The Iran Freedom Congress (IFC) was founded in London in March 2026 to bring together opponents of the Islamic Republic around two goals: increasing political and economic pressure on the regime and preparing for a democratic transition if it falls. Its members have engaged with European lawmakers to push for measures including limiting financial ties with Tehran and pressuring the regime over executions, while also confronting the question of what should replace it and how a transition should be managed.

The Congress is not a government-in-exile, and participation does not require its members to agree on every political issue. It is an Iran-wide opposition platform that brings together political parties, civic groups, and individual figures to develop common positions on Iran’s future. Among its participants are three parties from Iran’s Kurdish region, known among Kurds as Rojhelat, or Eastern Kurdistan.

Those Kurdish parties are simultaneously part of another, narrower political project. In February, most of the major parties from Rojhelat formed their own coalition in an attempt to coordinate Kurdish political strategy after decades of rivalry.

The coalition includes the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), the Khabat Organization of Iranian Kurdistan (Khabat), Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan (Komala), and the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KPIK). Most are long-standing organizations that have opposed the Islamic Republic for decades. Several maintain armed wings, while much of their leadership and many of their bases are located across the border in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

The two projects therefore overlap but serve different purposes. The Kurdish coalition is meant to coordinate the various Rojhelati parties, while the Iran Freedom Congress brings some of those same parties into a broader Iranian opposition framework.

That overlap has now raised a difficult question. When a Kurdish party participates in an Iran-wide organization such as the IFC, is it acting independently, or is it expected to coordinate its position with the other members of the Kurdish coalition first?

A dispute over an IFC declaration in July brought that unresolved question to the surface. In it, the declaration addressed the war, foreign intervention, and the Iranian people’s right to determine their own political future. It also held the Islamic Republic responsible for the policies that led to the war, rejected foreign military intervention, and argued that opposition to war should not become a justification for preserving the regime. Its central position was that Iran’s political future must be determined by the people of Iran, not external forces.

Three Kurdish parties participating in the Congress subsequently made clear that the declaration should not automatically be read as their position. The PDKI said it had neither drafted nor approved the text. Komala also distanced itself from the declaration. PJAK later explained that participation in the Congress did not mean accepting every IFC position.

The disagreement quickly escalated into a debate about Kurdish unity (or lack thereof). But the IFC is not responsible for the political differences among these parties. They have disagreed for years over whether or not having armed wings is a good idea, relations with other Iranian opposition groups, international alliances, and the future political status of Kurdistan. Some regard participation in Iran-wide opposition platforms as a way to strengthen Kurdish influence over any potential future transition. Others worry that joining such organizations without clear guarantees could weaken Kurdish standing.

The July controversy exposed that the new Kurdish coalition is not at all prepared for how members are supposed to manage those differences. That might seem like an internal political dispute, but the stakes are much higher. If the Islamic Republic begins to unravel, these parties could suddenly face far bigger decisions to make together, with little time to do so.

The parties entered their new alliance at an unusually dangerous moment. Only days after the coalition was announced, war broke out, and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq came under sustained missile and drone attacks. Iranian Kurdish opposition bases, camps, and residential areas were among the targets. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) documented hundreds of attacks within the first weeks of the war, while human rights monitors reported repeated strikes against Iranian Kurdish parties and camps housing their members and families.

By early August, more than 950 drone and missile attacks had struck the Kurdistan Region since February 28, killing 32 people and wounding 154. Not all targeted Rojhelati parties, but their facilities were repeatedly hit. By mid-July, attacks had killed at least 17 members of Rojhelati parties. After a July 19 strike on a PAK base, the party alleged that white phosphorus or another incendiary munition had been used. That claim has not been independently verified.

The coalition has responded politically. On March 20, it issued a joint statement condemning attacks on Kurdish parties and refugee camps. After another coalition meeting on July 23, it described casualties suffered by individual parties as losses for the wider Kurdish movement, and called for an investigation into the reported use of prohibited weapons. The statement publicly presented attacks against individual members as a concern for the alliance as a whole.

But there is much the public still does not know.

Has the coalition established a joint emergency mechanism? Does it have a common system for documenting attacks and casualties? Have the parties agreed on procedures for protecting residential camps? Who coordinates their response when one member is attacked?

These are practical questions for an alliance whose members and their families are living under repeated military attacks. Statements issued afterward are important, but they reveal little about what, if any, systems are in place to prepare for the next strike.

The coalition has shown at least some capacity to cooperate abroad.

On June 22, representatives of five member parties met in the British Parliament and called for a shared Kurdish political position. Other international appearances, however, have been party-based, including Abdullah Mohtadi’s separate address to the Dutch Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

There is nothing inherently contradictory about that. Political parties in a coalition can maintain independent diplomatic relationships.

The lingering question is how those relationships fit into the coalition. Do parties consult one another before major international meetings? Are there positions that representatives are expected to carry collectively? Do they brief other members afterward? Are some countries or institutions assigned to particular parties?

Without a clear set of public rules, it is difficult to distinguish a coordinated division of labor from six parties conducting parallel foreign policies.

The Iran Freedom Congress has its own issues to address.

If political parties participate in the Congress without endorsing every declaration it publishes, the distinction needs to be clear. The Congress should explain how it consults political parties, how it drafts and approves declarations, and what participation signifies when members disagree with a position issued in the IFC’s name.

As a member of the IFC Central Council, I do not think the organization should be shielded from that criticism. An organization presenting itself as part of a democratic alternative to the Islamic Republic should be able to clearly articulate its democratic procedures.

But criticism of the Congress alone won’t fix its problems.

The Rojhelati parties created their alliance precisely because internal divisions had weakened their ability to act cohesively. Its founding framework identified overthrowing the Islamic Republic, Kurdish self-determination, and establishing democratic governance in Rojhelat as central objectives.

Those ambitions require the parties to make decisions together when they disagree. So far, the public has little information about how that will work.

Can coalition members join outside political platforms independently, or must they consult the coalition first? Can one member sign a declaration that others oppose? Who speaks for the coalition? How are disagreements resolved? Does a leadership structure have the authority to make urgent decisions?

The same questions become more consequential in the event of political upheaval inside Iran.

If state authority weakens or implodes in parts of Rojhelat, who would coordinate security? What happens if two coalition parties disagree about armed deployments? Is there a common plan for administering territory? How would local political authority be established? What relationship would such an administration have with a transitional government elsewhere in Iran?

These are not hypothetical questions invented after the coalition was formed. The political environment in which the parties created the alliance was already defined by instability and the possibility of rapid change. Contemporary accounts of its formation described preparations for both political transition and democratic governance in Rojhelat as central to the project.

The creation of the coalition was significant precisely because these parties have spent decades divided by ideological, strategic, and competitive differences. Bringing six of them under one framework is an achievement in and of itself. But signing a common political agreement is different from building an institution that can survive disagreement.

The first months of the coalition’s existence have already tested its durability. The military attacks, international diplomacy, and participation in the wider Iranian opposition have exposed the same uncertainty about how collective decisions are made and how much freedom individual members retain.

It has been five months since the coalition was announced; its members should publish the procedures they intend to use to work together. Regular reports on meetings and decisions would also let the public judge what the coalition has actually accomplished and where it can improve.

None of this requires the six parties to ignore their political differences. A functioning coalition should not depend on agreement about everything, but on knowing what happens when compromise cannot be reached.

Until those rules are clear, every new military attack, diplomatic invitation, or Iranian opposition initiative risks reopening the same dispute: whether a party is speaking for itself, for the Kurdish coalition, or for a broader alliance of which it is a part.

There may come a moment when Iranians have a genuine opportunity to free themselves from the Islamic Republic, and political movements that hope to shape what follows need to be ready before that moment arrives. For the Kurdish coalition, that means resolving these questions now, not in the middle of a crisis. If an opening for political change comes and the parties are too divided or disorganized to act together, they will have squandered an opportunity the community may not get again for a generation.

On the morning of July 17, 2026, residents of Yaftal-e-Sufla district of Badakhshan woke up to unexpected yet welcome news. In the dead of night, a group of 20 to 25 armed men carried out a surprise attack by storming into the district headquarters, capturing the building, and disarming Taliban personnel there. The group withdrew several hours later before the Taliban could retake the district.

The group behind this surprise attack is a newly formed armed opposition calling themselves “Sepahiyan-e Mihan” (Soldiers of the Homeland or Patriotic Soldiers Front), whose swift and sudden blow to the Taliban resulted in its army chief being dragged to Badakhshan in hopes of quelling any further uprising. In videos circulated on social media, the group’s leader, Abdul Qayum Malang, is seen dressed in camo over the rooftop of the district headquarters, victoriously hoisting their flag. They eventually retreated to the mountains, having successfully stolen weapon caches and Taliban personnel vehicles.

This past Saturday was the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. They commemorated the occasion by crusing through the streets in tanks, Humvees, and motorcycles, firing celebratory shots into the air as they went.

Five years in, the Taliban continue to downplay and deny any internal strife. The group’s Chief of Army Staff Fasihuddin Fitrat, in an interview with local news, said, “Whether it is the National Resistance Front, the Freedom Front or Sepahiyan-e Mihan, they merely want to make their name heard. They cannot confront our security forces.”

But reports on the ground paint a messier picture. The Taliban have responded with apparent alarm to the mutiny of Juma Khan Fateh, one of their prominent commanders in Badakhshan, and sporadic attacks by opposition forces in the north. This suggests they are taking the threats to their rule quite seriously. Fighting broke out between Fateh and Taliban special forces over what analysts believe to be internal disputes rooted in power distribution and mineral rights. During these intense clashes, a helicopter that was transporting the deceased and the injured was also believed to have been downed in Badakhshan by Fateh’s forces. Eventually, as more reinforcements arrived, Fateh surrendered to the Taliban on August 17th and has since been transported to Kabul. But their response suggests they are seriously concerned about festering dissent within their ranks—in addition to the growing external opposition they are facing.

Since 2021, hundreds of the Afghan National Defense Forces were forced into exile or relocation. Special forces units were airlifted to the US and UK while the rest dispersed to neighboring Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan. Those who remained in the country faced two difficult choices: either go home and do nothing, expecting prejudice from the new rulers, or join resistance movements and fight back. Many chose to stay home, but some decided to fight back.

The Taliban have persistently said that they have absolute and total control over Afghanistan, including the north where historically most resistance to their rule has been mobilized. Yet following the collapse of the republic, several prominent armed opposition groups emerged and have since regrouped, mobilized, and carried out regular guerrilla attacks. The clashes between the Taliban and other anti-Taliban groups around the country not only contradict their claim of territorial sovereignty, but also give hope to those who thought that the Taliban’s rule was solidified and indefinite.

So who are the armed groups challenging the Taliban at a moment when it is celebrating five years in power?

Not much is known about Sepahiyan-e Mihan, as they surfaced only after their recent attack on Yaftal-e-Sufla in Badakhshan. The group’s leader, however, is believed to have served in Afghanistan’s National Defense and Security Forces and previously with the US Delta Force. He was also seen in photographs with another prominent anti-Taliban commander, Khalid Amiri, who has a background in the former Afghan military. Amiri is a key commander in the National Resistance Front (NRF), playing a vital role in organizing and leading resistance operations. Abdul Qayum Malang reportedly broke away from the NRF due to differences with its leadership and subsequently formed Sepahiyan-e Mihan.

The NRF was formed immediately after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, with members comprised mostly of ethnic Tajiks and former military personnel. They initially retreated to Panjshir Valley along with military personnel and helicopters, hoping to form an armed opposition movement there and creating a frontline of defense against the Taliban. Their efforts to hold onto the Panjshir Valley quickly failed because the groups had no tactical preparations whatsoever prior to the Taliban taking Kabul. The group lost its foothold in the Panjshir Valley in September 2021, and its leaders moved to Tajikistan, where they have maintained a political office ever since.

While the NRF was more of a reaction to the Taliban’s takeover than a calculated or strategically planned initiative, other groups learned their lesson and stayed in the shadows, quietly waiting for the right opportunity. One such group making headlines lately is the Afghanistan United Front (AUF), established in October 2023 by Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, with its political office in Virginia. In an exclusive interview with Middle East Uncovered, the 41-year-old army veteran shared why he ordered his forces to begin combat operations on August 1, 2026:

“In Afghanistan, we have a habit where we fight first and then politicize after, when it should be the other way round,” said the confident general over a phone call from his office in Virginia. “Initially, we started with team building to survey our available assets.” According to him, after the initial team-building phase, the AUF established its structure and eventually built its political capital both in the US and elsewhere around the world. Now, he says “We have entered phase 4, which is the start of combat operations,” with a 5-month delay from their initial planned start date of March 2026. He says Pakistan was keeping the Taliban busy, and it would have been a “tactical advantage to attack then, but strategically we decided to wait until they have expended their firepower and depleted their morale.”

Opposition forces today are scattered, segregated, and appear to be acting ad hoc, with the only commonality between them being opposition to the Taliban and their willingness to take action against them. Each group comes from different backgrounds and has its own unique political agenda. General Sadat, however, believes in cooperation regarding other opposition forces; he says, “Our intentions are aligned despite our political differences; however, for the sake of the country I am more than willing to join forces with anyone who shares the same principles as AUF’s.” Those principles, according to him, are based on the 2004 Afghan constitution, which was ratified and adopted by the people of Afghanistan. The Taliban immediately abolished it when they took over the country.

While General Sadat firmly believes in the constitution’s principles, he warns that he does not want to see the previous ruling class back in power under any circumstances. “We want a new republic to be born, one that is free and comprised of the younger generation of Afghans,” he says.

He already has a plan for the new order, even if it is still too early. “We have created a roadmap to guide us in navigating Afghanistan post-Taliban,” he says. But first they have to defeat them. “We have to go to war and fight the Taliban; only after they are gone can we move to a transitional government, peacebuilding, and reconciliation.”

So how effective have General Sadat and his men been so far? It’s hard to tell. The Taliban continues to deny the activities of any armed opposition group and dismiss them as thugs or insurrectionists, while the resistance forces often inflate the number of attacks or casualties they inflict. Without proper channels to verify these events, most of these claims cannot be confirmed. However, the Secretary-General’s office verified the existence of these armed groups in a 2024 UN report. Of more than 160 claimed attacks, 29 were confirmed to have taken place. More recently, since the start of AUF combat operations, dozens of attacks have been reported across the country.

While General Sadat refrained from sharing some of the confidential aspects of his operations, he did reveal that throughout the years, his forces have been identifying targets within Taliban ranks, especially figures who have actively participated in the arbitrary killings of former Afghan military personnel. “I obviously can’t discuss details, but our operatives have conducted an assessment of Taliban intelligence members, those who have targeted and killed former Afghan military forces, and prominent political figures,” he says.

