On January 14th those protesters forced Zein al Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for the previous quarter-century, from office. What followed was not easy. Terrorism hindered both economic progress and deeper political reform. But in 2015 the country became the first Arab state ever to be judged fully “free” by Freedom House, an American monitor of civil liberties, and it moved up a record 32 places among countries vetted by the Vienna-based Democracy Ranking Association. In December Ms Mathlouthi sang before another spellbound audience—this time in Oslo, as part of celebrations surrounding the award of the Nobel peace prize to four civil-society groups that shepherded in the new constitution of 2014.
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Iraqi forces face heavy resistance in Hit
Heavy resistance has slowed Iraqi forces Tuesday as they pushed forward toward the center of a town held by Islamic State militants in western Anbar province, commanders at the scene said. Hundreds of roadside bombs, car bombs and heavy mortar fire slowed advancing Iraqi troops to a near halt Tuesday after entering the small town of Hit the previous day.
Hit — which lies along the Euphrates River in a valley in Anbar’s sprawling desert — is strategically important as it sits along an IS supply line that links territory controlled by the extremist Sunni group in Iraq and in Syria. Through the line, IS ferries fighters and supplies from Syria into Iraq.
Iraqi troops entered Hit on Monday, under cover of heavy airstrikes and a week after launching the operation to retake the town. Their advance has been stalled as tens of thousands of civilians become trapped by the fighting. A political crisis in Baghdad as well as poor weather conditions further slowed the push.
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Jordan superhero comic book
When Zaid Adham and Yasser Alireza met in the comic-book section of Dubai bookshop Kinokuniya they had little idea they would embark on a unique storytelling collaboration.
What Alireza didn’t know was that Jordan-born Zaid had won a Middle East Film & Comic Con (MEFCC) writing award for his outline for a new Middle East superhero comic and needed an artist to bring his vision to life.
And what Adham didn’t know was that Alireza, who hails from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, was an MEFCC award-winning artist looking to fulfil a childhood dream of working in comics.
Talking to the pair, who will launch the first issue of their comic book, Wayl, at the next MEFCC, from April 7 to 9, it’s not difficult to believe that fate brought them together.
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Investigative journalism in Mideast
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.”
They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. They also discovered that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies have been able to skirt international sanctions by registering shell companies in places like the Seychelles.
What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
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A Revolution Devours Its Children
It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the teeming Cairo neighborhood of Faisal to what locals call “El Sijn”—Arabic for “the prison.” There are many in Egypt, but everyone seems to know the prison: Tora Prison, opened in 1908. It has housed a diverse assortment of the country’s dissidents, businessmen, Islamists, and statesmen—including the ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for nearly three decades before his regime fell in the uprising that began almost exactly five years ago.
Since then, the upheaval hasn’t stopped, and it’s as much personal as it is collective. The country saw its first-ever democratic elections; another wave of protest over the rule of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president those elections brought to power; a military coup, led by then-Army Chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; and a reinstatement, under now-President Sisi, of the kind of authoritarianism protesters risked their lives to escape five years ago. The crackdown has ensnared liberals and Islamists alike, leaving the prison as a burial chamber for the aspirations of the revolution, in all their wide variety.
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The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon
In the spring of 2010, three Lebanese comic-book artists were ordered to come to the Beirut headquarters of the Directorate of General Security, where the country’s censorship authorities are located. Omar Khouri, Hatem Imam, and Fadi (the Fdz) Baki were in their early thirties, and had known one another since they were kids. (I’ve known Khouri and Baki since then as well.) In 2007, they founded Samandal, a trilingual comic magazine based in Beirut, which became an important platform for Middle Eastern comic artists. “When we were first called in, we had no idea what was going on,” Khouri said. “We assumed that there was a problem with our publishing license or some missing paperwork.”
The three were told to sit on a bench and not to speak to one another. Then Imam was ushered into an office.
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“My Younger Sister Barely Remembers Me”
After spending three years in Jordan, detached from home and family, Somar was starting to get accustomed to life as a single man with minimum responsibility. “All I worried about in Jordan was my rent, but when I saw my sisters? My God! I realised how far removed from responsibility I was,” he told me. The journey started with reestablishing a connection with his sisters. “My younger sister barely remembers me, only through pictures she tells me”, he said in disbelief. Somar was committed to changing that reality.
