Janine di Giovanni asks: “When Staffan de Mistura became UN special envoy, his past successes brought hope for peace. A year later, with no solution in sight, he faces heavy criticism. Has his innovative diplomacy failed or is it simply mission impossible?”
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Syria: Impact Of Death Of Zahran Alloush
Rebel sources report that a missile hit a gathering of Islam Army leaders in the Eastern Ghouta region Friday, killing several of them, including Mohammed Zahran Alloush. Some reports also say that an allied rebel faction, Feilaq al-Rahman, had much of its leadership wiped out, and that the strike was carried out by Russia. (The Syrian government claims that its own airforce was behind the attack.)
This is big news and it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the Ghouta, a region of suburbs and agricultural towns into that rings the Syrian capital. It could also impact the Syrian peace process—such as it is—that is slated to begin this January.
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The Lives They Lived: QUEEN FAWZIA
From princess to empress to a royal forgotten amid Egypt’s transformations.
In 1939, when Princess Fawzia of Egypt married the crown prince of Iran, Mohammed Reza, the teenagers united two great Muslim lands. Each side had political and personal motives for welcoming the union: for the Egyptian King Farouk, the princess’s brother, the marriage asserted a constitutional monarch’s power in a region lorded over by the British. For the shah of Iran, formerly an ordinary soldier, the century-old Egyptian royal family conferred aristocratic legitimacy on his own. At the wedding in Cairo, guests received bonbon boxes made of gold and precious stones; flower-filled floats paraded down the wide avenues; fireworks were set off over the Nile.
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‘The New Odyssey’ by Patrick Kingsley
Europe is facing a wave of migration unmatched since the end of World War II – and no one has reported on this crisis in more depth or breadth than the Guardian’s migration correspondent, Patrick Kingsley. Throughout 2015, Kingsley travelled to 17 countries along the migrant trail, meeting hundreds of refugees making epic odysseys across deserts, seas and mountains to reach the holy grail of Europe. The New Odyssey: The Story of the European Refugee Crisis is Kingsley’s unparalleled account of who these voyagers are. It’s about why they keep coming, and how they do it. It’s about the smugglers who help them on their way, and the coastguards who rescue them at the other end. The volunteers that feed them, the hoteliers that house them, and the border guards trying to keep them out. And the politicians looking the other way.
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France, Islam, terrorism & integration
“Like other European nations, France has a long and complicated relationship with the Muslim world and its own immigrant population, many of whom have been in the country for generations. French Muslims are highly diverse, and some are secular while others are observant. One of the policemen killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Ahmed Merabet, was Muslim. Some are at the center of society — soccer player Zinedine Zidane, born in Marseille to Algerian parents, led France to a World Cup victory in 1998 — but large segments of the population remain excluded. Research from INSEE, France’s national statistical agency, indicates that in 2013, the unemployment rate for all immigrants was approximately 17.3%, nearly 80% higher than the non-immigrant rate of 9.7%, and descendents of immigrants from Africa have a significantly more difficult time finding work. The report found that the education and skill levels only explained 61% of the difference in employment rates between descendents of African immigrants and those whose parents were born in France.”
About Journalist Resource:
Based at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Journalist’s Resource project examines news topics through a research lens. We surface scholarly materials that may be relevant to media practitioners, bloggers, educators, students and general readers. Our philosophy is that peer-reviewed research studies can, at the very least, help anchor journalists as they navigate difficult terrain and competing claims.
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Syria’s collapse, in 7 charts
Since the war in Syria began in 2011, more than 250,000 people have been killed and more than half of Syria’s population has been displaced from their homes. Devastation on this scale is almost impossible to understand in the abstract: What does that kind of disaster do to a country? These numbers on indicators that feel familiar — things like GDP and school attendance rates — can help show how utterly the war has gutted this once-stable nation.
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Turkey’s Troubling ISIS Game
By Roger Cohen
Sanliurfa, Turkey – ABOVE a restaurant specializing in sheep’s head soup, with steaming tureens of broth in the window, two young Syrian journalists took up residence in this ancient town in southeastern Turkey. They had fled Raqqa, the stronghold in Syria of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and devoted their time to denouncing the crimes of the barbarous jihadi group. Today, their second-floor apartment is a crime scene, with a red police seal on the door.