Critics of General Sadat and other armed opposition groups warn of the endless cycle of bloodshed that will ensue if they are supported and financed. The General, however, is firm in his belief that the Taliban are not going to change; they must be replaced. He rejects the claim that Afghanistan will spiral into a civil war because, in his eyes, his fight is one for the liberation of the people. “We have the people’s will behind us; the Taliban doesn’t have legitimacy exactly because they lack the people’s support since 70% of the population lives in poverty,” he says.

There is a lot of uncertainty about what General Sadat is promising the people of Afghanistan, as it depends on factors beyond the operational capabilities of a group of patriots willing to go all in. For one, logistical and financial support is crucial to sustained and prolonged warfare. One where equipment and weapons can easily flow into the hands of the people fed up and willing to take the fight to the Taliban. This kind of support has historically been provided to the Afghan Mujahideen by the US government to fight against the Soviet Union, and later to the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban the first time around. Pakistan was crucial to executing this deal, serving as both a middleman in arms dealing and a training ground for Mujahideen militias, while Tajikistan served as the staging ground for the Northern Alliance.

Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban is strained and does not resemble that of the olden days. The Taliban are aware of that and have already accused the armed opposition groups of being proxies of Pakistan who are tasked with disrupting the “peace” in Afghanistan. General Sadat, however, claims, “We are a citizen- and private-funded organization thanks to our generous donors who are patriots and care deeply about Afghanistan; we have no ties with any government,” he said.

When asked about whether he was willing to accept support from Pakistan, General Sadat said, “We are willing to work with Pakistan if they truly cut off their ties with the Taliban and take decisive measures to ensure they are eradicated,” he added, “I believe at some point our animosity with Pakistan must stop; no legitimate state in Afghanistan had ever clashed with Pakistan directly except the Taliban.”

General Sadat has a long road ahead of him, and he acknowledges and accepts it. So do the rest of his forces. They understand that the help they seek might not come anytime soon, with the world plunged into crisis after crisis. Yet, they are not going to stop trying. He is actively engaged in political discussions in the US and elsewhere, raising awareness in an attempt to put Afghanistan back on the international community’s priority list.

But he wants to make one thing perfectly clear: he does not want to see foreign troops in Afghanistan again. He truly believes that Afghans are more than capable of liberating their country themselves if given the opportunity—and that the fight against the Taliban must ultimately be won by the people of Afghanistan.

In 2005, Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein published an account of what he believed to be al-Qaeda’s plan for jihad around the world in the coming years.

He based his book on conversations with al-Qaeda figures. Hussein was jailed alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1996 in Jordan for his opposition political activities and critical journalistic work linked to the Arab Ba’ath movement. Al-Zarqawi, who went on to establish al-Qaeda in Iraq during the years of the American invasion in 2003 and infamously beheaded the American hostage Nick Berg, was arrested for attempting to establish a militant cell to pursue jihad in Jordan. He was later killed in an American airstrike in 2006.

Hussein spoke with other al-Qaeda figures while researching this book, too, including Saif al-Adel and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.

Hussein identified that al-Qaeda had a seven-stage plan for jihad, which was later summarized in an article by Der Spiegel promoting Hussein’s book, also in 2005.

The plans lay out clear vision, split into phases, and ultimately lead to the rise of an Islamic caliphate and “definitive victory.”

The first phase was designed “to provoke the U.S. into declaring war on the Muslim world” so as to “awaken” Muslims. This phase was supposed to last from 9/11 up until the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Baghdad, and at the time the book was published, these events had already occurred.

But this phase was built around a foundational error. America did not, in fact, declare war on Islam generally, but on “terror.”

George W. Bush was careful in the wake of 9/11 to define Islam as “ peace”, saying in a speech to an Islamic center in Washington, DC, on September 17th, 2001 that:

“Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens. These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

The second phase, according to Hussein, al-Qaeda planned to “recruit young men” and pursue jihad in Syria and Iraq, as well as launch attacks against Israel, Turkey, and Jordan. From there, it hoped to produce the collapse of Arab governments in the region. According to Hussein, they aspired that “between 2013 and 2016, Western influence in the Islamic world will be so reduced, and Israel weakened so much, that resistance will not be feared.”

After 2016, they hoped for “total confrontation” and a “fight between the believers and the non-believers.” According to Hussein, al-Qaeda hoped that the rest of the world would be “beaten down by 1.5 billion Muslims,” which would achieve an Islamic caliphate in the region by 2020.

It’s now 2026, and some of these predictions seem to have been quite prescient. Others appear to have been completely wrongheaded.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq—the organization founded by Zarqawi, and which later rebranded itself as ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham—undoubtedly did try to found an Islamic caliphate. In fact, they managed to achieve this by 2014, when the group (then led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) announced the foundation of a new caliphate. As the BBC wrote on June 30th 2014:

“Jihadist militant group ISIS has said it is establishing a caliphate, or Islamic state, on the territories it controls in Iraq and Syria.”

It also proclaimed the group’s leader, al-Baghdadi, as caliph and “leader for Muslims everywhere.”

Setting up a state governed under strict Islamic law has long been a goal of many jihadists. But, Iraq’s army continued an offensive to retake the northern city of Tikrit from the ISIS-led rebels.The city was seized by the insurgents on June 11, 2014 as they swept across large parts of north-western Iraq.

This occured sooner than Hussein suggested it would. At its fullest extent, ISIS did control substantial territory in Iraq and Syria, roughly equivalent in size to Portugal, and it was home to an estimated 8 to 10 million people.

The caveat here is that most of this land is empty desert. But there were rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates, lakes, dams, and major cities such as Mosul and Raqqa.

From there, things did not go as al-Qaeda hoped. Most Muslims worldwide did not accept the new “Islamic caliphate,” and the group lost control of the lands it had won by 2019. Today, it has evolved back into what al-Qaeda originally was—a decentralized global network of militant insurgencies rather than a territorial “caliphate.”

What never materialized was the conflict al-Qaeda had sought to provoke all along—a global confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Yes, America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, but American governments—including under Bush and Obama—were always careful to differentiate between groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban on one hand, and Muslims generally on the other.

Yes, al-Qaeda leveraged the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, particularly the civil war between Bashar al-Assad and his opponents, as a way to grab land, power, and establish their theocracy.

A major tripping point, though, was that although there had been a lot of anger directed at the previous Iraqi government, and also with the Assad regime, Iraqis and Syrians living under the caliphate did not like it very much. ISIS in Iraq: The Social and Psychological Foundations of Terror by Munqith Dagher et al interviewed Iraqis who lived under the caliphate:

“Most Sunni Iraqis who experienced the arrival of ISIS, particularly in Mosul, say the group was largely accepted at first, as an alternative to what was viewed as a corrupt, abusive, and sectarian Iraqi state. In retrospect, however, many of the people interviewed about ISIS’s governance thought that although ISIS was superior in some aspects of governance to the Iraqi state, the group largely wore out its welcome through its brutal imposition of an interpretation of sharia that was far more extreme than even relatively conservative Sunni Iraqis were willing to accept.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that people living in the 21st century—and in a world with internet access—would not wish to live under a literal interpretation of 7th-century Islam, imposed by masked jihadists who publicly executed those who got in their way.

Medieval-style Sharia law—with hand amputations for theft and the stoning to death of adulterers—is a harsh system for modern people to live under.

It’s equally unsurprising that America under Bush did not fall into the trap of declaring war against Islam, and instead declared war against “terror.”

America as a global hegemon had longstanding relationships with multiple Muslim-majority countries, and Bush’s advisers understood that the balance of power in the region required them to maintain good relations with these states, including with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and others.

Whether an American government under Trump would have been so circumspect, well, I am not so sure about that. But President Trump certainly appears to wish to continue positive relations with multiple Muslim-majority countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Hussein’s book does reveal the modus operandi of jihadists. By engaging in extreme violence against their foes, they seek to provoke an extreme reaction that draws the wider world into confrontation with Muslims.

Falling for this kind of provocation is a mistake. Terrorism is designed to make its enemies behave in ways that advance the terrorist’s political project. Al-Qaeda understood that it could never force 1.5 billion Muslims into a global religious war on its own. It needed its enemies to help create one.

That is what makes the distinction between fighting jihadists and treating Islam itself as the enemy so important. Al-Qaeda’s grand strategy depended on collapsing that distinction. Two decades later, refusing to do so is still one of the simplest ways to deny them the confrontation they have always wanted.

In the entrance hall of the Egyptian Museum, a large screen takes viewers behind the scenes, where conservators are hard at work. Eid Mertah smiles when he sees the crowd gathered. “They watch the film, then go into the galleries to search for the object. It makes me feel happy and relieved to see people appreciating the work you have done for them and future generations,” he says.

Their enthusiasm reminds Mertah of his first visit to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It was a school trip that would shape the course of his career. Peering into glass cabinets housing treasures from the tombs of pharaohs, he found himself captivated by golden antiquities that glinted with secrets from a distant age. He longed to get closer—to touch and hold them so he could better understand the stories they carried.

That opportunity arrived sooner than expected. In 2015, a few years after qualifying as a conservator, Mertah was chosen to participate in the conservation of the golden funerary mask of Tutankhamun, widely recognized as a masterpiece of Egyptian art. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will never come again. I started with my career highlight,” he says.

Now a conservator of archaeological materials at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Mertah, 36, has worked with hundreds of antiquities, including many from the tomb of Tutankhamun, the third-to-last pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. His career has taken him to archaeological sites across the country and exhibitions around the world, where he has restored objects ranging from painted wooden coffins and gilded shrines to bronze statues of Osiris and delicate papyrus scrolls. Each object presents its own challenges, but the guiding principle remains the same: work slowly and document every decision. “There is no space for mistakes,” he says.

The past decade has seen rapid advances in conservation methods, revealing hidden information in pieces after decades on display. Mertah is most proud of his work on Osiris statues from the first millennium BC.

Modern techniques, including portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for elemental analysis and microscopy for surface examination, revealed traces of Egyptian blue, gold leaf, glass, and Lapiz Lazuli. After removing a thick crust of dirt, he uncovered facial features and decorative details from the statues, which were often given as offerings to the Egyptian god of the dead to secure a person’s passage to the afterlife.

A rush of excitement accompanies these discoveries. “You feel relieved when you bring something new for the audience and the object,” Mertah says. Working on priceless antiquities is a huge responsibility, but “you need to trust yourself.”

Mertah proceeds like a doctor, operating under the oath to ‘do no harm.’ He begins with a thorough analysis to determine the treatment direction. Everything from the object’s original condition to the methods and materials used must be meticulously mapped to provide a permanent scientific record for future research.

These days, conservators rarely make mistakes, but older methods have caused long-term damage. When papyrus scrolls were unearthed at burial sites in recent years, Mertah was able to restore those in good condition and stabilize pieces affected by insect and biological damage.

Environmental impacts are unavoidable, but many papyri found in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were severely degraded by acidity in the glue and cardboard supports used to display them. Fixing clumsy conservation work is time-consuming and “very frustrating,” Mertah says.

In the past, pieces were routinely scraped for samples, a practice that’s all but banned today as non-invasive modern technologies help secure the future of ancient treasures. Non-destructive techniques like multi-spectral imaging and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) allow conservators to visualize microscopic details and identify an object’s composition.

The conservator’s aim is to preserve the object in its original form, but sometimes intervention is necessary to prevent further decay or fix previous errors. “It’s easier to deal with an object that has never been touched than to intervene when it has already been restored,” Mertah says.

New discoveries often emerge when pieces travel abroad. Mertah frequently collaborates on international exhibitions, which involves the often-overlooked but deeply delicate work of transporting collections overseas.

Packing ancient artifacts takes a team of specialists who carefully dismantle the objects and reassemble them on the other side. “We start with the easiest,” says Mertah. “We don’t always know what we’re going to find.”

This work taps into an internal dilemma for conservators. Alongside a duty to protect and preserve is the need to share ancient artifacts with the world. But public interest is secondary for Mertah. “You always care for the object before anything,” he says.

That’s why he supported the decision to move the Tutankhamun collection to a new facility in Giza. “It’s better for the objects—conditions at the new museum are of the highest standard.”

The Grand Egyptian Museum is the world’s largest archaeological facility for a single civilization. At its launch last November, the Tutankhamun collection was prominently positioned with the golden mask, throne, chariots, sarcophagus, and jewelry presented through a thematic and chronological narrative that guides visitors through the king’s life, death, and burial assemblage.

The presentation aims to evoke, as closely as possible, the original spatial arrangement of the objects, as they were when British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. At the time, more than 5,000 artifacts were brought to light, but only now is the complete collection on public display.

Watching the collection leave the Egyptian Museum, where it has been housed since Carter’s men transported it from the site in Luxor, was a poignant moment for Mertah, but other treasures still keep him occupied.

Despite re-homing many of its pieces to other institutions, the old museum still holds the world’s largest collection of Egyptian antiquities. The building is a piece of history in its own right, dating back to 1902, when it became the first purpose-built national museum in the Middle East. “We call it the mother of all the museums because every museum in Egypt has objects from here,” Mertah says.

Plans are underway to rearrange displays. “Now we focus on developing the Egyptian Museum to say it still exists. We still have the biggest collection of Egyptian art in the world, and we are trying to present it to the public in the right way,” Mertah says. Walking through these halls, he remembers his 12-year-old self gazing in wonder at relics from the boy king’s rule. Tutankhamun was just eight or nine when he ascended the throne. For the young Mertah, he was “a star” whose civilization achieved extraordinary feats. Now, as an adult, he is still trying to get closer to the ancient Egyptians, preserving artifacts that have survived for millennia so humanity can learn more about the fascinating people behind them.

I was a child the first time the Taliban told me I did not belong in a classroom. I am an adult now, and they have told me the same thing twice. The second time, I was not a child hiding a schoolbook under my clothes. I was a woman who had built a company, a newsroom, and a life that answered to no man’s permission. On August 15, 2021, an armed movement that has never won an election, run a hospital, or built a school walked into my country and declared that everything Afghan women had built no longer counted. Five years later, they are still there, and the world has largely moved on to other headlines.

I have not. I will not.

Let me be precise about what this is, because language is the first casualty of every occupation. The men ruling Afghanistan are not a government. They are not, as diplomats like to say, a “de facto authority.” That phrase is a courtesy they have not earned and Afghan women cannot afford. They are a religious extremist militia that seized a country by force and has spent five years administering the systematic destruction of half its population. I will call it what it is.

Here is what they inherited and destroyed. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghan women did not wait for anyone’s permission to become people. We became judges, close to 270 of them, ruling in courts that would not have let us testify a generation earlier. We became members of parliament, provincial officials, ministers, generals. We built businesses, newsrooms, clinics, schools. I built mine, a media career and a company that let me walk into rooms my own mother was never allowed to enter, rooms I still remember the first time I sat in them, understanding exactly what it had taken to get there.

Nearly a million girls sat in secondary classrooms their own mothers never saw from the inside. None of it was handed to us. It was seized, year by year, by women who understood that power conceded slowly is still power lost. In 2021, men with guns and no governing experience took it all back in a matter of weeks: my company, my newsroom, my seat at every table I had earned, along with the parliament seats, the judgeships, the clinics and classrooms thousands of other Afghan women had spent two decades building. That is theft, carried out at rifle point, and dressed up in religious language its own leaders do not apply to themselves.

