Horror allegorizes problems; it sorts problems; it describes problems; it plays out problems. What it does not do is solve them, and this intractability is the main theme of the most gripping book of horror I have read as an adult. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is a triumph of the genre, but it is also one where the monster, if allegorical, is also very real. Set in 2005 in the depths of chaos and terror of the US invasion of Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad gives us no scientist striving to know the nature of the human soul, toying with fate, daring to play God. Its creature—known as Whatsitsname—is likewise not a science experiment, but a metonymic tour guide through a sort of magical realist house of horrors—the sort of inane horrors that could only ensue from an American invasion in the name of “democracy.” (Here, we might pause to note that the acknowledged masterpiece of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, was also inspired by a US-backed atrocity.) The fright is not merely a fun spook on the pages, but rather a stand-in for death, rage, tribalism, pain, gore, and the absurdities of fate.
Published nearly 200 years prior, Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” after the Greek myth about the god who, punished for giving fire to humans, was tied to a mountainside, doomed to have his liver devoured by raptors each day. The Greeks knew the liver regenerates, so accordingly this punishment would be eternal: Prometheus’ liver regrew every night. (A fair bit of body horror!) Sadaawi’s book, on the other hand, begins with a shady junkyard dealer named Hadi, whose main passions are whoring and ouzo, when he can afford them. Despite—or perhaps because of—his knowledge of his own degeneracy (is there ever really a difference?), he muses that the many dismembered body parts around town—thanks to both the US invasion and the vicious sectarian violence in its wake—deserve a proper burial.
A tinkerer, Hadi is quite handy with needle and thread, and, for those of you familiar with the source material, you can guess what happens next. Once enough body parts have been stitched together, the timely (or untimely) demise of a local security guard in an explosion renders his body a vaporous “pink mist” devoid of solid pieces, thus delivering a Shelleyan soul to the oozing, squishy, rotting patchwork of flesh. Whatsitsname is born. It’s alive!
While the original novel is subtitled for an actual god who gifted fire to mankind, the idea of human daring so sacrilege as to generate life (outside of, you know, fucking) is endlessly fascinating (like fucking). The ghost story is undoubtedly as old as camp fires, Promethean and otherwise. But gothic horror has its roots in a very particular moment in history, relevant to Shelley in a different (if also very scary) way compared with the historical context that informed Saadawi.
Apropos of fucking, the summer Mary Shelley started writing the book featured one hell of a Regency romp. After absconding to Europe in the wake of sex scandals too numerous and incestuous to list here, Mary Shelley, her new husband, Percy, and Lord Byron, among others, found themselves in Switzerland.
That climate catastrophe which gifted the world the gothic genre would also decide the fate of nations. Its global ramifications lasted for years. There was no summer of 1816. Europe, already reeling from the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, sank into crop failure and misery that crystallized lower class discontent into political radicalism and revolt in the coming decades. In New England, the following winter after the lack of summer was dubbed “Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” The region was so cold, it partly depopulated, driving the westward migration that would soon anoint itself “Manifest Destiny.” In South Asia, cholera killed at unprecedented rates, weakening empires and making way for total British conquest and greater European colonial incursion into Asia. That legacy and the United States’ subsequent 20th-century rebranding of empire set the stage for the horrors of Frankenstein in Baghdad, even if Mary Shelley provided the plot.
Caitlin McCormack
Sadaawi first published his update of Shelley’s tale, replete with djinns, genie folklore, and American incompetence, in 2013. It won a brace of major awards before Jonathan Wright translated it in 2018, winning it many more.
All that time—and still to this day—the book is wretchedly timely. Whatsitname initially seeks revenge upon evil, but that task in and of itself is a mire of gray areas and contradictions. Beyond the murky, moral ambiguity of seeking revenge in a sectarian conflict set loose by a brutal invasion, Whatsitsname is plagued by “serious putrefaction problems.” These, in turn, force it to be more indiscriminate in picking its victims simply to harvest body parts he needs to replace.
The violence literally feeds on itself and the moral imperative doubles back. The wacky plot descends into the Pynchonian (e.g., a “Tracking and Pursuit Department” becomes a focal point); Whatsitsname grows media savvy and gives the following soundbite: “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.”
Though it is perhaps implied, one reason I hastened to name-check Young Frankenstein is that there is no describing Frankenstein in Baghdad without emphasizing its hilarity. The absurd premise of the book careens between horrors, but it never strays far from the sense of humor that, as the book suggests, is the next best thing to a moral compass. Sometimes, it’s all you’ve got left.
Rare is the book that will make you tear up, throw up, and crack up in a single chapter. Like Whatsitsname, it’s stitched together of too many parts to be identifiable as any single genre other than human. Whatsitsname is a metaphor for messes left behind, vendettas at tragic cross purposes, hopes of coexistence wrecked and rotting, but it is also a metaphysical mystery to behold, a sign of faith and of ruin. The “monster”’s name is dead-on.
In the original, Mary Shelley herself wrote an admonishment that could easily be applied to Western Imperialism: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." Perhaps the United States itself is the closest thing to an arrogant mad scientist forcing both its beliefs and its hierarchies on the ancient city of Baghdad—daring to play God by wanting to remake a country in its own image and, in the process, unleashing every demon from the depths of hell.
Ahmed Sadaawi rips out the soul of a Western metaphysical classic to attempt to describe the horrors that a soulless, thoughtless Western invasion unleashed. It’s alive: The elegance and grotesque totality of the metaphor are complete.
[post_title] => The Monster Mash of Imperialism
[post_excerpt] => Some spooky seasonal appreciation for Ahmed Saadawi’s "Frankenstein in Baghdad."
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My father left Somalia in 1982 to study engineering on a scholarship in Washington D.C. Then, a war began in his absence and changed the course of his life.
In the winter of 2021, forty years after his departure, I boarded a flight with him ready to see Mogadishu for the first time. My grandmother gone, my father wanted to track down his childhood home and divide the proceeds from its sale among his siblings.
The house was in poor condition, the concrete and stone badly damaged. My father was disoriented. He lamented that he did not recognize the neighborhood—the Hodan District—or the route we took there. So much had changed, been leveled or lost. What remained was in ruins.
~
I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I spent my days daydreaming in class and my evenings on the internet where I befriended other Somali girls from around the world. We were young and earnest and thought our angst made us exceptional. We were embarrassingly self-fetishizing. We didn’t want to be reduced to our identities, yet secretly feared they were the most interesting thing about us. We were raised on nostalgia, took it into our bodies like milk from our mothers.
We were born in the rupture of the archive, in its lapse.
Two weeks before our trip to Mogadishu, I stumbled down a staircase and hurt my ankle—a hairline fracture caused by repetitive strain, as opposed to a single discrete injury. The importance of strong ankles is basic physics: they dictate the force with which one can meet the world.
Traveling with my father, I walked with a limp; I could not bear my own weight. I took pictures of everything in an attempt to find my place in the rift between him and his fate, between his history and the history of his country.
To this day, my ankle buckles beneath me if I step the wrong way, instability no longer a condition but a fixture of my body.
~
Somalia’s borders were not drawn by clans, but through colonial contracts. Italy claimed the south, England the north, but in Djibouti, it is France’s legacy that lives on.
The proof of these colonial horrors can be found in the museums of Europe, alongside much of Africa’s plundered heritage. In 1923, Benito Mussolini inaugurated Rome's Colonial Museum in the Palazzo della Consulta which housed, at its height, over 12,000 artifacts stolen from its African colonies—Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea. In 1940, it was moved to a larger location and renamed the Museum of Italian Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, the museum fell into neglect. A damning relic of a defeated regime. Its archives were boxed away.
The history of the modern museum cannot be separated from the history of empire. Almost eight decades later, Italy’s colonial archives were transferred to the Museum of Civilizations in Rome which curated a project titled “The Museum of Opacities” in an attempt to critically examine Italy’s colonial past as it absorbed thousands of artifacts. The exhibit invoked French philosopher Édouard Glissant’s assertion that a people have a “right to opacity.” That is, something in each of us and our histories that cannot be translated, easily understood, catalogued, or contained.
~
When my father took me to see Somalia's national monuments, my uncle and cousin joined us. We started at the Somali Youth League memorial, a plaza dedicated to the young activists who played a key part in the movement for independence. Next was Daljirka Dahsoon, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Hawo Tako, a woman who watched over the city with a torch in her hand and an arrow through her heart. Then we saw the Seyed, father of the Dervish Movement, disparagingly called the Mad Mullah by the British, seated atop his famed steed in Mogadishu’s city center. A short distance away was Taalada Dhagaxtuur, the statue of an anonymous stone-thrower, symbolizing the brave men who fought the British with nothing but stones and the steel in their spines.
None of these statues are the originals, all of which were destroyed at the start of the Somali Civil War, their bronze and stone limbs reduced to scrap and sold to neighboring countries. We took pictures in front of their doppelgangers.
We wandered the streets of Mogadishu and the streets of memory. Our last stop of the day was the Somali National Museum, but it was closed to the public. Built by the Sultan of Zanzibar, the building dates back to 1872 before it was converted into Somalia’s first public museum, the Museo della Garesa, by the Italian colonial administration in 1933. Its collection included roughly 3,000 items, serving as an archive of Italian military history. For the colonial administration, it also served as proof that the Italians had created order out of chaos, and preserved what would have otherwise been lost.
It would not be the building’s last transformation.
In 1960, seventeen African countries, including Somalia, gained independence from colonial rule. Less than a decade later, General Siad Barre seized power in a military coup and the Supreme Revolutionary Council adopted Scientific Socialism as Somalia's state doctrine.
As political, economic, and cultural ties between Somalia and the USSR deepened, a team of Soviet scholars arrived in Mogadishu in 1971 for an archaeological expedition aimed at decolonizing Somali history. The scholars sought to forge a continuous chain of rebellion by linking the Dervish Movement in the late 19th century to Siad Barre's 1969 coup, casting Somalis as both victors of an unbroken struggle and heirs to its liberation.
The construction of a new national museum and the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage became top priorities for the new government, and the 1987 completion of the Somali National Museum was hailed as a great achievement by UNESCO.
But the promise of the young republic was usurped by a ruinous civil war. The museum was looted, its collection stolen and sold, then scattered as far and wide as Somalia's people.
~
In the fall of 2024, my friends Aziz Farah and Ibrahim Hirsi, cultural workers with no formal training in art history or curation, joined forces with Asha Noor, a higher education professional, and Idel Rasheed, a researcher and curator, to launch Koor Archives, a traveling exhibition dedicated to preserving Somali heritage. Though they live in four different countries— Canada, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—they are bound by their shared commitment to the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture.
Aziz and Ibrahim met earlier that year at Piasa, a French auction house that was selling the lifetime collection of Pierre Loos, a Belgian “tribal art dealer.” They successfully bid on 45 Somali headrests. The next day, they spent hours wandering through a Parisian flea market and stumbled upon a Brazilian dealer of East African art. After some haggling, they acquired a cache of books and a traditional Somali amber necklace. Their collection has since grown substantially, culled from galleries, private collections, estate sales, online auctions, street vendors in Somalia’s back alleys, and donations from families and friends.
Their search has exposed them to the political economy of antiquities, an underworld built on expropriation and dispossession. They spend time on Facebook forums where people clash over what constitutes art, where African artifacts are described as primitive, even as they exchange hands for thousands of dollars, buying Somali artifacts from non-Somalis, often at exorbitant prices, and haggling with strangers over the right to their own heritage.
In Somalia, the buying and selling of antiquities is unregulated. There is a network of impoverished residents who steal items from graves and sell them to local dealers. And while most of Africa’s cultural heritage remains in Europe due to centuries of colonialism, Turkey and the UAE’s increased influence in the region has resulted in what Aziz calls a “second plunder.” One antique seller in Mogadishu tells Ibrahim that Arabs and Turks are now his most frequent customers.
Some of the items in the Koor Archives’ collection make Aziz and Ibrahim uncomfortable, like the taxidermy mounts of gazelle and antelope heads, their faces frozen since they were hunted in 1910. “Europeans loved their trophies,” Aziz says. The duo dream of returning them to Somalia where they can be properly laid to rest.
In many ways, Koor is what Françoise Vergès, the French postcolonial scholar and curator, calls the anti-museum: a space that uplifts a poetics of ordinary life and invests in communal stewardship, both the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture, including oral traditions, poetry, music and song, and collective memory. In Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization this kind of rupture is “a program of complete disorder.” The anti-museum, then, might be understood as an attempt to reconstitute what Fanon describes as a world “cut in two”: a world of buyers and sellers, objects and owners. A program that dares to emancipate both the imagination and archive.
Koor is a project of love and disorder, the only forces strong enough to upend “a world of statues" and bring into being a world with no masters and no marble gods.
In their first public exhibit in Toronto of over 100 rare Somali artifacts back in the summer of 2024, three generations of a single family—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—stood around a loox, a wooden tablet used to read and write the Quran. Elders shared memories of learning the holy book this way. Someone recalled the process of making ink. Another spoke of trees sprouting from the dirt where the ink of sacred verses had been rinsed. The verses they first read on the loox were inscribed not only on wood, but on their hearts.
