So let me get this straight. I see a viral clip where Ivanka Trump describes how she and Jared Kushner were boating along the Albanian coast. They spot an island. Hike to the top barefoot. Become enthralled by the view.

And decide to develop the site into a luxury resort.

Just as one does.

At first, I think this seems simple enough to understand.

But then I start reading. And as is often the case these days, it turns out that nothing is simple.

For starters, there is the island. It’s called Sazan. Then there are the flamingos that are supposed to be endangered by ”the development project”.

Then it turns out the flamingos aren’t even on the island.

Then it’s about protected natural areas. About protests. Legislative amendments, corruption allegations and Saudi capital.

Then, suddenly, the island is an uninhabited military outpost? Which for millennia has been coveted by superpowers? Which the Soviets used during the Cold War?

With thousands of tunnels, weapons depots and submarine bases? And nuclear shelters?

So, my confusion is apparently not just mine. It seems to be built into the deal itself.

Subscribe now

It turns out the project also concerns the mainland near protected wetlands. These function as carbon sinks and that is actually where the flamingos are. Where they have already started clearing land.

Which also threatens plants and migratory birds and monk seals and sea turtles. And that is why protests have exploded.

Albania’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, defends the project. He wants the major capital. He claims the protests are actually created by Iranian hackers from Tehran.

Albania says the land the Trump family wants is private. Others say it is not.

The EU has warned that the deal goes against environmental regulations. Albania’s anti-corruption agency has opened an investigation.

And the money to buy all this doesn’t seem to be just money. Kushner’s company has received an injection of two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Later, it was topped up with more from Doha and Abu Dhabi.

Not even the water seems to be just water. A gas pipeline runs under the sea surface, and another energy project is being planned.

Share

And the company doesn’t seem to be just a company. On TikTok, detectives are collaborating, putting together puzzles and chasing shell companies to Amsterdam and following the money in unexpected directions.

An Israeli company has appeared. And that company owns firms that the UN accuses of doing business in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

At some point, I realise I’m sitting and watching yet another small TikTok account where someone is explaining the strategic importance of the Strait of Otranto to the Mediterranean, and honestly, I don’t really know how I ended up there.

The more I read, the less sure I am about what story I am trying to understand.

Is it an environmental conflict? A real estate deal? A story about Albania’s economic development? A story about global capital? Geopolitics? Security? Energy?

Or is it all at the same time?

And I think: How does Ivanka Trump expect to pass this off as a spontaneous holiday discovery?

What is it that is actually being bought?

What are they intending to use it for?

Subscribe now

I end up here quite often. It starts with something that seems simple. I pull a thread, and suddenly I’m sitting there in the dawn light with fifteen tabs open.

It’s a strange feeling. The more information I find, the harder it becomes to understand what is actually happening.

The more I read about the world, the less I understand about the world.

There is also something else here that makes me uncomfortable. I notice that I increasingly assume that there is something more behind the story.

Motives that are not stated. Interests that are not visible. Strategies that are not formulated.

I don’t trust what I read anymore. Am I being conspiratorial?

Have I started expecting that people, companies and governments only tell a part of the story?

Or have I just learned to trust that strange feeling when something doesn’t add up?

That there is a gap somewhere. A pattern I cannot yet see but that I strongly feel.

All those twists of truth. All the versions of reality that compete with one another.

Perhaps it has done something fundamental to me. That I have started reading the world as if there is always a layer behind the visible, and that it has made me vigilant.

I think that is what fascinates me about Sazan Island. Not just all the different stories, but what happens to me while I try to understand them.

In Kafka’s The Trial, there is the line: ”It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”

Read more of Anna Branten:

People of the tents, I write to you from my exile. I write to you, you who live in conditions that mountains could not endure. I write to you because I want to send you love to brace your tent pegs, the ones that have failed to shake the world’s conscience.

I want to send you the walls of my home that protect me, while you are exposed under the fragile cloth of the tents and the grace of the sky. I want to send you the food that I eat from beautiful plates, while your stomachs are empty.

I want to send you the lemonade I drink from freshly washed glasses, while your drops of water make your children weaker. I want to send you my Nabulsi soap and my medicine that I can get at the pharmacy, while you are dirty and dying slowly before the silence of the world. I want to send you my brushes and my finest paper, while you search for cardboard to draw on.

In Gaza, we lived together in a vast prison under a suffocating blockade, yet our city surged with life.

We found our freedom in the small things we loved: singing in the square in the middle of the night, buying crispy falafel and kunafa, filling canvases with colour to postpone our breakdowns, lying on the hot stones of the bathhouse, scattering nuts over fresh fish and giving our souls dignity.

We had our breathing spaces and our refuges.

But now…!

In my exile, I live a waking nightmare, scrolling and staring at every image of the dead on Instagram and Facebook, desperate to ensure your faces are not among them. If you do not answer the phone, I linger extra long over every photo.

The anxiety in my chest is a weight that keeps me from sleep, but your anxiety is a daily struggle to survive on the edge of death.

And in the midst of this, you overwhelm my heart by asking me: “Have you eaten, Khulud? Have you had something to drink? Have you slept well?”

As if you were the safe ones, and I the stricken.

People of the tents, when the houses fell upon you, you planted your roots in the sand and tore an impossible beauty from the heart of nothingness. Around the pale tents, you transform death’s backyard into miniature gardens, where you plant mint and basil to let the scent of greenery perfume the air polluted by ash and lead.

You share your wretched food with strangers and gather the shards of your souls with the sound of your laughter at sunset, while the shadows of the death-boats lurk out at sea.

Winter drowned you in muddy pools, and as summer arrives, it transforms your plastic tents into suffocating ovens. Skin rashes and infectious diseases itch and wear away at the bodies of your children and the amputees.

But your life did not stop, for every day a new child is born from the womb of the tent. A bloody miracle without anaesthesia or sterilisation. The newborn arrives under inhuman conditions and is received like a hero who has won the battle of existence.

The zaghrouta (cries of joy) rise from the neighbouring tents to drown out the bombers. You share a few dates and celebrate simple birthdays, with candles lit on pieces of dry bread.

Art’s “windows” have been charred, Omar’s lute has fallen, and the minarets of the historic Al-Omari and Al-Basha Palace mosques have fallen silent. But your tents are today our history. They are our art and the truest of homes.

Here lives Ramzi Halawa, my fellow journalist who once overflowed with order and passion. Before the genocide, you had your family and your house by the shore. When the war broke out, you managed to send your wife and your three daughters to Egypt. Now you live in a tattered tent with your mother, your brother, your brother’s wife, their small child, and your injured neighbours.

You tell me that your life consists of endless queues. You stand exhausted in the water queue before dawn, to fill canisters with what is undrinkable. Then you move to the bread queue, to get a few pieces for astronomical sums. Then comes the wait to charge your phone.

Even the toilet and the shower have queues, and they make you think twice before eating or drinking, to avoid the filth of the place and the humiliation that comes with the wait.

Share

Ramiz, you tell me about the insects and the rats with whom you share a bed, and about the constant buzzing of the drones that live inside your head and corrode your nerves. About the bombs that fall and the stench from the mass graves.

You people of the tents queue for everything, except for death, to which you are given priority.

Under the pressure of necessity, your genius has exploded into innovation. You have converted bicycle wheels into manual motors to power washing machines. The children have turned tragedy into a playground, sliding with smiles atop the smooth mounds of rubble. Fathers watch for migratory birds to secure a meal for them – a scene proving that the will to live is stronger than the engineering of genocide.

In the ruins, you young people gather to play melodies – sometimes mournful, sometimes rebellious – on instruments that have been salvaged and repaired. Even marriages have not ceased. You, the brides and grooms, are celebrated among the people of the tents as you declare your love for one another and begin to build a future, even as the eye of death watches you.

Subscribe now

Womanhood is violated every day. Amani Abu Nada, you tell me about the misery. Of how your body has become an extra burden, stripped of all privacy. How you search for a corner just to comb your hair for a minute, and how you use old rags when you have your period. A shower has become a rare luxury, occurring once every two weeks.

Hadeel Dawla, you tell me about your flight, and about the day you lost your nine-year-old daughter, Tassal, when a missile struck your home. You were left with your six-month-old baby, enduring the bitterness of loss and displacement. You slept together on half a sofa in a seated position, crowded among over 80 others. You were ashamed to bring out the small amount of food you had in front of the hungry, because you did not have enough to share.

People of the tents, I write to you so that your voices may be heard in the shells of the sea.

People of the tents, I write to you so that your worn-out shoes may become the bright tracks that guide us through the darkness of this world.

People of the tents, weighed in conscience, you are the free beneath the canvas of the tents, while the rest of us are merely slaves in palaces of sand.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 64,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Dear world, you who are perishing from your own individualism. While modernity is busy building walls around “personal independence”, here in Gaza, we are tearing down all walls to build a “collective home”.

In our photo albums, there are no pictures of lonely people. The wars that were meant to crush us found no individuals in their path. They found “intertwined bodies”.

We live what the social psychologist Erich Fromm called the art of mature love, where care and responsibility are our daily bread. In Gaza, homes are not measured in square metres, but in the number of breaths they shelter. A place that holds five people in times of prosperity, holds fifty in times of steadfastness.

Subscribe now

Our children do not inherit houses from us (as they are ruins). They inherit stories of endurance and beautiful memories.

We are the counter-narrative to a material world that sanctifies the “I”. We are the society that hallows the “we”.

Our photographs are not just memories. They are a human and spiritual shield, proof that love, when it becomes a collective act, is stronger than the machinery of annihilation.

But behind this unity, death commits a crime: the “erasure of traces”. A study of the death tolls in Gaza by data analyst and researcher Dr Nur Naim confirms that our unity is our “secret weapon”. Therefore, the occupation seeks to break it by completely erasing over 2,730 families from the civil registry. Not a single one of them remains. From a further 6,020 families, only one or two people have survived.

