As Neda (not her real name) recounted her ordeal to aid workers at the Mamilyan camp for internally displaced people in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, she showed little emotion, the aid workers said. That is probably a coping mechanism. “If they give in one time and cry, they will not be able to stop crying for a while,” says Rezhna Mohammed, the director of psychological services for the SEED Foundation, which runs a centre in the camp. Neda, though, has only asked for cash (to repay her liberators). Few people in the Middle East seek or receive help for their mental suffering.
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The Siege Starts Without Warning
I woke up one morning 24 years ago to find a war all around me. The night before I had been at a concert for the Partybreakers, a punk band from Belgrade. I’d had too much beer and I had a headache. Bursts of gunfire were audible, along with the explosions of the mortar shells that would rain down on Sarajevo for the next three and a half years.
I don’t know what it was like when the war first came to Aleppo, Syria. Only the people still living there do – thousands of men, women and children who have now been under siege for years. From the perspective of an ordinary citizen, let’s say a 25 year old with literary and musical interests, the siege starts without warning and comes out of nowhere.
Yes, the papers and the TV have been reporting for months about how the situation in the country is growing more complicated, how conflict is brewing among political opponents, and how in the provinces there has already been fighting. But as long as a city continues to live its normal, placid life, which is the sort of life it lives up until the very last instant and the final quiet evening, war seems impossible. You look at your dog and your books, the spider in the corner of your room spinning a web that tomorrow will catch its first little fly, and you can’t imagine that the next morning all this, including the dog and the spider, will be caught up in war.
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Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria
In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.
America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria — little-known to the American people yet well-known to Syrians — sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry this week announced a “provisional” ceasefire in Syria. But since U.S. leverage and prestige within Syria is minimal — and the ceasefire doesn’t include key combatants such as Islamic State and al Nusra — it’s bound to be a shaky truce at best. Similarly President Obama’s stepped-up military intervention in Libya — U.S. airstrikes targeted an Islamic State training camp last week — is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the radicals. As the New York Times reported in a December 8, 2015, front-page story, Islamic State political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention. They know from experience this will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.
To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.
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The Coming Crisis in Mosul
A humanitarian catastrophe is looming over northern Iraq. As many as a million people are expected to stream out of Mosul when Iraqi government forces, backed by the United States, move to retake the city from isis, which took control two years ago. The much anticipated military operation could begin as early as next month, but aid workers here say they do not have anywhere near the resources, money, or manpower to deal with the expected human tide.
“It’s a nightmare—a disaster heading our way,’’ Alex Milutinovic, the director of the International Rescue Committee in Erbil, told me. “The Iraqi government is determined to destroy ISIS, but it is impossible to accommodate the number of refugees the military operation is going to produce.”
The Iraqi and American governments have been planning to retake Mosul since isis invaded the country and captured the city, in 2014. The reasons for doing so are obvious and urgent: the people of Mosul are being held hostage by violent fanatics; last month, according to the Iraq Oil Report, which has correspondents inside the city, ISIS agents arrested ninety people on charges of spying for the Iraqi government and executed sixty of them.
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The World Is a Thriving Slaughterhouse
Here, lying in a stained carton, are notes on a refugee camp in Tanzania, where surviving Tutsis and their Hutu enemies lived side by side in blue tarp tents. It is 1994. The notes record that there are people everywhere, milling and moving in short parades on the main path in the camp, hastily constructed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Women wear colorful cloths, khangas, and carry yellow plastic containers of water on their heads. Children and old men push up against one another, as if at a bargain sale. They hold portable radios to their ears. A man in a brown rain hat drags a reluctant goat by a rope. White smoke mixes with the smells of fresh earth and excrement. At an outdoor butcher shop, a cow’s bloodied horn lies beside the animal’s astonished head. I greet a group of young Hutus in French. “Did you participate in the killings?,” I ask. “We did nothing,” one says. “Did you see others do the killing?” He says, “We saw nothing.” I ask, “How many Tutsis are left in Rwanda, do you think?” A teenage boy wearing a green baseball cap grins, and slowly draws the side of his index finger across his throat.