~
Long before I met Aziz and Ibrahim, I took my grandmother to the only Somali Museum in North America, in Minneapolis. I expected her to share my excitement, but she was dismissive. “We have these things at home,” she said.
It was true: In our garage in Portland were several xeedho, woven containers central to her tribe’s wedding customs, which she’d lovingly protected from dust in hopes of saving them for my own wedding.
She looked at the wooden fandhaals on display and said: “This is a spoon. Why is a spoon in a museum?”
I did not yet know to question the museum’s logic, its bureaucratic and lifeless classification of the world. My grandmother was impervious to this conditioning. To her, these items were ordinary, pedestrian staples of everyday life.
Years later, wandering the Africa collection at the British Museum, I marveled at the Somali artifacts sealed behind display cases. I knew there were even more hidden within the museum’s bowels. I pressed my hand to the glass that separated me from them and them from the world—a checkpoint I could not cross. Each artifact bore a date of acquisition wed to the name of the donor, the seller, the excavator, the field collector.
I thought of the feet that once wore the leather sandals on display, imagined the roads they tread. The woman who held her long hair over the smoke of a glazed incense burner. The fingers of the blacksmith wrapped around his iron hammer. The shield of hide and wood and the human heart it once protected from harm.
I look at the pictures from my 2021 trip to Mogadishu, I see our smiling faces, our skin glistening with sun and sweat. My uncle has since died, but he is immortalized in these photographs. In my favorite picture, we are posing in front of the Somali flag and underneath a banner that says, “Soomaliya Soomali baah leh.”
Somalia belongs to Somalis.
I lay claim to all that lays claim to me. My living and my dead and the dirt from their graves. My father’s childhood home. His schoolbooks and the sins of his youth. The grief that beats inside him like a second heart. I inherit the echo and the trace and the blue that binds us—the flag, the sky, the sea.
[post_title] => A Somali Archive of Our Own
[post_excerpt] => When memory in the aftermath of war meets nostalgia for a place and time that no longer exist.
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A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
Amid the ruins of destroyed buildings and the weathered tents that have become home for more than one million displaced people in Deir al-Balah’s camps, 11-year-old Misk walks alongside her classmates, carrying her Hello Kitty school bag. Along the way, she encounters just a few of the human realities of displacement: families searching for water and food; children carrying yellow plastic jerrycans as they take on daily responsibilities far beyond what they should or can.
But for Misk, this path represents the road to being a student again. She is feeling eager and excited. In her backpack, she carries a couple of things she had been without for some time: a notebook and a pen.
Since 2023, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have lost access to formal education amid the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians. Israeli military operations have destroyed and continue to destroy many school buildings, while others have been converted into shelters for displaced families. Temporary learning spaces began popping up in early 2025 as teachers and volunteers transformed displacement tents into classrooms, adding desks, chairs, and blackboards so children could return to learning despite the ongoing violence. These spaces have offered more than a place to study: They have given children a chance to regain a part of their daily routines, a community of peers, and something resembling the normal life they'd lost.
Misk was in the third grade in May 2024 when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders—paper slips that were airdropped over entire neighborhoods ordering people to vacate their homes and leave town. In southern Gaza, her city of Rafah welcomed over a million displaced residents overnight, while Misk and her family ended up in the center of the Gaza Strip at Deir al-Balah, where they still share a single small room in her relative's house—a room where they all sleep, eat, study, and work, in circumstances that have changed nearly every part of their daily lives. Amidst all this, Misk’s new school at the Deir al-Balah displacement camp, while temporary, has become a refuge.
On a recent September day, Misk sits with eight other children inside a small room. There is no school gate, no morning assembly, and no bell marking the beginning or end of their lesson. Yet children still arrive at 9 a.m., with whatever basic supplies they can find. Some carry old notebooks or loose papers, and the few pens they have. They sit at simple wooden desks facing the board, enthusiastically raising their hands as their teachers—sisters Jumanah, 24, and Shahd Al-Naouq, 22—guide them through lessons in Arabic, English, and mathematics. The scene resembles an ordinary classroom, where children listen, answer questions, and learn together. But instead of concrete walls and a permanent building, their class takes place in a single tent inside a displacement camp.
This one-room school did not start from big plans or with help from a fully-funded institution. It started with a question. Last year, Jumanah was an ambitious university graduate with an accounting degree preparing to begin her career. But the war had changed that path. Job opportunities were scarce and starting a career in accounting seemed increasingly out of reach as she was forced to navigate the daily challenges of an uncertain future.
Then, earlier this year, Jumanah visited a friend whose relatives were hosting a displaced family. There, she noticed a young girl drawing. She could not stay focused for long. Every so often, the girl’s mother would ask her to help wash clothes by hand or with other chores, and she would get up. After finishing, she would return to her pen and paper and continue drawing.
“When I saw Misk trying to draw despite everything happening around her, I thought we needed to do something,” Jumanah tells me. “I felt that children had not only lost their schools; they had lost a part of their daily lives.”
She thought about the children living in the area and in the nearby displacement camps, probably tens of thousands of them, who were growing up without education or a place to return to after losing their homes. Then came her question: If children could no longer safely reach their school due to displacement, long distances, and Israeli bombardments, what if their school came to them?
Her sister, Shahd, agreed to be a part of it.
“We did not have a school or big resources, but we had children who wanted to learn. I said, ‘Let’s start with what we have.’ Even if the place is simple, the important thing is that they have a place to come back to,” Shahd says.
When they first opened the school, Jumanah welcomed their students inside their Deir al-Balah home, a small structure made of corrugated metal. She put a single table in a room and bought a small chalk and marker board. Shahd, an English literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza, joined her, and together the sisters spoke to their neighbors and asked for small donations to help pay for the necessary supplies. Before long, children from the neighborhood and the nearby camps came. Misk was among the first to join.
At that point, there were no more than ten students from six to 12 years old. Jumanah took on most of the responsibility for organizing the space and putting together lessons on basic Arabic, math, and other topics. Shahd, meanwhile, taught the children letters and numbers in English.
At first, their goal was not to complete a full school year or make up for everything the children had lost during the past three years of war. “The most important thing for us was to make children connected to learning and make them feel that there was still a place waiting for them every day,” Jumanah says.
As more families learned about the school, more children began attending. Within four months, Jumanah and Shahd were able to move to a newly designated area in their neighborhood, where not one but three rows of tents were set up as classrooms, allowing them to welcome even more children. They have since been joined by additional teachers, who also volunteer their time to teach the students.
A few simple wooden desks and learning materials were added, including notebooks, textbooks, pens, and another blackboard. Children sat in rows next to one another, with the chalkboard at one end, like a traditional classroom. It became known as the Al-Itqan (Excellence) School.
Al-Itqan has provided a refuge for children, but it is not separate from the reality of the camp—it is at its heart. Daily life continues outside its main entrance, as people push water carts between the tents, walking back and forth as they try to secure their basic needs. The children, too, also carry different stories with them—stories of the years they've lived without access to education.
For Misk, returning to the classroom has meant more than just the opportunity to sit in front of a book or complete an exercise. It has also been a chance to be with other children who have lived through the same experience. It has meant she can finally build new friendships; that once again, she can belong.
“I was happy,” Misk says about the chance to return to school again. “I felt like I was living the way I used to. I had a place to go, meet other children, and learn again.”
The school has offered something similar to other children, too, while still presenting challenges shaped by the realities of life in the camp. There is a twelve-year-old, Farah Al-Harazin, who always sits in the front, not because she chooses to, but because she needs to be close enough to see what’s written on the board. Due to limited access to medical care, she hasn't yet been able to get treatment for her weak eyesight. Still, Farah is now in a space that understands her needs and has allowed her to participate with the other children.
“I asked Aseel, ‘Where is Yousef? Why hasn’t he come for a few days?’" Shahd says. That's when Shahd learned that every morning he had to fetch water for his family living in the camp.
There is also Issa, who always comes to the classroom with an empty pot inside his backpack. The pot is his way of providing food for his family: Classes begin at 9 a.m., but every day, Issa leaves to the community kitchen (takiya) to fill the pot with whatever food is available at 10 a.m. He then brings the pot home before returning to class.
Among the children is also Ahmad Nasrallah, who lives with a kidney condition, making everyday life especially difficult. The stifling heat, poor ventilation, and lack of electricity in the classroom made the space feel exhausting and suffocating for him. During lessons, Ahmad often struggles to breathe and finds it difficult to concentrate.
Earlier this year, Jumanah tried to move him to a better spot, where some air could reach him without him having to walk out of the classroom. “Sometimes I felt that I was not only their teacher," Jumanah tells me. "I felt like I was a mother to them. Every child has their own circumstances.”
What the sisters-turned-teachers have witnessed in their students are not isolated cases, happening only in Al-Itqan. According to the United Nations and education organizations like Save the Children, there are around 700,000 children aged four to 17 who have missed nearly three academic years of in-person learning, while around 93% of schools in Gaza require major repairs or reconstruction.
But these numbers do not show the small ways that conflict and dispossession continue to shape the lives of children.
Three years ago, before the war, Misk’s Hello Kitty backpack was simply part of her daily journey to school. After losing her family home, she used it to carry the few clothes and personal belongings she could take with her. Today, she walks between the tents with the same backpack, carrying a notebook, a pen, and a bottle of water. The makeshift school that started with eight children has grown, too, and now welcomes nearly 100 students across its three tent classrooms.
After more than two years away from her old school, Misk now attends classes every day, with friends her own age.
Amidst so much, it's like she is living part of her childhood again.
[post_title] => The Things Children Carry
[post_excerpt] => A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
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A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023.
I used to imagine myself as a nurse dressed in white, moving between patients' beds, one link in the chain of their healing. I always believed that nursing was a humanitarian message before it was a job. I believed—and still believe—that nurses are angels of mercy who fight battles and wars every single day, in every shift they work. But then came October 2023.
At the beginning of the war, I decided to return to the emergency department of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the center of Gaza City where I’d previously done my internship. Its specialized units received patients from across the entire Gaza Strip, and its emergency department, also the largest in Gaza, was divided into three zones: green for minor, yellow for moderate, and red for critical cases.
To take the job, I had to leave my father and four of my siblings at our family home in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. Two days later, they too were forced to leave, and another two days after that, our house was bombed. In the weeks that followed, I lost many friends and colleagues. Each day, I felt like I was losing a part of my own life.
Maybe it was the encroaching death, or separation, or longing—but "Gentle Faress," as my mother always called me, soon became hard. At the emergency department, I carried torn limbs with my bare hands, the hospital’s supply of gloves rapidly dwindling as medical supplies weren’t allowed to reach the hospital. I put my fingers inside deep wounds to stop their bleeding. And I developed the nerve to inform a family that their son or daughter had died by telling them, "Take them to the morgue so there is room for someone else.”
~
On the third of November at 7 o'clock in the morning, I got ready to start another typical 24-hour shift. I had just woken from a two-hour nap—sleep that felt more like a half-waking—on one of the metal chairs in the staff changing room, with two of my colleagues by my side. I went out searching for any spot with a phone signal so I could call my mother and tell her I was still alive, and to make sure everyone in my family was still alive, too. I would have to lie to her as usual, telling her that I was eating well, that I was still strong, and that we were safe and under international protection because we were medical staff. But none of it was true.
Outside, a now typical scene met me: what appeared to be thousands of displaced people were spread across the ground in the stairwells and corridors of the hospital, sleeping on the bare floor without the slightest bit of privacy or comfort. Children were crying, maybe from hunger or cold, or simply in their search for any feeling of safety. I looked into people's faces, which tell tales, and saw deep exhaustion and tears held back. Maybe they’d lost their house, their family. Maybe they’d lost everything, and only they themselves had survived.
Finally, I spotted a few people standing by the hospital gate, holding up their phones. After a few steps, I heard a loud whistling and then a violent explosion nearby. Israeli warplanes were bombing a water truck and the people queuing to fill their empty gallon bottles near the hospital’s entrance.
For a split second, in the commotion, I truly believed I had died, that I would never see my family again; that if my phone rang, no one would be able to answer it.
When sound returned to my ears, I could hear the screaming and crying of children and women around me. Wake up. Hurry. Get up, my dear. Don't die. Like slaps across my face, these words brought my awareness back, and I ran back into the hospital as fast as I could.
~
In the emergency department, my role was to insert intravenous cannulas so a doctor could assess the patients and try to compensate for blood loss with fluids. But because the intensive care unit was already filled with severe injuries and had no space left, we began receiving ICU patients in the ER, as well. Understaffed and given the overwhelming need, this meant choosing those who we believed had the greatest chance of survival. I felt the pain of having to decide who lives and who dies as I moved from one injured person to another, my mind unable to absorb what my hands were doing. The sounds of screaming and crying, and the smell of blood and burned bodies, filled the hospital.