In Gaza, entire family trees, such as the Salem family (170 people), are deleted with the press of a button. Whole generations of fathers, grandchildren and grandparents disappear beneath the ruins in Sheikh Radwan and Khan Younis.

Share

Despite this, Gaza – becoming increasingly interconnected even as everything else is severed – refuses to accept orphanhood. Rami Al‑Arouqi and his wife, Iman, opened their hearts to Janah, the little girl who lost her entire family when she was only eight months old. Today, in her second year, she lives in her newfound joy as everyone’s daughter.

Mental fragility never knocked on our doors in Gaza. We knew neither isolation nor depression in the way I have experienced it in the mercilessly individualistic Sweden. In Gaza, souls teem with life, embraced by family and friends and the warmth of festivities that never run dry.

The days were filled with people from dawn until nightfall. The culture of “pre-booked visits” had never contaminated the spontaneity of our encounters. Our doors stood wide open, and the guest stepped in as a member of the family to share food, sleep and laughter.

Our gardens were places of gathering, and our children grew up in the embrace of the collective. They learned the fundamentals of life from the hum of the streets, not from the screens of isolation.

Even our pots were always prepared with an abundance of generosity, waiting for a stranger or passerby. If an evening passed without guests, we carried the surplus to wanderers and travelers at the “bird shop,” so that the giving never ceased.

Throughout the day the ember of coffee and tea never died in our elders’ gatherings, where they laughed and told stories to the sound of dice games in the alleyways.

In Gaza, we did not live in houses. We lived in “one single heart” that refused to fall silent.

In your world, isolation grows despite technology, but in Gaza, the family grows stronger despite death. The family is the small homeland, and the homeland is the large family that never abandons its children to oblivion.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 65,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

The best place to watch the sunset in Tehran is from the top of one of the many hills surrounding the Iranian capital. Up here, the air is cooler and clearer, and the view over the sprawling sea of pale buildings is magnificent.

The Milad Tower rises above everything else, a thin needle in the skyline, while the Alborz Mountains sit in the distance.

Below, the restless movement of the city carries on. Traffic is inching forward, lights are flickering. The bustle rarely slows down.

Read more

My children and I wake early, brimming with that particular energy you only feel when you’re longing for a special day to begin. We set off while it’s still dark, guided by the scent of iodine and salt spray.

When we reach the sea, we take off our shoes and carry them in our hands. We want to feel the damp, soft sand between our toes – cool and comforting at this hour. All the while, we listen to the sound of zalaf (seashells) washing up and rolling onto the shore with the rhythm of the waves, as the sun slowly creeps up behind the horizon. It’s a magical sight that we see every day, but one we never, ever tire of.

At Al-Hasba (the fish market), there’s a pungent smell of salt and fish of every kind and colour, hauled in by the sweat of men who have fought waves, poverty, and shells to return with a livelihood dipped in dignity.

My children and I watch the fishermen as they arrive at the market. Men with furrowed faces. Some old with hands like bark, others young boys who have inherited the sea from their fathers.

Share

Everyone has their own spot, where they spread out their catch with the greatest of care on basta (display tables), as if they were showing off precious jewels. My children are still small, watching with the joy of discovery as they learn the names of everything that glitters. Their eyes grow wide and sparkle as they touch the sardines, the crabs, the ghazlan (small, silver-shimmering fish), and the red mullet (Sultan Ibrahim).

Meanwhile, the fishermen let their gazes wander between their fish and us visitors. They wait patiently for those who will buy the day’s harvest, with a sense of contentment despite the long, hard night they have spent out on the open sea.

Subscribe now

When we return home to Al-Rimal, bags in hand, our kitchen is transformed into a place of celebration. I teach the children how to cook zibdiyat gambari (shrimp stew), simmered in clay pots. When the stew comes out of the oven, we decorate it with cashew nuts and pine nuts.

We make a Gaza salad of crushed green Gaza chillies with garlic and ain al-jarada (dill seeds), which we mix with red tomatoes, and plenty of olive oil. Then we wait for the luxurious sayadieh dish, with its caramel-brown rice and fried onions, topped with fried pieces of white fish and nuts.

When the meal of the fruits of the sea is finished, family, neighbours, and friends gather, invited in as the warmth of our food reaches them.

There is also a sunset, when the shadows grow long. I take a stroll with my friend Samouha at the harbour. We sit near the fishermen’s nets, spread out by the small wooden boats, lined up like weary warriors.

As we talk, we see the occupation’s gunboats as dark silhouettes on the horizon, and they stare back at us. We cannot escape the thought: death lurks out there, ever watchful, just behind the beautiful scenery. We remain in silence, caught between a love for life and that which waits.

Behind these unforgettable days lies a tragedy. Gaza’s fishermen face not only natural storms, but the muzzles of cannons and a blockade that transforms our beautiful sea into a water-bound prison. It prevents Gazans from importing engines, spare parts, and nets, turning every voyage into a suicide mission.

Human rights reports document hundreds of attacks every year, where the occupation’s boats fire upon the fishing vessels. It has turned the pursuit of a livelihood into a daily journey toward martyrdom or injury.

I have been out there myself, on the open sea. Together with my fellow journalists, I headed out at dawn as we waited for the Freedom Flotillas set to break the blockade of Gaza. We brought our breakfast and our cameras, but also a gnawing anxiety in our chests.

Being out on the waves in Gaza is more than just a trip. It is a balancing act between life and death. The waves can be high, but what terrifies you most is when the gunboats appear. It is then you realise that every net cast is a defiant act of survival.

According to the Gaza Fishermen’s Union, at least 238 fishermen have been killed since the genocide began. Now, the boats no longer lie in neat rows. Instead, they are scattered, broken, and burnt. The occupation also arrests fishermen at sea and confiscates their boats. Families are left behind in deep poverty, enduring a long wait behind the bars of absence.

But what the sea has left in our souls, time cannot erase. I will continue to cook zibdiyat gambari with my children to wash away the bitterness of these days and remind them of when we woke before sunrise and followed the scent to the harbour.

One day, I want to wake up to such a morning again.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 65,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

In Gaza, we do not ask how much hope we have left. We ask: “When will we cook sumaqia?” It is not just a dish. It is a proclamation of joy and an act of resistance.

This sumaqia, which we regard as Gaza’s very identity, a national treasure that can never be forged, has withstood the occupation’s every attempt at theft. The dish’s complex ingredients and the slow patience required to prepare it have made it a guardian of our cultural heritage.

It can only be made by one who has kneaded their hands into the soil of this land and breathed the scent of its sea.

Share

Today, as I strive to summon that scent amid the rubble and dust, I remember how sumaqia was the natural centrepiece of the “henna nights”, those evenings that precede our weddings and fill our squares with love.

At my own wedding, at my sisters’, and at the celebrations of my cousins and neighbours, the squares thundered with hundreds of plates.

After hours of dabke dancing that made the ground tremble, and joyful songs that touched the sky, everyone, men and women alike, sat down in warm circles to eat “provisions of love”.

Served with pickled vegetables and freshly baked bread, sumaqia was the most beautiful reward for all who had come to share our song, the moment when all exhaustion melted away with the first bite.

My kitchen was the arena where the tensions of identity between native Gazans and those displaced from Jaffa were resolved in the most delicious of ways. My mother-in-law, a true Gazan, believed that a sumaqia which did not burn the tongue was no sumaqia at all. My mother, who came from Jaffa, preferred calm and balance.

With a “MasterChef’s” touch, I brought the two schools together. I balanced the chilli and measured the sumac, the chard, and the meat with the scales of the heart, until I became the family’s foremost authority.

No one dared lift the lid of a pot without my blessing.

And my father, his stories were the very spice of life!

He would sneak into the kitchen, as if he were plotting a great secret. He would taste a spoonful, glance around to make sure my mother wasn’t watching, and whisper softly: “My daughter, your cooking tastes a thousand times better than your mother’s … but for God’s sake, don’t tell her!”

Those words were my true medal. Before long, neither my father, nor my mother-in-law, nor my mother would dream of making sumaqia without calling me to ask for “the secret of the recipe”.

Sumaqia is the dish of “shoulders pressed close together”, and it demands absolute precision. It cannot succeed without one hand chopping the chard, another sorting the sumac, and a third crushing the garlic.

The greatest secret lies in cutting the meat into perfectly equal pieces, as if they were even stones laid with love, then distributing them fairly across hundreds of plates so that each guest receives their share of the blessing. It is a quiet calling that gathers aunts and grandchildren, a spontaneous feast that brings order to the chaos of life.

Subscribe now

Today, with ingredients scarce and loved ones scattered, some in flight, others lost as martyrs, we miss the togetherness more than the food itself.

Yet despite everything, we protect our history through memory. The occupation, which has sought to divide us, has failed to understand that a people united by a single bite of sumaqia is a people that cannot be defeated.

One day we will return to lay our tables in the squares, to light the fires beneath our great pots, and to laugh again as we share plates filled with meat and blessing. We will show the world that Gaza’s table is never broken, and that the community baptised in the scent of sumac can never be torn apart.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 65,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Read the next postcard:

The saying rhymes in Persian: Esfahan nesf-e jahan – Isfahan is half the world. The idea is that once you have seen this city, you have seen half of the world's beauty. It is home to the Zayandeh River and the magical Khaju Bridge, built under Safavid rule in the 17th century.

When there is water in the river, people paddle kayaks here or take a trip in the same kind of kitschy, swan-shaped pedal boats that became infamous when the Taliban used them for fun on a lake outside Kabul.

Even when the riverbed lies dry, the green parks along it are the city’s gathering place. Families and friends spread blankets on the grass, drinking tea, smoking shisha.