Here are several photos of and notes on Divis Flats, a Catholic neighborhood, or stronghold, in Belfast. It is 1981. Coiled barbed wire runs atop a long gray wall on which is written smash h-block, a reference to the British prison in which members of the Irish Republican Army are held. Windows are pockmarked with bullet holes and display black flags of mourning for hunger strikers. Rats skitter in huge sewage pits, soggy with rain. Glass chips cover streets that are interrupted by “dragon’s teeth,” huge blocks of stone set out by the British army in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. The presence of a stranger in the area is scrutinized, my every step tracked by a huddle of teenage boys with grim, bold faces, loitering beside a fire-blackened car. It is essential not to look British. The week before my arrival, a CBS reporter was stabbed at this same spot because he made the mistake of wearing a Burberry coat.
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‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’
Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
In 2003 and early 2004, I wrote a book to make the case for hope. Hope in the Dark was, in many ways, of its moment – it was written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq. That moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defence.
Coming back to the text more than a dozen tumultuous years later, I believe its premises hold up. Progressive, populist and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we have undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.
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360° Reality of World’s Most Vulnerable
Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.
The third boat, a gray Zodiac, found them. It’s manned by two young men—one an out-of-work Greek, the other a Norwegian bored with his stultifying Oslo desk job. Neither of them possesses an organizational affiliation. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have come through Lesbos in the past year, as of my visit on December 18, neither Frontex nor the Greek coast guard has established much of a presence. Instead, the job of offering aid falls largely to international volunteers who have flocked to the island. A throng of them, their experience ranging from extensive to none, waits onshore with reflective survival blankets. The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch is here, as is a fashion model from Manhattan who brought perfume samples for the refugees. As the Zodiac approaches the dock, the Norwegian hurls himself into the water and ties the boat up to a mooring.
Behind the scene trails the fourth boat, a wooden vessel owned by a local fisherman. On the bow, a bearded American named David Darg holds up a small virtual-reality camera called a Ricoh Theta. Thirty-seven years old, with a reddish-brown beard, tight black jeans, and the thick build of a logger, Darg occupies a unique and peculiar role within the fast-moving world of new media.1 On the one hand he’s a crisis responder and vice president of international operations at Operation Blessing, a faith-based nonprofit. But he’s also cofounder of Ryot, a Los Angeles for-profit company that specializes in hopeful video content from developing and disaster-affected nations. He has come to Lesbos to bring the reality of the migrant crisis to the wider world. Darg calls the VR camera in his hand a “transportation device,” one capable of essentially bringing Western viewers to the world’s strife-ridden places. “You register VR as an experience you had,” he says, “rather than something you see”—a common boast about VR.
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Why Europe Can’t Find Jihadis In Its Midst
The assignment given to the Belgian police in the summer of 2014 was straightforward but high stakes: Follow two men suspected of involvement with ISIS through the streets of Brussels. Find out who they meet, record what they say. A court had approved wiretaps for the men’s phones and for the use of tracking devices, and a specialized team of covert operators from the secret service had broken into the men’s homes and vehicles and planted bugs and GPS devices without leaving a trace.
Rather unusually, there had been little problem getting senior police officials and the courts that oversee Belgium’s personal privacy laws to approve the mission. Partly, it was the two men’s history: They had long criminal records — drug dealing, petty theft, and the occasional violent robbery — and now, unbeknownst to them, had been placed on a terrorism watch list.
With hundreds of people suspected of having ties to ISIS and al-Qaeda, it would be impossible for the Belgian authorities to monitor all of them. But these two were believed to be linked to Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French-Algerian man charged with killing four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels on May 24, 2014.