The second big change Somar was learning to live with was the overwhelming size of Istanbul. Coming from a village where he used to know every family, he felt so small. He even said he already felt nostalgic to the simplicity of Amman and its cozy coffee houses. As he busily navigated the metro against the minaret-embellished cityscape, acknowledging he is one of the millions using public transportation daily, he trod along the start of what he now understood will be a long path ahead.
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The Challenge of Salafi Jihadists
The pre-emptive security operation against a suspected ISIS-linked cell in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid earlier this month was a rude awakening. That all members of the cell were Jordanians added to public anxiety. While praise of the security forces and Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) came from all sides, starting with King Abdullah himself, a sense of unease permeates throughout the kingdom. This was the first armed confrontation with ISIS, called Daesh locally, within the kingdom’s borders. Until the Irbid incident, Jordan’s efforts to fight the militant group were centered on its participation in the U.S.-led international air campaign in Syria.
Since the GID published a terse statement on March 2 explaining the circumstances of the Irbid operation, a news blackout was imposed by the State Security Court general prosecutor. Those who were arrested in the operation were being interrogated. The little information that was made public indicated that members of the cell had machine guns, explosive vests, and were planning to hit unspecified civilian and military targets. An earlier raid resulting in the arrest of 13 suspects probably led to information about the militant cell. It was not clear if this cell was linked directly to ISIS or was composed of members sympathetic to it.
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Journey to Jihad: Why teenagers join ISIS?
In 2009, a fourteen-year-old Belgian named Jejoen Bontinck slipped a sparkly white glove onto his left hand, squeezed into a sequinned black cardigan, and appeared on the reality-television contest “Move Like Michael Jackson.” He had travelled to Ghent from his home, in Antwerp, with his father, Dimitri, who wore a pin-striped suit jacket and oversized sunglasses, and who told the audience that he was Jejoen’s manager, mental coach, and personal assistant. Standing before the judges, Jejoen (pronounced “yeh-yoon”) professed his faith in the American Dream. “Dance yourself dizzy,” a judge said, and Jejoen moonwalked through the preliminary round. “That is performance!” Dimitri told the show’s host, a former Miss Belgium named Véronique de Kock. “You’re gonna hear from him, sweetie.”
Jejoen was soon eliminated, but four years later, when he least wanted the attention, he became the focus of hundreds of articles in the Belgian press. He had participated in a jihadi radicalization program, operated out of a rented room in Antwerp, that inspired dozens of Belgian youths to migrate to Syria and take up arms against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Most of the group’s members ultimately became part of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, joining more than twenty thousand foreign fighters engaged in the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS controls large parts of both countries. With revenue of more than a million dollars a day, mostly from extortion and taxation, the group continues to expand its reach; in mid-May, its forces captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and, last week, they took control of Palmyra, in Syria.
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Molenbeek’s gangster jihadists
In the poor inner-city areas of Brussels, deprivation, petty crime and radicalisation appear to have gone hand in hand. The BBC’s Secunder Kermani has been finding out how drinking, smoking cannabis and fighting – combined with resentment towards white Belgian society for its perceived discrimination against Arabs – prepared some young men for a role as fighters in Syria, and terrorists in Europe.
Molenbeek is a place full of contradictions.
It’s just a few minutes away from the heart of the European Union, but this densely populated district of Brussels has 40% youth unemployment.
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Egypt’s dirty wheat problem
CAIRO – When Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Gad stepped out of a cafe on the outskirts of Cairo to take a call last October, a gunman on the back of a motorcycle trained a semi-automatic rifle on him and opened fire.
Three bullets ripped into Gad’s right side before his attackers sped off.
Gad, who survived, said the men were trying to silence him for his attempts to expose corruption in one of Egypt’s most important commodity markets: wheat.
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Choosing the Hard Way Out of the Region
Somar Kreker is a movie junkie. He loves cinema for the space it allows people to reimagine the worlds in which they live. As a teenager, he dreamt of opening a film club in Damascus, where stories of ordinary and extraordinary lives could be brought to the big screen. But of all the possible impediments interrupting his vision, an Arab Spring erupting in the West Asia North Africa region and in Syria specifically, was the least expected.
Without warning, Somar found himself witnessing his fellow countrymen and women redrawing their lives, not in scripts, but directly in front of him, in the streets of Al Zabadani, Al Hameh and Qudsaya. The son of proud pan-Arab nationalists, raised on tales of revolutionary Arab leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser, Somar joined the ranks of peaceful demonstrators, learning — city after city — to see his country in a new light.