Isfahan is also home to some of Iran’s most iconic sites and World Heritage landmarks: the great Naqsh-e Jahan Square with its marble floors, the Shah Mosque with its turquoise dome covered with intricate patterns, and the Chehel Sotoun Palace with its columned hall reflected in the garden’s still waters.

The palace is one of the World Heritage sites that have been struck in the US-Israeli war – one of more than 120 historical sites damaged across the country.

Subscribe now

Then there is the city’s grand bazaar, usually bustling with life. Its long corridors are lined with stalls selling handicrafts and block-printed tablecloths with intricate floral designs – typically Iranian, typically Isfahani.

But on my last visit during a holiday, everything was closed. Shops shuttered, restaurants dark, the usually lively bazaar completely deserted.

I walked through the silence. Small openings on the roof let in narrow shafts of sunlight, cutting through the dim halls in soft beams.

Occasionally, someone passed by. A man pushing a cart, two women strolling and talking who paused to ask where I was from, before smiling and saying:

“You are very welcome here.”

It’s a small gesture.

And yet, it makes me wonder how many Iranians were warmly welcomed in Europe. I think we could all do with a little more Iranian hospitality.

Postcards from Iran

Stefanie Glinski is a journalist and photographer primarily covering the Middle East and Asia for Foreign Policy and The Guardian. Mohammad Mohsenifar is a photojournalist based in Tehran, Iran.

Life. In this series, they tell short stories of ordinary Iranians, and of the places and traditions that define the country. While the war in Iran has dominated the headlines, they highlight other sides. Amidst the death and destruction, there is also culture and architecture, food and hospitality.

Death. In the unprovoked US-Israeli war, at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, including at least 254 children, according to the US-based human rights organisation HRANA.

Injuries. In Tehran, over 8,600 people have been injured, 87 per cent of whom are civilians, according to emergency services. Nationwide, 45,000 people have been injured, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, including at least 1,767 children, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. At least 3.2 million people have been internally displaced, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

Hospitals and schools. Over 2.2 million children have had their access to healthcare disrupted as 442 health facilities have been damaged, according to the Ministry of Health and the Iranian Red Crescent. In addition, over 760 schools have been affected, according to the Ministry of Education and UNICEF.

Infrastructure. More than 115,000 civilian buildings and units have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Iranian Red Crescent and the UN humanitarian office OCHA.

World Heritage. UNESCO has confirmed direct damage to the World Heritage sites of Golestan Palace in Tehran and Chehel Sotoun in Isfahan. Over 120 historical sites have been damaged.

The yellow-brown sand thickens the morning air, already hot. As the sun rises and cuts through the dust, everything turns into a floating haze. A deceptively beautiful horizon in the middle of horror. They should have arrived by now. But between Tiné in Chad and Tina in Sudan, the desert is almost empty. Only now and then is the silence broken by the dull creaking of wooden carts crossing the border, pulled by whipped horses and donkeys, loaded with people whose exhaustion seems to belong to another age.

It is early November 2025, and two weeks have passed since the city of al-Fashir in Darfur, 186 miles from here, fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, which is committing genocide in Darfur.

RSF besieged the city for eighteen months. Dug earth berms around it so people could not get out. Stopped everything from coming in, except the indiscriminate bombs.

Like the encirclement of Stalingrad. But that lasted two months. Not eighteen.

Around 260,000 people have been trapped inside al-Fashir, forced to eat leaves and animal feed, press themselves to the ground under constant shelling, and watch the city turn to ruins.

For a long time, the UN warned that something even worse would happen when RSF took the city. Now that day has come, and aid organisations are waiting at the border for refugees to stream in for food and shelter.

But only a few thousand make it.

The rest are as if swallowed by the desert.

Subscribe now

At the same time, traces of the missing begin to appear. Not in the desert, but in satellite images.

For the first time, researchers can see blood on the ground from space. By studying the images, they can follow how RSF gathers bodies into piles. Burns them. Buries them.

They warn of ongoing massacres.

Then comes an estimate that 150,000 of the 260,000 people are missing. RSF is cleaning up after itself and keeping out both journalists and aid workers.

When no one is allowed in, the satellite images and the survivors become the closest the world gets to the truth.

The women and children who do reach the border carry with them what the world is prevented from seeing.

These are their testimonies.

Seventeen-year-old Faiza Abdullah Bashar has reached the Oure Cassoni camp. She shades herself from the sun beneath a tree.

Since the escape, she has not been able to sleep.

With her is one of her older brothers, who keeps asking people around them:

“Where is my mother? Where is my father?”

Faiza says he is traumatised. That his mind is no longer right.

They both saw their parents killed. Faiza’s husband was killed at the same time. And her one-month-old son.

She was carrying him on her back when the shot came.

“They told us to sit down on the ground. Then they told us to stand up. Then they shot at us.”

Only Faiza and her older brothers survived. Because they ran.

“We have received no help here at all. I am very sad. Sometimes my brothers do not even want to eat because they feel so bad. We left everything. Our parents and everything we had.”

She puts words to the logic of genocide.

“They do this because we are Zaghawa. They kill Zaghawa.”

The Zaghawa are one of Darfur’s non-Arab ethnic groups. They are Muslims, like the other groups in Darfur, and the conflict is not about religion. It is about power, land, resources and racism.

Since Sudan’s independence in 1956, the state has treated Arab groups differently from people with darker skin, such as the Zaghawa and the Masalit, who have been seen as inferior.

The division was created under British colonial rule, after the Darfur Sultanate was incorporated into Sudan in 1916, and became a wound more than a century old that has never healed.

When climate change and drought in the 1980s reduced resources and increased competition over land and water, the state made the conflict deadly by siding with Arab groups. That drove the first genocide in Darfur in 2003.

Since 2023, a second genocide has been woven into Sudan’s wider civil war.

They beheaded them with knives

At a health centre in the Oure Cassoni camp, 22-year-old Shima Adam Ibrahim sits with her seven-month-old son Walid in her lap. He is acutely malnourished. She listens closely as the doctor explains how she should use the nutritional paste.

Outside, about a hundred other mothers wait in the same situation. Nearly 29 million Sudanese people are suffering from acute food insecurity.

Shima arrived here from al-Fashir with Walid and her three-year-old daughter Wojen eight days ago.

“Life there was very hard. There was shelling all the time and a lot of people were killed. People ate leaves and the grain we usually give to the animals.”

During the flight, she and the children saw RSF behead three people. One woman and two men.

“With knives, yes. In front of us.”

She says it almost in passing, without raising her voice.

“They shot children who were Zaghawa. They shot little babies. There were dead people lying in the desert. They take women and girls and rape them. Sometimes they kill them too.”

Shima paid to travel on the back of a truck with what she thinks were 25 other people. But not everyone made it.

On the road, RSF stopped them. Young men were separated from the group and executed. It was not madness, she says, still just as calmly.

“They are not crazy. They just do not like black people.”

According to the UN human rights office, more than 6,000 people were killed in the first three days after al-Fashir was taken. The total number is still unknown, as investigators have not been granted full access to the city.

The Guardian later reported that al-Fashir had become a slaughterhouse and cited a high, uncertain estimate: that at least 60,000 people were massacred in al-Fashir in the first three weeks.

The question that decides who gets to live

As the massacres continue and parents lose their children, 20-year-old Sause Mohammed has brought a new life into the world during the flight.

In her arms lies 15-day-old Musen. He smiles when the sun touches his face. His two older brothers, Mosamil, 3, and Maasin, 4, look at him.

Sause’s husband, 26-year-old Jafar Mohammed, is thin and worn down. The family comes from Kabkabiya, a village on the road from al-Fashir, and has just crossed the border into Tiné in Chad. They sink down onto the ground and wait to be registered as refugees.

“It was impossible to stay. Drones came and bombed, and life was terrible. The only thing we have had to eat during the war is millet,” says Jafar.

They cheated death.

He says they passed about thirty roadblocks during their flight, and that RSF wanted to know the same thing at every checkpoint.

“They asked: ‘Which tribe do you belong to?’”

The family is Zaghawa, an ethnic group RSF sees as an enemy. The Zaghawa have a role in armed resistance groups in Darfur and are allied with the government forces, SAF, which is fighting RSF in Sudan’s civil war.

“If they suspect you are Zaghawa, they can arrest you, torture you, shoot you. We lied and said we are Fur.”

The Fur are Darfur’s historic main tribe, the people after whom the region is named – the home of the Fur. They are also extremely vulnerable and being subjected to genocide in Darfur, but Jafar says that in the area where they were, RSF is mainly cleansing out the Zaghawa.

At the roadblocks, one answer can decide whether a newborn child gets to live.

The genocide is not chaotic. It is systematic.

With losses as their only luggage

Most of those who reach Chad carry only the stories of what has been taken from them.

Not the money. Not the gold. Not the photo albums. Not the phones with the numbers of those who may still be alive. Not the bodies of those they could not bury.

Only the stories.

Fifteen-year-old Maha Mohammad Hassan from al-Fashir begins to laugh loudly when she thinks about the first thing she lost. Before the war, she went to school and liked watching French television series.

“I liked the series because their lives were so good. Everyone had beautiful houses. Everything they did was so beautiful.”

She cracks her fingers. The smile disappears in the same movement.

“Then the planes and drones came. They bombed all the time. My mother was killed in our house. They shot her. I fled with my brothers. On the road we saw how they killed and raped.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Tagua Badr Djohonda is also from al-Fashir. She says she never wants to return to Sudan.

“All we have is destruction. If I went back, I would only find the earth. They have killed whole families. They are just gone.”

Her house was bombed while her daughter was inside. The daughter survived.

When Tagua fled, RSF stopped her and others on the road. They took everything they had with them. Four people were killed. She herself was beaten.

“If you have nothing they can steal from you, they beat you.”

They beat her with electrical cables.