Here is the part that should make you angrier than anything else: the men enforcing this system do not believe in it.

Senior Taliban officials, negotiators, ministers, the men who signed the decrees banning Afghan girls from school, have spent the last five years quietly enrolling their own daughters in schools and universities in Doha and Peshawar. One of the men who helped design the architecture of Afghan women’s erasure has a daughter who became a doctor abroad, trained in the exact profession his government forbids Afghan girls at home from ever pursuing.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. The regime that has looked directly at its own policy and decided it is fit for other people’s daughters—not their own.

Their financial conduct tells the same story. A movement that claims religious purity as its governing logic has spent five years entangled in the opium and methamphetamine trade, in mineral deals with China cut behind closed doors, and in a mining economy worth an estimated one to three trillion dollars that flows almost entirely to a small circle of men from a handful of provinces, while the country they govern ranks among the hungriest on earth. Call it what you want. I call it a mafia that memorized scripture.

And they have not brought the peace they promised in exchange for our rights. Afghanistan under this regime has become exactly what the world feared and what the Taliban swore, in Doha, it would not become: a sanctuary for the armed groups threatening the entire region. The United Nations Security Council’s own monitors describe a country where ISIS-Khorasan recruits and trains with a freedom of movement it never had before, where al-Qaeda’s regional network treats Taliban-run Afghanistan as safe harbor, where Pakistani militants cross the border at will. Afghanistan and Pakistan are now, by any honest description, at war along that border, with airstrikes killing hundreds of civilians in a single incident this year.

The men who told Afghan women that stability required our silence have delivered neither stability nor safety, but instead a regional powder keg—with our rights as the down payment.

Meanwhile, the machinery of persecution grinds on with bureaucratic precision. Close to one hundred edicts and directives now govern what an Afghan woman may study, wear, say, and where her body may be seen. This year alone brought two edicts that history will not forgive. One set no minimum age for marriage at all, stripping a girl of any legal standing to object the moment she reaches puberty. The other, a criminal code signed by the Taliban’s supreme leader in January, formally reintroduced slavery into Afghan law, using the classical term for slave and dividing the population into four tiers: religious scholars, elites, a middle class, and a lower class, each facing different punishments for identical crimes.

Afghanistan is now the only country on earth to have legalized chattel slavery in the twenty-first century, and it arrived stamped with a supreme leader’s signature rather than smuggled in the shadows. Every woman who once sat on a judge’s bench under the republic has been removed and replaced by men with no legal training, ruling by these edicts instead of law.

The human wreckage is tangible. Fourteen million Afghans facing acute hunger this year, a third of the country, with malnutrition among children reaching crisis levels in a dozen provinces. The maternal mortality rate has risen to roughly 638 deaths per 100,000 births, among the worst on the planet, driven in large part by a healthcare system now starved of the female doctors, nurses, and midwives it needs, because the regime spent five years making sure fewer are ever trained. Afghanistan is projected to lose more than twenty thousand female teachers and health workers by 2030 to a ban that guarantees its own hospitals will one day have no women left to staff them. Child marriage rates have climbed as much as twenty-five percent nationally and, in provinces like Helmand, now claim nearly two out of every three young women before adulthood, girls sold into marriage as families run out of options. The mental health catastrophe is so severe that nearly seven in ten Afghan women describe their own mental state as “bad” or “very bad,” and roughly one in twelve knows a woman or girl who has attempted to end her life.

These are the intended output of a machine built to remove women from public existence.

Then their is the terror campaign against anyone who once wore a uniform for the government the Taliban destroyed. Despite a publicly declared amnesty, investigators have documented at least 110 killings of former Afghan security personnel since 2023 alone, men hunted, tortured, and executed years after they laid down their weapons, their families left with no recourse and no justice. Add to that the more than five million Afghans expelled or forced back across the border from Iran and Pakistan since 2023, sixty percent of them women and children, arriving in a country that offers them nothing but the same regime they fled, and you begin to understand the scale of what these past five years has actually cost.

Here is what I hear now, five years in, from women still inside the country. Their testimony matters more than my analysis of it. I hear about a former civil servant teaching her daughter algebra behind a drawn curtain because the girl refuses to stop learning. I hear about a physician running an informal referral chain so patients can still find one of the country’s dwindling female doctors. I hear about women who have turned their own living rooms into classrooms, clinics, and law offices, whatever the moment requires, because waiting for permission stopped being an option years ago.

What I have not heard, not once, in five years of these conversations, is a woman asking me to feel sorry for her. They report. They organize. They keep records the world will need one day, whether the world is interested in them yet or not. They are not victims. The country’s women are running a resistance network the rest of us have the luxury of hailing as “remarkable” and “resilient” from a safe distance.

In August 2021, the international community made Afghan women a promise: recognition and engagement would be conditioned on their rights being protected. Five years on, that promise is dead, and almost no one has said so out loud. I’m not telling you this as a victim. I tell you this as someone who has spent five years in exile rebuilding a media company, a podcast that reaches Afghan women in their own language, and a network of advocates in capitals that would rather issue a statement than change a policy.

I have watched the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader and its chief justice for the crime against humanity of gender persecution, and I have watched European governments host Taliban delegations in Brussels within the same year, quietly negotiating deportation deals with the very men that court has charged.

Here is what the world still refuses to understand, five years on. This wasn’t inevitable. It was never simply cultural, religious, or a fate Afghanistan was destined for. It was a choice, made by identifiable men, financed by an economy they control, and protected by a diplomatic community that keeps mistaking engagement for leverage.

And still the women continue to resist. Mothers teach algebra behind drawn curtains. Former judges run legal clinics from their living rooms. Women-run clinics operate on borrowed time and donor scraps because they refuse to close. Afghan women journalists still file stories in two languages so no government, anywhere, gets to say it did not know.

Real solidarity would not be complicated if the world actually wanted it.

It would mean the ICC warrants are followed by sanctions that bite, not statements that expire. It would mean an immediate end to deporting Afghan women back into the hands of men an international court has charged with persecuting them. It would mean funding the underground schools and women-led networks directly instead of hosting conferences about them. It would mean refusing to legitimize a regime that cloaks itself in religious language while shipping its own daughters abroad for the very education it denies everyone else’s.

And it would mean finally giving what has happened to Afghan women a name the law recognizes: gender apartheid. Codified, prosecutable, and impossible to shrug off as culture.

I do not know when I will go home. I know that Afghan women rebuilt a country’s courtrooms, classrooms, and clinics once already, out of the ashes the first Taliban regime left behind, and did it faster than anyone thought possible. We are still standing five years into the second attempt to erase us—hungrier, angrier, and far from finished. We built it before. We will build it again. The only open question is whether the rest of the world will finally stop rewarding the men trying to stop us.

This essay is republished from Maternal Dispatches With Hollie McKay. McKay is a distinguished foreign policy expert, war crimes investigator, and bestselling author renowned for her work, particularly the book "Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield."

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan, August 2021— On August 14, 2021, I wake before my alarm on a Saturday morning, a sobbing mess, hungover with anxiety. The body, I quickly learn, never lies. My photographer, Jake Simkin, and I meander through the oddly empty Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The city’s dynamism has been stripped into shuttered stalls as hundreds line up outside the banks, a last-ditch bid to withdraw whatever cash they can to head somewhere else.

There is no longer a way out for us. A rare breeze wafts through the typically static air, carrying something ominous. Frightened families stuff themselves and their belongings into tiny, intricately colored rickshaws, retreating into the city center as their homes on the periphery come under threat. Under a scorching sun, shops are closed, and cars and construction equipment lie abandoned.

Around midday, Jake and I jump into a cab and drive toward what we presume to be the sandbagged front lines, where Afghan and resistance forces are putting up the fight of their lives. There are no signs of fighting.

“I’m scared,” the cab driver unexpectedly croaks. “I don’t want to go any further.”

Our interpreter, Hami, still on his Nokia flip phone, turns to us in the backseat.

“The Taliban has just broken through the first of the three front lines,” he blurts out with a bizarre smile, either out of secret pleasure or to appease my unease. “We are surrounded.”

I return to my hotel room, making call after call. I lie and tell my worried parents I am not near Mazar, which they hear on the news is on the verge of Taliban control. Still, every Afghan government and military official I speak to tells me the city will not fall, at least not for many more days.

The clock ticks, each second stretched thin, refusing to move fast enough toward whatever comes next. We venture out for Afghan street kebabs. After all, it is a Saturday night. Upon leaving our hotel, we are met by pitch-black skies and barren streets illuminated only by a faint crescent moon. We eat quickly, pulling hunks of fatty beef and liver off long metal skewers, noting that the kebab café down a dozen crooked steps is silent, empty, and unusual. Our favorite basement kebab café has never been silent before.

“That Spidey sense,” Jake utters, his voice trailing off.

We forgo our food, throw some money on the table, and head toward the hotel as quickly as possible. In the stifling summer night air, gunfire crackles. My fast walk becomes a run as motorbikes roar closer and closer behind. With my fingers gripping the back of Jake’s shirt, I thrust my body through the blast-proof doors of the ornate, towering hotel overlooking Mazar-e-Sharif.

Everything I think I know about war disappears from my graveyard of memories. I don’t know anything. I do not know what will come. I text a friend in Southern California.

“It’s falling,” I write, my hands shaking as I hurry to the roof in time to watch the Taliban swarm what was supposed to be the bulwark of resistance below. “It’s fallen.”

When I ask him if I will make it out, seeking any semblance of reassurance from a world far away, he says he does not know.

The Taliban’s celebratory gunfire intensifies. Jake and I move away from the glass windows. As a precaution, the hotel staff asks that we avoid taking pictures out of caution that our phones and cameras might be mistaken for weapons. These young staffers bring me warm green tea and assure me I am safe, despite their pinched faces and listless eyes. They’re lying. They don’t know. Nevertheless, I trust these staffers whose names I do not know, in a place where it is hard to find trust.

A message flashes across my phone announcing the cancellation of my flight back to Kabul, scheduled for two days later. The vibration on my phone will not stop. Media outlets are looking for stories. I am now the story, and I do not want to be the story. In this confusing moment, it feels as though the outside world knows more about what is happening in the clouded streets below than I do. I’m trapped inside an isolated, burning bubble. Far away in Australia, my father leaves another voicemail. In the wake of news reports stating Mazar has fallen, he nervously asks again where I am.

Subconsciously wishing I could return to the infantile state of having someone else take care of me, I curl into a fetal position on the wooden floor. It is the color of walnuts, and I fixate on whether I will crack walnuts at Christmas. I always crack walnuts at Christmas. Will I be able to this Christmas? Just for a moment, I am a child who wants someone else, someone older and stronger, to take her out of this unforeseen mess. We are never too old to miss our parents. How had I not comprehended that the city would fall so quickly? I should have known better than to be here. Why was I even here?

I came to Afghanistan again to forget the American life with Uber, air-conditioning, and Sprite Zero, the cozy American life that did not feel like mine, the life once stuffed with celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights and Malibu soirees, Oscars, Grammys, cigar bars with Wall Street powerplayers and egos that could not be deflated. I returned for the forgotten. The small voices. To not forget the small voices. Is anybody there? Could anybody hear them? The ones wrapped in war after war after war? That is why I am here. Some say you should travel only to return home and find your center again. Home, at this point of my life, doesn’t really exist. It is here, in the core of bedlam, that I feel most like myself.

Just like that, in an ordinary moment, the extraordinary city inside a country I had come to love plunges into a medieval, concrete morass I no longer recognize. The takeover is complete, but the earth continues. I snap my eyes open. I’m still on the glass-encased rooftop, and the Taliban is still below. I bounce up and onto wobbly feet.

In a calm and collected manner, Jake and I creep back down to the seventh floor. We lock the blast-proof door behind us. And we wait.

Iram Ramzan

Iram Ramzan & Hollie McKay on Afghanistan and Women’s Rights

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Iram Ramzan, Middle East Uncovered, and Hollie McKay

One year after our last interview, Safaa Odah still lives in a tent in Al-Mawasi, the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza. It is from here that the Palestinian cartoonist continues to draw. Despite the ceasefire and hope that the end is near, she often hears gunfire, with military operations encroaching closer and closer to her makeshift home.

“Summer has made life even more difficult,” Safaa tells Middle East Uncovered, “tents are not designed to protect people from extreme heat, so even the simplest daily activities have become exhausting. Military operations have moved closer to us, and now we hear gunfire much more often. We live with constant anxiety, never knowing what might happen from one moment to the next.”

Odah, born in Rafah in 1984, is a cartoonist and animation artist with a master’s degree in psychology. Before the war, her work consisted of drawings and animated images that explored the relationship between art, society, and mental health. But since October 7, 2023, her life changed dramatically. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Strip, she was forced to leave her home and move several times, searching for safety.

Her house in Rafah, now largely depopulated, was destroyed. “A home is not simply a place to live,” she explained. “It is our homeland, our parents’ sacrifice, our memories.” After multiple displacements, the tent in Al-Mawasi is now her new home. But it has also became her art studio. For a while, Odah drew on the sides of her tent because paper was impossible to come by.

Odah’s story has attracted international attention. “At the beginning of the war, when I ran out of paper, I drew on the sides of the tent because they were the only surface available to me,” she said, “later, I returned to drawing with pen on paper. For now, I am temporarily working on a computer, waiting until I can have a dedicated drawing device that will allow me to work more effectively and return to my usual artistic process.”

She turned the tent into a canvas, drawing the war as she experienced it. While much of her work depicts destruction, hunger, and displacement, it’s important to her to also showcase the ordinary acts of care and routine that continue around her.

Through Instagram, where she has nearly 45,000 followers, Odah publishes her cartoons in real time, using the social network as a visual diary of sorts. Her style is immediately recognizable by the essential lines, black-and-white drawings with blue shading, and simple images that convey complex emotions.

The collection “Safaa and the Tent,” published in English and later released in Italy under the title “Safaa e la Tenda” by Fandango Libri, brings together all of her drawings from 2023 to 2025. It has since become one of the most significant artistic testimonies of the war.

In 2025, Odah received the Special Award from the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Her work has been praised by Joe Sacco, a cartoonist, journalist, and author of Palestine, who described her images as among the most powerful works to come out of Gaza during this period.

Her pieces have made their way to Italy thanks to the exhibition “Al di là del mare. Palestina Italia” (Beyond the Sea. Palestine Italy), born of the artistic dialogue between Odah and the Italian cartoonist Pat Carra. The exhibition, dedicated to the relationship between two united by their shared language of comics and ability to portray the present, is currently on display in Lecce and Rome as part of the Bande de Femmes festival and will continue in Modena in September.

