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During his first term in office, President Trump described the European Union “as a foe,” established “to hurt the United States on trade.”

He repeated the charge at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, but in more vulgar terms: “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.”

Then he said he was preparing to hit Europe with 25 percent tariffs on cars and other goods.

After Mr. Trump’s embrace of Russia and his warnings that Europe had better fend for itself, the president’s latest attack added to the increasing view of European leaders and analysts that he and his team of loyalists consider America’s traditional allies in Europe as adversaries not just on trade, but on nearly everything.

Some officials and analysts see the Trump administration as merely indifferent to Europe; others see open hostility. But there is a common view that the fundamental relationship has changed and that America is a less reliable and predictable ally.

Mr. Trump has rebuffed NATO and aligned himself with the longstanding, principal threat to the alliance: Russia. Vice President JD Vance has attacked European democracy while calling for the door to be opened to far-right parties. Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump aide, has heaped contempt on European leaders and openly endorsed an extremist party in Germany.

Equally shocking to European leaders, the United States this week refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations. It instead broke from its allies and voted with Russia, Belarus and North Korea, all authoritarian governments.

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The imprisoned leader of a Kurdish guerrilla movement that has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state called Thursday for his group to lay down its arms and dissolve, a pivotal declaration that could echo in neighboring countries and help end 40 years of deadly conflict.

Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., made his appeal in a written statement that was read aloud during a news conference by members of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish political party who had just visited him in prison.

He said the group had gained ground at a time when “democratic channels of politics were blocked” but had outlived its life-span and should disband.

“Convene your congress and make a decision,” he said in the statement, read aloud first in Kurdish then in Turkish. “All groups must lay down their arms and the P.K.K. must dissolve itself.” Turkey and the Kurds must now move forward “with the spirit of fraternity,” the statement added, saying democracy was the only path to do so.

The news conference was packed with journalists and Kurdish politicians. Some in the audience applauded and gave a standing ovation when a new image of the rarely photographed Mr. Ocalan appeared on a screen.

The rare message from Mr. Ocalan raised the possibility that a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people over four decades could finally end.

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Despite the heavy casualties it has suffered in the war between Russia and Ukraine, North Korea appears to have sent more troops to Russia as its soldiers re-entered frontline combat, South Korea’s spy agency said on Thursday.

The National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s main spy agency, said it was still trying to assess the size of the new deployment. But its brief statement followed a report in a South Korean newspaper, JoongAng, citing anonymous sources, that North Korea has sent up to 3,000 additional troops since January by ship and military cargo planes.

North Korea sent an estimated 11,000 troops to Russia late last year, and has supplied large shipments of artillery shells, missiles and other conventional weapons. The troops were sent to the Kursk region, where they fought alongside Russian forces to help them regain territory lost to Ukraine.

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There are usually no international flights out of the airport in Mae Sot, a town on Thailand’s border with Myanmar. But in recent days, hundreds of people here boarded direct flights back home to China. They had been rescued from Myanmar, where they were ensnared in a 21st-century scourge — online scam mills that have used forced labor to bilk tens of billions of dollars out of victims worldwide.

The chartered flights were part of a multinational effort that followed the trafficking last month of a Chinese actor to work in a fraud center, which scared off Chinese tourists from visiting Thailand. The rescue missions, coordinated by officials in Thailand, Myanmar and China, were pitched as a body blow to this industry of grift.

But even as the planes headed north, construction workers in these scam centers — modern tower blocks within sight of the Thai side of the frontier — continued to weld and hammer into the night, brazenly building new warehouses dedicated to crime. Fraudsters confined to rooms with barred windows kept cajoling money out of lonely hearts and eager investors in the United States, China and beyond.

Following a military coup in Myanmar in 2021 and an ensuing civil war, the country’s border with Thailand has exploded into one of the most lawless and lucrative places on earth. Chinese criminal syndicates have moved in, making deals with rival factions to turn rainforests into high-rise settlements dedicated to online fraud.