“You can see the scars,” she says, lifting her skirt.

There is another kind of loss.

One that never ends.

Not death, not life. Only uncertainty. A grief that stays in the body and gnaws, hour after hour, because a mother does not know whether to mourn her children or keep hoping. Whether they are hungry. Whether they are afraid. Whether they are calling for her. Whether they think she abandoned them. Whether they are even alive.

That is the loss 29-year-old Esma Usama carries with her across the border to Adré, farther south in Chad.

She suffers from a chronic illness and needs surgery for problems with pressure in her eyes. She comes from the capital, Khartoum, 895 miles away – a distance almost comparable to the length of Sweden.

One day, she had to get to hospital. Her two daughters, 9 and 12 years old, stayed at home with their grandmother.

While Esma was at the hospital, the fighting broke out so violently that she could never get back to the house. Since then, she has fled through Sudan for months with her youngest daughter. Soldiers have stolen everything they had with them.

Even her phone.

When she talks about the daughters she left behind, she starts crying and cannot stop.

“No one in my family knows whether I am alive or dead. And I do not know whether they are alive or dead either,” she says.

Esma and her daughter have not been given a tent. They are hungry.

The end of the road

The road out of Sudan does not lead to safety. It leads to the next part of the catastrophe.

They have arrived. But they are not saved.

Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world and has taken in 1.2 million Sudanese refugees. Camps spread across the desert, but there is not enough space for everyone in tents. People sleep under trees. Children wait for food. Traumatised mothers wait for care.

Those who survived the genocide must keep surviving a little longer.

Even here, they are unprotected. Even here, they are subjected to violence. At the same time, the humanitarian response is only 12 to 15 per cent funded, according to the UN’s humanitarian coordination office.

Around them are the heat, the sand, the hunger and the silence of all those who never came.

Those who reached the border can tell what they saw. What the world was prevented from seeing.

The rest can only be seen from space.

Read more about Sudan:

I am speaking with my art teacher, Basel El Maqousi. He has been displaced five times – from Khan Younis, Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, and Az-Zawaida. Through every ruin, he has carried his bag of paints. He saw children age prematurely, he tells, which challenged his humanity.

“Fragile bodies staring into the mouths of cannons, and small hands that have traded toys for gathering firewood and carrying water.”

Faced with this sight he decided to transform his tent into an “artist residency”.

“It isn’t a way to pass the time. It’s a roar for life against the most brutal of deaths. When a child’s body meets a missile that pulverises concrete, paint becomes our only tool to mend what has been broken inside.”

Today, he has a “little Shababeek” in the tent camp, where he runs workshops.

Before the genocide, he had a large Shababeek.

The story of the artist collective of the same name began in 2003, at the Al-Karawan café in Gaza City, a favourite spot for Gaza’s poets, writers, and artists.

At Al-Karawan, the artists Basel El Maqousi, Shareef Sarhan and Majed Shala dreamed of opening shababeek (windows) in the suffocating wall of the blockade, to be able to look out at the world and to let the world look in.

In 2009, they converted a house in Al-Rimal, located just metres from Al-Shifa Hospital, into the gallery Shababeek lil-Fann al-Mu’asir (Windows for Contemporary Art).

Here, our pain was transformed into a universal language. Basel taught us that through art, we can communicate with the world without an interpreter.

For me, Shababeek was more than just an art institution. It was my extended family – one that I have now lost.

The friends would gather here already in the morning. I can still taste the breakfast that Basel used to buy for us all. Crispy falafel, hummus, ful (fava beans swimming in olive oil, with peeled and finely chopped tomatoes, lemon and garlic) and twenty steaming, fresh loaves from the nearby Family Bakery for just two shekels.

We covered the stained, simple wooden table with newspapers and ate with our hands. Our faces met over tea scented with fresh mint as we shared bread and ideas before sharing colours.

Shababeek had a wonderful garden, filled with flowers and vines climbing over the entrance. Here, the oud sang to us while we created. I began with acrylic on paper. Then Basel showed me how to stretch canvas over wooden frames.

I fled here from the pressure, the horrors of the blockade, and the constant sounds of killing during the wars, to pour my anger and stress onto the white canvas.

My husband was always away, and I raised my three children Jumana, Ayha and Abood alone. At Shababeek, I regained my strength.

Under Basel’s patient guidance, I learned how a brush can tame anxiety and postpone a breakdown.

Shababeek lil-Fann al-Mu’asir became our “hospital for the soul”. When our thoughts were too many and life too narrow, we came here and tried to breathe out our identity, from our confined world through the windows to “the other” in the world outside.

After every war, Shababeek became the place where the broken souls of mothers and children were mended.

My children also came for the psychological support projects. They mostly painted about the war because of the extensive destruction our home was subjected to.

Fear was constant. Our house stood opposite the old al-Saraya prison, built by the British to jail those who rose against them. It was later taken over by Hamas and struck 18 times by F-16s.

Shababeek hosted artist residencies, reminiscent of the art scene in Paris. Here, Gaza’s talents were nurtured, developing their aesthetics. It housed more than 20,000 paintings, photographs, and sculptures.

But … the windows were not allowed to stay open!

During the genocide, the Al-Shifa Hospital was subjected to brutal destruction and massacres by the occupation. In April 2024, the halls of Shababeek fell, and the art – born from years of tears – was turned to ash.

The greatest loss was the artists. 118 cultural workers were killed in Gaza in 2024 alone, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.

This is a cultural genocide, as defined by Raphael Lemkin, targeting museums, galleries, art exhibitions, theatres, cinemas, music institutes, libraries, publishing houses, bookshops, newspapers, millennia-old buildings, and ancient cultural treasures such as traditional costumes and pottery.

An attempt to erase every testimony linked to this land.

Today, nothing remains of the great Shababeek except a memory in digital space, a cold archive salvaged by its founder, Shareef Sarhan.

The warm life that once thrived there, the fingers that painted, the eyes that saw the beauty, and the green garden that gathered us for breakfast – it is all dead.

Now, a small Shababeek exists in Basel’s tent. He says the workshops for mothers and girls are the most painful of all.

“We draw our ruined homes, flowers, and the Palestinian flag. We weep together as we sketch our dreams. On the beach, we build houses of sand. The waves sweep them away, but we build them again, and again.”

The artist Rufaida Sehwail also paints in a tent. In December 2023, she was due to open her fifth solo exhibition, titled Birth. But her home was bombed, and everything was turned to ash.

“I lost eighteen paintings, my entire studio, and my library of a thousand books,” she says.

After a period of paralysing shock, she decided to rebel against the routine of death.

“I sought out the simplest paper I could find and began sketching in the heart of the refugee camps in Khan Younis. Art became my spiritual recovery, a way to channel the pain of the children and the silent weeping of the mothers. Through daily workshops of painting and movement, I try to open a window of hope.”

The blockade stops brushes and canvases, and Rufaida’s work is a constant struggle against the odds. How many more windows will be shattered before the world drowns in ugliness?

“I paint in a race against the sunset, before the darkness takes hold for lack of electricity. My exhibition Birth, which was physically destroyed, has now assumed a new existential form. I am colouring the ashes and asking if a human can be born anew from the time that tries to annihilate her.”

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 65,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Read the next postcard:

I call my friend Sawsan, who lived near the bathhouse in the old district of Gaza City, but has since been displaced. She weeps with despair, yet I hear a fragile sense of relief that we are finally speaking to one another.

“Do you see what has happened, Khulud?” she says between sobs. “Everything is gone. I cannot understand why they destroyed the bathhouse. It feels as though the target wasn’t just the stones, but the scent of our history, our memories, and all the beauty we carried within us.”

Hammam al-Samra was more than the last historical bathhouse in Gaza. An entire people lived within its walls. The scent of bygone eras rose from the archways, like the steam from the warm water.

Every corner held a story.

I see before me the many visits with Sawsan and my other friends. We brought olive oil and salt to scrub ourselves with. We talked, laughed, and always helped each other. If you went to the bathhouse alone, there was an older woman there whom you could give a few shekels to be scrubbed.

We made hair masks with the olive oil and let it sit while we washed ourselves with Nabulsi soap, which is made from olive oil and is one of the world’s oldest soaps. It has been manufactured in Nablus in the West Bank for over a thousand years, and the soap artisans continue to make it to this day despite the occupation hindering the movement of goods. Each soap is stamped by hand at the factory. UNESCO has protected the craft as a cultural heritage.

It was as if the bathhouse got to know us during our visits. As if it preserved our voices and our laughter between its walls.

It was here that we met Abu Abdullah al-Wazir, who worked at the bathhouse for over 55 years. He served us tea steeped with sage and spoke of its history with the same tenderness as if he were telling his own life story.

On one wall hung a plaque stating that the building was restored during the Mamluk era, in the year 685 AH (Islamic calendar), around 780 years ago.

It has stood through the ages, a witness to the endurance of a city whose heart never stopped beating.

Even its materials were drawn from the city’s soul. The bathhouse was built of Gaza’s golden kurkar sandstone. It was a true Levantine masterpiece, divided into rooms where we moved from the cool outer space, through the warm middle, and into the inner heat.

Above us, the domes arched, with small openings where sunlight filtered through like threads of light. We did not lie on towels, but directly on the stone to absorb the heat. Because it was hot, it was not slippery.

Hidden furnaces spread the warmth, in a system that has endured for centuries, reflected the ingenuity of an earlier age.

But this was not all. The bathhouse was far more than a place for cleansing. It was a social and cultural heart, deeply woven into the fabric of life in Gaza.

It was here that our wedding celebrations began. For generations, traditions were passed down through the “bridal bath” and the “groom’s bath”.

On the “night of henna”, the bride would arrive to the sound of song and the scent of lemon. Women carried olive branches, wearing traditional Palestinian dresses rich with embroidery. On the morning of the wedding, the groom would emerge through the gates in a ceremony symbolising purity.