For Odah, who cannot leave Gaza, seeing her drawings exhibited so far from the Strip allows her to travel, in a way. “It means a great deal to me because, although I am still in Gaza, my drawings have managed to travel where I cannot,” she says, “through these exhibitions, I feel that my voice and the stories of the people here are reaching a very distant audience.”

Her hope is that the public will not stop at images of war alone. “I hope visitors will see more than images of the conflict. I would like them to understand the humanity behind every drawing: the dreams, the fears, the resilience, and the daily lives of ordinary people. If someone understands that the people of Gaza are not just numbers in the news, but human beings with hopes and stories, then my work has achieved its purpose.”

For Odah, comics do more than tell stories. They document history as it unfolds, capturing the human element other forms of media cannot. “A news report tells you what happened, but a drawing can show you how it felt,” she says. “I do not draw to replace journalism, but to add the human dimension that is sometimes missing from the news.”

Each of her cartoons is a reflection of something she has experienced directly. “I am not drawing as an outside observer. I am part of the story myself. Sometimes it is painful to transform these experiences into art, but I feel responsible for continuing.”

The lack of materials, limited electricity, the summer heat inside the tent, and the sound of gunfire make even the creative process tough. “The challenges I face are both practical and emotional. Finding drawing materials is still difficult, and there is no proper place to work. At the same time, the uncertainty of every day makes it hard to concentrate.” There are efforts underway to help her leave Gaza, but the process is slow and uncertain.

When the war ends, Odah dreams of returning to more ambitious projects. “I would like to create a graphic novel. I also dream of making an animated film. There are many stories waiting to be told.”

Outside her tent, the gunfire is still too close. Inside, Safaa Odah keeps drawing, documenting a place, a people, and a life that war has already changed beyond recognition.

Lebanon has quite the reputation for making the news for all the wrong reasons. But not this week. On August 11, the Lebanese parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, replacing it with a life sentence and “aggravated hard labor.” Once the law is signed by the president and published in The Official Gazette, it goes into effect; however, acquiring such a signature is just a formality in the Lebanese parliamentary system.

This is a historic decision for the Arab world and the Middle East. But despite The Washington Post hailing it as a “first” for the region, it is not. Djibouti, a member of the Arab League, abolished the death penalty in 1995. Turkey did the same in 2004.

This makes Lebanon the second Middle Eastern country and the second Arab League member to take the step.

According to Amnesty International, 17 countries carried out at least 2,707 executions in 2025, a 78% increase from 2024. Of those, 2,611 took place in countries in the Middle East and North Africa, with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen among the region’s most prolific executioners. In March of this year, Israel passed a mandatory death sentence for Palestinians convicted of terrorism.

Lebanon has chosen to move decisively against the regional current, with a majority of the 128-member parliamentary bloc voting in favor of its abolition. Hezbollah’s bloc, unsurprisingly, opposed it.

The decision did not appear out of nowhere. Lebanese abolitionists have campaigned against capital punishment for decades, with organized efforts dating back to 1997. In fact, the last execution carried out in Lebanon was 22 years ago, in 2004.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi described the vote as a decision that “honors Lebanon’s history,” arguing that life, dignity, freedom, pluralism, and human rights belong at the heart of Lebanese identity.

Member of Parliament Adib Abdelmassih, speaking to Middle East Uncovered, was even more direct.

“This is a victory for justice and human rights in Lebanon. Lebanon wins,” he said.

He pointed to the global trend: 113 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Once the new law takes effect, Lebanon will become number 114.

Abdelmassih also raised the less philosophical and more practical benefit of extradition. Countries that prohibit capital punishment can refuse to send wanted suspects to jurisdictions where they might face the death penalty. Abolishing it, he argued, will make it easier for Lebanon to recover fugitives from countries that previously required assurances that a suspect would not be executed.

For Abdelmassih, the strongest case against executions comes down to the fallibility of the courts—particularly in Lebanon. Throughout history, he argued, people have been sentenced to death only for evidence to emerge later that they were innocent, and in some cases, that evidence arrived too late.

“I oppose using violent crimes to justify killing someone, even if such killing is legalized,” Abdelmassih said.

It is easy to argue against the death penalty with the risk of innocence surfacing too late. However, it gets harder to argue against if it involves a crime where sympathy feels almost offensive.

One Lebanese prisoner who spoke to Middle East Uncovered through intermediaries doesn’t take the decision lightly. Eighteen years ago, he was sentenced to death for killing four people.

“I committed this horrible murder 18 years ago, and nothing can justify the ugly crime I did,” he said. “But after 18 years, I am not the same person. I turned a corner, found God, found peace, and if time goes back, I would never ever even consider doing it.”

But he does not describe abolition as much of a relief.

“Although this abolition gave me a chance to live, it will not give me freedom. I will continue to live with my horrific mistakes, and this is a big price I deserve to pay.”

For decades, Lebanon has struggled with political corruption, lengthy pre-trial detention, overcrowded prisons, and cases that can drag on through courts for years. Giving such a system the power to impose an irreversible punishment demands a degree of confidence it does not deserve.

The vote quickly drew international praise. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk lauded Lebanon and called on other states in the region to follow. The European Union welcomed the decision as a major human-rights advance and an affirmation of the right to life. Amnesty International described it as a “landmark victory,” and urged Lebanon to formally commute existing sentences and ratify the international protocol aimed at making abolition irreversible.

Lebanon still has an enormous amount of work to do before anyone can describe our justice system as just.

But it has finally decided that no government, judge, or political system should possess a power for which there can be no remedy. And that is a step in the right direction.

During the last three years since October 7 and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Israeli government and its political leadership have stated that the dismantling of Hamas’s military capabilities and capacity to strike Israel is one of their central war aims.

This makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the new American-backed Gaza plan rather puzzling.

President Donald Trump and the Board of Peace announced at the end of July that Hamas has agreed to a 15-point roadmap. Under this agreement, Hamas will relinquish all of its weaponry as well as surrender its governing role in Gaza. This will make way for a new Palestinian technocratic government to oversee the rebuilding and development of the Gaza Strip.

That, if true, is a huge and monumental accomplishment.

Hamas has governed Gaza for the last two decades since they violently seized power by overthrowing the Palestinian Authority. Gaza has since been their base of militant operations against Israel. But it’s also been a source of political power over Palestinians, and an immense financial benefit for Hamas itself. Giving up control is an enormous loss and undeniable defeat for Hamas. Securing its agreement to do so is no small achievement.

Crucially, this was not a proposal asking Israel to withdraw from Gaza and simply trust that Hamas might disarm and surrender afterward.

The Board of Peace’s terms were explicit:

“For the first time, Hamas officially has committed to an actionable plan for relinquishing all its weapons, which will be followed by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”

Notice the sequencing: Hamas is disarmed first. Only then will Israel leave.

The full roadmap is more detailed. It establishes an International Verification Committee and says movement from one phase to the next is conditional on the verified completion of the previous phase.

This means that Israeli withdrawal will only happen after decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons. In other words: Hamas and other armed groups lose their weapons and governing power, while Israeli forces progressively withdraw.

Yet Netanyahu has rejected the 15-point document, insisting that Israel will not withdraw at all until Hamas has been completely disarmed. In other words, Hamas must give up everything first for Israel to cede anything.

As I argued earlier this week, there are many reasons to distrust Hamas. Hamas is a jihadist terrorist organization that has committed grave abuses against both Israelis and Palestinians. Nobody should simply take its promises at face value.

But this untrustworthiness is exactly why the Board of Peace proposal created a verification mechanism and made the withdrawal conditional on its implementation.

If Hamas refused to hand over its weapons, Israel would not have to proceed with the corresponding withdrawal.

So why reject the framework outright?

One increasingly plausible explanation is Israeli politics.

Israel goes to the polls on October 27, and Netanyahu is fighting for political survival. His hard-right political partners and competitors—such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—have every incentive to portray any territorial withdrawal as capitulation. So it’s hardly surprising to see that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Netanyahu’s rejection of the plan and are likely to be important to his prospects of forming another government.

Palestinian-American analyst and peace advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib makes this case even more strongly in a post responding to Netanyahu.

Alkhatib argues that Netanyahu’s announcement looks like political messaging aimed at the Israeli electorate. He notes that Board of Peace representative Nickolay Mladenov has already been negotiating Israeli objections, and argues that the modified framework substantially incorporates Netanyahu’s stated demand of verifiable disarmament before Israel completes its withdrawal.

There is other evidence pointing in the same direction. The Guardian reported that Netanyahu had been discussing implementation of the plan with senior Israeli military officials only days before publicly rejecting it.

Even Washington appears to view Netanyahu’s objections partly through the lens of domestic politics. The Times reported that the White House regards Netanyahu’s statement as part of his Israeli election campaign.

None of this conclusively proves that Hamas would actually have completed the disarmament process, to be clear. Hamas might well have stalled, or attempted to cheat.

But there was a simple way to discover that: test the agreement. Try to implement it. See what happens. If they are bluffing, call their bluff.

If Hamas refused to surrender its weapons, Israel would have been in a stronger position diplomatically. Netanyahu could say: we accepted the process, and Hamas rejected its obligations.

Instead, Netanyahu rejected the framework first.

Hamas can now tell Palestinians and the wider world: we accepted a process leading to disarmament and Israeli withdrawal; Israel rejected it.

This will undoubtedly serve as a rhetorical talking point for Hamas and its political allies or successors in the coming years.

Perhaps Netanyahu believes he can negotiate a better agreement. Perhaps there are genuine Israeli security objections that have not yet been publicly explained. And the Board of Peace itself says negotiations with Israel are continuing and that the plan remains operative.

If the answer is that no Israeli withdrawal can be promised until everything Israel wants has already happened, then this is not really a dispute over sequencing. It raises the question of whether there are any terms under which Netanyahu is prepared to end the war at all.

But if disarming Hamas is the overriding objective, then a verifiable international mechanism designed to do so seems like a victory. Not some kind of threat or problem.

Unless, two months before an election, being seen to make a deal is itself the threat.

John Aziz's Blog

Why Did Netanyahu Reject Trump's Gaza Deal To Disarm Hamas?

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Hasan Al-Habib was supposed to be in Iraq in April. It would have been only his second visit to the country where much of his family history is rooted. But at that point the war was still raging between Iran, Israel, and the United States, drawing in the wider Middle East, including Iraq.

Al-Habib’s plans, naturally, were put on hold.

For the British comedian, the distance between his place of birth and Iraq has been a source of fascination, frustration and, at times, envy. As a child, he watched his South Asian classmates head off to weddings on weekends and wondered what it would be like to have that kind of family life nearby.

“I remember feeling jealous when they would complain, ‘I’ve got a big family, I’ve got to go to a wedding in such a place’, and I thought, ‘I can’t do that because they’re all in Iraq’,” he tells Middle East Uncovered.

Al-Habib is speaking from his hotel room in Edinburgh, where he will be performing his latest show “Stuck in the Middle (East) with You” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—the world’s largest performing arts festival—throughout August.

Even in Scotland, Iraq is difficult to escape. Al-Habib is wearing a bright green Iraqi football jersey, and we briefly discuss the national team’s performance at this year’s World Cup.

His connection to the country has always been mediated by family. When he was 16, his grandmother visited the UK. He credits her with the Arabic that he knows.

“My parents would speak to us in Arabic, and I would reply in English. My listening is decent, but my speaking isn’t as good,” he says. “My grandmother came over, and she didn’t speak any English. So all the Arabic I speak is thanks to her.”

Al-Habib was born in London and is the eldest of three children of Iraqi parents. His dad, who had a PhD in engineering, was from Baghdad and his mum, a medical doctor, was from Najaf.

The family moved near Birmingham, in the West Midlands, when he was two.

His first visit to Iraq was in 2016, to bury his uncle Amer in Wadi-us-Salaam, in the holy city of Najaf. For Al-Habib it was more than just a physical journey.

“It was amazing,” he says. “I felt like a part of my soul was unlocked, something I’d never felt while in the UK.”

However, while he enjoyed meeting extended family members, the trip for him also cemented just how British he truly was.

“I realized the UK is home. English is my first language,” he says.

That complicated relationship with family and sense of belonging runs through his comedy, including in his latest show. Al-Habib’s skits are normally self-deprecating, littered with anecdotes about everyday racism or anti-Muslim prejudice. He often jokes about once trying (unsuccessfully) to pass off as white British to fit in.

In his current show, however, he will tackle something considerably more painful—the abuse he says he suffered from his mother.

Their relationship, he says, has always been difficult. For a long time, he “didn’t tell anyone what was happening. One, because I was ashamed, and two, I thought, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” he says.

Living in that environment, “it’s easy to be gaslit,” he continues. “You’re told ‘this is not happening’, and ‘what you did was bad’. I’m a 32-year-old financially independent man. I’m not the kind of person you would think would be a victim.”

Having got out of the situation with his mother only months ago, it’s clearly still raw for Al-Habib. There are longer silences between his words, and fewer smiles and jokes.

Asked for more details about what he experienced, he starts and stops several times before saying, “It’s complicated.”

But in a strange way, discussing the emotional subject in front of countless strangers is cathartic in a way that therapy might not be.

“It feels like the audience is with you. Sometimes that’s enough,” he says.

Al-Habib’s life has been full of trials and tribulations. His parents got divorced when he was still in elementary school.

“I don’t remember them ever being happy,” he admits.

Being the “conduit” between two adults who would refuse to speak to each other also put a lot of pressure on him, even on his own relationships in later life.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of having children with someone and then splitting up. I didn’t want [the children] to go through what I did.”

For a while he lived with his dad. “I have nothing but huge admiration for him,” he says. “We grew up with a single dad. I have a better relationship with him now.”

His difficulties at home were compounded by the bullying he encountered at school. It was just after 9/11, and he was the only Arab in a class full of white children.

“I got into comedy because I realized if I was being funny, if I made people laugh, they couldn’t make fun of me—especially if I made fun of myself first,” he says.

Al-Habib began doing stand-up shows as a university student—he studied biochemistry at Imperial College London and completed a PhD in oncology at Cambridge University.

He laughs as he recalls his first live show in London. “I was terrible! But I got through it, because I was less terrible than everyone else and I was confident,” he says. “I delivered bad jokes terribly.”

He includes Sacha Baron Cohen, John Stewart, and Dave Chappelle among his comedy icons.

Al-Habib realized soon enough that his background could prove to be an advantage in comedy.

“Being Arab and Muslim growing up in Birmingham was rare, and it gave me a different perspective,” he explains. “An audience is more forgiving if you tell a bad joke, but if it’s something they’ve never heard before.”

Since then, Al-Habib’s career has been on an upward trajectory. His sketches have chalked up over 20 million views on social media, and he has appeared on multiple comedy shows on British television and radio.

His solo debut in 2025, “Death To The West (Midlands),” sold out its entire run and received nominations for Best Debut at the Leicester Comedy Festival Awards

It’s not just comedy that plays a huge role in his life. Al-Habib is also a practicing Muslim. Earlier this year he appeared on the new series of “Pilgrimage,” a popular factual show on the BBC, where seven celebrities of different faiths (or none) walk along a religious route.