With the Thai government failing to intervene forcefully, Chinese gangsters and militia commanders from Myanmar have smuggled tens of thousands of people across the riverine frontier to labor in these hubs of criminality, according to the United Nations. Thailand has also supplied the electricity and internet for the fraud centers, and served as a conduit for construction materials, instruments of torture and even the odd Lamborghini.

The raids this month were the latest offensive against the scam centers and freed thousands of people who were scammed into becoming scammers themselves. Often lured by false promises of good-paying jobs in I.T., engineering or customer service, citizens of at least 40 nations have been forced by Chinese criminals to engage in crypto-fraud, online dating deception, TikTok shopping swindles, WhatsApp real estate dodges, Instagram deep fakes and Facebook trickery.

Confined to these compounds, the scammers, many of whom are Chinese, have been beaten, subjected to electric shock and tied up for hours in a pose that mimics crucifixion, people who were witnesses to or victims of the abuse said. Another form of torture involves crawling on gravel, until knees and hands bleed.

Unfinished Business

Marking the successful rescue operations last week, Chinese, Thai and Myanmar officials held hands and celebrated what they called a unified vanquishing of transnational crime. A raid in Cambodia, another hotbed of cybercrime, freed others, too.

“China is actively carrying out bilateral and multilateral cooperation with Thailand, Myanmar and other countries to severely crack down on cross-border online gambling and fraud crimes,” the spokesperson’s office of the Chinese foreign ministry told The New York Times in a statement Thursday. “At present, many online gambling and fraud dens have been eradicated overseas, and a large number of suspects have been arrested.”

But such self-congratulation is premature, according to interviews with about two dozen people, some who have worked or are currently working in the scam centers and others who serve in national and militia bureaucracies that aid or profit from the cyberfraud industry.

Thousands of individuals who were supposedly rescued from the scam warehouses this month are still stranded between the hell of forced labor in Myanmar and the promise of freedom in Thailand. Tens of thousands more remain imprisoned in the fraud factories.

“Business is normal,” said Ma Mi, a Myanmar national who toils in one of the online crime hubs. She spoke by phone and said that, like many Myanmar citizens there, she was working voluntarily.

And none of the major players orchestrating this international criminal network, which spans dozens of countries and operates with a Chinese nerve center, have been taken down in the current campaign. The arrest in 2022 of a Chinese-born kingpin, who is now in a Thai prison fighting extradition to China, did not slow construction in the scam towns he is accused of having run.

“Addressing human trafficking and online scam operations requires more than reactive law enforcement measures,” wrote Saw Kapi, the founding director of the Salween Institute for Public Policy, which focuses on the region where the scam centers are proliferating, on Feb. 21. “It necessitates confronting the root causes — failure in governance, corruption, and the entanglement of organized crime with political and economic interests.”

On Saturday evening, as Thai police set up checkpoints near the border with Myanmar, one trafficker said that a group of Chinese scammers was moved from one large cybercrime compound to a smaller one, via Thailand, because roads in Myanmar do not yet connect the crime settlements. The scammers, the trafficker said, splashed across the river, which is low because it is the dry season.

Naw Pann, who has facilitated other nighttime border crossings and who is being identified by only part of her name for her safety, said that human trafficking from Thailand to Myanmar is continuing, despite the supposed crackdown. Because she does not speak Mandarin or other foreign languages, she said, she motions to the victims to keep quiet, raising her index finger to her mouth. Some of the people who have crossed in recent days, she said, have had wounds on their faces and bandages on their legs.

“I feel pity for them,” she said. “But I can’t do anything to help them.”

Ko Min, a member of an armed group in Myanmar that has a stake in one of the largest crime cities, said he witnessed four or five Chinese men beating and shocking with an electric prod another Chinese man curled into the fetal position on the floor. The room was filled with rows of workers sitting in front of desktop computers, he said. They knew not to look at him or at the abusers, he said.