A new beginning, and a shared joy.

Despite repeated wars, Hammam al-Samra stood as a witness to the continuity of civilisation.

But during the ongoing genocide, the entire historic quarter of Gaza City has been subjected to the occupation’s relentless bombardment.

The bathhouse walls have collapsed. The place has fallen silent.

It stood surrounded by other historic landmarks: the Great Omari Mosque, dating back to 637 CE, Gaza’s oldest and largest, now devastated by strikes.

The Church of Saint Porphyrius, founded in the 5th century CE and one of the oldest active churches in the world, shared that fate. Christians who sought refuge within its ancient walls were injured and killed.

“They have erased Gaza,” my friend Sawsan says, as we speak of our memories of Hammam al-Samra. “Those days will never return.”

When I close my eyes, I can still smell it.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 64,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

When the writer Daoud Hari looks back on how it all began, he remembers one thing: the weather. In his book The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur (2008), he writes that in the 1980s the rains came less often, and the land grew steadily drier.

Fertile soil and water holes were no longer enough. Arab nomads pushed their herds south, encroaching on the ancestral lands of the Zaghawa, the Fur and the Masalit.

Hari, who is himself Zaghawa, explains in the book:

     In the past they would have asked 
     permission, and a few camels might 
     have changed hands. If no bargain 
     could be reached, and if they used the 
     water and the grass anyway, a challenge 
     would be made for a battle of honor on a 
     traditional battlefield, far from any 
     village. After the fight, the matter would 
     be considered settled and the Arabs and 
     the Zaghawa would immediately be 
     friends again, dining in another's house. 

Arab nomads and non-Arab farmers had long lived in parallel. Conflicts were settled locally, by tradition, away from civilians.

Then the climate shifted. The desert surged south. The land failed. Competition sharpened into hunger.

And the devastation was not distributed equally.

The non-Arab settled communities of Darfur, in Sudan, were already politically and economically marginalised, with roots stretching back to colonialism. As climate stress increased, the struggle for land and water turned into desperation. In 2003, that desperation exploded into armed rebellions against the state.

The former dictator Omar al-Bashir chose to crush them by exploiting the divisions between Darfur’s communities. He armed some. Left others unprotected.

Daoud Hari explains:

     What was different now was that the 
     Arab government of Sudan, because it 
     wanted the more settled people of the 
     land, was taking sides with the Arab 
     nomads and providing some with guns, 
     helicopters, bombers, and tanks to decide 
     the arguments. 

The climate crisis made everything combustible. The state provided the spark.

The Arab mounted militias armed by the central government were known as the Janjaweed, roughly, “devils on horseback”. Their violence against civilians between 2003 and 2005 was recognised by the United States and others as genocide.

In 2007, the then UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon put words to what many had missed when the genocide was reduced to ethnicity alone:

"Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand – an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis.”

Many international observers have called Darfur the world’s first climate war. Not because climate alone created the violence, but because the climate crisis deepened existing injustices and made violence more likely.

Subscribe now

The violence that began in 2003 never ended. It continued at low intensity, then became high intensity again when Sudan’s civil war broke out in 2023, after two generals first helped each other overthrow the dictator al-Bashir and then turned their weapons on each other.

Those now ethnically cleansing the non-Arab tribes are the same Janjaweed as twenty years ago. They have a different name, Rapid Support Forces, RSF, but they are massacring the same communities.

The United States again assesses it as genocide, as does the UN.

And when one looks at Africa today – at drought, land degradation, water scarcity and rapidly growing populations in places where states are weak and weapons are plentiful – Darfur is not an exception.

It is a warning.

It is strange to move from one view of the world to an entirely different one. Mostly because it requires me to change as well. I can’t remain the same person anymore. If I do, won’t I simply keep sustaining something that needs to die? I cannot ask the world to change if I am not willing to change myself.

There is a danger in this moment, that those who want to transform the world into something radically different – whether in economics, ecology, or the way we organize ourselves socially – do so mainly on an intellectual level. We think and talk endlessly about what it should look like, yet step into the new world as the same people we were before, marinated in the system we grew up inside.

Subscribe now

Perhaps that is why so much change never moves beyond ideas. We try to create something new with the same reflexes, the same motivations, and the same understanding of value as before.

The person I used to be was always moving towards something. I lived by understanding what was about to happen before it fully arrived. I wanted to be first. To start things. To build. I thought bigger, faster, more. There was always a next step, and I lived inside that step.

Everything changes when that disappears. Not just what I think or believe, but the very feeling of who I am.

The person I was still exists somewhere as an echo, while another part of me is trying to realign the compass. The old self watches the new one and wants to speed things up. The new self is disappointed that the old one did not stop sooner.

It feels as though two parallel life stories are unfolding inside me at the same time. In one story, I was full of promise. I created new things, saw opportunities, built platforms, but ultimately became a failure because I burned out, lost my direction, and disappeared from several communities - and with them, the life I thought I was going to live.

In the other, softer story, I am someone who tirelessly searches for ways to do what feels right – for myself and for the world. Someone who keeps trying to survive in the only way I know how, but who no longer believes that more is always better.

     “In reality, however, every ego, so far from 
     being a unity is in the highest degree a 
     manifold world, a constellated heaven, a 
     chaos of forms, of states and stages, of 
     inheritances and potentialities. It appears 
     to be a necessity as imperative as eating 
     and breathing for everyone to be forced to 
     regard this chaos as a unity and to speak 
     of his ego as though it were a one-fold and 
     clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. 
     Even the best of us share this delusion.”
     – "The Steppenwolf" by Herman Hesse

There is another insight here as well. That what went wrong – in the rhythm, the position, the relationships – may not only say something about me. It may also say something about a system that has become dependent on people constantly optimizing themselves.

The systems and environments I lived in were never a good fit for me because I am simply not built for that rhythm. But because I lived there, because I saw almost all of it, I can also stand where I stand today. With the strength to step away. With the conviction that another kind of life exists somewhere else. A life I catch glimpses of now and then, fragments that make me happy in a way that feels entirely new.

Peace. And a different kind of freedom. Call it awakening, age, or courage – I don’t know, and I don’t really care. I simply want to keep existing and become more of who I was meant to be.

I see more and more fragments of something else. Sunlight moving across the floor. Feelings. Words slowly emerging. I genuinely do not want to be anywhere other than here.

But who am I if I am no longer the person I built my life around being? When does a person stop being the same person? And how much must die for something else to live?

The world makes it difficult to let go. Everywhere there are traces of who I was. Versions of myself. The teenager I once was still exists in the eyes of old classmates on Facebook. My first business cards are tucked away in moving boxes. In the wardrobe hang suits I will probably never find a reason to wear again.

Keep or let go?

I don’t know. Perhaps it is the same question I am still asking about the person I used to be.

Läs mer av Annas dagbok:

Iranians and Afghans have long argued over which side of the border produces the best saffron, and I’d probably say that, with little dispute, both countries grow some of the world’s finest saffron.

Every autumn, the delicate purple flowers bloom across dry fields. They must be picked at dawn, before the sun wilts them. Later, the tiny red threads in its middle are carefully removed with tweezers, then dried, before being sold in small jars in markets, or shipped across the world.

Persian cuisine relies heavily on saffron, and one of my favourite things to eat is havuj bastani: saffron ice cream topped with fresh carrot juice. (Hear me out before you judge.)

Read more

The mountains are a lush green. They sit in stark contrast to the desert high plains around Tehran. While the Alborz Mountains surrounding the capital are dramatic, with spiky rocks and snow-covered peaks, the hills of Gilan are soft and rolling, covered in trees and fields, speckled with the occasional farmhouse.

Just a three-hour drive from the capital, it’s where Tehranians spend their weekends, filling their cars with petrol that costs barely ten cents a litre (at least before the war), and their thermoses with boiling black tea, flavoured with cardamom, saffron, and perhaps a little too much sugar.

Read more

My reality is shaped by where I place my gaze and how long I allow it to rest there. What I become accustomed to seeing. What I let in. But also what I stop seeing as a result.

I wake up to birdsong and the familiar feeling that I have missed something important. That I have let someone down. That I should be better informed. Better read. More engaged. Is it shame?

The world moves faster than I can understand it.

But underneath that, a little deeper down, there is something else. A feeling of being indebted to suffering I can never repay. I know things. I see things. And then I have to make breakfast.

There is a particular kind of fragmentation in this that I don’t think human beings have always lived with. Being constantly exposed to the pain of the world without any proportional way to respond. Without even knowing whether we should respond. It is not only overwhelming, it is a kind of unfinished movement the body carries around.

Perhaps it has always been this way, but what feels different now is that everything is happening at once, in many different places, roaring straight into the nervous system.

And in the middle of all that, we are expected to remain functioning human beings. Parents. Friends. Colleagues. People who still want to feel deeply and do something real without breaking apart.

What troubles me most is not the volume of it all, but how deliberately everything is designed to keep me there. Everything and everyone is competing for my gaze. Not only for my opinions or beliefs, but for my attention.

What should I focus on? What should I be afraid of? What should I have time to react to before the next thing takes over?

And the systems surrounding reality – the algorithms, the platforms, the logic of the news cycle – have learned exactly how to hold a human being’s attention for a few seconds longer. Sometimes they stroke me gently in the direction I am already moving. Sometimes they force my eyes open, stir emotion, only to numb them again moments later.

At the same time, it has become harder to stay with a thought. A feeling. A conversation. A fleeting sense of discomfort easily turns into scrolling, work, distraction. It is as if the whole culture is training us never to rest our gaze anywhere for too long.

My attention breaks while writing this text. I jump to the news feed. A child who has lost their entire family. I stay for three seconds. An AI-generated influencer. I scroll on. Then an advertisement for shoes.