“The show was fantastic; it was a unique experience. I wish more people could take part,” he says.

The program also gave him the opportunity to visit a synagogue for the first time, alongside fellow participant Ashley Blaker—also a comedian—who was previously an ultra-Orthodox Jew.

Al-Habib was also allowed to pray inside, something he described as a “privilege.”

“I’ve never been to a synagogue before; I’ve always wanted to go,” he says. “It was a unique introduction into Jewish belief. Ashley had different views to the people inside; you get that in every faith. There are big splits in Islam as well, which have caused so many deaths and fights.”

The show also caused him to reflect on his faith while he was a student. Al-Habib recalls the Muslim students who would regularly go out drinking, but a conversation with one of them made him realize that he had judged him without knowing about his inner turmoil.

“You can’t judge people, especially if they’re having deep psychological issues,” he says. “They might drink alcohol, but they might be dedicated in other aspects of their faith.”

Like many successful comedians before him, Hasan Al–Habib has spent much of his career turning difficult experiences into jokes, often making himself the punchline before anyone else can. His latest show at the Edinburgh Fringe takes that instinct into more uncomfortable territory, but the aim remains the same—finding humor in pain.

When I visited Benghazi last November, a coffee shop perched above the Mediterranean had become one of the main attractions along the city's newly renovated corniche. Yet beyond its mesmerizing view, the war's wreckage still spanned the city. Streets that were once teeming with life had fallen eerily quiet. Buildings that once stood tall were damaged or destroyed. As residents fled, stray dogs gradually took their place. The ruins became their home, and the bodies of fallen fighters their means of sustenance.

To understand how Benghazi reached this point, you have to go back more than a decade. After Gaddafi’s downfall in 2011, Libya descended into conflict. Benghazi became one of its fiercest battlegrounds as Islamist armed groups, including Ansar al-Sharia and later ISIS, established a presence in the city. In 2014, Khalifa Haftar launched a military campaign dubbed “Operation Dignity” to drive them out. In a span of three years, Haftar succeeded in his mission, but the war’s toll on Benghazi’s infrastructure was severe. Despite the reconstruction projects, remnants of the war, whether damaged buildings or stray dogs, continue to haunt the city.

Benghazi is not alone. Across the Middle East, wars have produced growing populations of stray dogs. During the war in Gaza, efforts to identify bodies of certain Palestinians were difficult, given that some of them were scavenged by dogs. Graves in Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, were also pillaged by the same animals. Even Palestinian children were not spared the sight of dead bodies being torn apart by stray dogs.

Similar incidents were witnessed by American soldiers during the war in Iraq. One serviceman was traumatized after seeing dogs feeding off bodies in mass graves. Another retired serviceman, Cody Alford, described a similar experience in an interview about his time in Fallujah.

Today, stray dogs have become a grave concern for Benghazi’s residents. On multiple occasions, children have been either wounded or killed.

Mecca Al Magribi, a 3-year-old girl who regularly played with the neighbors’ kids, disappeared on the morning of January 3rd. She went out to play but never returned home. Her family was concerned and publicized her disappearance on social media. Eventually, she was found after being mauled by a pack of stray dogs. She later died from her injuries.

The incident involving Al Magribi triggered a massive outcry. The government was criticized for failing to regulate or curb the spread of the dogs, and many residents called for a solution, citing the devastation they were causing.

In response, internal security forces launched a campaign to cleanse the city by exterminating them. The campaign was not well received by segments of the population, who believed there were better alternatives.

To date, there is no concrete data on the number of stray dogs roaming the streets of Benghazi or how many have been eliminated. However, in 2020, a similar campaign was launched by the same unit of Benghazi’s internal security forces. It was in response to another incident when a child was attacked, barely surviving after being severely wounded. The campaign reportedly eliminated 2 percent of the entire population.

Even though another campaign was launched in 2022, stray dogs continue to encroach on Benghazi’s neighborhoods.

Hind Salameh* is a Benghazi resident who spoke to Middle East Uncovered about the impact of stray dogs on her daily activities. Salameh lives in Al Keesh, an old neighborhood affected by the proliferation of the dogs. Both Salameh and her mother were bothered by the increasing number of these animals, blaming the municipality for failing to implement containment programs.

“I often joined my mother during her walk around the neighborhood,” said Salameh. “However, we tended to carry sticks or a brick to fend off the dogs in case they attacked us. When we heard the tragic story [of Mecca Al Maghbribi], we gave up on walking. After a full day of work, you need a bit of fresh air. However, killing the dogs is not the best way to tackle this issue.”

The head of the stray dog ​​unit, Deputy Officer Abdul Rabah Al-Faydi, said the extermination campaigns are necessary to protect residents from attacks and reduce the risk of disease. It was the same method adopted by the municipality in Baghdad, which eliminated more than 19,000 dogs in 2025.

Without a sustainable government program, the stray dogs of Benghazi will likely encroach even deeper into different neighborhoods. From Benghazi to Baghdad, advocates have argued that shelters and humane population control offer a more sustainable solution than mass extermination. Advocates point to neighboring Erbil as evidence that another approach is possible. There, authorities say a three-year program of collecting, sheltering, and sterilizing stray dogs has brought attacks in the city center under control.

Along the corniche, Benghazi’s cafés are busy again, and the city is slowly rebuilding. But a few streets over, residents still carry sticks and bricks when they leave home. As the city recovers, the challenge is not just repairing what the war destroyed, but confronting four-legged scavengers it left behind. How the city chooses to respond will shape the future of both the stray dogs and the residents who are forced to share the city with them.

Had the world looked away, Iran’s Baháʼí community might no longer exist. That’s the warning from Bani Dugal, the Baháʼí International Community’s representative to the United Nations.

She argues that sustained international attention has prevented the Islamic Republic from carrying out what could have amounted to the eradication of the country’s largest non-Muslim minority.

“The government could have eliminated the Baháʼís through brutal means, which they are known to use,” Dugal tells Middle East Uncovered. “But I think it’s the international condemnation and the spotlight that’s shone on them, by these resolutions and other actions and statements by governments, that has prevented them from doing so.”

While global attention focuses on wars and bloodshed across the Middle East, another decades-long struggle has continued, largely unnoticed: the persecution of the Baháʼís.

The largest unrecognized religious minority in Iran, Baháʼís have been the target of harsh, state-backed repression since their religion was established in the 19th century. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian authorities executed or forcibly disappeared hundreds of Baháʼís, including their community leaders. Since then, the regime has codified its repression of Baháʼís into law and official government policy. Baháʼí homes and businesses are often raided or confiscated.

That persecution continues today, even as Iran is engaged in a war with the United States and Israel.

Dugal discussed the plight of the Baháʼís at a recent conference in London organized by the AMAR Foundation, a charity that aims to help persecuted communities around the world.

A UN group monitoring human rights abuses in Iran recently warned of a sharp increase in arrests, torture, and violations of Baháʼís, with at least 61 currently being held in detention centers or serving prison sentences, having been tortured to extract forced confessions.

Cousins Peyvand Naeimi and Borna Naeimi, the group observed, were subjected to “mock executions” to coerce confessions and remain held under dire conditions.

Such stories hardly get media coverage, says Dugal, because it’s “the same old story.” For journalists to cover the subject, she believes, “There should either be a lot of blood on the ground or something new or heinous.”

When Iranian poet and former prisoner Mahvash Sabet wrote about her ordeal from behind bars, she became the voice of thousands of Baháʼís who could not speak freely. Sabet and other members of the informal Baháʼí group, the Yaran-i-Iran (”Friends of Iran”), were labeled as spies working for foreign powers by the Islamic Republic. After spending two-and-a-half years imprisoned before trial, Sabet and six colleagues were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Sabet would ultimately spend a decade behind bars before being released in 2017, only to be re-arrested in 2022 and sentenced to another ten years. Now aged 74 and suffering serious heart and lung problems, she is still under the threat of being returned to prison.

Her translator, Bahiyyih, spoke with Middle East Uncovered earlier this summer.

“Mahvash writes so well,” says Dugal. “Reading extracts of her book and account of her treatment was bone-chilling.”

Dugal recalls a brief phone call with Sabet while the latter was in France visiting Bahiyyih, but the conversation was limited as Sabet does not speak much English and Dugal doesn’t speak Farsi.

Sabet managed to send Dugal a piece of art that she created while she was held in Evin Prison.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” says Dugal, searching for words. “It’s just beautiful.”

Dugal admires the “strength and resilience” of her fellow Baháʼís and the “courage of their convictions,” adding: “Yet they harbor no ill will towards the government. Baháʼís don’t wish the Islamic Republic ill. All we want is for them to respect [our] right to believe.”

Dugal, a 66-year-old retired lawyer, was born to Punjabi parents in northern India. A devout Sikh herself, she never imagined one day she would convert to another faith.

She made the decision after moving to the United States. Surprisingly, her parents didn’t object.

“My mum asked me, ‘Do Baháʼís believe in God?’ I said yes, it’s the same God. Then she said, ‘Next time you’re in India you will go with me to the Gurudwara [Sikh temple], and I will go to the Baháʼí temple with you.’”

“My father-in-law [also a Sikh] said to me, ‘I want my grandchildren to be raised in religion, it doesn’t matter which one.’”

Dugal had exposure to the Baháʼí faith in India, which is home to the largest Baháʼí community outside Iran. New Delhi is home to the famous Baháʼí Lotus Temple.

For centuries, India has absorbed countless minority groups, many of whom have assimilated successfully.

Dugal shares the fable of the Zoroastrians, or Parsis, who fled persecution in Iran between the 8th and 10th centuries and arrived on the shores of Gujarat in western India.

According to legend, the king gave the refugees a cup full of milk to show his land was full and had no space for new people. The Parsi priest added sugar to the milk without spilling it, to show his people would blend in and enrich the local culture without causing disruption. Pleased with the answer, the king let the new arrivals stay under the agreement that they respect local customs and learn the local language.

Today, the Parsis are a successful community that has retained the Zoroastrian faith while adopting Gujarati customs.

In a similar vein, Baháʼís are a model minority wherever they live, says Dugal.

Which is why their persecution is even more painful for her.

“We must stop othering people,” she warns. “If all individuals were to do their part in contributing to the wellbeing of their society, I think we would have a much better world than we do today.”

The high-pitched whine of a low-flying drone hangs over Beirut’s southern suburbs. Below it, excavators chew through mountains of concrete. Between the shattered bricks lie fragments of ordinary lives. A child’s toy, family photographs, a soot-blackened sofa, a single Christmas stocking. On top of one pile of rubble, a fresh yellow flag flutters in the summer wind.

As Dahiyeh slowly begins to rebuild, the symbols of Hezbollah remain just as visible as the destruction.

To many outsiders, the flag is a symbol of what is often called a “Hezbollah stronghold.” To the people who live here, it tells only a fraction of the story.

The citrusy, earthy aroma of za’atar and the fatty, nutty smell of melted cheese drifts into the street from a small bakery where Ali Jaber is tossing one piece of dough after another into the blazing oven. As he replaces the baked manakish (or manouche, a popular Lebanese flatbread akin to pizza) with raw ones, customers wander in and out.

During the war, the oven stayed lit.

“We kept making manouche,” he says. “It’s our land. If we didn’t stay, who would?”

Some days the strikes hit the buildings right outside the bakery. Other days they just made the shelves next to Ali Jaber shake.

“We don’t know the word fear. We have been through so much.”

On the wall behind him hangs a portrait of Hassan Nasrallah, the deceased secretary-general of Hezbollah.

Ali Jaber notices me looking at it.

“In the West, you see Hezbollah as terrorists,” he says.

“But that’s not the only truth. We are people. We are families. It’s my mother, my father, my sister, my brother and the child in my wife’s stomach. We were born and raised here. We are people of this land. You are the ones who don’t understand us. So how will we ever get our point across to the world?”

He takes out a manouche, steaming with melted cheese, and places it on the counter.

“I want peace. And I want to be able to defend myself.”

Support for Hezbollah remains strongest among Lebanon’s Shiite community, although opinions have become more divided since the latest war, according to experts. Even in Dahiyeh, residents disagree over many of the movement’s decisions, but many also feel outsiders rarely ask how their views were shaped.

From the tenth-floor balcony of his apartment, Ahmad lights a cigarette while he looks out on what used to be a display of the neighborhood’s many apartment blocks.

Now, the view is one of destruction.

His family’s apartment survived with only minor damage.

The dust of war has been wiped from the blankets, but two months after they returned, the backseat of their car is still packed with clothes, documents, and flip-flops. They’re ready to leave again. Not because they plan to, but because experience has taught them that they might have to.

“Since I was a child, there has always been a war. I don’t even know what life without one looks like. What would I even talk about? Cats and dogs?”

Thirty-year-old Ahmad has spent much of his life fleeing from one crisis to the next. Over the past two years alone, he has been displaced repeatedly from both Beirut and his hometown of Markaba near the Israeli border. In the recent war, an estimated one million people were internally displaced.

Many Lebanese blame Hezbollah for drawing the country into repeated wars with Israel. Asked if he understands them, he pauses for a second while the whine from the drone takes over the silence.

“I see myself as neutral. I am not a supporter. I am not against them. I think both Hezbollah and Israel are wrong for this,” he says and expresses what people in Dahiyeh are often hesitant to—despite thinking it. That is why Ahmad prefers not to have his last name used.

There is destruction all around us. Critics will say that without Hezbollah it wouldn’t be here. Why don’t you and the people here see it like that?

“People stick to the people who defend them. That’s why people follow them. They want someone to save their houses. They want to live there. Eat there. They don’t want to be displaced from their lands,” he says.

“In the headlines, it’s always about Hezbollah going against Israel and trying to protect the Lebanese. Not the government.”

That perception is rooted in history. For decades, southern Lebanon was among the country’s poorest regions with limited public investment and weak state services. Hezbollah emerged during that period, combining armed resistance with schools, clinics, and welfare programs that became deeply rooted in many Shiite communities.

The movement has also consistently portrayed itself as the “defender” of southern Lebanon. Over time, critics and experts have argued that this has reinforced the belief that the movement alone can protect the south, while supporters point to repeated conflicts with Israel as evidence that the threat is real.

A few kilometers from Ahmad, Zeinab Jawad is looking through a photo album. She gently flips the page and points to a picture of a small boy smiling.

“It’s Hadi,” she says with a tight smile.

Next to her is a painting more than a meter tall. The background is bright yellow. On it is her son, Hadi.

He was killed in April while fighting for Hezbollah. Traditionally, he is supposed to be buried in their hometown. But even despite the ceasefire, they still can’t go there. So, while she is waiting to bury him, his body has been placed in a temporary grave.

She speaks softly. Not about politics, but about her son.

“He was gentle, caring and educated, with a university degree. He loved the south. He adored the plants in the south and the olive trees,” she says.