“I’ll never forget the terror of the people in the room,” he said. “It was like watching an animal being tortured.”

A Visit to Beijing

In January, the open secret of scam centers on this stretch of border — highly visible, highly electrified — jolted the public consciousness with the disappearance of Wang Xing, the Chinese actor. Although he was quickly freed from a scam park in Myanmar, public outrage percolated in China, and Chinese tourists canceled holidays in Thailand.

Early this month, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra of Thailand visited Beijing, where she promised China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that her government was cracking down. Before her trip, Thailand announced that it had shut off electricity to the other side of the border, something it had done briefly in 2023 as well. China’s vice minister of public security came to inspect the border zone.

Leaders of ethnic minority militias in Myanmar that control areas near the Thai border and lease land to Chinese companies sought to deny culpability. These armed groups, some aligned with the junta and some fighting it, help provide the muscle that keeps fear thrumming in the fraud hubs, witnesses and trafficked employees said. The militias have also been implicated in other illicit trades, from drugs and gems to wildlife and timber.

Gen. Saw San Aung, the chief of staff of the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, a rebel group, said that he only became aware of the scam centers operating in his territory after some troubling photographs circulated online this year. But he cautioned against believing all images of scam center workers who exhibit signs of physical abuse.

“They harmed themselves and accused their employers of torture,” General Saw San Aung said. “If the employers had tortured them, it’s unclear how they managed to take and share photos of their injuries.”

Even if the militias knew that something nefarious was going on, said a spokesman for another militia, they were coerced into staying silent by larger powers that profited from the criminal activity.

“We didn’t conduct these raids because of pressure from China,” said Lt. Col. Naing Maung Zaw of the Karen Border Guard Force, which holds more turf along the border. “We acted because reports mentioned that foreigners were being held against their will and abused.”

A Torture Chamber

Since Feb. 20, hundreds of Chinese released from the scam centers have been airlifted home; Chinese state media labeled the first batch criminal suspects. Another 260 people, many African, made it to Thailand in mid-February and are awaiting repatriation. But just across the border in Myanmar, about 7,000 people who were taken from the crime compounds are now stuck in a purgatory, sheltering in hangars in militia territory and awaiting permission to enter Thailand, aid groups say.

“We’re looking at a humanitarian crisis, with people running out of food, diseases breaking out,” said Amy Miller, the Southeast Asia director of Acts of Mercy International, which helps trafficked individuals who were forced to work in the scam centers. “In one place, there are two toilets for 400 people.”

The Thai authorities have said that foreign embassies need to help with repatriation efforts. While most of the people stranded in Myanmar are Chinese, there are victims from 27 other countries, including Zimbabwe, Liberia and Malawi, Ms. Miller said. Many African nations do not have embassies in Thailand.

Fisher, a 27-year-old Ethiopian who is being identified by a nickname, was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar’s borderlands. In a torture chamber, he was bound and beaten. Electric shocks made his body convulse.

In mid-February, Mr. Fisher was rescued and moved to Thailand.

“It was like a nightmare,” he said of his eight-month ordeal. “But I woke up, and it was real.”

Selam Gebrekidan contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Li You contributed research from Beijing.

With the clock running down on the first phase of the cease-fire in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent an Israeli delegation to Cairo on Thursday to hold further talks on extending the truce.

But even though the initial stage of the truce is set to lapse on Saturday night, Israel and Hamas appear to have made little progress on forging terms for a comprehensive cease-fire. It was not clear on Thursday whether the Israeli delegation was playing for time or had a serious mandate to bridge the yawning gaps between the two sides.

The uncertainty has left both Israelis and Palestinians in limbo about the fate of more hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and whether fighting could soon restart.

“Our only hope is that the cease-fire continues,” said Shamekh al-Dibs, a 36-year-old living in a school-turned-shelter since his home in northern Gaza was destroyed.

