8 April 2026 – Genocide and war crimes upon war crimes have been underway in our region for long, far too long. Today Lebanon is paying a heavy price inflicted by a state that acts with impunity. What is the difference between a terrorist state and a terrorist organization except that the first can indeed […]
27 March 2026 – The BBC had a report on how many Iranian civilians were killed by Israel’s army bombing. Then they invited the former head of the Israeli military intelligence to tell them that his country is using precision weapons and that they should interview Iranians who are hitting Israel. And then he told […]
Published at The New Humanitarian on 26 March 2026 Every morning, millions across conflict zones reach for their phones. They search for news. What greets them – alongside the genuine – is a flood of deceptive synthetic imagery. This is not an accident. It is an industry. Iranian missiles reducing Tel Aviv to rubble. American […]
20 Feb 2026 — Staying late reading a history book about prophet Mohammad and listening to early 20th century songs of Umm Kalthoum while waiting for the US to tell us that they have started bombing Iran again (or not). 23 Jan 2026 – “When I saw you in Egypt last August, you looked very […]
“The Israeli revenge war has become a watershed, but it is by no means some sudden new trend.” First published in The New Humanitarian on October 27, 2025 Twenty-four years ago, on 11 September 2001, I sat on the veranda of a picturesque seafront restaurant in the Gaza Strip. I had started working for the […]
31 July 2025 – Borges said that heaven will be a library. This is how I felt in Hodges and Figgis Bookshop after visiting the old Trinity college Library in Dublin. The new books and the old manuscripts and the serious ess of it all compared to the AI hype and post-truth internet flood. 22 June 2025 — Two […]
Published 5 April 2025 in the EU Observer and co-authored with Petra Stienen “In the trash-strewn zigzagging streets of Al Husseiniya, a slum less than 15km south of Damascus, Ahmad Bakr walks with his Oud strung on his shoulder on his way to a small apartment where he runs a music school. Al Husseiniya is […]
Celebrations of liberation are fading and sectarian violence has returned. Can Syrians avoid vengeance? First published in the Prospect Magazine on March 15, 2025 Fourteen years ago, I stopped traveling to Syria. A security agency was suspicious of my visits because my passport listed my profession as a journalist. So I felt a bit anxious […]
19 Jan 2025 – Palestinian poet Refaat Al’ar’eer was killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6, 2023, after he wrote this poem below. Let us execute his will left in the poem below, let us make kites, the least we can do now on the day of a temporary ceasefire in a war that […]
Time for the UN to Check Out of the Four Seasons As Geir Pedersen, the UN envoy to Syria, left the abandoned Sednaya prison near Damascus, a woman spat in his direction and threw her shoes at his car — a gesture of deep disrespect and disdain in the Middle East. Prior to the collapse of the Assad […]