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World needs to know about Yemen’s war
One Friday in Old Sana’a, while filming the aftermath of the Saudi-led coalition bombings, I found myself surrounded by a group of militia who were trying to take hold of my camera. I was detained for a few hours in the ruins, confused and unnerved. The interrogation I received from the Houthis was relentless. But the problems didn’t stop here. For a week, I was harassed with regular phone calls and visits from National Security officials at my hotel. All this despite having a press visa issued in London.
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There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS
There was a strange stillness in the news on Saturday morning, a Saturday morning that came earlier in Paris than it did in Des Moines, a city in Iowa, one of the United States of America. The body count had stabilized. The new information came at a slow, stately pace, as though life were rearranging itself out of quiet respect for the dead. The new information came at a slow and stately pace and it arranged itself in the way that you suspected it would arrange itself when the first accounts of the mass murder began to spread out over the wired world. There has been the predictable howling from predictable people. (Judith Miller? Really? This is an opinion the world needed to hear?) There has been the straining to wedge the events of Friday night into the Procrustean nonsense of an American presidential campaign. There will be a debate among the three Democratic candidates for president in Des Moines on Saturday night. I suspect that the moderators had to toss out a whole raft of questions they already had prepared. Everything else is a distraction. It is the stately, stillness of the news itself that matters.
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Consequences of media crackdowns
The recent awarding of the EU’s top human rights prize to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi is shining the spotlight once again on the rampant abuse of freedom of expression in the Middle East and North Africa. Although Arab autocrats have long used control of the press to silence opposition, in recent months the state has turned up the heat on both traditional and digital media actors in some not-so-surprising places, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and some surprising places, like Morocco and Tunisia.
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Illustrator’s glimpses of life under ISIS
Molly Crabapple, a New York-based writer and illustrator, has created a series of illustrations for Vanity Fair showing street scenes of Mosul, Iraq.
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Pulling Turkey back from brink of civil war?
In this long form article published in the Guardian, Christopher de Bellaigue delves into the origins of Selahattin Demirtaş involvement in politics, dissecting the history of Turkey’s People’s Democractic Party (HDP).
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Where does UK aid to Syria actually go?
The UK’s Department for International Development is spending over £1bn on aid for Syria. But where is it going and how much is reaching the Syrians it is supposed to help, asks Simon Cox.
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Life in Baghdad: Joy Amid the Chaos of War
A rare and surprising look at the everyday lives of ordinary young Iraqis. Against the backdrop of war, life goes on. Families are still attending carnivals and eating ice cream, young boys are diving into canals, teenagers are dancing in the streets. Most videos from Iraq don’t make you smile. This one will.
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Europe’s Spending on Migrant Crisis
Some half-a-million migrants have streamed into Europe this year. To help ease the crisis, the European Union and its member states have pledged billions to help the migrants arriving on their shores. But countries and nonprofit groups are strapped for cash, and the money is spent as soon as it’s received.
The EU has already burned through $80 million in emergency funding, and another $100 million is on the way. Meanwhile, Germany alone is preparing to shell out $11 billion a year to take care of the 800,000 migrants it expects to receive. What is the money spent on?
Watch this video to find out.
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My Escape From Syria: Europe or Die
Ismail, 25, filmed his journey to Germany with 19-year-old Naeem, capturing the most dangerous parts of a perilous trip, including the boat crossing from Turkey to Greece where hundreds of refugees have died this year.
In this exclusive footage, VICE News gives an insight into a desperate trek, as Ismail and Naeem give first-hand accounts of their journey, the life they left behind, and their hopes for the future.
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Truck deaths: voyage to Europe
In August the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants were found in an abandoned truck in Austria. In the most complete account to date, we tell the story of one of the victims, Saeed Othman Mohammed, and how he came to die.
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The Hijackers
Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, established by a clan of the Prophet’s tribe to rule the first Islamic empire. Syria is where, in 1516, the absorption of the Arab world into the Ottoman Empire began, with the Ottoman victory in the battle of Marj Dabiq; where the nahda, the cultural renaissance of the Arab world, blossomed in the 19th century; where the unified Arab kingdom that the British promised the Hashemites, who led the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, was to have its capital. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Syria is also the terminus of the Arab Spring.
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Man with the toughest job in the world
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Why is digital Arabic content key?
“Arguably, vernacular is one of the reasons that mobile phones have spread so fast: the main applications (voice and text messages) are offered in the language that is most relevant to their users. Over 60% of Arabic speakers prefer browsing internet content in Arabic according to Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013. More than half of them do not speak English. For the extreme poor and the bottom 40% of the population that the World Bank seeks to help, access to online knowledge and services in a native language is likely to matter even more.
The prospects for stronger digital Arabic content are exciting. Consider these last few numbers: only a quarter of women in the Arab world participate in the formal workforce. New forms of work such as online contracting and microwork could offer a chance to bypass physical barriers or social restrictions and empower women.”
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Arab Youth Survey 2015
The 7th Annual ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2015 was conducted by international polling firm PSB to explore attitudes among Arab youth in 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The aim of this annual survey is to present evidence-based insights into the attitudes of Arab youth, providing public and private sector organisations with data and analysis to inform their decision-making and policy formation.
Take a look at the findings for the year 2015.
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Interview: Edith Bouvier, Journalist
Douglas Herbert from France 24 meets Edith Bouvier, the French journalist who appealed for help on YouTube after being injured in a rocket attack on the besieged Syrian city of Homs, and who was later evacuated from Homs by Syrian activists.
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The Fight of Their Lives
On the evening of August 8th, Najat Ali Saleh, a former commander of the Kurdish army, was summoned to a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the President of the semiautonomous Kurdish region that occupies the northern part of Iraq. Barzani, a longtime guerrilla fighter, was alarmed. Twenty-four hours before, fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had made a huge incursion into the Kurds’ territory. They had overrun Kurdish forces in the western Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, and had surged as far as Gwer, fifteen miles from the capital city of Erbil. At the Mosul Dam, on the Tigris River, they had seized the controls, giving them the ability to inundate Baghdad with fifteen feet of water. The Kurdish army is known throughout the region for its ferocity—its fighters are called peshmerga, or “those who face death”—and the defeat had been a humiliation. “We were totally unprepared for what happened,” Saleh told me. Kurdish leaders were so incensed that they relieved five commanders of their posts and detained them for interrogation. “It would have been better for them if they had fought to the death,” he said.
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Tales of the Trash
Many things in Egypt don’t work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get cancelled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than seven hundred members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole, Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than seventeen million, zabaleen like Sayyid have managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.
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Scenes from Daily Life in ISIS de Facto Capital
Editor’s note: In the year since Islamist factions took over Raqqa, Syria, very little unfiltered news has made it out of the area. In the meantime, ISIS has established its de facto capital in the city. Vanityfair.com received the below text from a Syrian who claims Raqqa as a hometown. To protect this individual’s security in an area where speaking candidly about ISIS is dangerous, we’re not revealing his or her name.
Artist Molly Crabapple has completed sketches based on the scenes presented in the source’s photos. “With the exception of Vice News, ISIS has permitted no foreign journalists to document life under their rule in Raqqa,” Crabapple wrote. “Instead, they rely on their own propaganda. To create these images, I drew from cell-phone photos a Syrian sent me of daily life in the city. Like the Internet, art evades censorship.”
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Arab states lag in extremists’ media war
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — As the Islamic State group battles across Syria and Iraq, pushing back larger armies and ruling over entire cities, it is also waging an increasingly sophisticated media campaign that has rallied disenfranchised youth and outpaced the sluggish efforts of Arab governments to stem its appeal.
Long gone are the days when militant leaders like Osama bin Laden smuggled grainy videos to Al-Jazeera. Nowadays Islamic State backers use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to entice recruits with professionally made videos showing fighters waging holy war and building an Islamic utopia.
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