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Iraq 13 years on
After a series of horrific bombings, the worst of which was in the shopping district of Karrada, people from all over Baghdad lit candles in remembrance of the victims. A heavy sadness consumed the city, but also an intense anger at the political elites.
When Prime Minister Abadi visited the site, people on the streets shouted insults and threw shoes at him. Checkpoints across the city were still using the fake bomb detectors sold to the Iraqi government by a British businessman now jailed for fraud.
The explosive-laden truck passed through several checkpoints before reaching Karrada. But it was only after the bombing that the prime minister announced that the fake detectors would be replaced with reliable technology. However, inside the Green Zone, where the political class live and work, K-9 sniffer-dog units prevent such attacks from happening.
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Arab youth: Stability over democracy
Young Arabs express the same concern over the rise of the Islamic State (IS) as young people do elsewhere, the annual Arab Youth Survey reveals. For the second year in a row, , with four in every five young people interviewed saying they were more concerned about it than other problems. Its public appeal may have also decreased slightly, findings in the survey suggest.
About 50% of the 3,500 Arab men and women questioned in the 18 to 24 year age group from 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) considered the rise of IS to be today’s biggest obstacle, an increase from last year’s 37% of people who thought it was the region’s main problem. Their other main concerns were the broader threat of terrorism, unemployment, civil unrest, and the rising cost of living. The survey was carried out in about six weeks during the first two months of this year.
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Greece: Creativity in a time of crisis
A true capital of culture, Athens is strewn with reminders of the gifts the gods left in their wake: theatre, poetry and sculpture. Yet modern Greece has faced financial ruin, crippling austerity measures and record rates of unemployment in recent years. The country is also dealing with a refugee crisis, with tens of thousands of people seeking asylum on its shores. So how do artists continue creating amid these economic and social crises? Street artist Spike 69, film director Thanos Anastopoulos and members of the Skrow Theater group tell us about making art against all odds.
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Look forward in anger
WITH his gelled hair, taste for coffee and keen interest in women, Muhammad Fawzy could be a university student anywhere. At the age of 21, and studying engineering at Cairo University, he should be looking to a bright future; after all, the world is crying out for technically minded graduates. But Mr Fawzy feels the outlook is bleak. He worries that no job he finds after graduation will pay enough to cover his costs, let alone allow him to support his widowed mother. Without a good salary, Mr Fawzy cannot buy a flat; without his own home he cannot marry; and without marriage, he cannot have sex.
“I cannot have a girlfriend for religious reasons, and because I wouldn’t like that for my sister,” explains Mr Fawzy. “I was in relationships [with women] previously but it never got physical. I never held their hands or kissed them.” He often talks to women, but on Facebook: it affords privacy and safe distance. As with much else, his predicament about women is more complex than just the pull of tradition.
His views of Islam are just as tangled. He regards himself as more devout than his parents, but does not pray regularly; he prefers the company of friends to listening to preachers, yet craves a purer version of Islam. Egyptian tradition, he thinks, is tainted by a culture of bribe-paying, nepotism and other behaviour banned by religion. “We need to enforce morals that the West has taken from us.” The spread of atheism, he thinks, is a menace.
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Psychology of Modern Suicide Bomber
IN A SCENE FROM Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal’s new documentary Dugma: The Button, Abu Qaswara, a would-be suicide bomber, describes the sense of exhilaration he felt during an aborted suicide attack against a Syrian army checkpoint. “These were the happiest [moments] I’ve had in 32 years. If anyone had felt exactly what I felt at that moment, Muslims would want to go through the same feeling and non-Muslims would convert just to experience it,” he enthuses to the camera, visibly elated by his attempted self-immolation.
Abu Qaswara’s attack failed after his vehicle was blocked by obstacles on the road placed by the Syrian military. But speaking shortly after he returned from his mission, it was clear that his brush with death had filled him with euphoria. “It was a feeling more than you can imagine,” he says. “Something I cannot describe, it cannot be described.”
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How to Understand ISIS
In his best-selling History of the Arab Peoples, published two years before his death in 1993, the Anglo-Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani remarked on the surprising levels of political stability prevailing in the Arab world at that time. Despite the rapid growth of its cities, and many disparities of wealth between the governing elites and newly urbanized masses who were calling for social justice, calm seemed to rule, at least on the surface. Since the military coups of the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere there had been remarkably little change in the general nature of most Arab regimes or the direction of their policies. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco had seen no dynastic changes for more than two generations; in Libya and Syria the regimes that came to power around 1970 were still in place. In 2000 in Syria, nearly a decade after Hourani’s book was published, leadership passed smoothly from father to son, while in Egypt and Libya the issue of dynastic succession was being widely discussed.
Like many other observers of Middle Eastern and North African history, Hourani interpreted this picture of calm with an eye to the writings of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the Arab historian and polymath whose theories of dynastic change and cyclical renewal and especially his concept of ‘asabiyya, variously translated as “clannism,” “group feeling,” or—in Hourani’s definition—“a corporate spirit oriented towards obtaining and keeping power,” provided a prism through which contemporary systems of governance could be viewed.
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More Liberal Islam. Death Threats Began.
For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – known abroad as the religious police – serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.
Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that bans alcohol. But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.
A key offense was ikhtilat, or unauthorized mixing between men and women. The kingdom’s clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse.
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Crossing Through Europe’s Firewall
We transited through five Greek islands –Rhodes, Symi, Nisyros, Kos and Kalymnos — as we sailed westward across the Aegean Sea, collecting more asylum seekers at every stop. Exhausted men and women passed out in the narrow corridors, while others hand washed their clothes, and those who could not sleep gazed at the colorful clothes hung out to dry on the deck, fluttering in unison with Greek flags.
The group which first started out with Somar, his sisters and cousins expanded over time to include Somar’s fellow village friends, and at this point we were hanging out with strangers.
We finally arrived at Piraeus port, and against the cacophony of crashing waves people congratulated one another on finally making it to Europe. They then debated the ‘service memo’ system, which was enforced to allow Balkan states to track the movement (and hence the protection) of asylum seekers as they progressed further West. But due to lack of information, the young men didn’t appreciate the initiative. Instead, they heralded serious warnings about the risks of registering early on prior to reaching one’s chosen state of asylum. Their mistrust of the Dublin Regulation led them to a fear of being held in the Balkan States against their will.
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The Shadow Doctors
On a recent Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants’ dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain’s leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. “Hi David,” it began. “This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria.” Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach.
The image had been sent by a young medical worker in Aleppo. He had removed several bullets from the patient’s small intestine, but he wasn’t sure what to do about the wound in the throat. For the past hour, the man had been slowly dying on the operating table while the medical worker awaited instructions.
“Sorry, didn’t see your message till now,” Nott typed under the table. “Is the neurology ok?” It was: a bullet had pierced the trachea and the esophagus, but it hadn’t damaged the spinal cord. Nott told the medical worker to insert a plastic tube into the bullet hole, to provide an even supply of air. Then, he instructed, sew up the digestive tract with a strong suture, and, “to buttress the repair,” partly detach one of the neck muscles and use it to cover the wound.
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MidEast Writers Find Refuge in Dystopia
Basma Abdel Aziz was walking in downtown Cairo one morning when she saw a long line of people standing in front of a closed government building.
Returning hours later, Ms. Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, passed the same people still waiting listlessly – a young woman and an elderly man, a mother holding her baby. The building remained closed.
When she got home, she immediately started writing about the people in line and didn’t stop for 11 hours. The story became her surreal debut novel, “The Queue,” which takes place after a failed revolution in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. The narrative unfolds over 140 days, as civilians are forced to wait in an endless line to petition a shadowy authority called The Gate for basic services.