For now, the first six-week phase of the cease-fire is set to conclude without a clear framework to take its place. That does not necessarily mean an immediate return to war: The agreement says the truce can continue as long as negotiators are working on the next steps. But it makes the already fragile deal more precarious.

Israeli government officials did not provide details about the delegation’s trip to Cairo, and extending the deal would entail tackling much thornier issues than hostage and prisoner releases, such as a permanent end to the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Under the terms of the phased agreement, Israel would effectively have to declare an end to its war against Hamas in order to secure the release of some two dozen hostages believed to still be alive.

For the families of Israeli captives, the prospect of their loved ones’ release is both closer than ever before and agonizingly distant. They are well aware that formidable obstacles remain to securing their freedom given the lack of an agreement on the future of the deal.

“By Sunday, we’ll be in no man’s land,” said Adi Alexander, whose American-Israeli son, Edan Alexander, has been held in Gaza for more than 500 days. “It was left blurry on purpose, and it’s still blurry,” he said of this element of the cease-fire agreement.

Israel and Hamas did not sign off on an immediate end to the war in mid-January. Instead, they committed to a complex, multiphase plan meant to slowly build momentum toward a comprehensive cease-fire after more than a year of devastating fighting in Gaza.

The first stage was intended to stop the fighting while the two sides hashed out a larger settlement.

Hamas released 30 Israeli and foreign hostages and handed over the bodies of eight more in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel. It was a rocky process, involving staged hostage transfers that Israel described as humiliating, and that almost derailed the entire deal.

Israel and Hamas remain as distant as ever on their core demands.

Israel has vowed it will not end the war permanently until Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza and the territory is demilitarized. Hamas has mostly refused to consider disbanding its armed battalions or sending its leaders into exile.

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, has floated the idea of extending the first phase by continuing to swap hostages for prisoners.

On Thursday, Abdel-Latif al-Qanou, a Hamas spokesman, said the group was open to extending the first phase as long as it did not entail giving up on Hamas’s core demands, including an end to the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces. He said Israel had dragged its feet on opening negotiations for the second phase.

Mr. Netanyahu faces considerable pressure from within his own government not to conclusively end the war. His political allies say they want to keep fighting Hamas and build Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Under the cease-fire agreement, Israel is set to begin withdrawing forces from Gaza’s border with Egypt over the weekend. But Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he views Israeli control of the area as a core security interest.

Both Israel and Hamas have reasons to avoid a resumption of the war.

Hamas wants to give its forces a chance to recuperate and begin rebuilding Gaza. Israel wants to bring home the remaining hostages. Of the roughly 250 taken during the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli government believes about 25 are still alive. Israel also wants to recover the bodies of roughly 30 others.

But the prospect of renewed fighting has never really gone away. Many Israelis, particularly on the right, say they cannot countenance ending the war with Hamas still ruling Gaza. For now, Hamas appears to have given little ground on the question.

Mr. Alexander, whose son was abducted from an Israeli military post, said he was optimistic the truce could hold.

“Nobody wants this war to restart again — not Israel, not the United States. I definitely don’t think Hamas wants it,” he said.

But the Israeli government should “put the hostages up front, let this country heal, and think about Hamas later,” he added.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinians have been welcoming home prisoners freed by Israel as part of the agreement. Scores were serving life sentences for involvement in planning and carrying out militant attacks, including bombings that killed Israeli civilians. Many others were detained during Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza and held without any formal charges.

Some Palestinians were also expelled abroad as part of the agreement and not allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank. Their families hope to meet them in Egypt, but at least some say that Israel has not allowed them to leave the West Bank in the meantime.

Alaa Abu Hmeid, whose husband, Nasr, was sentenced to five life terms for carrying out attacks against Israelis during the Second Intifada, said she tried to travel to Jordan to see her freed husband, only to be turned back by the Israeli authorities.

“Their dream of breathing fresh air is finally coming true, at least in part,” she said. “But we still feel stuck in limbo.”

Fatima AbdulKarim contributed reporting.