While I was running with an oxygen bottle in my hand, suddenly, a woman rushed toward me, seizing my hand tightly and kissing it. "Please help my son—he's breathing, please, he's alive, I'm sure of it, I have no one else, and if I lose him I will have lost everything in my life,” she pleaded. He was lying on the ground, blood pooling around him like a lake. I knew he was already gone, but I was caught between two fires: the fire of the mother and her grief, and the fire of the many other injured people who still needed care. My conscience insisted I do something for the woman as she looked at me with eyes full of hope and anguish. But I did not know how to tell her that her son could not be saved, so I whispered to the doctor that we needed to perform CPR. It seemed almost impossible given how little time we had, yet the doctor agreed. Afterwards, we told the mother that her son had not survived. Then we moved on to finish our work with the other patients, leaving her behind.
"He was going to be married soon, and happiness was about to visit us,” she wailed. “I was going to sing for him at his wedding. The most precious thing I had has died.” To this day, whenever I hear another story of loss in the news, I still picture that woman’s face, and her hand reaching for her son’s.
I wanted to call my own mother to tell her that I was alive. I kept seeing her image and her shadow, as if she were walking beside me, to reassure me. But after meeting that woman, after seeing her tears, I began to fear that one day, my own mother might be in her place.
~
Family members carried dozens of bodies out of the intensive care unit to the morgue, and those who’d suffered injuries were transferred to the inpatient wards for follow-up. Our department looked like an actual battlefield, with blood everywhere, and IV lines, syringes, and used equipment scattered about. Around 12 p.m., once we’d finished assisting the morning’s cases, I walked outside once again to try to call my mother. My hands trembled as I held my phone and heard her tender voice answering hello. But despite all my longing for her, I hung up. I tried another time, and when I heard her voice, I burst into tears and hung up again. I couldn’t understand why.
Maybe it was all simply too much for me to bear. The Israeli military had destroyed the infrastructure around the hospital. They had destroyed the water lines and the solar panels we used to generate electricity, which shut down the operating rooms, the ventilators, and the sterilization equipment. How could I watch thousands of people die, without any fault of their own, while we just ran from one injured person to the next without any medical resources or equipment? The military had blocked the medicine, painkillers, and sedatives sent by international organizations from reaching the hospital. There was no food. I kept a box of dates in my locker, and I ate one a day.
The hours passed and the situation grew relatively calm. We could only hear the sound of reconnaissance aircraft flying low, like the buzzing of mosquitoes in your ear, but much louder, and the gunfire from the warships at sea. They sounded increasingly close—a bad omen. Most of the bombing and the massacres took place in the middle of the night. This made it harder for ambulance and rescue crews to pull people out from under the rubble, and harder for medical staff to help the injured.
~
My colleagues and I sat in the emergency department at 1 a.m., talking about what we would wish for if we made it out alive. A radio station broadcast from the West Bank, and we tuned in hoping to hear some good news about a ceasefire, or anything at all. But all the news mentioned were the threats to storm Al-Shifa Hospital and the Israeli military plan to occupy the Strip.
We heard the sounds of bursts and fire belts striking the area near the coast that separates the north and south of Gaza City. After several minutes, some ambulances arrived after having been blocked by the advancing Israeli tanks. I assisted the dozens of injured people coming in, most of whom had burns or lacerated wounds across their entire bodies. I asked one of them where he’d come from. When he mentioned the neighborhood where my own family was, I lost my mind.
I ran among the injured and the martyrs, among the disfigured and the unidentified, searching for anyone from my family. I tried calling them but couldn’t get through, and I tried to go with the ambulances to see for myself, but the Israeli tanks had advanced so far that they’d split the Strip into separate parts. I went to the morgue to search among the bodies, thinking through the worst scenario I could imagine. I had no strength left in me, as if I had lost the last strand of hope in this world.
Heavy hours passed, but none of them arrived.
With the sunrise, I walked out to the street once again to try to call one of my brothers. After several attempts, Yasser answered, and with it, life returned to my body. His voice sounded both shaky and exhausted, as though he were forcing each word out. "We got out by a miracle,” he told me. “It truly was a miracle, but we are still alive and we are all fine."
Then the signal dropped and our call ended.
~
Eight o'clock in the morning, the fourth of November. I made my way back to that same hard, cold metal chair where I had woken up the day before, a lifetime earlier. I closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. The day played back to me in pieces: the water truck, the young man who was already gone before I ever helped him, his mother's hands wrapped around mine, Yasser's voice breaking at the other end of the phone. I asked myself what our sin was, why all these children and women had to die. But instead of an answer, I only had that chair, my exhausted body, and the hope that if I kept my eyes closed long enough, I might, for once, dream of something else.
[post_title] => 24 Hours in the Emergency Room at Al-Shifa Hospital
[post_excerpt] => A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023.
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Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse.
These are just a few of their stories.
Olena Zaitseva was in the early stages of pregnancy when she was unlawfully detained by Russian forces in February 2019.
“They took me into a prison-like facility, where they handcuffed me and attached me to a pipe,” she recalls. But soon after, they moved her to another room, “where the violence—and all the horrors imaginable—took place.”
Living close to what was then the front lines of eastern Ukraine, where the ongoing war with Russia first broke out in 2014, Olena and her 18-year old son Vladyslav had been accused by Russian forces of plotting to destroy railway infrastructure. Without legal defense or recourse, the mother, then 48, would spend the next four years as a civilian captive, while her son would be sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Olena was first held captive in Makiyivka, a former prison colony, and later in Izolyatsia, a former pre-trial detention center. Both had been converted into torture chambers by the Russian army, and were widely known for the atrocities committed by Russian servicemen against Ukrainian prisoners—atrocities that continue to this day.
When she first arrived at Makiyivka, Olena tells me she was imprisoned in a one-person cell, where around six men in balaclavas beat her and raped her with rubber batons for several days. (The soldiers put a bag on her head, so she could not count the total number of perpetrators.) The rapes triggered grave gynecological difficulties, causing Olena to bleed heavily. For nearly two years, these symptoms persisted. “I was alone in a cell with only a mattress, a bottle of water, and one bucket,” she says. “I’d sit on the bucket so that the blood could flow because I had no pads, no cloth, nothing.”
Olena with a photo of her son, Vladyslav. (Photo: Sara Cincurova)
Subjected to other forms of torture, Olena did not receive medical aid in her four years in Russian captivity, except for a single hospital visit in occupied Donetsk to consult with a gynecologist. “I cannot translate that feeling into words,” she recalls. “It was like in American movies: my hands in chains, my legs in irons, I was forced to bend forward and look down, and they dragged me like a dog. I was so ashamed.”
“People were walking in the street, and I had a bag on my head, like the worst of the criminals,” she says.
The doctors did not give her a diagnosis that day. It would have been impossible, Olena says, because the same Russian servicemen and prison guards who had abused her were watching and listening. But she already knew she had lost her pregnancy as a result of the violence she’d experienced during her imprisonment. (The father of her child would die on the front lines before they could be reunited.)
After four years in captivity, Olena was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2022. I meet her outside of Kyiv, where she now lives alone in a small room in a shared apartment. She has recently applied to receive disability status as a result of permanent injuries sustained during her imprisonment, while her son Vladyslav remains in Russian captivity, now for the eighth consecutive year. Olena continues to advocate for his release every day, and says she only relives the abuse she experienced and gives interviews to the press in order to help draw attention to his case. But she admits there is little hope.
“For my son to be exchanged, a miracle would have to happen,” she tells me. “Looking at what is happening, those who had been imprisoned before 2022 have been forgotten.”
Searching Houses for Vulnerable Victims
Olena’s story is just one of nearly 30 testimonies I have collected over the past two years of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against Ukrainian women, and is consistent with the testimonies of other women I have interviewed who were held at Makiyivka and Izolyatsia.
All of the women’s accounts were independently verified by Ukrainian NGOs collecting evidence of Russia’s war crimes, and together, paint a grim picture of systematic abuse—one that is not just a crime of opportunity, but suggests an intentional scouting effort by Russian soldiers to find potential victims who are especially vulnerable.
Although the Geneva Conventions, as well as international humanitarian law, stipulate that all civilians in conflict who are wounded or sick “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances,” UN reporting suggests that Russian forces have not respected these protections, routinely abusing even the most defenseless of Ukrainian civilians. Children, disabled persons, and the elderly are also protected civilians under international law; as are pregnant women like Olena, as well as mothers and other caregivers. But since the war broke out in 2014, rape and other war crimes have been routinely documented against each of these protected groups, as confirmed by both a 2023 and 2024 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Explicitly defining rape as a form of torture under international law, the investigators found that soldiers routinely "identified women in a vulnerable situation" and "committed acts of rape and sexual violence when they broke into the victims’ houses," sometimes "at gunpoint with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling."
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
While sexual violence has become a defining weapon in the Russian war in Ukraine, it has also been on the rise in conflicts around the world. A 2025 UN report documented thousands more cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2024 compared with the year before—a 25 percent increase, widely considered a conservative estimate. A 2026 report of the UN Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence estimated that for each rape reported in connection with a global conflict, 10 to 20 cases went undocumented.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence have long been a violation of international humanitarian law, yet committed with impunity in conflicts around the world, Jessica Neuwirth, founder of the Frontline Women's Fund, tells The Conversationalist. Her organization works to combat this by offering support to women's organizations working in conflict zones, helping survivors of sexual violence. “The Geneva Conventions prohibit ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and specifically mention ‘rape and any form of indecent assault,’" she says. “The statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly includes rape as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
The problem, Neuwirth says, has not been the legal prohibition of rape, but the failure to hold perpetrators accountable under the law.
There have, however, been some efforts to bring perpetrators to account. In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, joined by several other experts, sent a dossier of sexual torture allegations to the Russian Federation, involving the cases of 10 Ukrainian civilians. “These were all highly sexualized assaults which included rapes, threats of rape, and other depraved conduct,” the dossier read. “It is becoming clearer that the Russian Federation’s deliberate and systematic policy of torture in Ukraine involves sexualized torture and other sexualized cruelty, including against the civilian population.” (While Russia did not formally address a reply to the UN, the Kremlin has publicly stated its belief that many reports by Ukrainian women of sexual violence were groundless.)
The Strongest of All
“No one is as strong as Ukrainian women,” Liudmyla, a retired teacher who will celebrate her 79th birthday this summer, tells me. In the summer of 2022, she was beaten and raped by a young Russian serviceman in her house in a small village of the Kherson region, then under Russian occupation. The soldier left her with four broken ribs, among other injuries.
I interviewed Liudmyla for the first time in February 2025. Despite temperatures in the negatives that day, we set out to meet in the ruins of a bombarded elementary school in her village, which Liudmyla wanted to show me. In the end, we had no choice but to record the interview in a car because of the unbearable cold.
Despite the risks of coming forward with her story, Liudmyla has refused to be silenced, and has inspired other survivors in the country to speak out—including elderly or deeply religious women who at times blamed themselves for their assault. For her bravery, she is now seen as a local leader.
Liudmyla. (Photo: Diana Deliurman)
A year and a half after our first interview, I meet Liudmyla again. Her mobility has worsened; she struggles to walk up and down the stairs. But her resolve remains unchanged, speaking with the same determination she had the first time we met.
The day she was raped, Liudmyla recalls, she was convinced she would die. When the soldier started violating her, she said “farewell to my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in my mind.” But she survived. “I speak in order to denounce the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukrainian women,” she tells me.
Liudmyla says the Russian soldier who raped her stormed into her house around 10 p.m. She was terrified: At the time, she lived alone. He shouted and interrogated her, asking questions such as “who lives in your house?” and “why are the lights turned on?” Then, he beat her up and tore her clothes apart. He raped her, she says, then immediately fell asleep beside her. Liudmyla said those hours were among the most harrowing. “I lay right next to him, petrified,” she said, “while he was asleep and snoring.”
At 4 a.m., the soldier woke up and told Liudmyla he would come back in two days. “He told me that if I told anyone, he would kill me,” she says. Liudmyla was too scared to go to the hospital—then occupied by Russian troops—and immediately decided to flee her village rather than wait for the soldier’s return. She was only able to move back to her house, which had been almost completely destroyed, after her village was liberated in late 2022.
Recalling the days of occupation, Liudmyla says she saw wounded and desperate civilians being tortured by Russian soldiers. Some were hanged; others were forced to drink motor oil, she recalls. Other survivors as well as Ukrainian soldiers from the area I have interviewed recall seeing and hearing school children being raped.
Today, Liudmyla’s village is located near the so-called “kill zone,” about 30 kilometers from the frontlines, where Russian servicemen use first-person view (FPV) drones to kill civilians with precision. The practice is called “human safari”—an act of brutality consisting of dropping bombs on people, cars, and even children at play, as if it is a video game. Making matters more dire for the village, there is almost no access to food or medications. “If it wasn’t for humanitarian organizations, I would die of hunger today,” Liudmyla tells me. She hopes the situation will not get worse.
Liudmyla’s testimony is not an isolated incident. Rape and forced abductions of elderly Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army have been widely documented in recent years. The elderly also represent a large majority of people who remain living close to the frontlines, unable or unwilling to move out of the houses where they have spent their entire lives.
