Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (the PKK) has been in solitary confinement for the last twenty years, sitting in a cell in the Turkish Imrali island prison in the Marmara Sea. His contact with the outside world has been extremely limited. It thus came as a surprise when on the May 2nd, Öcalan was allowed to meet with his legal defense for the first time since 2011.
These days, Amal Damashqi begins her morning negotiating fares with taxi drivers. After several rounds of back-and-forth, she finally gets in to an already-crowded taxi.
In Lebanon, talk of pushing Syrian refugees to go home isn’t new. However, there are now growing concerns that that tone has now shifted even harder
Al-Hol camp is the international community’s temporary solution to a growing crisis: the question of what to do with women IS members and their children born under the hardline group’s rule.
The stories are often similar, repeated tens of thousands of times over: uniforms bursting through the door, loved ones taken away. Then, the silence.
Seemingly endless lines of Islamic State fighters streamed out of the group's last pocket, Baghouz, last weekend as US-backed fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces rendered the thin strip of riverbank into a surrealistic sea of empty tents and abandoned cars. By Saturday morning, defeat was finally announced.
In the few quiet moments, Muayyed Abu Amer’s friends still gather to chat, drink tea and brew coffee late into the night—just like how things were before the war.
In the early days, there was precious little equipment. Handheld camcorders, just a few props. Reflective headlights removed from cars served as light reflectors. And filming would usually take place on the bombed-out East Aleppo streets outside.
For months, Abu Mamdouh felt like he was being torn in half.
BRUSSELS: “How can we build solutions with the perpetrators of crimes against humanity and war crimes?”