Three mainstream political parties in Austria said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to form a new government that excludes the far right, ending five months of roller-coaster negotiations after an election last fall.

It was an improbable comeback for a diverse political coalition that was tripped up by policy infighting when it tried and failed to form a government earlier this year.

And it was a bitter setback for the Freedom Party, which finished first in last year’s elections on the strength of an anti-establishment, anti-immigrant campaign, and was briefly on the cusp of giving Austria its first far-right chancellor in the postwar era. No party came near winning a majority of votes or seats in Parliament.

The likely new chancellor, Christian Stocker, will instead come from the center-right party that has led the nation for most of the last seven years: the People’s Party, which finished second in the September elections, as voters punished it for a string of corruption scandals that mostly occurred years ago.

Mr. Stocker is set to lead the first three-party coalition in an Austrian government, alongside the Austrian Social Democrats and the centrist NEOS party.

“In times of great challenge, Austria has always drawn its strength from the consensus of constructive forces,” Mr. Stocker said at a news conference in Vienna on Thursday, where the three parties’ leaders presented a more-than-200-page plan to govern the country for the next four years. The coalition will announce further ministerial appointments on Friday.

The announcement freezes out the Freedom Party, which failed in its own attempt to form a government earlier this year.

The new government will start on thin ice. The Freedom Party has only grown more popular since last fall, and is now backed by a third of the country.

Polls show Austrians remain frustrated about an economy that has spent the last two years in recession and worried about immigration to the country, particularly from predominantly Muslim countries. The Freedom Party made both a central issue in its last campaign, promising widespread deportations and a ban on political forms of Islam.

In a nod to those issues, the new government said it would toughen its stance on migration, by not allowing asylum seekers to bring their families, while banning head scarves for girls.

“We are honest: these are going to be hard years, two hard years,” said Beate Meinl-Reisinger, the head of NEOS. “We are in a difficult economic situation; we are in a difficult budgetary situation,” she said.

The Freedom Party, founded by former Nazi soldiers in the 1950s, and its leader, Herbert Kickl, had been bidding to become the latest in a wave of hard-right, anti-immigrant parties to take or share power in Europe.

After the Freedom Party won the fall election, other parties refused to work with it. Those parties were given a chance to form a government, but their efforts bogged down on policy issues, like how to mix spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the nation’s budget deficit.

When the mainstream coalition reached an impasse, the most conservative of the parties, the People’s Party, entered negotiations with the Freedom Party. They were prepared to make Mr. Kickl the chancellor.

But those negotiations surprisingly broke down over the question of which party would be able to run the interior ministry, which is responsible for migration and public safety. Both parties insisted they wanted it for themselves.

That gave the mainstream groups one more chance.

Mr. Stocker said that the three parties were able to pick up negotiations where they broke off in January, and all three leaders said they worked late into the nights to be able to present the program, which has elements of each party’s platform. While fixing the budget was a top priority, the Social Democrats lauded a rent freeze for people who are feeling the effects of recession. The NEOS party praised a plan to reduce bureaucracy and cut certain labor costs.

There are many pressures on this coalition, including over the national debt and the other differences among the parties, said Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a political science professor at the University of Vienna.

Still, he said, there’s one major factor holding the coalition together. “The negative incentives are very strong: others would almost certainly benefit from the failure,” he said.

For years, the two main parties of the coalition were the only mainstream options in Austria — power would switch between the two regularly. Those old rivalries might make the coalition more fragile, wrote Peter Filzmaier, an Austrian political analyst, in an email exchange.

“As soon as, contrary to expectations, one of the coalition partners should become more and more popular, old rivalries between the ÖVP and the SPÖ will resurface,” wrote Mr. Filzmaier, referring to the People’s party and the Social Democrats by their German acronyms.

One thing could make the coalition more stable, say experts: the smallest party, NEOS, cannot bring down the government by leaving it, because the two mainstream parties have enough seats in the Austrian Parliament for a majority.