     My daughter asked me when she was six. 
     "If you could, would you go to space?"
     "Yes, I'd love to."
     "But you are already in space. 
     Earth is already in space."
     Our sense of separation on full display, 
     exposed by the raw insight only
     a child possess.
     – Dennis Hedenskog

I don’t know what this does to me over time. I don’t know what it does to us. What happens to a society where we quickly categorise, react, judge and move on? Where everything must become content before it has had a chance to become experience?

Sometimes I wonder whether we are not exhausted by work at all, but by spending too long with our gaze fixed on things that drain our life force. Feeds that keep us reactive. Ideals that leave us feeling inadequate. Visions of success and progress that make us feel as though we are falling behind.

The brain can only be consciously aware of a fraction of everything we take in, but I have read that the rest is stored somewhere anyway. In the fatigue. In the anxiety. In the feeling that something is wrong, even when we cannot quite put it into words. The body knows.

Sometimes everything I gather becomes a powerful feeling that guides me beyond the rational, but more often it feels heavy.

But it works both ways. The moment I become aware that my attention is being owned, I can also choose to place my gaze elsewhere. On a place I would otherwise walk past. On a person I want to understand. On the light through the trees. Or on a book from another time.

Or on myself. Not with the efficient, judging gaze that measures everything through performance, but with a more forgiving one. A gaze that helps me see the context more clearly. The exhaustion more clearly. Things as they actually are.

Reality looks different when we dare to truly see it. Not selectively. Not reactively. But through a gaze we have consciously chosen for ourselves.

I think that is where I have to begin.

When September arrived, the season began where our hearts met before our hands did – it was time for the olive harvest. In our bayara (orchard and farm), the whole family gathered. And when we Gazans say family, we mean everyone: children, siblings, nieces and nephews, parents, in-laws, uncles, cousins …

We were some thirty souls, young and old, spreading colourful cloths on the ground beneath the silver-green trees to begin picking, a blessing in an atmosphere filled with laughter and joyful smiles.

Everyone had their part. The short ones tended the small trees, while the tall climbed into the great, swaying canopies with poles to reach the fruit hanging highest, under the roof of the sky.

These moments were filled with anticipation. We wanted those olives on the table the moment they were picked, and we didn’t wait – we all sat on the ground right where we had harvested, hunting for smooth stones to gently crush the olives in a spontaneous tradition we call zaitun jarjir (literally, crushed olives).

In a flash, we mixed our zaitun jarjir with lemon slices, salt, a splash of vinegar, and hot red Gaza chilli. It was a pickle ready to be eaten that same day, when we were too impatient to wait the long weeks that regular curing requires.

During those harvest days, we would light an open fire and brew tea, letting it steep with sage in a pot brought from home, served in proper tea glasses, and pick fresh oranges for a break.

At the end of the day, we returned from the groves to find that the grandmothers had prepared a wonderful meal as a reward for our labour. A true feast for us all.

Subscribe now

The harvest was meticulously sorted: the black olives that are my children’s favorite for the table, the green ones for pickling, and the rest for the sacred journey to the olive mill. People stood there in long queues, filled with joy. They chatted proudly about their harvest, their olive varieties, and the quality, comparing them to previous years. No one noticed the time – it felt like a communal picnic.

In that moment at the mill, when the first fresh oil emerged, we carefully observed the tradition of drinking a small cup of it straight away, to feel its warmth and the fruit of the earth coursing through our veins.

At the peak of the season, the national dish, musakhan, reigned over our tables – a ritual meal we prepared together. It captures the country’s history in a single mouthful: warm khubz al-taboon (clay oven bread), thick and uneven with a crisp crust, soft and pillowy inside to soak up the golden olive oil, covered in sautéed onions and a generous dusting of royal sumac.

The warm scent from our furn al-taboon (clay oven) drifted across the entire street. There was also the aroma of qurs zaatar (round olive oil breads filled with wild thyme) and qallayat bandora (tomato pan) with garlic and chilli … Everything drenched in olive oil. In Palestine, we don’t eat oil just for sustenance, but to draw strength from the land and the resilience of the trees.

Today, my family has been displaced and scattered in every direction. My uncle, the head of our family, has passed away, and with him, parts of our souls died too. He was the symbol of justice, he distributed everything – from hazelnuts and eggs to meat and olive oil – with precision and love.

Our bayara, which once teemed with life, has been crushed by occupation tanks. They drove over the olive trees we grew up with, leaving behind a devastation that words cannot describe.

Since the start of the genocide, the harvest season has ground to a halt. Lacking fuel, people have been forced to hack down the remaining branches for firewood, to cook and survive.

No eager hands come to pick the fruit anymore. Only a few pale trees remain in Gaza – those that managed to escape both the tanks and the fires of the hungry.

This devastation is part of a broader “green genocide”. According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, approximately two million olive trees in Gaza have been destroyed since 7 October 2023.

The attacks on our trees are not random, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. These trees are the backbone of our economy, accounting for 14 per cent of all agricultural income.

While they attempt to uproot our proof of the right to the land (on the West Bank, continuous cultivation has long served as evidence of land use under Ottoman legal traditions that still influence land rights, and destroying olive trees or preventing farmers from reaching their land is often described as a way to render the soil “unexploited” and easier to seize) the Al-Badawi olive tree outside Bethlehem remains, proud and alive, estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,500 years old.

It is one of the oldest olive trees in the world. The name comes from the legend of Sheikh Al-Badawi, who, according to the story, used to rest beneath it. It is guarded by the local resident Salah Abu Ali, who has been looking after it every day for decades.

When the branches of the olive trees are sawn off, the roots live on beneath the soil, just as our memories live within us, ready to send out new shoots. This is why the settlers burn the trees, so they may never grow again.

They are trying to steal our hope as well.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 65,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

In Gaza, the pen has never been just a tool for writing. It has been our daily prayer and our most important battlefield. We are the people who brought illiteracy down to zero before the gates of hell were thrown open. We are the ones who capture light from the deepest shadows of blockade and war.

In the 1990s, I spent my youth in Al-Rimal, Gaza’s most elegant district. There, in the UNRWA schools at the heart of the neighborhood, my first dreams were woven.

The image of my teacher, Kainat, and her legendary authority lives on in me forever. It was she who taught me the art of writing. A strict disciplinarian, she would punish us by making us stand all day or copy our homework tenfold, yet we loved her through our diligence and respect.

She instilled in me the strentgh that became the foundation of my resilience, a refusal to give up, even as the occupation suffocated our peace with constant raids and a pressure that never lifted, and curfews that began as early as seven in the evening.

I married in 1996, but in 2003, amidst the Second Intifada (2000–2005), I made a difficult and life-altering decision. I would return to school, even though I was already a mother of three. And I did not stop at secondary education, I pushed forward, completing my university studies alongside my children, all under the weight of a suffocating blockade and a morning rush that never seemed to end.

Every day at four in the morning, I moved through the darkness of my kitchen in Al-Rimal. Due to the chronic electricity shortages, I learned to find everything by touch, memorising the place of every spoon and jar with my heart rather than my eyes. I never dared to light candles, haunted by the devastating fires that had claimed the lives of so many children across the city.

But the darkness was not free of mistakes!

I remember one morning, at the height of that relentless rush, preparing breakfast. I picked up a jar I thought was salt and sprinkled it generously over the fresh eggs we had collected from our own chickens in the garden. I did not realise I had grabbed sugar instead of salt until the children began to eat. With a mother’s firmness, inspired by my teacher Kainat, I made them finish their meal. Suddenly, the “sugar eggs” turned into a burst of hysterical laughter that filled the entire house.

Even today, after all these years and everything we have been through, my children remember the taste of those eggs with joy, as if that mistake was the “sugar” that helped us endure the bitter days.

Subscribe now

In the midst of our laughter, the scent of freshly fried Gaza falafel drifted up from the shop beneath our home, and my son Abood ran downstairs to fetch steaming fresh bread. We ate cheese I made myself and drank tea with mint, while I prepared their school sandwiches with zaatar and cucumber.

Together, we walked through the beautiful streets of Al-Rimal, along the enchanting Lovers’ Street, lined with fragrant juri roses and tall cypress trees that stood guard over our steps. In our eyes, there was a glimmer of defiance against the darkness of the blockade.

Today, the scene has moved beyond all reason. For two and a half years, a genocide has raged, directly targeting schools and universities, turning temples of knowledge into mass graves for displaced families.

Gaza’s children now write their alphabet inside torn tents, beneath a bombardment that never falls silent and the constant whine of drones overhead. No clean water, no food that satisfies hunger, no clothes to shield them from the winter’s bite or the summer’s heat.

And yet, they refuse ignorance.

The occupation has destroyed Lovers’ Street, uprooted the cypress trees, and reduced the universities to rubble. But they have failed to understand one thing – Gaza itself is the world’s largest school.

We are the fishermen who cannot reach the sea, but we are also the palm trees that refuse to bend.

The laughter once born from those “sugar eggs” in Al-Rimal is the same will, the same resistance, that drives schoolchildren today to study on top of the ruins.

We believe that knowledge is the one light that the occupation can never extinguish.

Postcards from Gaza

Khulud Shaban is a Palestinian journalist, born in Gaza in 1980, writing from exile.

Life. This series of personal stories is about how people once lived here – about the everyday life and the places that carried them. The culture, the food, the laughter, and everything they loved. A society forced to suffer and die. Survivors who remember what was with love and pain.

Death. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians and 36 children, according to AFP. Since then, Israel has killed over 72,587 people in Gaza and injured over 172,381, according to Gaza health authorities.

Children. Over 64,000 children have been killed or injured, over 56,000 have lost one or both parents, and between 3,000 and 4,000 have undergone one or more amputations, according to UNICEF.

Displaced. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee, many of them repeatedly, according to the UN.