Pain That Cannot Be Expressed in Words
While international humanitarian law protects all civilians living in conflict without discrimination, certain groups are singled out for additional protections. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for example, contains specific protections for people with disabilities, who are at greater risk of violence, including of a sexual nature.
While reports across various countries have shown that violence against people with disabilities tends to receive relatively little media coverage, the UN has been “gravely concerned” about the fate of disabled Ukrainians since the outset of the war. “People with disabilities trapped in the Russian control zones in Ukraine are reportedly being used as ‘human shields’ by the Russian Federation armed forces,” the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) warned in September 2022. Other human rights organizations such as ZMINA have also published reports documenting the experiences of women with disabilities living in Ukraine.
Lidia Tarash, the acting head of the Department of Documenting War Crimes at the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, tells me that according to their organization’s data, at least 27 civilians with disabilities are currently held in Russian captivity. “We also have testimonies regarding at least five seriously ill civilians unlawfully detained by Russia,” she says. “These include people with spinal conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, cancer, amputations, and paralysis.” Some of these civilians are also being held “incommunicado,” in complete isolation from the outside world—their whereabouts and conditions completely unknown.
“These cases demonstrate that even particularly vulnerable groups of civilians receive no protection from Russia’s system of persecution,” she explains. “They point to the systematic nature of the unlawful detention of Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."
Documenting disabled people’s stories in conflict also presents particular challenges. Many disabled people live close to the frontlines, where media access is limited and particularly dangerous. Disabled people are also a largely underrepresented group across traditional media, and anecdotally, this has made it especially difficult for journalists to find a home for their stories. On his last day in the role, Giles Duley, the United Nations Global Advocate for Persons with Disabilities in Conflict and Peacebuilding Situations, said, “When I photograph somebody in a war zone… they always say to me: share this story with the leaders. But the opportunities to do so were never fully realized.”
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
In the spring of 2025, I spoke with the mother of a disabled woman, living with her family only about 13 kilometers from the frontlines of the Kherson region. Their village, which was occupied in 2022, has been routinely hit and targeted by FPV drones.
Her daughter Olha, she explains, sustained a severe head injury as a toddler that blocked the flow of oxygen to her brain, leaving her non-verbal and bed-bound. Although now a young woman of 33, she still looks like a child, no older than 9 or 10.
In late February 2022, as Russians stormed into their region, Olha’s parents were taken to the local police station for questioning. Her mother says they were forced to kneel for hours as they were beaten and interrogated by Russian soldiers. But all the while, she feared most for her daughter, who had been left at home alone.
Hours later, Olha’s mother was released. When she returned home, she found Olha lying on the bed, naked and motionless, with sweets placed on her pillow.
“Olha cannot undress herself alone,” her mother tells me. Devastated, she immediately knew: It must have been the Russian soldiers.
With Olha unable to speak, it was impossible to fully determine what had happened. But Olha’s body spoke for her. In the months that followed, she lost around 10 kilograms, and nearly all her teeth fell out. She became terrified of men, her mother says.
While the family will never know the details of the abuse, organizations such as Human Rights Watch have documented similar war crimes perpetrated against people with disabilities in Ukraine. In 2024, the country’s United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) stated that the prolonged and combined nature of insecurity, displacement, and economic deterioration had reduced “the coping capacities of women and girls and other at-risk groups in Ukraine ... further exposing them to risks of gender-based violence.” The organization also warned that older women and women with disabilities represent a significant majority of vulnerable civilians in frontline areas, and that both are more likely to be left alone, which often makes them especially vulnerable. As a result, the UNFPA concluded that different forms of gender-based violence have been significantly increasing.
A Fear of Sexual Violence
Children are legally protected in armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, with a series of rules granting them special protections. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating 23 cases of child victims of conflict-related sexual abuse, out of a total 396 reported cases of sexual violence by Russian troops. These numbers, however, are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and do not reflect the full reality of the sexual abuse that has been committed against children.
Alla Sobchuk, a 42-year old woman from Kherson, tells me she was unlawfully detained with her then 11-year old daughter, Viktoriia, when the city was occupied in 2022. She says they were driving through a checkpoint set up by the Russian military, who tried to force her to remove her window tint.
“I said no and they threatened to shoot me,” she says. “They handcuffed me, beat me, put zip ties on my wrists, and sprayed me with tear gas.” All of this, she adds, happened in front of her daughter.
Alla next to a sign that reads, "Ukraine will win." (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
The pair was then taken to a former police station, occupied by what seemed to be Russian police, she says. Viktoriia watched as Russian officers hit her mother and tore her dress apart.
“We are both very afraid of sexual violence,” Alla says, “and very afraid they would assault us.” (She adds that “luckily,” the Russian forces “only” used physical violence.)
Viktoriia was taken to a separate office, where the soldiers interrogated her. One of them threatened to send her to a boarding school and Alla to prison, before threatening Alla directly, as well. “He hit me in the face because I demanded my child be returned,” Alla says. They were both held at the police station in separate offices for nearly 24 hours. The next day, they were freed.
After they were released, Alla says, Viktoriia was very frightened—but relieved to see her mother again. “I supported her by telling her she was a hero, and even adults could not endure the [abuse] by occupation forces the way she did.”
Viktoriia next to a sign that reads "Kherson is Ukraine!!!" (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
This kind of exposure to violence—sexual and otherwise—is prevalent in captivity, especially in cases where children and teenagers are held for longer periods of time. But as more cases emerge involving Ukrainian children, particularly those detained in Russia, humanitarian organizations—and victims’ families—are warning of another deeply disturbing reality: evidence of severe physical and sexual violence inflicted on children themselves. Mariam Lambert, the co-founder of Emile Foundation, an organization that helps bring Ukrainian children abducted to Russia back to Ukraine, shared one recent case involving a family reunited after years of separation. “One of the children, a six-year-old girl, had previously been identified on a Russian adoption database,” Lambert says. “After her return home, evidence emerged indicating that she had been exposed to violent sexual abuse while in Russian-controlled custody.”
Lambert also confirms that similar incidents point to a broader pattern of abuse, disappearance, forced separation, and exploitation of vulnerable children caught inside a system operating without transparency or accountability. “The world still does not fully understand what some of these children have endured,” she concludes.
Hundreds of Methods of Torture
The sexual abuse committed as a weapon of war by the Russian forces remains just one method of brutal torture used against imprisoned civilians and other prisoners of war. Lyubov Smachylo, the Head of the Analytical Department at Media Initiative for Human Rights Ukraine, an NGO that has carried out comprehensive investigations and in-depth interviews with detained civilians, says she and her colleagues have been able to document patterns and connections between violations of civilians’ rights in different locations and at different times, which indicates that such violations “are not isolated incidents and may qualify as war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity.” Today, the organization is aware of at least 2,495 civilians held in unlawful captivity across 240 locations.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted as part of the organization’s research, in 87% cases of torture, Russian forces subjected victims to severe beatings, using their hands, feet, sticks, clubs, belts, hammers, or other improvised equipment. Of the 54 torture victims identified, 34 were also subjected to electric shocks. The evidence also suggests that Russian forces have used sexual and gender-based violence against both male and female detainees.
On May 22, 2026, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, reported that Russia has used 695 different forms of torture, including physical and psychological abuse, as well as sexual violence, in the war so far." Prisoners of war are strangled, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, set upon by dogs and sometimes forced to stand in one place for up to 18 hours; as soon as you start to squat, you are immediately physically beaten,” he said. He said that Russia has already tortured 406 Ukrainian captives to death.
This torture and abuse is perpetrated unlawfully and indiscriminately. The stories described above are a reminder that such horrors have not spared anyone—not even the elderly, not even the children. But reporting for months on sexual abuse across Ukraine, it has become clear to me that numerous survivors do not want their accounts to remain buried in shame. Nearly all of the women I spoke to longed to have their stories told and shared with the world—showing global readers that such unbearable, widespread abuse continues, and none of its perpetrators have been brought to justice for their crimes.
[post_title] => "All the Horrors Imaginable"
[post_excerpt] => Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse. These are just a few of their stories.
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How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.
A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.
“Azadi!” she called.
“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.
Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.
~
Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.
This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.
Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.
Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.
From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.
In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.
~
Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.
While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.
Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.
As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.
And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.
~
For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.
It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.
If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.
~
Call and Response:
Hum kya chahte?Azadi! What do we want? Freedom!
Chheen ke lenge—Azadi! We will snatch it—Freedom!
Hai haq hamara—Azadi! It is our right—Freedom!
Zor se bolo—Azadi! Say it louder—Freedom!
Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi! We love it more than life—Freedom!
Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi! Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!
[post_title] => America Needs Azadi
[post_excerpt] => How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.
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Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.
One summer day in 2022, Varvara, an autistic 6-year-old girl from Ukraine, approached her mother Oksana while she was on the phone with the police. Oksana, now 39, was inquiring about her husband Maksim, a Ukrainian soldier who had been reported dead, but whose body still hadn’t been found.
“Mom,” Varvara said, “I know that dad is already in heaven.” She pointed toward the sky.
It was at this moment that Oksana realized her daughter was not like other children. “Varvara somehow understood that her father had been killed while he was defending Kharkiv from the Russian troops,” Oksana says, tears streaming down her face. “I never told her the truth; she only knew that her daddy moved to a faraway place… But she understands everything.”
Like Oksana, thousands of mothers in Ukraine are raising their children alone as a direct result of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Although the number of war widows has not officially been confirmed by Ukrainian authorities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement last February that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in 2022. As the fighting continues, it is mostly women who care for the country’s children. Some of these women live on the frontlines and use their own bodies to shield their toddlers from Russian attacks. Others have to safeguard children and teenagers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, developed after witnessing and experiencing atrocities during the war. Others, like Oksana, have to take care of children in increasingly difficult circumstances, managing their households and earning a living while grieving for their dead husbands, or else worrying about those alive but still fighting.
Disabled children are particularly vulnerable during war, in part because they are unable to access the same resources normally available for their ensured safety and care. On the frontline or under Russian occupation, that means that they might not have access to a hospital or needed medications, let alone specialists or therapy, as deteriorating mental health is a widespread issue in war-torn countries. Beyond that, being in the epicenter of the fighting makes children more vulnerable to PTSD and shock, as well as to physical injuries, which can further impact their mental state.
According to UN Women, of the 14.6 million people needing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine in 2024, 8 million were women—many of them single mothers, the elderly, or victims of gender-based violence. A large number of these women take care of children and loved ones with disabilities. The Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development reports that over 3 million persons with disabilities currently live in Ukraine—but this estimate almost definitely falls short of the actual numbers, and will likely continue to increase due to war-related injuries.
Of those, 1.8 million people with disabilities are already in need of humanitarian aid because of the war, a number that will also likely only increase. But where resources have fallen short, mothers across the country have singlehandedly done everything in their power to fill the gap.
Defending Ukraine Since Day One
The city of Kharkiv, where Oksana and Varvara live, was among the first to be invaded by Russian troops following the start of the war on February 24, 2022, in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called “a special military operation.” To this day, Kharkiv remains one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine, and is regularly hit by both airstrikes and artillery.
“My husband, who has been in the Ukrainian army since 2015, told me he was going to fight immediately after Kharkiv was invaded,” Oksana says. She was left alone with their two daughters: Varvara, now nine, and Sofiia, 17. Her husband Maksim never came back; and even after he was confirmed dead, Oksana shares, it took ten months to find his body.
“It was hell,” Oksana tells me. “I am still taking antidepressants.”
Varvara, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum at the age of three, has also become increasingly fearful as the war has unfolded. “Whenever she sees dead or injured persons, she says in her own words: ‘A bad boy has been shooting,’” Oksana says. Still, she says it has been difficult for them both. “Whenever the sirens sound, Varvara is extremely stressed—much more than a [neurotypical] child. She experiences panic several times a day.”
Oksana and her daughters, Varvara (top) and Sofiia (right). (Photo courtesy of Oksana.)
Luckily, Varvara is sociable and likes going to school, which is often her only source of joy—and a great source of comfort for her mother. In the suburbs of Kharkiv, Varvara attends classes at a specialized institution, where a local humanitarian organization recently built a bomb shelter specially tailored for children with disabilities, with heating, restrooms, and a library. Disabled children like Varvara—who are extremely afraid of air raids—can spend their entire days there peacefully.
Alyona Budagovska, a communication officer for People in Need, the NGO that constructed the bunker, tells The Conversationalist that families with disabled children in Ukraine face extraordinary challenges. For example, many parents cannot carry their children to safety during air raids, and standard public shelters are often inaccessible or too far away. In some cases, children are left behind out of fear or desperation, including children who are bed-bound or too heavy to be carried.
“In the context of war, children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable, yet often the most overlooked. Many of them attend specialized schools that lack the most basic protection against missile attacks,” Budagovska says. “Building shelters in [these] schools is about more than concrete walls—it’s about dignity and inclusion.”
