted, even though many had believed that tribes were no longer influential in those countries.

“Tribes always provide security services, and they do that not just to protect themselves, but also because it provides them with financial opportunities,” he said. “It’s a very natural response to the collapse of central authorities.”

It is possible, of course, that such groups could be more humane than Hamas. But research suggests that there are still high logistical and economic costs to fragmented, unofficial governance.

The Israeli government has suggested in the past that the clans might formally take over governance — a plan that the clans themselves roundly rejected. But that official refusal may not prevent the clans and other groups from exercising de facto local authority after the war.

“The way you make power is by having weapons, but also by distributing to the population, which of course is starving, in horrendous conditions,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on nonstate armed groups at the Brookings Institution.

Long-term instability

Gaza is a tiny territory compared to countries like Haiti, Somalia or Afghanistan. And its borders are tightly controlled from the outside by Israel and Egypt, both of which have a strong interest in ensuring the situation within Gaza does not become so chaotic that it threatens the security of its neighbors — which is, after all, how this war started in the first place.

But the longer Gaza is left without any civil administration, the more powerful smaller armed groups will have an opportunity to become — and the harder it may be to dislodge them. “Once these clans or these organizations actually gain control over the region, it’s very difficult to come to them and say, ‘Look, OK, you’ve done your share, now it’s time for us to come back,’” Voller said.

In many parts of the world, situations like that have led to a kind of hybrid system, in which formal government authorities exercise some control at the national level, but gangs exercise day-to-day control over their local territories.

Drug cartels in Mexico, paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland and Central American gangs like MS-13 have shown that model can be resilient and profitable for the armed groups involved. But for ordinary citizens, that means living in a violent, authoritarian system in which their safety and livelihoods are contingent on the whims of men with guns.

Another option, history suggests, is to integrate armed groups eventually into a future government. That isn’t a panacea: It can mean that organized crime groups persist, often allied with political parties or government officials, and prey on the public. But it does allow a transition to peacetime governance and some centralization of formal authority.

“The Balkans are a prime example,” Felbab-Brown said. “In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the political party formation and the formation of strongmen often has very deep linkages to the smuggling networks of the late 1990s.”

But if there is no central government, or the one that exists is too weak to assert control, outcomes can be far worse.

That worst-case scenario is currently playing out in Haiti, where armed groups that began as small criminal gangs often affiliated with different politicians have now become so powerful that they have overwhelmed the country’s government, subjecting ordinary citizens to the rule of the gun.

“Today the big Haitian gangs have all developed a political mantle,” Felbab-Brown said. “They are no longer just subservient to political masters, they often try to dictate things to Haitian politicians.”

Haiti is, as I say, a worst-case scenario. But as the question of what will happen in Gaza’s “day after” remains stubbornly unanswered, it offers a chilling reminder that even successfully defeating Hamas, without a plan for what will replace it, could be a source of future crises.

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The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, known for composure on previous scaffolds.

His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.

The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier may try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.

Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.

She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.

Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.

Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.

“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”

But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”

Ms. Le Pen has given every indication that she will not. So even before it has reached the power it has long sought — the French presidency — her National Rally is in the driver’s seat.

“I’m having more and more trouble seeing what could put a brake on their reaching power,” Mr. Crépon said. “If things continue as they are, with a government that can’t assert its authority, the National Rally could seem like the solution.”

Others in the party are more explicit than Ms. Le Pen. “If they remain deaf to us, they should pack their bags,” one of her party’s lawmakers in Parliament, Laurent Jacobelli, told the television station BFMTV.

That the Donald J. Trump-friendly National Rally calls the shots in France, which has so far resisted the pull of crony populism, is only half-acknowledged by the news media and by a political class that greeted the American election largely with alarm. Ms. Le Pen is currently on trial with her associates for misusing European Parliament money, and risks being convicted and barred from running for office.

But now, the prime minister is vulnerable, and Ms. Le Pen appears not in a good mood. “None of our ideas were included in the government’s budget, even hypothetically,” Ms. Le Pen, who often sounds aggrieved, wrote in an opinion article in Le Figaro last week. “We’re getting closer to a censure motion,” the Socialist lawmaker Jérôme Guedj said on French television.

What is it like to live under threat of imminent political death? At 73, Mr. Barnier feels he has little left to lose, friends and allies say. He has been exercising a stiff upper lip — a phrase whose French equivalent, sang froid, he invokes often.

“It’s useless to get irritated over such important questions,” he said last week, like an admonishing grandfather, during a debate in Parliament. “Please, keep your cool,” he told a visibly flustered member of Parliament in one recent encounter on the hustings. But that may not be enough to save him.

He was appointed in September by President Emmanuel Macron, who ignored parliamentary election results that were disastrous for his own party and allies, instead calling on Mr. Barnier, a figure from the traditional centrist right, to head the government. The leftist coalition that came out on top was furious. But Mr. Macron was exercising his constitutional prerogative.

Since then, the weakness of Mr. Barnier’s position has become clear. He is living “the hell of Matignon,” a phrase used by generations of political commentators to describe the difficulties of reigning from Matignon Palace, seat of the government, where a leader has some power, but hardly all of it.

The average tenure for a French prime minister is two and a half years, and Mr. Barnier seems likely to come in well under. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who held the office in the 2000s, has spoken of the bind. “Most days, you wake up feeling pretty lousy about what’s coming up,” he told a French television documentary.

Now, the far right feels scorned, the left dislikes Mr. Barnier on principle, and he is unloved by Mr. Macron’s centrist deputies because he proposes wringing more revenue out of the rich and out of 440 of France’s biggest companies, a violation of the French president’s pro-business creed.

In an interview on French television on Tuesday, Mr. Barnier smiled. He tried to project calm. “I’ve known since the 5th of September” — the day he was appointed — “that there would be a censure vote,” he said.

But, he noted: “Then what happens? There won’t be a budget. And there will be a serious storm in the financial markets.”

Those who know him say the calm is unfeigned. “He’s serene, because he feels free in this mission,” said Antoine Vermorel-Marques, a lawmaker who is close to Mr. Barnier. “He didn’t beg for the job.”

“He’s a battle-hardened negotiator who is used to diplomatic and political exchanges, and he’s never bowed down to populism or demagoguery,” Mr. Vermorel-Marques added. “He sat down for coffee with the Brexit negotiators and spoke of the need for calm. He needs to bring out that cup again.”

Mr. Barnier started his political life more than 50 years ago as a 22-year-old Gaullist councilor in his native Savoy, in France’s eastern mountains. He has methodically climbed the rungs of the political ladder — member of Parliament, regional president, senator, cabinet minister.

He is sometimes mocked for his phlegmatic demeanor but, with advancing age, is not perceived as a threat to others’ careers. Called “the French Joe Biden” by the news media, he finished well behind rivals in a presidential primary in 2021.

Pierre-Jérôme Hénin was his spokesman when Mr. Barnier was a minister. “He’s got an expression he invokes a lot: ‘the calm of old soldiers,’” Mr. Hénin said. “And he has that capacity. He doesn’t panic. He stays serene.”

“He’s used to putting people who hate each other around a table, and finding a solution,” he added.

In the television interview, Mr. Barnier rebuffed suggestions that he might quit. “Why should I resign?” he said. “I’m happy to do this work. I am of a certain age. You can see it. As long as I have the same capacity to be enthusiastic and indignant that I had 50 years ago, I’m ready to serve.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.