“Fiction gave me a very wide space to say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority,” Ms. Abdel Aziz said in a recent interview.
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How It Ends
The windows are open, and I’m driving my mother-in-law’s car, a turquoise compact number that’s festooned with bumper stickers like “Namaste,” “Peace,” and “Save the Tatas.” I’m free, free from my child for the first time in weeks, free from my husband, free from the little rented bungalow on the adorable street where the blue skies are almost oppressive. I’ve been back in the U.S. for exactly two weeks, and this trip away from it all, up Venice Boulevard, feels like a Carnival cruise.
I’m kind of a terrible driver. Turns out I haven’t spent much time at the wheel of a car in the past handful of years. For a long time that job went to other people: cynical, sarcastic, sometimes burly, sometimes handsome, always charming men — men I would hire by the day or the week or the month.
There was Ahmed, in Baghdad, who drove NPR’s armored Toyota pickup. He was big and round and baby-faced and soft-spoken and reasonable, with a Hitler-like mustache you would recognize if you’ve spent any time in Iraq. I want to say we were as close as siblings, but I knew that could never be true. Still, from the day I met him, my first day on the job as Baghdad bureau chief in 2010, I knew we would die for each other if we had to.
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The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali
What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage.
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Between Giving Up & Joining Extremists
Ali Othman is among a shrinking band of Syrian rebels in the mountains across from this border town who face an agonizing choice: accept a settlement with a regime they revile or fight alongside al Qaeda’s Islamist allies.
The Syrian army defector and his fellow fighters say they are weakened and cornered after enduring months of bombardment from Russian forces buttressing President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Peace talks ended last month without progress amid a major escalation in violence in the northern city of Aleppo. On Thursday, a day after the U.S. announced a deal with Russia on a fresh cease-fire in Aleppo, Islamist groups targeted regime-held areas of the city with rocket, mortar and sniper fire, according to Syrian state media and U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“My wife begs me almost each day to leave the mountains,” Mr. Othman, 26 years old, said during a recent visit with his family in Turkey. “She keeps asking me: `Why are you still fighting?’”
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Mindfield: Mental Health in MidEast
WHEN Neda told her children that she might have to kill them, they assented. Such was their suffering after Islamic State kidnapped and enslaved them, along with thousands of other Yazidis, a religious minority, in northern Iraq in 2014. Neda’s husband was taken and presumably killed; her eldest son, just 13 years old, was forced to fight with the jihadists. She shaved off the hair and eyebrows of her two young daughters to make them look boyish and sickly, so that IS rapists might leave them alone. Neda herself was raped, beaten and sold several times before she was bought and freed by relatives last year.
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Films to Understand Modern Arab World
A number of catastrophic events have afflicted the Arab world in recent years. Western news reporting and Hollywood cinema tend to present these crises through disaster footage or stories about Western protagonists in which local people are merely extras. Film from the Arab world is often more complex and nuanced.
Recently, I was preparing the programme for a new season on contemporary film from the Arab world at The Mosaic Rooms in London. I have been privileged to watch incredible short and feature length films from Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. I believe these films make visible what is often invisible to the rest of the world – people’s everyday struggles.
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‘Islamic State’s’ most wanted
In this five part series, BBC World incorporates animation to tell the story of a group of Syrian teenagers who decided to resist when the so-called Islamic State group took control of their city. They became citizen journalists and used the internet to show the reality of life in Raqqa. They are the founders of the page “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”.
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Smuggling — An Act of Resistance
More than twenty days had passed since the start of their long journey to Europe, but not one went by without Somar and his sisters daydreaming about their parents following them to Germany. This was well before they made it there themselves.
Their failure to mobilize international support (through the Edirne demonstration, read Part II) to grant them safe and legal entry to Europe had accentuated their nostalgia for home. A frustrated and overburdened Somar began attaching a degree of legitimacy to the idea of getting smuggled.
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The Assad Files
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
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