Oksana feels relieved that her daughter likes school, and that her two daughters get along well. Yet, she says, it is still difficult being left without her husband, who she says knew Varvara best. “My daughters love each other very much and that makes me happy, but it doesn’t replace my husband,” she says. While her loving family is a source of resilience, both she and her daughters continue to be affected by grief.
Mothers On the Frontline
Oksana’s experience is far from singular. In frontline towns and villages across Ukraine, thousands of single mothers also raise their children without any support, despite the incredible risks. According to UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, there are currently 1.9 million children in need inside the country. But prior to the war, Ukraine already had one of the highest rates of child institutionalization in the world, and the highest in Europe. Of these children, UNICEF reports nearly half of them were disabled. Now, the agency reports that 16 children are killed or injured in Ukraine on average every week.
Denys, a 7-year old boy from the Kherson region, is one of the survivors of such frontline attacks—together with his mother, Iuliia, 25, who also suffers from heavy injuries. Both of them were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are overcoming psychological hardships, facing the challenge of healing both physically and mentally in the aftermath of their attack.
In late April, I meet them in their home village only a few miles away from Kherson, currently the most dangerous city in Ukraine. Upon entering their home, I learn that a Russian drone has shattered a local house just three hours before my arrival. These FPV (first person view) drone attacks and artillery strikes continue on a daily basis—and can be heard as I conduct interviews.
Iuliia is still in shock after the morning attack, and cries relentlessly during our conversation, while Denys is silent, hiding in another room.
“My husband died on the frontline in Kherson shortly after the war broke out,” Iuliia says. “Up until that point, we lived just like everyone else: We had jobs, we worked on a farm, we had our daily worries… Then, everything turned upside down.”
Iuliia and her son, still grieving their loss, had continued living in the destroyed village, even as artillery strikes became more and more frequent. But one night, everything changed.
She and Denys were sleeping in their house—each in a different room—when they awoke to a loud sound. Then, came the shock and the chaos: a Russian missile had hit their home, reducing it to ruins.
Iuliia and her son were lucky in their misfortune: They both survived, but suffered severe concussions, head trauma, and PTSD. Iuliia, who was closer to the explosion, also sustained skin wounds and severe damage to her inner ear.
“The ambulance immediately took us to the nearest hospital,” Iuliia recalls, shuddering at the memory. “We spent several days there. They gave us injections, syrups, medicines, and we underwent various procedures.”
Once Iuliia and Denys were released from the hospital, they also needed to find a safe place to stay. “Our house has been turned into ruins; there is no roof, and the walls are broken,” she tells me. “I literally had to go back and dig out some of our basic personal belongings from the [rubble].”
The pair decided to live, temporarily, with Iuliia’s sister. But their first night there quickly turned into a nightmare. “As we were falling asleep, a rocket hit the property right next to my sister’s house, with shrapnel hitting our walls,” Iuliia tells me, crying. Following that night, she says she suffered a breakdown.
“If I could somehow force myself to function before [the second attack], I really can’t now,” Iuliia tells me. “I have severe PTSD and need to rest and consult a psychologist. I am constantly short of breath, my hands are shaking, my vision is going black.”
But Iuliia tells me she has no savings, and nowhere to go. While Denys is sometimes cared for by their family and friends in the village, she says she has lost hope for a better future. She still suffers from earaches, tinnitus, dizziness, hypervigilance, flashbacks, and frequent blackouts. Denys, she says, is seeing several doctors and a therapist, and is in need of rehabilitation. While he is healing well from his physical injuries, there are multiple layers of trauma that he needs to talk through with a psychologist, especially due to his young age: losing his father as a toddler; losing his home in a bombardment; witnessing his mother and family members injured and suffering.
Iuliia cries whenever she talks about her son. “Denys is everything to me,” she says. “Children heal faster from some wounds; he recovered from his concussion faster than I did. At age seven, he is stronger than I am at 25.” Like many other mothers in Ukraine, she is facing the impossible challenge of remaining calm and composed in front of her child, despite facing deep physical and psychological wounds herself. But taking care of an injured child while suffering from PTSD and her own injuries, in a village hit by drones every day, is one of the most difficult things she has ever had to endure. Her only recourse, she says, has been to reach out to the very few humanitarian NGOs operating where she lives.
Giles Duley, the UN Global Advocate for Persons with Disability in Conflict and CEO of Legacy of War Foundation, which provides aid to people on the frontlines, tells me that in conflict, the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society are often forgotten or ignored. “The elderly, single parent families, and those living with disability are at far higher risk from collapsing healthcare systems, displacement, and lack of social services—in Ukraine we have seen those with disabilities unable to evacuate frontline areas; vital medical facilities targeted by Russian [forces]; and vulnerable communities left without healthcare,” he says.
“The war has also exacerbated previously existing inequalities, with disproportionate effects on older women and single mothers,” he adds.
Surviving Occupation with a Disability
Olena, 54, has felt the weight of this inequality as a single mother to a disabled child. She and her son, Misha, 12, come from Mykhailo-Laryne, a small village near Mykolaiv in the south of Ukraine that was occupied between late February and November in 2022. Her ex-husband, Misha’s father, lives in a different town, and is unable to help support their child financially, in part because of the distance, and in part because of the war.
Olena’s son Misha has an intellectual disability, and she believes he is likely also on the autism spectrum—but she has been unable to take him to a psychiatrist since the war broke out. Traveling, even to neighboring Mykolaiv, is too expensive for her, and while their village was occupied, it was “absolutely unthinkable,” she says.
Olena and her son, Misha. (Photo courtesy of Sara Cincurova.)
Olena currently works as a school assistant for a disabled girl at a local school—but with her single salary and prices skyrocketing since the outbreak of the war, she frequently struggles to buy food, she says. As a school assistant, she earns approximately $88 USD a month at most—but her salary is often cut down significantly, as it largely depends on the number of hours she works per week.
Apart from this severe financial hardship, what Olena suffers from the most is when she sees the inhabitants of her village mock and hurt her Misha, who is her only child.
“People have this narrow-minded mentality in our village… They often used to make fun of Misha, calling him [slurs],” Olena says with pain in her eyes. But Misha is a talented and sensitive boy, she adds. “He is kind, curious, and a patriot. He loves cooking, he is always cheerful.”
Olena is currently receiving humanitarian aid from a local NGO, Voices of Children. The organization works with a wide range of children—including those with disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. Olha Yerokhina, a Communication Manager for the organization, tells me that whenever a family with a neurodivergent child asks for help, “We listen, we try to understand the need, and even if we can’t provide specialized support in-house, we do our best to refer [the family] to trusted professionals or partner organizations.”
The NGO also supports Ukrainian mothers just like Olena. “[Mothers] are often overwhelmed and left to navigate [the] complex reality alone,” Yerokhina says.
At the end of the interview, Olena recalls the one—and perhaps only—positive aspect that the war has had on her and her son. “People are now more accepting of Misha’s disability,” she says. “During the occupation, many have reconsidered their values and their priorities.”
“They now make less fun of Misha and accept he is a human being, and treat him with more love.”
[post_title] => Motherhood on the Frontlines
[post_excerpt] => Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.
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It begins with a panicked message on Bluesky in October 2024. Someone is messaging me with a link to a fundraiser and stilted English that reads as though it came from a bad translation app. The picture on her GoFundMe shows a young woman with a pale face and shocking green eyes.
It’s been seven months since the borders of Gaza were sealed. She says she is in Zeitoun, a pocket of north Gaza under siege. I respond in colloquial Arabic, to see if this person can even speak the language, to see if she is real. I ask her for a WhatsApp number. She gives me one. It starts with +972.
She is real. Her name is Hayat. She, along with her husband and children, did not flee south as the siege on north Gaza tightened. Where to go? she says.
Hayat is pregnant. Eventually she will give birth—by c-section, without anesthesia—to a little girl with blue-green eyes as brilliant as her own. She names her Fatima. Now, I have a namesake in Gaza.
I meet Mohamed next. A farmer and a teacher, he has lost his sheep and rabbits, but even living in al-Mawasi refugee camp, he persists in growing plants and crops in a little garden by his shelter so there may be something fresh to eat amid the siege. Al-Mawasi, a cruelly named “safe zone,” has witnessed regular attacks and bombardments since Mohamed arrived there in March 2024.
This same siege today, almost three months since all aid to Gaza has been cut off, has driven people to famine. The cost of flour, if you can find it, careens wildly, swinging from an already farcical $100 USD to an impossible $700 USD. The bread bakeries have shut down. The World Central Kitchen says its warehouses are bare. Children have been dying of malnutrition and under bombs all at once, like fish in an increasingly shrinking barrel. To quote a DC pundit, “The war in Gaza is not really that different than other wars.” A beat. “Well, except I guess they can’t run away.”
My keeping a bunny as a pet amuses Mohamed. One day, he shares a story about missing his animals, and a farmer in Texas donates $500 to his fundraising campaign. Mohamed is saving every penny for his eventual evacuation from Gaza, now a distant hope. Meanwhile, the cost to survive continues its inhumane inflationary spiral. Funds meant for escape are now hoarded for food, any food, which is becoming harder and harder to find.
After Hayat and Mohamed, I meet Obada. Obada is a lawyer with three children. He considers his youngest, Zain, a gift from God, as his other two children required medical intervention to exist. Zain did not. On Eid, Obada shares a photo of Zain in his little white thobe, a dignified and serious garment for adults that is adorable on a baby.
The calls for help swirl thick and fast—other families realize they can build lifelines beyond the walls of Gaza, that someone, anyone, is willing to hear out their agony. There are Naser and Amal, with their children Rolan and Omar. Naser currently lies in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals with a breathing obstruction, and needs surgery. I try to help them a little. Rolan sends me a thank you photo: a young girl of seven, sitting on a pile of rubble against a blue sky, holding a sign that reads, “My love for you (heart) Fatima Ayub.”
Before Israel sealed the Rafah crossing with Egypt in March 2024, it cost $5000 USD per adult, and $2500 USD per child, to organize an evacuation from Gaza. Those figures, as extortionate as they were, are meaningless now. No one can leave, and if they do, it will be as part of the deliberate depopulation of the strip. Yet, as my friends in Gaza keep telling me, nothing is left. Virtually no school, clinic, hospital, or mosque in Gaza has been left standing. Gaza has been bombed more heavily than London, Dresden, and Hamburg in World War II, combined. Children keep arriving in the few remaining hospitals with bullets in their heads.
I meet multiple Ahmads. There is Original Ahmad, who braved the migration boat passage under Israeli gunfire to escape Gaza to Europe—but is distraught because his mother and the rest of his family are still in the north. There’s Child Ahmad, who returned to Gaza to marry his lifelong sweetheart Samar, and was trapped when the war came. There’s Other Ahmed, whose siblings are all frantically trying to survive in a tent. Then, comes Another Ahmad, who shares a photo of himself in the rain, barefoot with already too-thin legs.
There is Suad, who is only 24, and mother to a little boy, Omar. She’s taken to calling me mom, having lost her own mother before the war. I have no maternal experience, but try to hear her story. Among the most common injuries in Gaza unrelated to war wounds are burns—made worse by so many people cooking on unsafe, open fires. She shows me a bad burn that needs medical treatment. Her little boy has broken his leg, an ordinary childhood tragedy compounded infinitely by the horror.
I meet Malak and Maali, who are sisters. Maali is disabled and needs a new wheelchair and special care. Malak labors hard on an unwelcome internet and on an unforgiving planet to help her sister retain her life and dignity.
Then comes Majd, 17, only just a child himself. Still, he shoulders the responsibility of trying to help his sisters and mother survive. He feels he has no choice.
Moataz is a shy and kind young man whose beloved father is ailing from kidney disease. Moataz doesn’t understand online fundraising, doesn’t understand social media, doesn’t understand this bizarre dystopia where he talks to a woman on the other side of the planet to try and outmaneuver a siege of biblical proportions.
Rumors circulate in the aftermath of hostage Edan Alexander’s release that food aid will be permitted to enter Gaza. So far, these are only rumors. The siege grinds on. The ground invasion begins in earnest. An Israeli MK tells the world, “Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed. And the question you asked me just now had nothing to do with Gaza. Do you know why? Because it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world.”
Does anyone care? Does caring matter?
Hayat, too, has burned herself. She tells me a pack of diapers for baby Fatima costs $70.
Still, no aid comes.
Obada sends me photos of his dear friend, killed just last night with his wife and baby daughter. “My heart hurts, Fatima,” he tells me. “With his baby in his arms. He was only married a year.”
Still, no aid comes.
A friend asks me if I can help Hanadi, a still-young woman with eight children. I give what I can.
Still, no aid comes.
Even good news comes tainted. Naser is out of the hospital, but now, his neighborhood in Khan Younis is under evacuation orders following the latest assault. He decides not to evacuate. “I’m tired,” he tells me. “Rolan came to me crying asking why we are staying when everyone else is fleeing. It cut my heart.”
Child Ahmad, meanwhile, is fleeing, also pushed into al-Mawasi. He says he will not be online so much. When I do not hear from him for a day, I worry. I think of the al-Hol concentration camp for some 55,000 wives and children of ISIS fighters in Syria.
The US undertakes a farcical “aid delivery attempt,” under the eye of mercenaries who take selfies against a backdrop of starving Palestinians. The effort is about as successful as the floating pier to deliver aid that sank into the sea, a perfect grotesque metaphor, almost as perfect as letting children die while hundreds of thousands of tons of food rots within sight.
Now that the ghastly end game for Gaza has been laid bare, this is what we—the Western world—have done to the Palestinians. When will it end? my friends ask me. How much more can we be expected to take? they ask. Until when? they ask.
It is May 28, 2025. I have no answers for anyone.
—
If readers wish to help any of these or other families trying to survive in Gaza, they may contact the author on Signal at fatimaayub.01 or by email at fsayub@gmail.com.
[post_title] => To Live and Die in Gaza
[post_excerpt] => Stories from my friends still trying to survive.
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There was a time when people would ask, "Do Israelis and Palestinians hate each other?" and I would say "no." Then, the walls came up. Now, that time is increasingly hard to imagine, even in memory.
As a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank and would frequently return to visit, I vividly recall the first time I witnessed the walls rising in the early 2000s along a road to Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem. I thought: Why did the Israelis do this? Why has it been erected with such disregard for the communities living behind it? I understood, even then, that this division would only tear neighbors apart, and more alarmingly, further separate "enemies" from one another.
In just a few years, the walls would stretch over 400 miles, dividing the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel. These walls and fences, which Israelis called the separation barrier, would not just be physical barriers, but the hardening and entrenchments of dueling positions in this conflict. They still stand today: In some stretches, the walls are made of concrete and 30 feet high.
What Palestinians call Al Jidar—Arabic for "the Wall," connoting "the Apartheid Wall"—was, according to Israelis, mainly erected to prevent suicide bombings and violent attacks, which were accelerating at a rate they alleged left them with very few options. In 2002, during its construction, Human Rights Watch reported that "more than 415 Israeli and other civilians have been killed, and more than two thousand injured, as a result of attacks by armed Palestinians between September 30, 2000 and August 31, 2002,” with most of the harm “caused by so-called suicide bombings.”
But while I could understand the horror and the pain and the fear these attacks had caused, I could never understand how the wall was the solution.
A child of the occupation
As a child, I discovered a fear that would forever shape my understanding of the military occupation.
I have seen soldiers for longer than I can remember, but through childhood eyes, they’d always seemed friendly. One night, however, that changed.
I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I demanded that I be allowed to mop the store floor in my small town in the West Bank. It was a sign of growing up, and behaving as I saw the adults around me do—working, tidying, driving, living. While I was mopping, a group of soldiers came into the store to buy some things. I remember being unable to control the joy I felt, performing this adult chore, while trying to control the mop, which was three times my size. I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, until I accidentally hit one of the soldiers with the mop’s handle.
When I looked up, I saw something I’d never seen before—the soldier's hand on the trigger of a very long weapon and, oddly, his bared teeth. I still remember these teeth without a face, and how they scared me as much as the trigger on his weapon. I knew I’d made a mistake—and that night, I learned how easily a mistake could cost me my life.
I’d finally met my "master," and understood the divide between "us" and "them."
The "solution" that created the "monsters"
After the wall, this divide grew bigger. For Palestinians, the wall separated us from life. It turned our cities and towns into cages, where the sky above us was the only place outside that felt within reach.
Solutions to this conflict were never going to be easy, if ever achieved. Yet the wall allowed both Israel and the international community to sidestep its complexity, disregarding the future of both Palestinians and Israelis alike. It decreased all human interaction with the “other side,” regardless of which side of the wall you stood. It was not a solution at all, but the deference or maybe even the ignorance of one. It was also a boiling pot: I say this because I saw it, and I felt it, and I lived it.
The wall disconnected me from both friends and "enemies," but in time, I was no longer interested in seeing either. It isolated all of us and confined us to our own causes and anger, not caring for how the "other" felt. After all, I could only feel my anger when standing at a checkpoint. I could only feel my hatred when looking at the wall in front of me. I could only feel my outrage that my freedom to move was restricted by a permit, which I was required to obtain whenever I wished to leave, and that it was something I needed to be deemed “acceptable” to acquire.
For some Palestinians, receiving this permit may have brought joy, because they felt like the "lucky" ones. But for me, I often felt better just going about my life, refusing to get one, because living inside the wall felt more dignified than seeking permission to leave it.
I did not always prioritize my dignity in this conflict. I looked for friendships and ways to enjoy life despite the violence and the vitriol that surrounded me. But eventually, all these constant humiliations chipped away at me. Chipped away at the hope and joys I sought—all the things available to most human beings, but not to me. It offered me no choice but to instead look at what I did not have: my freedom, my rights, even my will to love, something I cannot have when I am stripped every day of everything that is mine.
The wall did this. And I wondered as I wonder now, when people are unable to meet freely, is our only alternative more war and more killing?
Before the wall
There was a time when American-Palestinians from the West Bank could drive what we called a "yellow tag" car, which felt like the height of "privilege," because it meant you could drive freely in the West Bank and Israel. At the time, if you had one of these cars, it felt as if all you had to do was drive by the checkpoint and get waived through, most times without your ID even being checked. (Over the years—just like the ever-changing restrictions—civilian cars with a Palestinian tag couldn’t enter Israel and most parts of Jerusalem. Those rules continue to change even now, depending on the political climate.)
I drove a car like this once to go and meet with a friend for a swim in Tiberias, an Israeli town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Just writing this seems absurd in the year 2024. But it did happen often once, and not just for me, but for others, as well—although for Palestinians with limited "privilege" today who have an Israeli residence or hold an Israeli passport, it can still be a daily occurrence should they wish, because those people are considered "outside" the wall.
When driving back from my trip, I had to pass another checkpoint when leaving Tiberias. While I have an American passport, I also hold a West Bank ID, which placed restrictions on what car I could drive at the time. The restrictions had recently become stricter, and technically, I was not allowed to drive the "yellow tag" car I was driving.
I was nervous, but as I passed the checkpoint, the soldiers mistook me for Israeli. They asked me a question in Hebrew that I did not fully understand, and I said "yes." I thought they were asking if I was from Jerusalem, which would have allowed me to drive that car, and hoping they’d let me pass, I lied.
Seconds later, three soldiers entered my vehicle. Afraid of being caught violating the law, I just smiled and started driving. I soon realized that the soldiers wanted to hitch a ride to Jerusalem, something that might have allowed me to get away with my transgression, except I wasn’t going to Jerusalem, but home to a village in the West Bank. Not knowing what to say or do, I kept driving.
Amidst my panic driving along the winding road that night, one of the soldiers asked, "You came from America?" I said that I had. Then, he asked, "How come your parents didn’t teach you Hebrew?"
I knew this was the moment I should tell them I am Palestinian, so I replied, "Because my parents taught me Arabic."
After, it felt as if the world stopped turning and it was just me and the soldiers in the car. We were silent for a long time. My face turned hot, so hot I can still feel it all these years later. I could feel the soldiers were tense, too.
I’d made a mistake not confessing that I was not authorized to drive that vehicle and they’d made a mistake not vetting me at that checkpoint. In any other context, this might have been a moment of silent honor amongst harmless lawbreakers, but instead, it felt like a dangerous mess for us all.
For their safety, those soldiers should not have been in my car. For my safety, I should not have let them in.
"So, what are we going to do?" I asked after another long pause. "I cannot drive you to Jerusalem because I am almost out of gas and we must go through a checkpoint, and I cannot leave you on the side of the road just anywhere." We started strategizing when and where I could drop them off that was familiar to them, but was also somewhere I could go unnoticed. Eventually, we chose a place and parted ways, and never saw each other again.
This incident would not play out the same today—or maybe, more accurately, after the walls went up, it couldn’t: I’d see them differently now, and they’d see me differently, too.
You cannot contain hate
The wall did not just create a cage for "us." Israelis were also not free; instead, they were caged in fear.
You see, I am a person who is "occupied." I grew up understanding "they" rule me, and my rulers will kill "us" if we dare to rise and demand our freedom, the right of every human being on this earth. A right that is not to be granted or given. A right that we are born with and that belongs to us. Both of us also have a right to not live in fear. Yet it is their fear which is why we are made to stand, stripped of everything, in front of an enemy with an arsenal of weapons with which to annihilate us.
Killing, however, is not a right—not for "them" or for "us." As societies, we find different ways to justify it, support it, and, at times, speak proudly of it. Yet when we do so, we all lose, because there is no pride in killing. There is, I believe, no justification for taking a human life. And nothing can exonerate us from our complicity when we support it, even when it’s in service of pursuing our freedom.
When I was still a young aspiring documentary filmmaker, I remember once having to ride on an Israeli bus. As a Palestinian, I had no permit, and I remember being grateful I was still able to board, but was unprepared for how I felt throughout the ride.
I felt fear! What if there was a suicide bomber on this bus? One of my people, I remember thinking. Filled with anxiety, I surveyed every person who got on the bus at every stop, worried if "this person" could be the one. And in that moment, I understood there was no human difference between the fear Israelis must experience and my own.
But I also wondered if they would ever understand that, too. When I felt "their fear," I also wished they could know mine, and how we, the Palestinians, feared "them"—their cruelty, their disproportionate response to "our" attacks. Their collective punishment without mercy against the people inside the wall.
Witnessing horror in the making
As time passed, I grew accustomed to the wall's presence, and it became acceptable to see it everywhere without staring at or questioning it for too long. But the anger remained, an anger that is difficult to understand for those who have not lived on the "other" side of it.
Visitors saw the wall as an "ugly" thing, a sign of injustice, at most. But they were not witnesses to what has happened to the people for whom this wall represents the circumference of their existence. We were not living—just existing. Constantly adjusting to everything, from restrictions to violations, because we had no choice.
The years have gone by, and like many, I’ve seen less hope and more hate every year, with no way to correct it. My privilege as an American-Palestinian has allowed me to see the severity of these changes with each visit: the deteriorating living conditions, the increased restrictions, the endless violence, almost always without consequence.
But I have also observed something far sadder and more terrifying: a generation growing up without seeing their "enemy" as human.
You see, I am of a different generation. A generation that grew up under occupation and was constantly reminded that I had a "ruler." But before the wall, no matter how I felt about the occupation and my oppression, I could still see the people who "ruled" me; I could still see their humanity, because I could still see their faces.
Now, the wall has made the "enemy" soulless and faceless. And I wonder, on the other side of the wall, is there also a generation that fears their enemy and thinks of us as non-human, too? As people who not only do not belong to this world, but who also wish to cause them harm—to kill them?
I pictured a generation of people on either side, fighting an enemy they’ll never know, and I worried about what would happen when the walls come down, because walls always do. It’s because of this, when the time came, and people would ask me, "Do they hate each other?" My answer became, "Yes, they do."
The children of the wall
October 7, 2023 happened over two decades after the walls were built. To this day, I do not want to watch the videos that were plastered on every television screen. It is the nightmare I imagined, but even worse, because it was real. In the aftermath, many people—the media, acquaintances, colleagues—called the Palestinians who did it "monsters." Then, we saw the other "monsters" emerge, the Israelis.
On October 7, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel, including about 800 civilians, 346 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, and 66 police officers, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands were also injured in the attack and about 250 men, women, and children were abducted.
Since then, Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, with more than half of them women and children. Gaza has become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,” according to a UN official. Entire bloodlines have been erased. The videos that have emerged have been equally unbearable to watch as those from October 7: As ABC reported, "in many pictures and videos that have circulated since the conflict began… IDF soldiers are seen blowing up buildings in Gaza while in combat, waving women’s underwear like flags and rifling through the possessions of Gazans with gleeful expressions."
Many families of the Israeli hostages who were not released or rescued are still waiting on their loved ones to come home, dead or alive; while thousands of unidentified Palestinian children are either buried under the rubble in Gaza or have been left orphaned and injured and starving. Mass graves are only a sign of the times for the people in Gaza: Their "open-air prison" is now a graveyard.
Many may uphold that staying in Gaza is a heroic honor—and it absolutely is. But when there is no choice but to stay, we cannot call it a choice at all. Those still alive in Gaza continue to have nowhere to go, their right to move and live freely taken from them. The children, especially, deserve to grow up and decide their position on a war they did not choose to be a part of. But we have robbed them of that. We are spectators with a cause: We count the dead but look away from the living. The Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian fighters, even Hamas—all of them chose to fight in this war. The children did not.
Are we comfortable with Gaza’s children dying for "our" cause? I am not. But there are no winners in war: What good is winning when the land is drenched in blood?
So, who is the monster?
Neither of us were created to suffer. It is not our destiny, or theirs. While I’m not a peace activist, I did—and still do—believe that the only way through this conflict is to be seen, to be heard, and to share without hate and fear. But we can only do that by opening ourselves to the idea of peace, to opening the doors for peace. Not by walling them up.
Like the Israelis soldiers in Gaza killing Palestinians, many of those who killed Israelis on October 7 are from "behind the wall." The same wall that taught them that neither of them is human, that the people on the other side are objects to destroy, to seek revenge from, and to win against, no matter the cost. It’s a matter of perspective.
But I do not believe it is only the people who pulled the trigger who are to blame. To me, all who were silent when the walls came up, who witnessed human rights violations increase every year, who watched two generations living side by side while growing to hate and fear one another—they are to blame.
All of us, then, are to blame.
Every educator, every media personality, every politician, every international leader who did not speak loudly and demanded solutions. Every person who only chose to look after it was too late. All of us are complicit in the death of every child and civilian in Gaza, and Jerusalem, and the occupied West Bank, for the death of every person and child on October 7, and for the fear every hostage and citizen feels in Gaza today. This misery was created by us all. The deadly airstrikes, the starvation, the inhumane conditions that people are living under, the unknown fate of the hostages—all of it was made and maintained by us. Whether consciously or not, through our complicity, through losing sight of our shared humanity, we have all become the monsters we most purport to fear. Because the truth is, when we choose to build walls, we are the ones making a monster out of the people on the other side—and a monster out of ourselves in the process.
We must all ask ourselves, then, if the right conditions were set, the right circumstances—would we become a monster, too? I don’t know that I can say “no” for certain; my privilege, relative though it may be, does not allow me to give definitive answers. I was born a Palestinian by chance, just as we all are born into our circumstances by chance. But maybe in another life, I, too, could have turned into the "monster" behind the wall in this one.
Why the Abraham Accords could not bring peace to the Middle East.
In its November/December 2023 issue, the political magazine Foreign Affairs published a longform essay titled “The Sources of American Power,” which posited that the United States needs to “lay a new foundation of American strength” in the Middle East “that protects its interests and values and advances the common good.” Written shortly before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 (but published after), the author argued that “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” thanks to the Biden administration’s responsible stewardship. This lapse of critical judgment might have been forgivable had its writer not been US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.1 But he was also not the only American official who had lulled himself into false security.
Since taking office, the Biden administration, with great fanfare, had chosen to double down on the Trump era’s diplomatic coup, the Abraham Accords, in hopes it would become the crown jewel of regional foreign policy: building a new Middle Eastern economic and security architecture between the Gulf and Israel that would successfully confront and contain their mutual regional antagonist, Iran.
The Abraham Accords’ sleight of hand was subverting the Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking paradigm in the process. Instead of normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Middle East in exchange for a Palestinian state, as was the guiding principle of negotiations since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, the 2020 Abraham Accords dropped the question of establishing a Palestinian state altogether, making instead vague allusions to peace. Its supporters didn’t seem to mind. In Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals, they believed the time was ripe to put aside “tedious” questions of protecting Palestinians or their unrealized sovereignty, and to instead focus on the much more tangible and lucrative questions of trade, defense cooperation, and intelligence-sharing, as well as upgraded strategic relationships with the United States.
In this respect, it worked. Through the Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan all signed up for normalization agreements with Israel, and a flurry of diplomatic, touristic, and commercial enterprises sprung up in their wake. Israelis partied in Dubai; Bahrainis headed to Tel Aviv. Defense and intelligence sharing accelerated. All the while, the Biden administration continued to pursue Trump’s ultimate goal of bringing Saudi Arabia into the normalized fold. Pundits in the US crowed about a new era of peace.
Today, conditions across the region could hardly be worse. Escalations and counter-escalations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen threaten to deepen the abyss of violence and suffering for civilians. A year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s attack killed over 1,300 Israelis. The attack was strategically timed, in part, to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization. In the months since, Israel has killed some 42,000 Palestinians. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what was Gaza. A hundred thousand Palestinians are wounded. Two million Gazans languish amid devastation under Israeli military occupation. The Israeli apartheid machine continues to destroy lives and cities apace in the West Bank. Palestinians confront ongoing Israeli settler violence under the full imprimatur of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Near 10,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without pretense of due process. Some 2,000 civilians are already dead in Lebanon just in the last week, as Israel launched yet another invasion to fight Hezbollah. Ninety-seven Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s custody in Gaza. The Red Sea has become a perilous commercial passage owing to Houthi attacks. And the prospect of a full-blown war between Israel and Iran grows ever more acute as Tehran executes another dramatic but fruitless missile barrage. No ceasefire is in sight on any front.
How did the Abraham Accords, heralded as a new paradigm for the Middle East, yield a total collapse of security and stability across the region? The answer lies in the deliberate effort of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foremost backer, the United States, to sustain Israel’s control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. American officials—Republican or Democrat—may be loath to acknowledge this reality, but the central conceit (and consequently the failure) of the Abraham Accords lay in imagining a world where Palestinians did not exist. The status quo, which seemed quiet enough to Mr. Sullivan, was, in reality, deeply toxic. Though US policy formally sustains the fiction of a two-state solution, the Abraham Accords in effect tried to bury the question of when—or whether—Palestinians should ever be free and see an independent state come to fruition.
The desperate charm offensive led by Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein to convince Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to accede to the Abraham Accords, dangling offers of a defense pact among other political inducements, has failed. Even authoritarians need to keep their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment—and in Arab states, establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel is deeply unpopular. Mohamed bin Salman has admitted the carnage in Gaza makes the prospect of normalization a political nonstarter in the Kingdom.
The Gulf states are now in an awkward position. On the one hand, states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had already been working steadily to stabilize relationships with Iran, despite overriding tensions for the past several years. At a strategic level, there’s a clear understanding that diplomatic exchanges can head off the worst types of violent confrontation. We see these ongoing efforts as Saudi Arabia and Iran attemptrapprochement: The Kingdom is unquestionably nervous about the threat on its southern border from a febrile and trigger-happy Houthi movement. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are equally pleased to see the destruction of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which they see as Islamist-Iranian proxies that pose a direct challenge to their visions of a consolidated Gulf hegemony in the Middle East.
Reports that American officials greenlighted the Israeli escalation against Hezbollah after the two sides had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire opens the prospect of a more dangerous phase to this transnational conflict, wherein the US and Israel take this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the security architecture of the Middle East. The risk is that Israel could continue pursuing “greater strategic objectives” in responding to Iran’s missile attack on October 1, and drawing in American support for what would be a cataclysmic war of regime change in Iran.
None of this is inevitable. It’s possible that the US will be able to convince Israel to deliver a calibrated military response to Iran’s latest attack, tamping down further escalation for a brief window of time. But it feels increasingly likely that the delicate balancing act between security actors in the region that has prevailed over the last decade is about to come crashing down in the face of Israel’s unabashed impunity in both Gaza and Lebanon. This is not just because Arab states are unwilling to undo their peace agreements with Israel (Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi underscored again last week that Arab nations stand ready to ensure Israel’s security), but because it is unlikely that Israel will ever permit the creation of a Palestinian state, and none will emerge short of an internationally-enforced partition of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The stark reality that Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi should grasp is that the fastest means to defanging the “Axis of Resistance” is the establishment of said Palestinian state. That state is not going to be the product of negotiations, if it ever comes. The occupation will end abruptly; there are no piecemeal negotiated solutions to apartheid. For the sake of his own political survival, Netanyahu will continue to foment chaos across the Middle East to retain power for as long as Washington allows him free rein. And in large part, the Abraham Accords are to blame. In saying the lives of Palestinians were less important than normalization, the brokers of the Abraham Accords helped embellish Israel’s fiction that it could sustain the status quo with Palestinians without friction or blowback. They were grievously wrong.
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[post_title] => Biblical Failure
[post_excerpt] => Why the Abraham Accords were never going to bring peace to the Middle East.
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Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott?
In the proxy war over fast food that’s now enveloping the Muslim world, it’s clear who took the first shot. But unlike the war that triggered it, who exactly is footing the bill is another matter.
In the early days of the War in Gaza, Israel’s McDonald’s franchisee, Alonyal Ltd, set off a tidal wave of controversy when it announced it would give free food to Israeli soldiers. In January, the Israeli franchisee behind Pizza Hut appeared to follow suit, when the Palestinian news source Quds News Network posted screenshots from Pizza Hut Israel’s Instagram account of smiling IDF soldiers holding stacks of pizza boxes which, according to the caption, Pizza Hut had given them for free.
Both Alonyal and Tabasco Holdings, the Israeli Pizza Hut franchisee, appear to have acted alone, without approval from the American companies that own their respective brands. But their decisions to give food to soldiers fighting perhaps the world’s most watched conflicts has led to serious global ramifications. As the news ricocheted around social media, regular McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC customers all over the world, but especially in predominantly Muslim countries, announced plans to boycott all three restaurants. (The KFC and Pizza Hut brands are both owned by the same company, Yum! Brands.)
Attempting to quell the outrage, McDonald’s Corporation, the US company that Alonyal paid to use the Golden Arches logo and menu, released statements insisting McDonald’s was politically neutral and had no ties to either side of the conflict. Soon after, McDonald’s franchisees from Turkey to Oman—all of them unrelated to Alonyal, except in their common relations to the McDonald’s brand—distanced themselves from Alonyal by issuing their own statements of support for the people of Gaza and pledging support for relief efforts in the region.
But for millions of customers, the presumed complicity of any business wearing the brand of a global fast food company was already a foregone conclusion. Either they did not grasp the fact that franchisees were independently owned, or they believed independent ownership did not absolve them from their Israeli counterpart’s choices. The fact that the United States government is the leading international sponsor of the IDF only added fuel to the flames: Regardless of ownership, customers still considered these brands to be inherently American. Franchisees in countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East and Asia soon reported massive drops in sales. In February, the McDonald’s Corporation announced it had missed sales estimates for the first time since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Boycott promoters on social media took declining sales as a clear sign they were hitting the intended target. “Let this be a lesson to any company that wants to continue supporting the Zionist entity,” a PhD student in Canada, who goes by the handle @palfolkore, said in a TikTok with over 14 thousand likes, posted the day McDonald’s released its sales figures. “Your stocks will drop. Your earnings will be hit … There is no amount of rebranding you can do to dissuade us … We know what you are. We know what your politics are.” (@palfolkore did not respond to a request for comment.) Their post was one of countless others celebrating the apparent victory, and the boycott continues to this day.
The conceptual simplicity of a boycott, and a fast food boycott in particular, has made it especially easy for activists to get behind: Fast food companies are huge, global, and, unlike arms manufacturers, whose connection to the war is as direct as it is obvious, they depend on money from the general public to keep going. But fast food, like globalization itself, does not easily lend itself to such a straightforward line of attack. Before taking aim at fast food, it helps to understand who’s actually behind it.
~
If you know something about how the fast food industry works, you’re probably familiar with the concept of franchising. It works like this: The fast food company, called the “franchisor,” gives a company or individual, the “franchisee,” the right to use its name, menu, and likeness in a given area. In exchange, the franchisee typically pays the franchisor an annual fee and gives it a cut of its revenue. During the industry’s early rise in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising gave companies like McDonald’s and Burger King a way to expand without staking their own capital. Instead of borrowing money themselves to build new restaurants, they could rely on people with their own savings and lines of credit to underwrite new operations. It would ultimately benefit customers, too: A person could walk into a McDonald’s in Portland, Maine and another three thousand miles away in San Diego, California and expect the same food and service, despite the fact that each was independently owned.
As the industry became larger and richer, the capital advantage of franchising became less important. Many companies backed off the practice, electing the more profitable route of opening their own restaurants. But overseas, franchising still proved critical to the industry’s expansion. First, franchisees knew their own regions more intimately than a large corporation, headquartered on another continent, ever could. Secondly, local ownership allowed the industry to blur the lines around its own national identity. Depending on the mood of its customers, McDonald’s or KFC could be an American brand, a local one, or some indistinct fusion of the two.
But almost as long as global fast food companies have maintained a presence outside the US, they’ve been the subject of political protest, and even political violence, as was the case in a series of attacks and bombings in Latin American countries, such as El Salvador and Peru, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and in majority Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Lebanon in the 2000s and the 2010s. In many cases, it was clear the activists, rebels, or terrorists who targeted a particular fast food outlet intended to make it a proxy for something bigger. Often, the United States was the primary target. Other times, it was globalization itself. In his book-length account of his travels in India, The Age of Kali, William Dalrymplerecounts how, on the 51st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1999, members of a farmers’ union in Bangalore trashed a KFC in the name of a “second freedom struggle” to stop “the invasion of India by multinationals.”
Drawing a line from India’s independence struggle to KFC may have been a stretch. But it made striking at a locally-owned fast food outlet easier to justify. After all, if multinational corporations were colonial powers, what were franchisees if not their collaborators?
~
A similar question hovers over the current wave of consumer action sweeping the Muslim world. If symbolism is the point, does it matter who among the multitude of people and institutions behind various international fast food brands takes the biggest hit during a boycott? Fast food corporations may be nebulous, but franchised restaurants are their real-world manifestations. They may be independently owned, but they are nothing if not closely affiliated with the corporations whose names they carry. Why not go after them?