She smiles as her eyes redden and grow glossy.

I ask why, after losing her son, she still supports Hezbollah.

“No mother can take the pain from losing her son. But we are offering our most precious thing for safety. I want safety. I want to live.”

She speaks about growing up under Israeli occupation. About hearing of torture from the Khiam prison in the South. About stories passed down through her family. About a childhood shaped by conflict and believing that someone had to defend the south.

“It’s our right to fight for what is ours. It’s my land. My home,” she says.

Those experiences are the lens through which she and many Shiites see the movement.

Back in the bakery, customers continue to arrive.

Outside, another excavator tears into what remains of a collapsed building. Above it, the drone is still circling. The yellow flags are still waving in the wind too.

To many outside Lebanon, they symbolize a militant terrorist movement. To many people here, they represent memories, belonging, and survival.

Ali Jaber points towards photographs of young men hanging on the bakery wall.

“We have lost a lot. Friends, family. But it’s because of them that we are here now,” he says.

Some people believe that Lebanon could have been spared the suffering if Hezbollah had given up their weapons. Why don’t you agree?

He answers without hesitation.

“If they didn’t fight, we would all have been wiped out. We never really had a choice to begin with. For us, the only option was to defend ourselves, to go through wars and keep going. It’s not like we enjoy this. We have no choice.”

It is easy to reduce places like Dahiyeh to its yellow flags, but harder to sit with and really listen to the people who live under them. Their stories do not settle the issue of Hezbollah, and they don’t ask anyone to. But they do remind us that movements don’t often survive for decades on ideology alone. They endure because they become woven into the lives of people who believe they have few other places to turn.

Long after the cameras leave, those people will still be here, rebuilding homes, burying loved ones, baking bread, and hoping their children inherit something other than the next war. They are part of Lebanon’s story too.

Another week in Iraqi politics, and Murad Ismael is frustrated. Some days, he feels “sickened” by a political system that enriches a small elite. Other days, it seems impossible to get anything done. Entering office on a wave of support in November 2025, the engineer-activist believed his win would mark a turning point for the Yazidi people. “I thought I would be that person who gets things done; I’ll be the politician who makes change.”

Six months into his first term in Parliament, he has adjusted his expectations, but not his goals. The community he represents has slipped down the agenda, supplanted by wars in Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. “The international community helped initially, but then they dropped the ball before we had resolutions... Yazidi cases are really on the back burner now,” Ismael said.

Twelve years after the ISIS genocide, few reparations that would allow families to heal have materialized. Approximately 190,000 Yazidis are still displaced, unable to return to Sinjar where the reconstruction of schools, hospitals, and other vital infrastructure has been painfully slow. Many cannot go back because their homes have been destroyed. Others fear returning to a volatile environment where different armed groups vie for control.

“I am representing a population that needs support, employment, reparations, IPD [Internally Displaced Person] returns, and reconstruction. I think people are starting to wonder after six months what Murad is doing,” he said.

These issues loom large for an entire generation that has grown up in refugee camps, where Yazidi families fear lost loved ones have been forgotten as mass graves await excavation and investigations into trafficked children stall. But in Baghdad, where Ismael advocates daily for the Yazidi cause, politicians look surprised when he describes squalid conditions and food shortages. “They don’t even know that the IDPs exist. That really hurts,” he said.

After years of campaigning, Ismael believed politics would provide a platform for policy change. Now he fears it might be too late. “I wish I was in parliament in 2017 and 2018 when the Yazidi issue was at the forefront internationally. It takes a lot of energy to bring anything related to Yazidis [before parliament] now.”

A few months after Ismael began his term in office, a period of relative stability in Iraq came to an abrupt close. In March 2026, the US-Israeli conflict with Iran spilled into Iraq, turning it into a proxy battleground.

The ensuing months saw politicians grappling with the economic devastation caused by plummeting oil exports, while civilians faced soaring food prices as attacks on Iraqi soil dragged the country into another war. “Iraq is not a functioning country…the whole system is cracking,” he said.

Ismael began his term charged with ambition. He had no intention of being another Yazidi politician who enters parliament with a “heavily Kurdish agenda.” His vision remains broader and more inclusive, “to build a balanced Yazidi policy that’s not based on hate.”

So far, this has proved difficult in the context of a regional war that is exacerbating divisions in Iraq’s political system. Modest progress becomes arduous when confronted by the fault lines between parliament’s competing parties and sects. “Sometimes even the like-minded people can’t unite because of the way Iraq’s political system works,” he said.

Ismael never intended to run for office. After co-founding the Yazidi advocacy group Yazda and leading the fight for justice in courts abroad, he was already a leading voice for survivors. His work helped to secure recognition for the genocide in more than a dozen countries and drew attention to the testimonies of survivors like Nadia Murad. In 2020, he drew on his background in the non-profit sector to launch Sinjar Academy and create opportunities for Yazidi youth unable to find work.

Then, last year, he made a last-minute decision to join the first Yazidi unified electoral coalition and the votes flooded in. He received one of the highest vote counts in Nineveh, a victory made all the more remarkable by sidestepping the traditional party machinery, patronage networks, and hefty campaign budgets that bankroll many mainstream candidates in Iraq.

Iraqi politicians backed by the major parties typically spend tens of thousands, even millions, to secure their seat in the Council of Representatives. Ismael was elected outside the quota system, which reserves seats for minority candidates, after spending less than $20,000 on his campaign. “Yazidis have waited a long time for a person to give them hope, and power, and strength,” he said.

When the results were announced in mid-November, it felt like something had finally shifted. A community that has spent more than a decade struggling to be heard had a voice they trusted in a position of power. Celebrations erupted as fireworks lit up the streets. A convoy, hundreds of cars long, blared their horns until 3am. “It felt strong,” Ismael said.

That night, he saw the faith his constituents had placed in him. Six months later, he understands what it means to carry the hopes of a bereaved community on his shoulders. “It’s an honor, but also an unbelievably heavy burden.”

Ismael is using his time in office to explore all possible avenues for justice. He is part of the working group behind the new international crimes law, which will bring genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity into Iraq’s legal system. The law has been slow to materialize, and he is keen to accelerate progress on legislation that will afford greater protections to minorities in Iraq. It will also afford a degree of recognition for the suffering Yazidis have endured. “Genocide is a lot of open wounds that you need to close as much as possible,” he said.

While wider reform grinds on, he keeps WhatsApp open for day-to-day demands. He wants to counter the aloof image of Iraqi MPs and moves between two offices where he is accessible to voters. “As a politician you are a member of the community that sent you here. You have to be available when they need you.”

There are days when Ismael wonders what can be achieved with “just one seat.” Other times, he believes that one man, one voice in Parliament, does matter.

This means responding to a cry for help at 1am when someone’s family member is being held at a checkpoint, or stepping in when an employee needs six months off work to recover from illness. These are the differences he can make on a daily basis, while harnessing his access and building alliances to address broader challenges affecting Yazidis as a whole.

Looking ahead, he is clear in his goals. The challenge will be finding routes to achieve them in a system that safeguards power for a well-connected elite. He is encouraged by the new Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s anti-corruption crackdown, which has recovered more than $100 million in missing state funds and resulted in the arrest of senior officials, including MPs. But the corruption cases and patronage networks will not evaporate overnight, nor in the three and a half years left of his term. New to politics, he is learning how to work within a broken system, “adhering to my values while trying to get something done.”

Ismael doesn’t know whether he will run again when his term is complete. He won’t be distracted by campaigns and bids for power. His focus is on tangible change for a community that has been “let down by everybody,” while closing the gap between ordinary people and the politicians that speak for them. “A lot of the issues that Yazidis face are political issues, so they need to have strong political representation,” he said.

Six months after Yazidis chose him to “change the wave of injustice to justice,” Ismael knows the difficulties ahead. The obstacles are daunting, but he refuses to waver. “I will be the voice of my people in every instance,” he said.

Across the West Bank, Palestinian communities are facing a steady rise in attacks by Israeli settlers. Homes have been torched, agricultural land destroyed, and residents beaten or driven from their villages. The violence has become a source of growing concern not only for those living through it, but also for neighboring states watching the consequences spread beyond Israel’s borders.

Although these attacks are illegal—and many Israelis oppose them—Israel does nothing to stop them. In fact, Israeli security forces stationed throughout the West Bank have reportedly accompanied settlers as they storm villages, assault men, women, and children, and set fire to homes, vehicles, and agricultural land.

In the past year, these events have increased in number and intensity. In the first three months of 2026, settlers attacking or blocking access to homes resulted in the displacement of nearly 1,700 Palestinians. This is 90% of the number of Palestinians displaced during the entire year of 2025.

Unlike most situations in the Middle East, this is one problem that Israel has the power to unilaterally solve. Instead, it allows an already fraught security situation to worsen. Its failure to intervene is often seen as tacit endorsement of these attacks.

One of the neighboring states paying close attention to the escalation is Jordan.

Situated on the eastern border of the West Bank, the country consistently enjoys stability even as conflict engulfs much of the surrounding region. If the attacks continue unchecked, one of only four Arab states to have normalized relations with Israel could face growing domestic pressure that tests those ties.

Jordan is home to over 2 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, displaced since the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel. Israel’s reluctance to stop the settler attacks could trigger a refugee crisis as more Palestinians cross the border from the West Bank into Jordan. Jordanian authorities have strongly condemned the violence, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently expressing concern that the situation could fuel extremism and undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.

The presence of Israel’s Western allies, especially the United States, serves as a powerful deterrent against a wider Middle Eastern conflict. Yet settler violence has already begun to change the tone of Israel’s relationships with many of its partners. The United Nations has expressed grave concern over settler attacks. The European Union and the Vatican have issued statements of condemnation. In June, five Western allies imposed joint sanctions on individuals and networks in Israel known to support settler violence.

If these attacks continue, Western governments could face growing pressure to impose additional sanctions, reduce military or diplomatic support, or further distance themselves from Israel. A significant weakening of those alliances could encourage rival states and armed groups to take greater risks if they believe the likelihood of a coordinated Western response has diminished. Israel would remain a formidable military power, but a sustained erosion of Western backing would make a prolonged regional war more likely.

Unhindered settler violence provides extremists in the West Bank and Israel with ideological canon fodder. Settlers are shielded from consequences and protected by Israeli security forces. They are not discouraged from carrying out these attacks; instead, they are emboldened. If this continues, an increase in Palestinian retaliation would be unsurprising.

Increased Palestinian attacks alongside continued settler violence could create a never-ending cycle. As violence escalates, security in the West Bank would deteriorate further. That environment could provide more opportunities for extremist groups on both sides to recruit and expand their influence. With more people drawn into those groups, attacks would likely become more frequent, increasing the risk of further violence in both the West Bank and Israel.

If permitted to continue, Israel’s role in West Bank settler activity could shift regional and even international alliances. Added to the already volatile regional security situation, the scales could tilt so heavily against Israel that the unprecedented Abraham Accords would become obsolete.

It is not unusual for Middle Eastern alliances to be short-lived. This is because they frequently are built not on strengths, but on shared security threats and regime survival. If the Abraham Accords were scrapped, the four Arab countries that signed on to the Accords would face regional pressure to form new alliances or join existing ones. Other nations across the world would then need to adapt in order to re-secure their own interests. Such significant shifts in geopolitical alliances centered around the Middle East could recalibrate the world.

Israel has the power to end settler violence in the West Bank. Instead, it allows the attacks to continue. What happens in this disputed corner of the Middle East does not stay here. Governments across the region have condemned the attacks on Palestinians, and the combination of escalating settler violence and continued settlement expansion has created the impression that Israel is incrementally moving toward annexation of the West Bank.

Israel has both a moral responsibility and a strategic interest in changing course. Protecting Palestinians from violence means upholding the rule of law and basic human dignity. It also serves Israel’s own long-term security. Every attack that goes unchecked increases the risk of further violence, weakens Israel’s relationships with its partners abroad, and makes regional stability harder to achieve. Ending settler violence is not only the right thing to do. It is in Israel’s own interest.

Nearly 20 years ago, a group of Holocaust deniers and anti-Israel activists were invited to Iran to support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposition that the murder of six million Jews in Europe was a “myth.”

The anti-Zionist hardliner, then president of Iran, also called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

An unlikely candidate, one might think, to become a spy for a country the Islamic Republic has consistently labeled “Little Satan.”

And yet, if reports are to be believed, Ahmadinejad was allegedly groomed and recruited as an intelligence asset by Mossad, which even considered him for a role leading Iran if the Islamic Republic was toppled.

According to a report in The New York Times (NYT), Israel’s most feared intelligence service sent its top spy to Budapest to meet with the anti-Zionist former president. The mission continued even after Israel’s devastating war in Gaza against Hamas after October 7.

The terrorist group has received millions of dollars in funding from its staunch ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It may read like a far-fetched Hollywood movie plot. That’s certainly the line Ahmadinejad’s office is putting out there, which has dismissed the “Hollywood-style claims” that were “not worthy of denial,” before accusing the NYT of publishing “fabricated” material.

The paper also reported that Ahmadinejad is now under house arrest after Iranian authorities uncovered much of his alleged interaction with Israel. His office denies this.

For those who have followed Ahmadinejad’s career after he left office in 2013, the decisions that may have led him down this path are not so incredulous.

“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been ostracized out of the political sphere. And his ambitions remain unfulfilled. This motivation could be manipulated to get him on board with Mossad’s tasking. Israel gets control of domestic politics in Iran, and Ahmadinejad gets his old job back, something he believes he deserves,” says Jonathan Hackett, a US Marine Corps veteran specializing in counterintelligence and the author of Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Covert Action, Intelligence Operations, and Unconventional Warfare.

Such an operation is “High-risk, low probability of success,” one which most states would not undertake. But, Hackett goes on to say, “Mossad has an interest in influencing and directing Iran’s domestic politics. If Mahmood Ahmadinejad can achieve this for them, it would make sense.”

Ahmadinejad rose to power with the direct backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, serving as Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013.

He soon became one of the Islamic Republic’s most recognizable figures—not only down to his appalling views on the holocaust, but the violent crackdown that followed his disputed “landslide” re-election in 2009.

Many Iranians believed he didn’t win the election fairly, leading to mass protests on the streets, which became known as the Green Movement.

But it was Ahmadinejad’s relationship with the ruling establishment that was a bigger thorn in his side. The regime which brought him to power steadily deteriorated, and he was repeatedly barred from returning to the presidential race. That frustration would have turned into anger towards the regime, making him easy fodder for recruitment.

“Whilst he is not the most desirable asset from a handling perspective, the placement and access he has may outweigh the costs of difficult handling,” said Hackett, when asked why Mossad would recruit him.

In recent years, Ahmadinejad became a critic of the Islamic Republic, accusing senior officials of corruption and poor governance. His views became more moderate, and he worked on improving his English and getting a makeover. He trimmed his beard and reportedly had Botox.

Iranian-born historian Dr. Arash Azizi recalled arranging an interview between Ahmadinejad and an Israeli journalist, claiming that the former president repeatedly expressed an interest in discussing Jewish history and Israel.

“He seemed to be open to normalization with Israel,” Dr. Azizi told Iran International, a Persian-language satellite channel based in London.

It’s not clear when Israeli intelligence first approached the former president, but the NYT reported that the Islamic Republic traced at least some of Ahmadinejad’s contacts with Israeli intelligence to a 2023 trip to Guatemala.

According to the newspaper, David Barnea—then head of the Mossad—also traveled to Hungary to meet Ahmadinejad, after he had been invited to speak at Ludovika University at a climate conference the year before.

The story was corroborated in the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which suggested that the former Mossad director even skipped a security consultation about Gaza with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to focus on Ahmadinejad.

Israeli officials reportedly paid him for housing and travel, with Mossad operatives meeting him several times.

Naturally, Ahmadinejad’s behavior started to arouse the Iranian regime’s suspicions. He twice slipped his security detail during a 2025 trip to Budapest—shortly before that summer’s 12-day war between Israel and the US—and confronted him about his disappearances.

The operation reached its most dramatic moment on February 28, according to the NYT, when the US and Israel began military strikes against Iran, killing several Iranian figures including Ayatollah Khamenei.

An Israeli strike also hit Ahmadinejad’s compound, targeting a building used by his bodyguards. But the former president, according to the NYT, had been driven away by four Mossad agents, who then kept him at a safe house in Tehran.

Ahmadinejad had not been seen in public for months, sparking widespread speculation. But then he appeared among mourners at Khamenei’s funeral in July. In video footage, Ahmadinejad looked weary but raised a hand, perhaps to reassure someone off-camera, before nodding and smiling.

If the regime thought there was any truth to the spying allegations, why would he be seen at such a high-profile event?

“The regime is very weak and fractured,” Hackett explains. “They may be prioritizing the show of a unified front in the face of adversity for the time being. This does not mean Ahmadinejad is eternally safe. This is probably a temporary situation. The major figures both present and absent from the funeral were likely chosen deliberately, so having him there was a choice.”

So why reveal this alleged relationship now?

Such details would only have been released by Israel if there were compelling narrative benefits to doing so, according to an intelligence source. It would signal Mossad’s ability to recruit and handle agents who previously operated at the highest levels of a hostile state’s government.

Even then, exposing an alleged agent would carry enormous risks. Perhaps Ahmadinejad became troublesome or threatened Israeli interests.

If these details were authorized for publication, it suggests Israeli officials believed the strategic benefits of the disclosure outweighed the operational cost.

Unless Mahmood Ahmadinejad speaks out, we may never know whether any of it is true. However, if the allegations are accurate, they point to a far broader objective than simply removing Iran’s leadership.

Hackett concludes: “Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Israel is not so much interested in regime change in Iran, as it is in regime control.”

Editor's Note: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence and the killing of children that some readers may find distressing. "Sarah" and "Fatima" are pseudonyms used to protect the identities of the source and victim. In a country where justice is often out of reach and many such crimes go undocumented, we believe it is important to bear witness to these stories.

PARWAN, Afghanistan - It was around 8:30 am on July 7 in the Shinwari district of Parwan province when Sarah, a young healthcare worker, was called into a room to examine a patient. Sarah is not a doctor, at least not yet; she was there that day auditing one of the clinic’s wards in her capacity as a healthcare assistant.

“I heard shouting and screaming from the hallway before they called us to come and check her out,” recalls Sarah, who is an aspiring doctor and is currently studying medicine at an online university in Afghanistan. “A lady had just brought in a 10- or 11-year-old girl in her arms as she was crying. The Taliban officials asked us, only female healthcare workers, to see what was wrong with her.” Sarah was the first to get to the room where a young girl (we will call her Fatima), soaked in blood, lay in bed. “I went to check on her, but she was already deceased,” she says.

As the room filled with other female staff, they were all left paralyzed by the horrific scene in front of them. “We noticed that she was killed with a sharp object, most likely a knife, striking first her throat right under her chin,” she says with a trembling voice, adding, “We counted 17 stab wounds all over her abdomen and body, and since blood was still coming out of them, we stitched and closed them.”

Soaked in blood, Sarah and her colleagues continued examining Fatima’s body. It quickly became clear that this was more than a homicide. They found scars, bruises, and signs of tissue damage on her legs, thighs, arms, abdomen, and face. After consulting one another, they conducted a further examination and concluded that Fatima had likely been raped either before or after she was killed.

“I could not sleep for weeks after that incident because all I could see in front of me was the picture of that girl that day,” Sarah recalls.

Fatima’s case is far from unique. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, reported cases of rape and femicide (the intentional killing of women or girls because of their gender) have increased across Afghanistan, despite the regime’s crackdown on journalists, watchdogs, and dissidents who document such crimes. According to Afghan Witness, more than 332 cases of femicide were documented between August 2021 and June 2024. Even that figure is likely a significant undercount, with researchers describing it as only “the tip of the iceberg.”

Afghan Witness found that nearly half of documented femicides were committed by a family member or relative of the deceased. Another 12 percent were attributed to Taliban members, while 39 percent were carried out by “unknown actors.” Even when perpetrators are identified, accountability is rare. Deeply ingrained notions of family honor and shame often discourage relatives from pursuing justice, while a legal system that offers women little protection leaves many cases unresolved.

“After we examined the body, we filed a report and asked for the body to be sent to Kabul to the coroner’s office for forensic analysis,” says Sarah, adding, “I handed the report to the management office at the clinic since we are not allowed to talk to anyone in there [since they are all men].”

Not only was the report never sent to Kabul, but when Fatima’s parents finally arrived after an hour, they begged Sarah not to disclose that her child was raped.

“Her mom begged me and asked me not to tell anyone about her daughter being raped; she cried and said, ‘I have 5 more daughters, and nobody will marry them out of shame if they find out.’”

Fatima’s father demanded his daughter’s body be handed over, and they buried her two and a half hours after she was first brought into the clinic.

“Fatima’s father told me that now he has to marry off the rest of her daughters as fast as possible to save face,” Sarah told me.

The identity of the alleged perpetrator, and what happened afterward, made the case even more disturbing. Based on Sarah’s subsequent conversations with people close to the family, the man who murdered Fatima was her uncle by marriage, a neighbor who, they said, lured her into his home by claiming her aunt wanted to speak with her. According to those familiar with the case, Fatima was raped, murdered, and her body was left in a shallow stream across from the family’s house.

It was Fatima’s cousin who found her and alerted her aunt, who had been sowing wheat in a nearby field. Her aunt carried the 10-year-old to the clinic, hoping she was still alive.

Sarah says the suspect spent just nine days in prison before being released on bail. Devastated by her daughter’s death, Fatima’s mother has pleaded with her husband to leave the village.

The lack of accountability, proper investigative mechanisms, forensic analysis, and administrative authority is not merely an unfortunate consequence of the Taliban’s return to power, but the result of a system designed to function this way. Under the regime, women are afforded little value or protection, and crimes against them rarely warrant the resources or attention needed to deliver justice. Many of the killings and kidnappings of “public” women in Afghanistan have been carried out by Taliban members without any repercussions. Zan Times has documented these cases in a digital map of women who have been imprisoned or killed by Taliban members or unknown actors in recent years, illustrating the scale of this systematic oppression.

Cases of femicide in Afghanistan are on the rise and severely underreported.

On July 12, 2026, the body of 11-year-old Roida was found in her home in the Qazaq area of Sar-e-pol province. She had been fatally stabbed by an unknown perpetrator while her mother was outside. Earlier that June, the body of 8-year-old Saira was discovered several days after she disappeared from her uncle’s house in Kunar province, where she had been spending her school holidays. The perpetrator remains unknown, and the investigation produced no publicly known results. On June 8, 2026, Chiman Hosseinzadaeh and her daughter, Sara Yousufi, were found shot dead in Sar-e-pol province after Chiman reportedly refused to allow a local Taliban official to marry her 15-year-old daughter.

Sarah also shared reports she had heard of other young girls who were raped and killed in the same district. She was careful to distinguish rumor from firsthand knowledge, stressing that she had not witnessed these cases herself. Still, against the backdrop of rising femicide, such accounts are difficult to dismiss outright. “I heard from some of the villagers from the same area about a stepbrother who, in retaliation for his stepmother’s cruelty, raped his 2-year-old stepsister,” she says. “She did not survive.”

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, dismantling the institutions and legal protections for women was among their first priorities. The result has been a system with little accountability, few mechanisms to investigate crimes against women, and even fewer avenues for justice. Cases of femicide continue to emerge, but many are never documented, investigated, or publicly reported.

It is rare for healthcare workers like Sarah to speak publicly about what they witness. They work under intense scrutiny and severe restrictions, including a ban on smartphones in many medical facilities, making it far more difficult to document abuses or share evidence with the outside world. Stories like Fatima’s reach the public only because people like Sarah are willing to take extraordinary risks to tell them.

While scrolling through social media during the war in Gaza, I came across a post saying that a friend of mine had been detained by the Israeli army while sheltering in Khan Younis. No one knew where he had been taken, and I did not know whether I would ever see or speak to him again. Months later, when a post from him appeared on Facebook, I rushed to message him. After hearing what he had endured, I promised him I would help make his story heard.

Mahmoud Alhadad was detained at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on February 14, 2024, while sheltering at one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza after much of the enclave’s healthcare system had been devastated by the war. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was taken by Israeli soldiers to Israel, where he spent a year in detention without ever being charged with a crime.

Alhadad is not the only Gazan who was detained during the war without being charged with a crime. Like hundreds of Gaza’s residents, he was held under Israel’s Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law. Following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel massively expanded its use to detain Palestinians from Gaza en masse without charge or trial. The law allows the Israeli military to imprison people the army considers affiliated with groups engaged in hostilities against Israel.

Asking him to describe the first moments of his detention, he said: “They gathered all of us in a crowded room, then a truck came to take us all together,” he recounted. During his initial interrogation near the Gaza border, Alhadad said he was beaten and threatened by the Israeli soldiers. “They asked me where the hostages are? Where does Hamas store guns? The interrogator told me either you answer me, or you are going to die at my hands.”

Mahmoud thought his answers would save him, but they did not. He told interrogators he had no information about hostages or weapons, explaining he was a civilian seeking medical care at the facility. Despite this, he was transferred into Israel’s prison system.

His first stop was the notorious Sde Teiman detention center in Israel’s Negev desert. The facility drew international attention after a leaked video showed five Israeli reservists beating and sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee, who survived with a ruptured bowel, severe internal rectal injuries, broken ribs, and punctured lungs.

“It’s like a storage facility,” Alhadad said. “We will be on our knees, handcuffed. We were something like 100 prisoners, with our hands to the back, from 6 am to 11 pm.”

He described being forced to kneel for up to 17 hours a day, where even the slightest movement was met with beatings. “You cannot stand or change your position to lean, look at others, or sleep; if you try, you will be beaten,” he said. Even basic needs were restricted. “When I want to go to the toilet, I go handcuffed, and my eyes are closed. Even when we want to sleep, we sleep handcuffed, and our eyes are closed.”

Alhadad said guards used dogs to intimidate prisoners. “They used to freak us out with dogs; sometimes they unleashed them on us. People peed on themselves from fear.”

Alhadad’s account confirms details from other reports by human rights organizations who demanded the closure of this facility, including Amnesty International and B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights), which described the facility as “only the tip of the iceberg” of a broader, institutionalized network that has effectively been converted into de facto torture camps.

Three weeks after he arrived, Alhadad was transferred to another detention facility, known as the

“Al-Moskobiya” detention center in Jerusalem, where he remained for 33 days. He was then moved to Ofer Prison for 120 days, followed by a stint at Negev Prison, where he stayed from July 2024 until his release in February 2025.

Alhadad said the conditions in the Negev prison were no better. He described severe overcrowding, with 30 to 40 prisoners housed in tents with only 14 beds. “The winter was extremely cold, and the summer was extremely hot,” he stated. “I wept due to the cold weather; we lacked warm clothing.” Each morning, guards would confiscate blankets and mattresses, only to return them at night. “Rather than cleaning them, they are causing us to endure additional hardship,” he told me.

On top of the psychological and physical torture, there was a widespread outbreak of skin diseases, especially scabies and boils amongst the prisoners, due to lack of hygiene.

Alhadad’s ordeal extended beyond his own treatment. Cut off from his family in the Gaza Strip and denied any phone contact, he had no way of knowing whether or not they were alive. During interrogations, he says he was threatened with their murder if he did not provide information about Hamas and the hostages—a tactic he says was also used against many other Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

The abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israel is an open secret in Gaza. I remember hearing stories from the older generation in the Strip about numerous Palestinians who were arrested and tortured in the aftermath of the first Intifada, and the pattern is continuing now. Beating, threatening, humiliating, and recently sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners. Suspicion of affiliation is enough to justify it—absent any concrete proof.

When I asked about the food, hoping to steer the conversation toward something less painful, his answer did little to lighten the mood.

“We eventually recover from scabies after we’re released,” he said. “But no one gets enough food. I lost 30 kilograms during my detention.”

He added that everyone was held under the same legal framework, regardless of who they were: “People who had lost a leg, the elderly, young people, women, doctors, and criminals.”

When I asked whether he had access to a lawyer, Alhadad said legal representation was largely symbolic.

“Lawyers visited only a limited number of prisoners, and no prisoner was allowed more than one visit,” he said. “The lawyer only asked about prison conditions. He had no authority to defend you or look into your case. Basically, his job was just to see that you were alive.”

Alhadad was released a year later as part of the February 2025 hostage-prisoner exchange. Today, he lives in a makeshift tent in Gaza.

Torture is a war crime. When committed systematically and on a large scale, it constitutes a crime against humanity. Multiple human rights organizations argue that this standard applies to the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody.

At least 98 Palestinians have died in Israeli detention facilities since October 2023, according to Palestinian authorities and human rights organizations, citing violence, starvation, inadequate medical care, and other inhumane conditions.

Mahmoud Alhadad survived. He left detention thirty kilograms lighter after a year without charge or trial. He contracted scabies, was forced to kneel for up to 17 hours a day, threatened with the murder of his family, and released without ever being told why he had been imprisoned.

I recounted my own experience of torture and imprisonment at the hands of Hamas in my recently published book, Seashells at the Shores of Gaza: Testimonies and Memories from a Shattered Land.

As my friend spoke, I recognized much of what he was describing. Our captors were different—his were Israeli prison guards, mine were Hamas—but torture has a way of stripping away those distinctions. You are thrown into a place where your body and mind are systematically broken. Even after you leave, part of you never does.

The Israeli detention centers where Alhadad says he was abused are still open, and the legal framework that enabled his imprisonment without charge remains largely intact. Many of those implicated in allegations of abuse continue to serve, while new reports of mistreatment continue to emerge.

(Just yesterday, 60 prisoners were released from Israeli custody and transferred to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. Many arrived in wheelchairs, appearing visibly malnourished and exhausted.)

As we spoke, it became clear that Alhadad was not seeking revenge. Like so many survivors of torture, he simply wants acknowledgment, accountability, and the assurance that no one else would endure what he did. Hamas has never claimed to be bound by the rule of law. Israel does. That is precisely why it has a duty to investigate these allegations, hold those responsible to account, and ensure its detention system reflects the standards it expects others to uphold.

The family table laden with favorite childhood dishes; lazy days at the beach soaking up sun with friends. For some, the hallmarks of a Lebanese summer are noisy weddings that bring everyone together. For others, it’s waking up to familiar smells from the kitchen and being asked whether they want coffee or Nescafé.

When Tala* travels back to Lebanon every year, she looks forward to home-cooked kibbeh nayyeh served with tabbouleh and the constant ring of the doorbell announcing more guests. Her husband is from North Macedonia, and she relishes the chance to share these traditions with him—”The food, the people, the hospitality, the sunsets… but also the annoying things like traffic and noise and politics. Everything, the good and the bad.”

This year, forced to postpone her visit due to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, she is unsure. “I’m waiting for reassurance from my family that it feels safe enough to come.”

For millions of Lebanese living abroad, the summer visit is an annual ritual that reaffirms family ties and deepens their connection to a homeland many were forced to leave. In a country of contradictions, instability seems to strengthen the attachment of a dedicated diaspora that typically maintains close links with their homeland, even after decades away. But this year, the unpredictable chaos of regional war has made even the most intrepid Lebanese travelers hesitate before booking flights home. “Part of me wants to continue living my life, go back, and enjoy Lebanon. The other hurts to see what the country and its people are going through,” Tala said.

In a typical year, the summer months bring a spike in arrivals as around one million Lebanese return home to visit family and friends. Lebanon has one of the world’s largest diaspora communities relative to its population, with an estimated 15 million Lebanese people based abroad compared to around 5.7 million living in Lebanon. These communities provide a lifeline to the country’s struggling economy, sending back remittances that account for 33 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The annual homecoming reaffirms their connection to a country where political instability, financial crisis, and regional conflict have alienated many Lebanese, prompting mass emigration in recent years. It also brings a much-needed boost for the economy. Cafes fill up, festival tickets sell out, usually quiet beaches bustle with people, and shopping malls throng with visitors again.

For Nour Zreika, who moved to Italy following Lebanon’s financial crisis in 2019, it is when a scattered community comes back together. Her immediate family lives in the US, but they visit Lebanon every year, maintaining their connection to a country they still call home.

The 33-year-old looks forward to reconnecting with childhood friends who live in different countries and return to Lebanon during the summer months. “And, of course, the food, the sea, and the overall feeling of being back home.”

This year is different.

Figures for the first quarter of the year show a steep drop in traffic at Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, with a 33 percent decline compared to the previous year. Flight numbers also decreased while ticket prices rose considerably on regional routes.

Reem Jabri, who works in HR in London, has canceled her flight back to Beirut. “I try my best to visit regardless of the situation, but it got really bad with the war this year,” she said. “The lack of safety and uncertainty makes me think twice.”

A ceasefire agreed in April, followed by subsequent agreements in June, has done little to restore confidence amid frequent flare-ups of fighting. Around 1.2 million people have been displaced and more than 3,900 killed in the latest round of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, which began on March 2 following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The war is the latest in a series of conflicts that have prompted waves of Lebanese professionals and young people to move abroad, deepening the brain drain that threatens the country’s prospects for economic growth.

When Rami Mehio, 33, left Beirut seven years ago, he planned to build his career then return when the situation improved. As time passed and successive crises pushed Lebanon’s recovery further into the future, he felt his enthusiasm ebb. “I have become less attached to it. If my family was not there, I don’t think I would be visiting as frequently,” he said.

His wife is expecting their first baby in October, and the couple is reluctant to visit a war zone while she is pregnant. With ticket prices soaring and the increased risk of getting trapped if hostilities flare, he may cancel his trip for the second time this year.

“The cost of living has become so high [in Lebanon] that I am weighing up whether it’s better to go there or send the funds to help my parents with living expenses,” he said.

The country’s economy is projected to shrink by seven to 10 percent this year, with the current war expected to cost an estimated $20 billion. Lebanon was already struggling from financial collapse in 2019 and the 2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Much now depends on the tense ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah brokered in June following renewed clashes earlier that month.

In May, Lebanon’s Finance ‌Minister Yassine Jaber said in a Reuters interview that the full extent of economic damage would also be determined by the flow of remittances from the Gulf and the success of the summer tourist season.

Summer tourism brings billions of dollars into Lebanon each year, providing crucial support for the hospitality sector. Visitors come for the beaches, cuisine, culture, hospitality, heritage, scenery, nightlife, and events. They book hotels and eat in restaurants, typically spending more than diaspora visitors who tend to stay in family homes.

Early indicators this year suggest a sharp drop in bookings as foreign tourists avoid Lebanon amid travel warnings and flight disruptions. Traditionally, the country’s tourism sector has demonstrated remarkable resilience, with the 2025 season registering a 44.5 percent increase on the previous year despite the impact of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah linked to the wider conflict in Gaza. However, a new wave of regional volatility and repeated ceasefire violations in 2026 have cast doubt on whether this recovery can be sustained.

In an article examining the financial fallout of a lost tourism season in Lebanon, Libnannews cites the knock-on effects across the economy, resulting in lost earnings, failing businesses, and families under pressure.

“Tourism is often presented as a leisure sector. In Lebanon, it is also a social shock absorber. It employs waiters, maids, receptionists, cooks, drivers, security officers, technicians, musicians, delivery agents, guides, vendors, and seasonal workers. Many depend on a few months of activity to hold the rest of the year.”

After a slow start to the season, July hotel bookings showed tentative shoots of recovery, but the sector remains vulnerable to shocks. “A strike in Beirut, an evacuation order in Tyre, a flight suspension or an embassy alert may be enough to break the momentum… A country cannot build a sustainable tourism strategy if each summer depends on a ceasefire negotiated abroad.” Libnannews reported.

For Lebanese living overseas, watching loved ones endure the impacts of another war adds to their dilemma. “Part of me feels that if they are living through it, then I can manage to visit, but it requires more careful planning and awareness of the situation,” Tala said.

She avoids mainstream media coverage, which she feels paints the situation as “black and white.” Instead, she takes guidance from people on the ground and has booked a trip to Lebanon for the end of August, when she hopes the situation will be clearer.

Sophie Mawad, 33, visits three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and in summer, from her home in Saudi Arabia. She is among hundreds of thousands of Lebanese based in Gulf cities, where the wider regional conflict with Iran has placed economies under pressure. Of an estimated $6 billion in annual remittances, nearly 50 percent come from Gulf countries. However, job losses among expats threaten the flow of remittances back to Lebanon.

In diaspora hubs, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the war has disrupted tourism and trade, damaged energy infrastructure, and upended supply chains. Many fear that being stranded in Lebanon could jeopardize their jobs abroad. Others find the anguish of watching their country suffer has only deepened the desire to return home.

Mawad is adamant that she will stick to her travel plans: “I always end up going, no matter what.” However, for those living further away, or traveling with children, trips to Lebanon in the current climate can feel impossible.

After hoping the situation would improve, Lina Hallab has reluctantly decided against visiting this year. “We opted to stay in the US this summer, especially now that we have a toddler,” she said. “There was so much uncertainty…and we are worried if the situation gets worse, we might get stuck there.”

In a typical year, the summer months bring people together from all over the world as Lebanese from Brazil, Canada, the UK, Europe, West Africa, and other countries reunite in the Levantine nation. From June to August, the atmosphere lifts as families celebrate special occasions, young people dance to blaring music, and tanned bodies stretch out on the beach.

This homecoming persists in the face of ongoing crises, replenishing a country that seems constantly on the verge of unraveling. Tourism in Lebanon has weathered geopolitical shocks before. The question this year is whether repercussions from the 2026 Iran war threaten a deeper impact. As the blow to tourism and remittances filters through the economy, wage cuts, job losses and business failures may prompt even more Lebanese to leave.

It’s a dilemma that preoccupied Lebanese students attending the inaugural Cedars Conference in London earlier this year. Aimed at enhancing the sense of community among Lebanese students abroad, the conference featured speakers who discussed the challenging prospects of building their future careers in Lebanon. Speaking to the crowd gathered at the London School of Economics, former director general of the Finance Ministry and current chairman of the Citizen Foundation Alain Bifani captured the contradiction that confronts the next generation. “I would be ashamed to tell a young person in Lebanon to stay, but I wouldn’t like to tell them to leave.”

Now and in the future, practical considerations compete against emotional ties to a country where decades of conflict have alienated some but deepened the connection for others. Nour Zreika has canceled plans to return for her cousin’s wedding in August, but longs to feel the familiarity of home. “If anything, [the situation] has strengthened my connection with Lebanon. Of course, uncertainty and safety concerns affect my decisions, but I still feel a strong desire to return whenever I can.”

For generations of Lebanese abroad, returning home has never been simply a vacation. It is how families stay connected across continents and how many continue to invest in a country they refuse to give up on. Another lost summer risks fraying both.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun arrived in Washington this week with a difficult proposition. Lebanon wants Israeli forces to withdraw from the south and reconstruction to begin. It also accepts that, in time, the state’s authority must extend to every armed group, including Hezbollah. The challenge is persuading each side to move before the others do.

Aoun returned with a decision to restore direct commercial flights between the United States and Lebanon for the first time in four decades, public support from the Trump administration, and the outline of a bargain that Lebanon still lacks the power to enforce.

Aoun’s visit was the first by a Lebanese head of state to the White House in nearly twenty years. He arrived at a moment when Lebanon is expected to restore state authority, even though Israeli forces still hold positions in the south and Hezbollah has no intention of giving up its weapons.

During the meeting, he made the case that Hezbollah’s disarmament could not be separated from Lebanon’s broader recovery. Asking Beirut to confront the group before Israel withdraws and before the state has the capacity to replace it, he argued, will leave intact the very conditions Hezbollah cites to justify keeping its weapons.

Aoun first met Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who praised the Lebanese government’s efforts to restore sovereignty and disarm Hezbollah. Rubio didn’t waste time mincing words after that, stating frankly that Lebanon could not achieve lasting peace while an armed organization remained stronger than, or ran parallel to, the state. Aoun also held talks with members of Congress and senior administration officials, making the visit broader than a single Oval Office meeting.

That outreach may prove to be more consequential than the Aoun-Trump meeting. American assistance to the Lebanese army, reconstruction support, sanctions policy, and long-term backing for any settlement with Israel cannot depend entirely on Trump’s mood. Aoun was trying to solidify Lebanon’s position across Washington, not just woo one president.

Still, charm played its part.

During the meeting, Aoun praised Trump's commitment to peace, told him securing it in Lebanon could become his legacy, and described him as a "great president." Trump smiled, agreed with the compliment, called Aoun handsome, and said the Lebanese president “knows how to get to me,” before adding: “Now he can have anything.”

It was, by diplomatic standards, practically a bromance. Trump, after all, had recently complimented Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s looks as well. Perhaps he has a type.

The exchange was amusing, but Aoun understood the man across the table. Trump likes praise, legacies, and agreements that can be presented as personal victories. Aoun did not lecture him on Lebanon’s historical complexity or beg for favors. Instead, he offered something far more useful—the prospect of making peace in Lebanon part of the president’s legacy.

For a small country negotiating with a superpower, understanding who you’re negotiating with is the first step toward good diplomacy.

Following the meeting, Trump directed his administration to allow American airlines to fly directly to Lebanon again, ending a ban imposed after the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. The decision carries real weight for Lebanon’s large diaspora in the United States, making it easier to maintain the family and cultural ties that connect many Lebanese Americans to their homeland.

The flights will not resume immediately. American officials must first complete a security assessment of Beirut airport, and airlines must decide whether the regional security environment makes the routes commercially viable. The United States also continues to advise its citizens against traveling to Lebanon.

The possibility of a broader agreement was introduced as well.

According to Lebanese media reports, they discussed linking the end of Hezbollah’s military role to a political and economic return for Lebanon that includes Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction assistance, international support, and investment. Economic zones, potential American investment in Lebanon’s offshore gas fields, and Lebanon’s possible place in new regional energy corridors were reportedly among the issues raised.

For now, this is all talk. Nevertheless, the talks show that Aoun was trying to present sovereignty as an economic project, not merely a security operation. A state expected to replace Hezbollah’s parallel military and social structures must be capable of offering citizens more than speeches about sovereignty—and it needs support to do so.

Aoun rejected any Syrian military intervention against Hezbollah. Instead, the discussion turned toward Lebanese-Syrian cooperation to secure the border, stop weapons smuggling, and disrupt Hezbollah’s supply routes. Rubio similarly argued that Syria should focus on securing its side of the border rather than entering Lebanon.

Syria invading Lebanon to fight Hezbollah would reopen old wounds and risk importing Syrian vengeance that could escalate into another Lebanese conflict, but Syria preventing weapons from crossing its territory would be a legitimate contribution to Lebanese sovereignty.

Trump also described Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri as a “good person” who might join the process once he saw progress. Berri responded that Trump seemed to understand him better than some Lebanese did, while warning that neither a complete ceasefire nor the required Israeli withdrawals had yet materialized.

The exchange exposed Washington’s realism. No Lebanese agreement involving Hezbollah can easily bypass Berri, Hezbollah’s closest institutional ally and the gatekeeper of parliament. But relying on him also carries an obvious risk. For decades, Berri has cast himself as a bridge between Hezbollah and the state, but only so long as the path leads somewhere Hezbollah is willing to go.

The visit coincided with the first Israeli withdrawal under the pilot-zone program. Israeli troops left Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, and Lebanese soldiers began deploying there. The next negotiating round is scheduled for August 4 in Italy, where the timetable for further withdrawals and army deployments will be central to the discussion.

This gave Aoun a concrete sign of progress, but it also demonstrated how fraught the process is. Israel says it will retain territory so long as Hezbollah remains armed. Hezbollah refuses complete disarmament and rejects direct negotiations. Lebanon argues that an Israeli withdrawal would remove the justification Hezbollah has long used for retaining its weapons.

Everyone wants the other side to move first.

Aoun did not return with a commitment to a full Israeli withdrawal, a reconstruction package, or Hezbollah’s agreement to disarm. Nor could anyone reasonably have expected a single White House visit to deliver those outcomes.

The better measure is whether he left Lebanon in a stronger position than when he arrived. He did.

The warmth between the two presidents was genuine. The agreement to restore direct flights, even if implementation takes time, is a tangible result. The broader understanding between the two countries is still taking shape, but Aoun appears to have secured something just as valuable: Trump’s attention and admiration. As the president himself joked, Aoun could now “have anything.”

Lebanon will soon discover whether that includes the two things it needs most: its territory back and a state strong enough to keep it.