Mr. Stocker, who is expected to lead the country starting Monday, took over his party’s leadership after the former chancellor, Karl Nehammer, resigned from the post in January when the mainstream coalition talks fell apart the first time.

At the time, Mr. Stocker was widely criticized for entering into negotiations with the hard right, especially because he spent months warning Austrians how dangerous the party was.

NEOS party members are expected to approve the agreement in a special vote on Sunday, Ms. Meinl-Reisinger told journalists on Thursday. The government could then be sworn in on Monday.

Mainstream European political parties have struggled in recent years to respond to an erosion in support for establishment parties and the rise of a new group of hard-right leaders who have harnessed voter unrest over immigration, economic stagnation and cultural change.

In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, finished second in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, doubling its vote share from 2021 but falling short of its hopes for an even stronger showing. But it is not expected to factor into the next government. All other German parties respect what is known as a national “firewall” against the AfD, refusing to include it in government, as part of a decades-long national effort to avoid a rerun of the Nazi era.

JD Vance, the U.S. vice president, criticized Europeans this month in Munich for that practice, which he said disenfranchises voters concerned about immigration, and urged them to include hard-right parties in government. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said.

Austria has no such firewall. The Freedom Party has repeatedly been included as a junior partner in coalition governments, most recently with the People’s Party. But it has never held the chancellorship.

Sharief al-Homsi shivered, clutched his arms and pretended to go through Syrian regime withdrawal.

Standing before an audience in Damascus, he was telling a joke that would have been unthinkable until just a few weeks before, when President Bashar al-Assad was suddenly ousted after more than five decades of his family’s oppressive rule.

“We need rehab centers. You can’t just take this guy away from our life like that — it has to be gradual,” the 33-year-old comedian and screenwriter said, describing the omnipresent posters and magazine spreads depicting the al-Assad dynasty, to laughter from the crowd. He continued to shake. “They’ll ask us what drug were you addicted to; we’ll say, ‘Bashar al-Assad.’”

It was a night of stand-up in late December at the Zawaya Art Gallery in the heart of the Syrian capital. Half of the comedians performing that night have been living abroad after fleeing the country during the 13-year civil war that ended with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.

Their routines included standard comedy fare — religion, sex and the pressure to get married — but the biggest punchline of the night was Mr. al-Assad. One comedian referred to him throughout his routine as “that whore.”

The comedians were relishing the chance to say things that for decades Syrians would be too scared to utter even in private company. Fear of the notorious mukhabarat, the secret intelligence service, was ingrained so deeply that Syrians lived with the cautionary warning that “the walls have ears.”

But even as they embraced the liberty to make new jokes, the comedians, like many everyday Syrians, were worried that this new freedom of expression could be fleeting. Ahmed al-Shara, the country’s interim president who leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel group that ousted Mr. Assad, has promised unity that reflects Syria’s diverse population, but there are deep concerns about how democratic and inclusive the government will be.

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For more than four decades, Turkey has been fighting an armed insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., a militant group that says it seeks greater rights for the country’s Kurdish minority.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict, in both P.K.K. attacks on military and civilian targets, and Turkish military operations against the militants and the communities that harbor them. Turkey, the United States and other countries consider the group a terrorist organization.

Now, the group’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, has called on Kurdish fighters to lay down their arms — although it remains unclear how effective his plea will be and what, if anything, the Turkish government is offering the group in exchange for ending the fighting.

Here is what to know about the P.K.K. and its conflict with Turkey.

Who are the P.K.K.?

The group launched an armed insurgency against the Turkish state in the early 1980s, originally seeking independence for the Kurds, who are believed to make up about 15 percent or more of Turkey’s population.

Starting from the mountains in eastern and southern Turkey, P.K.K. fighters attacked Turkish military bases and police stations, prompting harsh government responses. Later, the conflict spread to other parts of the country, with devastating P.K.K. bombings in Turkish cities that killed many civilians.

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