We might see the current wave of boycotts as an attempt to apply that same logic on a massive scale. But the result has been that people are going after franchisees with no business in Israel at all. In August, Americana Group, a franchisee that owns more than 2,000 KFCs and other restaurants across the Middle East and Kazakhstan, reported a 40 percent loss in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2023. QSR Group, the leading KFC and Pizza Hut franchisee in Southeast Asia, temporarily closed over one hundred KFCs in Muslim-majority areas.
“Let’s give it up for Malaysia, everybody,” another TikToker going by the handle @anti__mia said of the news. “The Malaysians really know how to boycott.”
Yet the people most affected by these boycotts may not actually be protesters’ intended target: Neither Americana nor QSR Group has any business in Israel. In fact, the largest backers of both franchisees are agencies of governments that have taken positions against Israel. Americana Group’s largest investor is the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—a country which has never recognized Israel and has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. The controlling shareholder of QSR Brands is an investment company owned by the Malaysian state of Johor, and one of its largest minority shareholders is another government entity, a pension fund controlled by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance. The Malaysian government is so at odds with Israel that, last year, it adopted a boycott of its own, banning all Israeli ships from entering its ports.
Fast food ownership might be fuzzy by nature, but the effects of the current boycotts are quite vivid. Earlier this year, QSR Brands intended to put itself up on the local stock exchange, attracting more investors and likely bringing in additional money for the state-owned agencies that control it. But after closing stores and watching profits tumble, those plans are indefinitely on hold. Despite the avowedly pro-Palestinian position of the Malaysian government, to activists and Gaza-watchers on TikTok, the KFC name—and its American ties—speaks louder.
~
Back in Israel, McDonald’s has gone through an even more dramatic transition. In April, McDonald’s Corporation made the drastic choice to buy back all 225 of Alonyal’s restaurants for an undisclosed sum. Owning Israeli McDonald’s outright will expose the company to more risk, but it will also give the company more control, and the local stores more stability during a period of political upheaval. Boycott or not, the fast food industry finds a way.
Ownership also means McDonald’s Corporation gets to capture the profits for itself instead of sharing them with a local partner. Ironically, a boycott of Israeli stores now would do more harm to the US company’s bottom line than it did when the boycott began. Despite the protestations of its corporate masters, the fast food industry—like any global industry—is enmeshed in world politics, after all.
[post_title] => The Proxy Fast Food War
[post_excerpt] => Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott?
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A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
At the broad, gray steps of the entrance to the European Parliament in Brussels, a group of women circle around one in particular. Most are dressed in traditional Yazidi attire—long, white dresses with short lilac or black vests, and white headscarves—but the woman they’ve assembled around is dressed inconspicuously, her long, dark hair tied in a loose knot. Everybody knows who she is: Feleknas Uca, a long-time advocate for the rights of her Yazidi community. Looking at the women around her, she calls out their names one by one, handing each a badge. With these badges, the women will be able to enter the colossal building before them, where their voices are desperately needed inside. Uca has organized this gathering, a one-day conference, to demand justice for the Yazidi genocide, ten years ago this August.
"Yazidis need to be able to protect themselves,” she says.
Those who remember the Yazidi genocide, which started on August 3, 2014, likely recall the haunting footage of Iraqi and US helicopters throwing water and food down to the bone-dry, scorching hot mountain below, where Yazidi refugees had gathered in a panic. Down the hill, ISIS, the fundamentalist jihadist group that had quickly occupied large swaths of Iraq and Syria, had begun an ethnic cleansing of their people.
Mount Sinjar (or Shingal, in Kurdish) is the center of the historic homeland of the Yazidis, and was, at the time, their last hope for salvation. As some of the helicopters touched ground, they prioritized pulling women, children, and the elderly to safety. Those left behind on the mountain either succumbed to the heat, thirst, or exhaustion; the rest were brought across the border after Kurdish militias opened a corridor to Kurdish-controlled land in Syria.
The fate of those who never made it to the mountain would become clearer in the weeks and months thereafter. Thousands of men were instantly massacred by ISIS, and thousands of women and children were abducted. Girls and women were forced into ISIS “marriages,” sold on markets, and used as domestic and sex slaves, while boys became “cubs of the caliphate,” fighters-in-training. All were forcibly converted to Islam.
Ethnically, Yazidis are considered Kurdish, and their mother tongue is the eponymous language; although some in the Yazidi community consider it an ethnic identity of its own. Others contend all Kurds used to be Yazidis, until the emergence of Islam, when many Kurds converted. ISIS considered the Yazidis to be devil worshippers, as most adhere to a centuries-old pre-Christian and pre-Islamic faith.
Uca was visiting Germany when the genocide started to unfold, receiving the news in real time on the day the tragedy began. ISIS had been approaching, but the Kurdish peshmerga forces present in the Shingal region had promised to protect the Yazidis from harm. They withdrew just as ISIS began their attack.
“A call came from a man I knew who was there,” she says. “His sister wanted to kill herself because she was about to fall into ISIS’ hands. She had a weapon. We tried to talk to her but then I heard a shot. I will never forget that moment.”
The daughter of a Yazidi family that migrated to Germany in the 1970s, Uca was born in the north-central town of Celle, which has a large Yazidi community. In 1999, at age 22, she became the youngest-ever member of European Parliament (MEP) as a German representative of the Party for Democratic Socialism, and later for Die Linke (The Left), where she remained an MEP until 2009, when she didn’t seek re-election. When the genocide began, she had just recently moved from Germany to Turkey, where her family was originally from: The Yazidis are indigenous to Kurdistan, which geographically includes regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. She’d chosen to live in Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast region, and had become a candidate in the parliamentary elections for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. Founded in 2012, HDP is a leftist party rooted in the Kurdish political movement; their main objective is to democratize Turkey and give regions and communities the opportunity to govern themselves. In the June 2015 elections, Uca was elected MP and became the first Yazidi in Turkish parliament.
From the start of her time as an HDP MP, Uca was in a delicate position. While advocating for Kurds and for Yazidis specifically, the HDP claimed that the Turkish government had been aiding ISIS, and consequently held it co-responsible for the genocide—something the government vehemently denied. The HDP, including Uca, also supported the armed Kurdish groups that fought against ISIS, including those the Turkish government considered to be terrorists because of their adherence to the same leftist ideology as the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which has been waging an armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since the 1980s. Because of this overlap, HDP MPs, like Uca, became victims of a government campaign that accused them of supporting terrorism.
Uca was undeterred by it. The author of this piece, herself based in Diyarbakır during those years, got to know Uca as a parliamentarian who was often found among her community, listening to their needs and trying to forge solutions for them in her capacity as MP. For example, many Yazidis who fled to Turkey to escape ISIS were left in refugee camps with tents that did not protect them during harsh winters and hot summers. They also lacked adequate medical care and were not receiving substantial education. As MP, Uca made attempts to increase the budget for the camps, and while she only had limited success, her presence and care endeared her to the community.
Feleknas Uca in 2008. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)
Having witnessed the Yazidis’ struggles over the years while advocating for them at high levels of government, Uca has a profound understanding of her community’s needs, wants, and fears. Today, she believes what’s most important is ensuring they are able to return to their homeland. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Yazidis left their home as refugees, resettling in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While they may be physically safe in these places, Uca tells me, their displacement is still a continuation of the genocide.
“What ISIS wanted to do, is not only to kill and enslave the Yazidis, but also remove them from their ancestral lands. One of the problems we face now is that the community is still not able to return to Shingal because it remains too unsafe,” she says.
In Shingal, where the Iraqi army and Iran-backed militias are now stationed, the Yazidi self-defense force—the Shingal Resistance Units (YBŞ)—founded by the PKK in the weeks after August 3, 2014, is under pressure to be dismantled. Like the PKK, Turkey considers the YBŞ a terrorist group, and regularly bombs them, killing fighters; in addition to targeting local medical clinics, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. Consequently, Yazidis can’t always return to their homeland, even if they wish to do so. Uca believes that Europe and the US have a responsibility to step in.
“Many Western countries have recognized the Yazidi genocide, but they don’t take any action to assist the community in building a future again in Shingal,” she says. “They don’t visit the region, they don’t help rebuilding it, they don’t hold Turkey responsible for assisting ISIS then, and letting it attack Shingal now.”
Among her many grievances are the centers that were opened in several European countries—mostly in Germany—where Yazidi women who were rescued from ISIS could process their trauma. These same services remain unavailable in Shingal.
“I have always said that if we really want to help these women, we will have to build trauma centers in Shingal, so they can process their trauma and rebuild their future and live their culture and religion in their homeland, where they were born and raised,” Uca says. “But the therapy has been transferred abroad, and with that, the future of the Yazidis. While the community can only really survive at home.”
The continued plight of the Yazidis could cause Uca great despair, but she is adamant that there are also victories, large and small. She has heard countless stories of Yazidi women, in particular, overcoming horrific circumstances and fighting back. She was able to get a visa for one of these women, Hêza Shengalî, so that she could speak at the one-day conference in Brussels. Shengalî was taken captive by ISIS in 2014 and remained in their custody for a year. After she escaped, she joined the Şengal Women’s Units, or YJŞ—the armed women’s wing of the YBŞ—and requested to be sent to Syria to join the forces fighting ISIS there.
“For me, and for other Yazidi women who have joined the YBŞ, fighting back against ISIS is a way to heal,” Shengalî says.
As a commander, she contributed to their eventual victory in the city of Raqqa, which ISIS had deemed their “capital.” When Raqqa was liberated, many Yazidi women and girls were liberated, too. After returning to Shingal, Hêza was even a part of a small delegation that handed over a newly liberated young Yazidi woman back to her family.
In large part because of the YBŞ, despite the Yazidi community’s past gender conservatism, things have started to change in the last decade, including its expectations of women.
“Hêza is normative for what Yazidi women can accomplish,” Uca says. “In 2014, and after that, even 70-year-old women have taken up a weapon to defend themselves. The community has transformed itself.”
Of course, there is still a long way to go. In early 2018, after ISIS lost the last territory they occupied, the women and their children were locked up in camps in northeast Syria and guarded by Kurdish forces. Amongst them were Yazidi women who were once held captive by ISIS. They were (and are) afraid to reveal themselves as such because ISIS ideology is still prevalent amongst the prisoners there. For others, it’s because they’ve had children with ISIS members and are afraid to lose them, as the Yazidi community does not accept these children as legitimate.
Periodically, Yazidi women and girls have been discovered within the camps and rescued by the Kurdish armed forces, but currently, some 2700 remain missing, and are believed to still be in the camps or abroad with ISIS members who managed to flee to neighboring countries, including Turkey. Others may be dead, and their remains are unlikely to ever be found.
Thousands of boys and men remain missing, as well. In cooperation with the United Nations, mass graves in different locations in the Shingal region have been opened since early 2019. Some remains have been identified by Iraqi authorities in cooperation with the UN and have gone on to be reburied with dignity. However, many mass graves remain untouched, leaving families in anguish over the exact fate of their loved ones and unable to give them a proper burial or grave. Other boys may have died in battle as “cubs of the caliphate,” although occasionally, some are found in Turkey, staying with families who belonged to ISIS, who may have distanced themselves from their ideology or who may quietly still support it. Some Yazidi boys have also been reunited with their families in exchange for a ransom.
Having visited Shingal multiple times since the genocide, Uca has been present to witness some of these reunions. She’s also spent a lot of time talking to the women, men, girls, and boys who have been liberated.
“I remember one boy whose first question was: ‘How is Shingal? Is it liberated?’ I saw hope in his eyes. ‘Yes, it has been liberated,’” she says. “And I see that hope in the eyes of the liberated women, too. They have gone through so much, but their resilience is impressive. This is what makes me feel hopeful.”
Uca knows she still has much work to do. In 2018, she was re-elected to the Turkish parliament and visited Shingal with an HDP delegation after Turkey targeted a clinic with a drone, killing eight. She gave a speech about it in parliament, demanding answers from her fellow MPs—answers she didn’t get.
In last year’s general elections, Uca wasn’t on the ballot, due to the party’s two-term limit for all parliamentarians. The end of her mandate also meant the end of her parliamentary immunity, compelling her to leave Turkey instantly because state prosecutors had opened investigations against her for “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” as it had done to dozens of Kurdish MPs, many of whom have been imprisoned. She returned to Germany, and from there, continued her political work in Europe, including organizing conferences, undertaking diplomacy work in the EU, and networking and cooperating with a wide range of Yazidi, Kurdish, and other women’s groups. She’s still keen to solve her legal problems in Turkey, however, and is also planning a new journey to Shingal; it’s been a year since she was last able to visit. And while there is still much to resolve and to heal in the aftermath of what the Yazidis have endured, for Uca, hope is alive and ahead.
“You know what comes to mind when I think of hope? I remember just walking in Shingal and suddenly seeing a lilac flower. Shingal, too, will bloom again and be the hope of humanity,” she says. “Of course, I can do a lot of work in Europe, but my heart is in Shingal. Only when I am there, working in my community, I know that I am Feleknas.”
[post_title] => The Story of the Yazidi Genocide Isn't Over
[post_excerpt] => A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
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