Infrastructure. Large parts of Gaza’s housing, hospitals, schools, culture, crops, and historical and religious sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

In 2016, when I was still new to Afghanistan, I went to Herat, the country’s third largest city after Kabul and Kandahar. (The latter a city in the south, strangely enough considered both a safe haven for gay men and a Taliban stronghold, which I would come to visit against the orders of my Pakistani CEO).

Here in the west, I found Herat to be a quiet border town near Iran, where the food is sweetened with fresh pomegranate as in its Persian neighbour, and where the women who cover do so in the lighter, patterned Iranian chador, which leaves the face open, rather than in the blue Afghan burqa.

I was invited to attend a peace conference. The guest speaker was the French ambassador, among many other international figures.

I wondered why I was invited at all. A simple General Manager is totally irrelevant compared to these high-profile speakers and attendees, but the flight and hotel were paid for, and off I went. I guess they wanted someone from the “Kingdom of Netherlands” on their list – as was mentioned on my name tag – to impress the sponsors who were paying for this event.

The city is home to a magnificent citadel and the amazing Blue Mosque. The visit to the mosque was a must. A cathedral of the Muslim faith.

Subscribe now

I went there with an American who was also invited to the conference and whom I had met at the hotel the day before. He was most likely intelligence of some sort.

In front of the Blue Mosque, there is a busy park where we wandered around. We were quickly spotted by locals who started to surround us.

“This is getting dangerous,” the American said, as if these normal Afghans going about their normal day were actually a bloodthirsty mob ready to lynch us right there and then.

He disappeared, leaving me with approximately thirty men around me. And what did I know? I wasn’t the expert, but looking into their eyes, I saw only smiles.

“Picture, picture!” they shouted, and I had to oblige as they all wanted a photo of me with every single one of them on their smartphones.

One young man asked if I wanted to go below the Blue Mosque. Again, I thought about the American and worried a bit about getting lynched, but curiosity got the better of me.

Five minutes later, I was under the mosque. Sunlight streamed from small openings in the domed ceiling high above, dust particles floating in the ancient air. Compressed soil keeps the room at a constant temperature.

Two men were sitting on the floor, working by hand with what looked like antique tools, still there from medieval times, shaping pieces of tile used to renovate the Blue Mosque.

I felt honoured to be allowed into this secret place, until one of the men pointed to the tip box placed well in view next to the door. Realising I wasn’t that special after all, and that many tourists must be led down the narrow staircase, it was still totally worthwhile.

I stepped out into the autumn sun, feeling alive.

The mosque itself was a stunning sight, with colourful mosaic tiles and a very impressive, humungous courtyard of white marble. Somehow, the men lying there resting seemed to have found the peace the conference was only talking about behind fortified gates.

It reminded me of the acronym NATO. In Kabul it meant “No Action Talk Only”.

(When, some years later, I told the Taliban Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Stanikzai, at a meeting, he laughed out loud and had to write it down, so much he liked it.)

What I do remember from all the talking is that the French ambassador, during his speech, said quite clearly that the Taliban are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters as far as he is concerned.

I thought it was rather courageous of the ambassador to say something like that. Words can easily be interpreted differently, and diplomacy is a fine line.

It reminded me of Nelson Mandela. During his first visit to the United States after his release from prison in 1990, he was questioned by Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline about his ties to Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro – leaders who had supported the struggle against apartheid. Yet Mandela’s defence of those relationships was an oxymoron, as far as the journalist was concerned.

Mandela’s answer was remarkable: “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.”

Postcards from Afghanistan

Through the eyes of hotel manager Timotheus Swagemakers, this series of stories offers a rare glimpse into some of Afghanistan’s hidden worlds.

Life. While headlines have long defined Afghanistan by its scars, these stories look beyond them – towards the unexpected light of everyday life and encounters where life continues, unseen by the outside world.

Dignity. Beyond the story of endless wars, there is deep hospitality, ancient traditions, and a people whose dignity cannot be shaken by the shifting tides of power.

The Graveyard of Empires. Afghanistan’s history has been shaped by the country’s strategic location, which has led to repeated attempts at conquest by Alexander the Great, the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States – all of whom eventually withdrew in the face of fierce Afghan resistance.

Decades of Invasion. In 1979, as the Cold War intensified, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It sparked a decade-long war that drove millions of people from their homes. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the power vacuum led to a brutal civil war between rival factions.

The Taliban Cycles. The Taliban first seized power in 1996 and imposed strict rule until 2001. After the September 11 attacks in the United States – in which no Afghans were involved – a US-led coalition invaded and remained in the country for 20 years. In August 2021, as international forces withdrew, the Taliban returned to power.

The Human Cost. After more than 40 years of almost uninterrupted conflict, the Afghan people remain the primary victims. They have been denied the opportunity to develop their nation in lasting peace, leading to one of the world’s largest displaced populations and a devastating humanitarian crisis.

Education and the Future. Today, millions of Afghan children are out of school, while women face severe restrictions on their fundamental rights to work and study – casting a shadow over the future of an entire generation.

Cultural Resilience. Despite the destruction of cultural heritage such as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan remains a cradle of Silk Road history, where poetry, craftsmanship, and a deeply rooted sense of honour continue to shape the soul of the nation.

A thunderstorm is building over the coastal mountains, as if nature itself has chosen the backdrop for this story. Down in the valley, across the fields of Al-Rusafa, the wind cuts so cold that no one wants to be outside. The poor village, set between Tartus, Hama and Homs, is home to about 1,600 people, most of them Alawites – the esoteric religious minority to which the Assad family also belongs.

On the floor of a modest stone house, 54-year-old Ghada Ali sits feeding branches into the stove. The wood crackles cosily as it catches fire. She pours hot water over yerba mate and hands over a cup of the herbal tea, an important social tradition in this part of Syria. The power is out, and she sets the kettle back beside the gas cylinder.

Her husband, 55-year-old Rashid Saad, enters with a white scarf wrapped around his head, his hands numb with cold. He pulls me into a welcoming embrace and kisses me on both cheeks. Here, amid scarcity and warmth, lives a farming family whose life has been torn apart.

“The way they killed my son was brutal,” Rashid says.

Among the most brutal in Syria’s history

Across Syria’s coastal region, massacres unfolded at around 40 locations in Alawite communities, in one of the most brutal waves of violence against civilians in the country’s modern history. For three days, over the weekend of 7–9 March 2025, the killings continued unchecked. Even afterwards, the violence did not fully stop. Low-level attacks have continued.

Security forces linked to Syria’s new transitional government emptied entire villages and wiped out whole families. Men, women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities were humiliated, tortured and executed. Skulls were crushed with metal pipes. Eyes were gouged out. Homes were set on fire. People were abducted and never returned alive.

Read more

Flies, crows, and hyenas suck and tear greedily at goats, cows, and camels that could go no further, and human children, whom desperate mothers have buried with their bare hands, but failed to cover properly. The mounds they swept together swirl away between their fingers, swallowed by the parched savanna. Not even these final resting places escape the deprivation and decay.

Scavengers circle eagerly in the sky, awaiting new victims to collapse and end up a bellyful of flesh, sinew, and eyes. Millions of livestock and tens of thousands of people have already perished. Skeletons and skulls remain the only silent witnesses in the heat and the dust.

It is 2023 when we begin to follow the drought, holding the people in a chokehold. Over the past month, the skeleton of six-year-old Quraama Mu’allim Ibrahim has begun to show. Not stripped bare like those she sees on the ground, but clearly visible. Her skin is only a thin veil over the sharp edges.

At home in the village, her mother and four siblings remain in an eerily precarious existence, where food and water are like a fading memory from long ago. The milk disappeared with the animals, and the crops have been destroyed as it is no longer possible to farm. The riverbanks have dried up and are filled instead with rubbish, urine, and faeces.

Five rainy seasons have failed, followed by heavy downpours that tore through the cracked earth, causing devastating floods and landslides. In the aftermath, they left a breeding ground for parasites now creeping towards Quraama’s brain, though she does not yet know it.

Towards the provincial capital of Baidoa stagger exhausted figures covered in orange desert sand. Their faces are as worn and tattered as their clothes. Many are traumatised by what they were forced to do, like 36-year-old Kusan Hassan Isak. Her three-day escape on foot was so filled with terror that she fears it will never let go of her.

Forced to bury the children

Along the journey, two of her children died of malnutrition and thirst. She had no other choice but to swiftly bury her three-year-old son, Mohammed Abdi, and her six-year-old daughter, Hindiyo Aden. She did what she could to give them dignified resting places in the scorched earth.

A mother’s deepest wish is for her children to be safe, but she could not protect them, not even their remains. Small bodies that once grew inside her womb now lay abandoned and served to the hyenas by an unmarked, dusty roadside.

“I can never find them again,” she whispers, choked with horror.

Subscribe now

Others are ill and slowly perishing, like six-year-old Quraama. She has fallen unconscious after the 40-mile walk from her village. Her mother had watched with deep worry at the way her daughter’s weight had vanished. When Quraama caught a fever, she was sent away with her grandfather, while the mother stayed behind to nurse the other children.

The starving seek rescue in a vast exodus. More than half a million people have arrived in Baidoa, transforming the entire cityscape. They are forced here because the militant jihadist organisation Al-Shabaab controls the surrounding territory, and aid reaches no further than the city limits.

Hundreds of thousands of tents are raised in close proximity, forming a hopeless field of domes made from dry branches, patched with sun-bleached rags and plastic bags. Mile after mile of motley, dystopian colonies, where the hope of a better life is swept away towards the horizon along with the rubbish and the dust. Leaving the people alone, with their curse and despair.

When Quraama wakes again, she has been admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit at the provincial hospital. Her hands are heavily wrapped in white bandages to prevent her from tearing out the feeding tube taped to her cheek and inserted into her nostril.