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A Decade of Despair in Iraq
An op-ed by author Ahmad Saadawi, writer of the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, published in March 2013
An Iraqi saying claims that those who endure one day just like the next have been dealt an unfair hand in life. During the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, this saying was frequently invoked. In those stagnant times, it seemed nothing ever changed, so much so that looking back, I can barely differentiate between 1997 and 1998.
Those days came to an end 10 years ago today, when United States forces invaded Iraq. The contradictions that had been contained under Saddam Hussein burst forth into the open. Lives were uprooted in the process. It is no surprise that, a decade later, some people find themselves yearning for the ’90s.
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The Truth About Syria
CNN Senior International Correspondent Clarissa Ward and Producer Salma Abdelaziz went undercover in rebel-held Syria, where few Western journalists have gone for more than a year. They worked with Syria-based filmmaker Bilal Abdul Kareem on a series of exclusive reports. Warning: Graphic images.
Rebel-held Syria (CNN)There’s a sickening moment between hearing the planes and waiting for them to drop their payload. A pit forms in your stomach. You know you could die, but you also know there’s no way to divine where the strike will hit.
On a hill overlooking Ariha, our guard Abu Youssef seems to have located the jet in the sky and is following it with his eyes. “Russian planes,” he says.
Suddenly he ducks. The sound of the explosion rings out with a “thwoomp.”
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Growing Stress on Jordan
In 2013, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Contingency Planning Memorandum “Political Instability in Jordan” warned that the biggest threat to the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom stemmed from local grievances eroding the regime’s core tribal base of support. Although economic privation, the slow pace of reform, and a widespread perception of corruption remain significant sources of popular frustration in Jordan, the palace has since vitiated its most potent tribal and Islamist domestic political opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. But as the risk of domestic unrest has diminished, the potential for spillover from the Syrian conflict has grown, posing an increasing threat to Jordan.
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Berlin Museum Tours Bridge to Refugees
Berlin – The Pergamon Museum is home to the famous Ishtar Gate, a monument of blue and white tile decorated with golden lions and daisies that was once the entrance to ancient Babylon. When Kamal Alramadhani, a 25-year-old Iraqi economics students, saw it for the first time this month, “I got goose bumps,” he said, pointing to his arm.
“It’s from Iraq,” he added quietly, through an Arabic translator. “My country.” A native of Mosul, Mr. Alramadhani studied economics at the University of Baghdad and came to Germany in October, part of a wave of asylum seekers that is stirring opposition here but also leading the government to look for ways to help the migrants adjust.
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History in Eyes of Bedouin Boy
The Jordanian movie Theeb has been nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar. It’s a beautiful, sweeping story set in 1916 in an area of western Saudi Arabia then known as the Hejaz. The film’s director, Naji Abu Nowar, says Theeb covers a pivotal moment in the region’s history.
“The First World War is kicking off … and the war is coming toward this area of Hejaz,” he tells NPR’s Kelly McEvers. “The British are … inciting the Arab tribes to revolt against the Ottoman imperialists. And so you’re on the brink of a massive change.”
The fall of the Ottoman Empire led to the borders of today’s Middle East being drawn. But rather than look at that moment from the perspective of Lawrence of Arabia, who famously helped organize the Arab revolt, or a grown Arab fighter, the film follows a young Arab boy. He’s the title character, Theeb; and like many in Hejaz at that time, he’s a Bedouin, or nomad. One day a British soldier comes to Theeb’s family tent looking for a guide to a well, and Theeb joins the trip across the desert.
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Arab Art Redefined
Sultan Sooud Al‑Qassemi knows media.
When the Arab Spring started sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi became a go-to source for live updates on social media. An occasional columnist with 375,000 followers on Twitter, he is now a public figure and activist. Art has become his big agenda. Eventually, he explains, his interest in breaking news had died down and he shifted his attention to collecting and promoting modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. He sees it as a continuation of the ideals of the Arab Spring, he says, because the art tends to be political — and it defies traditional definitions set by the West. Qassemi actively promotes the Barjeel Art Foundation, which he founded in 2010. It contains more than 1,000 works of art that he has collected. He has buying power because he also happens to be a member of one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates — though he’d rather talk about art than his family history. He stopped by NPR’s New York City bureau to do that.
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The Man Who Helped Trigger Arab Spring
Hosni Kaliya pulls a cigarette out of his pack with his mouth. When he poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire, most of his right hand was consumed by the flames and all that remains is a stump without fingers. He still has four fingers on his left hand, but they jut out like claws, burned, stiff and contorted. His fingernails are curled. He wears black wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, so that they won’t dangle emptily. A knit cap protects Kaliya’s head, where his hair was burned off, and his unusually small ears. But the disfigured face, the work of doctors using old and new skin, how could he hide that?
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The Road to Syria
The civil war in Syria was a powder keg when the Russians intervened in September. They put up an airbase and started bombing targets there. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the airstrikes were aimed at fighting Islamic terrorism, but it quickly became apparent that the majority of the bombs were aimed, not at ISIS, but at other Syrian insurgent groups fighting the regime of Russia’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad. Whatever their motives, the Russians have inserted themselves into the Syrian conflict and any discussion of how it might end.
A few months ago, 60 Minutes reported from the American base in Qatar, the command center for U.S. operations in the Middle East. We wanted to see the Russian base. So we asked and they agreed. We set out on the road to Syria — which took us on a detour we didn’t expect.
To get to the Russian airbase in Latakia, Syria, you have to start here in Moscow.
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The Arab winter
“I AM the free and fearless. I am secrets that never die. I am the voice of those who will not bow…” The voice in question, raised in song amid the crowds packing Avenue Bourguiba, a promenade in Tunis, at the beginning of 2011, was that of Emel Mathlouthi. For a moment of calm in a month of clamour, she gave voice to the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of her compatriots.
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In Tunis, a new home for comics
When it comes to Arab comics, Tunisian graphic designer and comics artist Othman Selmi (born in 1977) is an invaluable guide, with his home-studio being a carnival for urban cultural production enthusiasts. Among French and Arabic books on literature and movies, I see collections of old comics from the Arab world, filling the shelves of a large bookcase covering an entire wall. This is where you find the first issues of Majid, a magazine for children that was established in 1979 in Abu Dhabi and still enjoys circulation in the Arab world. Plus stunning glimpses into the rich imaginative life of the Egyptian cartoonist and visual designer Mohieddine Ellabbad and of the Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. I also notice stories from Tunisia by Moncef Elkateb or the style of Chedly Belkamsa when drawing in the popular children magazine Qaws Quzah (Rainbow), the first founded in Tunisia in 1984 by a private editor.
Holding a degree from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Tunis, Othman Selmi has been enjoying some popularity abroad for his editorial illustrations, and was asked by the Italian weekly Internazionale to recount the Tunisian spring in a series of cartoline (literally postcards) using the comics medium.
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How Refugees Find Jobs in Germany
On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.
About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)
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Following in the footsteps of migrants
Hoppers Way in Singleton, Kent, is a quiet suburban cul-de-sac of red-brick detached houses, each with its own garage and driveway. Parked outside No 8, there is often a large white-and-grey camper van – a luxury Swift Kon-tiki 679 model, with a double bed in the back and another over the cab. Singleton is a suburb of Ashford, the last big town on the M20 as it approaches the Channel Tunnel entrance at Folkestone and a stopping point for Eurostar train services between London and the Continent. That makes it a convenient location for the rental business run by Teresa and Stephen Tyrer, who hire out the motorhome for £1,000 a week to people wishing to travel to Europe.
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Once Upon a Time in the Middle East
There was one day near the end, when I took a taxi up a hill, to see a man. We sliced through canyons, making our way into the mountains north of Beirut, riding a black strip of asphalt upon which no lines were drawn. The span of tar was sometimes wide enough for two cars, sometimes one. We drove fast, nearly hitting someone when the road narrowed, nearly hit by another car ourselves when we bisected a second road—no stop signs, no stoplight—and then I realized: Nowhere at any point had a sign indicated a sharp curve or steep drop-off. We were on our own. When we finally stopped, four black dogs came running.
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IS recruitment lure Jordanian woman
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — A Jordanian woman who came close to joining the Islamic State group described a sophisticated 14-month recruitment process by the extremists that she said landed her in a secret IS compound in Turkey with dozens of other women.
The 25-year-old was eventually persuaded by Jordanian lawmaker Mazen Dalaeen — who earlier this year failed to extract his own son from the grip of IS recruiters — to return to her family.
The case highlights the systematic grooming of potential IS recruits through daily social media exchanges and follow-up on the ground for travel arrangements — in her case an enveloped stuffed with cash for a plane ticket to Turkey, handed to her by a veiled woman in her home district of Karak in central Jordan.
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