Above her hangs a mosquito net, and beneath her lies a cut-to-size black tarpaulin, as if her fate is already decided, her presence ready to be cleared away. The plastic clings to her skin, which glistens with sweat and stretches tight over her fragile bones. Her elbow joint is larger than the upper arm on which her head rests. Her oval face is delicate, her almond-shaped eyes do not want to die.

The most grotesque detail is the cord tied around her wrist – a charging cable for a mobile phone. The other end of the cord is attached to the metal frame of the hospital bed.

She is tied to her own nightmare.

Tens of thousands of victims

Both Quraama’s and Kusan’s suffering is a consequence of human greed. The increased use of fossil fuels and deforestation has created this catastrophe.

The extreme drought in Somalia, which killed 71,000 people between 2022 and 2024 – 40 per cent of them small children – and the subsequent floods that led to disease epidemics and further deaths, would never have occurred in a world that was 1.2 degrees cooler.

2024 became the hottest year ever recorded, with a global average temperature 1.6 degrees above the pre-industrial level from the period 1850–1900.

2025 began with more than ten thousand homes burning down in Los Angeles and millions of people being exposed to smoke hazardous to health. Something that only led to headlines when celebrities were affected.

The climate crisis strikes across the world, but its front line lies here, among the most vulnerable along the equator. Those paying the highest price are the ones who have contributed least to the emissions now killing them.

The mothers’ struggle

The hospital where Quraama is chained to a mobile charger, and Kusan’s cramped patchwork tent, where there is only a cardboard box and a couple of scarves to sit and sleep on, are not far from one another.

Kusan has a daughter of Quraama’s age, five-year-old Nora, who survived. She stands in the tent opening with an unfathomably tormented look and already a sharp furrow of worry.

“When will they come back?” she asks, as always.

Kusan never knows what to answer her about her dead siblings. Her eyes are red from salty sweat and tears, she lowers them to her knee and looks at her youngest, two-year-old Abdi Nasser, who also looks sad and thoughtful, his hands in his mouth.

“I had seven children …,” she begins.

The anguish presses across her chest, like a vacuum in her lungs. She feels as if she is about to faint.

“… now I have five.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been happy since I lost the children. I think of them all the time. Even when I sleep, I think of them and feel pain.”

Kusan’s home village, Moori Waraabe, is ruled by Al-Shabaab. Before the drought, the family’s only source of income consisted of eight cows and a camel. Livestock are the most important economic and social asset, and historically, communities have relied on customary law to cooperate over grazing land and waterholes.

But dwindling resources in the wake of the climate crisis, combined with political instability, have weakened these strong traditions and led to more conflict. Al-Shabaab demanded tax on the animals and for taking them to water sources, putting enormous pressure on the villagers.

At the same time, the Somali government, with U.S. backing, tried to exploit the impoverished population by arming them to fight Al-Shabaab. The military offensive launched in 2022 was initially described as a success, but it has since stalled, leaving the central and southern regions in a violent stalemate.

When the animals began to die, Kusan realised the end was near. The goats die first, followed by the cows. When the camels die, Somalis know what is coming. They do not need to read bleak reports of future statistics. Goats, cows, camels and humans – that is the order.

Millions under threat

Those who read the reports know that the forecast is darker than the night sky above the rag tents. In 2020, there were 30 million climate refugees in the world. By 2050, experts estimate that the number will rise to 1.2 billion climate refugees. The economic losses are expected to amount to USD 12.5 trillion, and healthcare costs to increase by USD 1.1 trillion. That is a total of USD 13.6 trillion. In addition, a further 14.5 million people are expected to die as a result of climate change.

We are on our way out of the corridor of life, the stable climate zone in which civilisation became possible at all.

The United States’ so called “war on terror”, launched after 11 September 2001, has cost more than USD 8 trillion and led to 4.5 million deaths. The failing offensive against Al-Shabaab shows that the U.S. has still not learned, despite the total fiasco in Afghanistan, that its counterterrorism tactics simply do not work. Once again, they are supporting a weak, corrupt government that does not meet the basic needs of the people, and therefore cannot convince them that the state is better than the jihadists.

One could argue that this is a time when cooperation, not division, is necessary to tackle the dual threats of security issues and climate change, which would ultimately benefit the survival of us all.

Intensive care doctor Muhammad Ali enters Quraama’s ward. With a stethoscope around his neck and pens in his shirt pocket, he checks the medical file and explains her condition in numbers: she should weigh 20 kg, but when she was admitted five days ago she weighed only 9.4 (about 20 lbs). Now, she has fallen to 9.2. He looks at the thin, exposed silhouette, where her feet are wider than her lower legs.

“We have prescribed several antibiotics, but she has worsened. When you are this severely malnourished, the immune system becomes extremely weak. The risk of secondary diseases increases, and it becomes harder to survive them.”

He explains that her malnutrition is life-threatening in itself.

“But what we are treating is her secondary illness, which is encephalitis.”

Rape and murder

In a warmer world, dry periods become both more frequent and more intense, while atmospheric humidity rises. When rain finally comes, it falls in torrents, causing floods and the spread of diseases such as cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, dengue fever, and encephalitis.

In the camps, there are mostly women and children. They struggle with daily tasks like collecting firewood, a dangerous duty, as rape and even murder are common.

The absence of men is often because those of fighting age are prevented from fleeing by various sides looking to recruit soldiers, or because they have chosen to stay behind to protect what little remains of their assets.

Those in the camps head into town during the day to seek manual labour. There, the murmur of voices mixes with the honking of tuk-tuks and the sound of bicycles being repaired, while a few dusty watermelons are set out for sale.

One man offers money exchange, his hands holding bundles of dirty brown Somali banknotes – a rarity on the verge of falling apart, since no currency has been printed since the civil war broke out in 1991. Instead, everyone uses mobile money, a well-functioning system developed in Somalia long before it arrived in the West.

When it is time for prayer, a mosque fills up, and the hundreds who cannot get inside spread their prayer mats on the street, blocking the traffic. Nearby, Coca-Cola bottles are lifted from a lorry and loaded onto a donkey cart. Almost everything sold here is imported – a luxury for city’s poor, an unattainable dream for the displaced.

At the foot of Quraama’s hospital bed sits her grandfather, 60-year-old Ibrahim Abdullah, who walked the 40 miles here with her. He stares tensely into nothing, spits loudly into a cup, and suddenly notices the mobile charging cable tying Quraama’s wrist. Ashamed, he loosens it and apologises, explaining that he is the only one here to look after her.

“I can’t watch over her all the time,” he says. “Sometimes I have to go to the toilet, and sometimes I have to sleep.”

Saved their lives

Another person who has also fled to Baidoa with grandchildren is 80-year-old Fadouma Ibrahim Idow, who has come all the way from Bakool, the next province to the north.

Dressed in bright red, she stands upright in the heat, like a symbol of resistance. Her face is weather-beaten, and a mobile phone hangs from a string around her neck. The words flow quickly as her wrinkled hands gesture with energy.

“I was thirsty, stumbled, and lost my tooth. But I just kept pushing on, walking and walking! I walked with my grandchildren, four orphaned children, it was just us. It took many days.”

She saved the lives of the grandchildren, aged five to twelve, after their parents died.

“We were so hungry. We had to walk, look for food. I was afraid of the hunger all the time!”

The extreme drought that struck East Africa between 2000 and 2023 reached biblical proportion, affecting 100 million people, 60 million of whom faced acute food insecurity. Ten million head of livestock perished across the Horn of Africa, four million of them in Somalia alone.

Since then, the news cycle has fallen silent, and the world has looked away, even as the situation worsens. 2024 began with a two-month cholera epidemic that further increased the number of malnourished people. When the spring rains finally arrived, they were so heavy that flooding once again forced many from their homes, only for the short autumn rains to fail entirely.

Not worth living

In 2025, the drought returns. Ali will turn five in July. He is the son of 30-year-old Hafsa, and for the past two years, they have been trapped in a camp in Baidoa, left without no livelihood after their livestock died when the sky failed them. They cannot return to being herders without animals, on land that once gave life but now takes it away. The children in the camp stretch out their small hands beneath a water tank that stands dripping.

The shortage is severe. Across the country, 6.6 million people lack access to water. Aid organisations are absent, despite the obvious suffering here. In addition, firewood has vanished from the area where the mothers used to collect it, and they do not dare go further away for fear of gang rape. Not even the children are safe from the violence.

Without fire, the women cannot cook any food at all. They are constantly searching for alternative ways to earn an income, such as washing clothes or other things that might yield a meager return, but these opportunities are diminishing along with the water.

Hafsa has fought desperately to put something into Ali’s stomach, but now hope has disappeared. She does not believe he will survive until his birthday. Perhaps he will die in just a few days. Many face the same fate.

Another mother says they will accept every trial Allah gives them, but that this is not a life worth living.

In February 2026, the UN warns that 6.5 million people are at risk of acute hunger. Two million are at IPC level 4, meaning they require immediate assistance to survive. The situation is especially dire for the youngest: 1.84 million children under five face acute malnutrition in 2026, with 483,000 at risk of severe acute malnutrition.

In 2022 alone, 107,530 children under five died in Somalia.

The silence after death

The crisis is made worse by the underfunded aid effort. Somalia’s 2025 humanitarian plan was funded at only 29 per cent, forcing organisations to scale down even as the needs continue to rise.

Six-year-old Quraama was never allowed to experience dignity. When she was three, the rain stopped falling, and she was never again able to eat until she was no longer hungry. In her final days, she was not even allowed to share that time with her mother and siblings. When she arrived at the provincial hospital in Baidoa, an average of ten children were being admitted every day. Not all of them survived. Intensive care doctor Muhammad Ali shook his head when asked whether Quraama would make it.

The silence that followed still echoes.

Read an Aadmi Story from Somalia: