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.

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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.

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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?

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams resumed their correspondence in 1812, they had not written to each other for ten years. Both were among the most important founding fathers of the American republic, central to the work of shaping the new state, but they held sharply different views of the direction the country should take.

In the early years of the revolution, they had been close allies. Later, in a period marked by deep ideological conflict, they became fierce political opponents.

When they began writing to one another again, their disagreements remained fundamental. They still tried, in different ways, to persuade each other. But the form of the exchange had changed.

The conversation was no longer driven by the same need to win. There was a greater willingness to test arguments, question assumptions and think further.

They argued sharply. At times, they were cutting. They challenged each other’s reasoning and made their differences explicit. What had changed was that disagreement was no longer treated as a threat to the relationship.

They corresponded in order to understand each other’s positions and to develop their own. There was a genuine willingness to test one’s standpoint against another mind – and to allow one’s own ideas to become more nuanced, more grounded and more deeply considered.

There was also an intellectual discipline in the exchange: not to ascribe worse motives to the other than to oneself, and to stay with an argument long enough to examine it properly.

Their correspondence reminds us of something important. Conviction does not have to turn conversation into combat. On the contrary, meaningful dialogue often depends on clear positions – but also on the possibility that those positions can be tested, challenged and developed through the encounter.

Today, we see something very different, both in public debate and in many personal relationships. At the very moment when the questions facing humanity have become more consequential, the forms through which we discuss them have grown weaker.

Conversations move at a pace that leaves little room for reflection. They are often charged with strong emotion, but offer little space for examination. Positions are quickly taken, reflexively defended and tied closely to identity.

When someone tests your argument or tries to establish another understanding, it is easily perceived as a personal attack.

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We also live in increasingly narrow bubbles, exposed to limited images of the world. Anything that does not fit becomes difficult to handle because it creates cognitive dissonance. At the same time as the challenges we face deepen – ecologically, politically and socially – our ability to speak about them in ways that lead to understanding and change appears to be weakening.

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In The Zone of Interest (2023), the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss lives a comfortable domestic life in a villa with an idyllic garden in the Polish countryside, right next to the wall of Auschwitz. His wife, Hedwig, walks among the flowerbeds with a baby on her hip, smelling the flowers. There are roses, pumpkins and beehives.

When her mother visits, she shows her the hand-painted wallpaper. In the kitchen, the servants bake cinnamon buns and apple strudel. The family paddles kayaks in the same river where ash and bone fragments drift past. They see the smoke from the ovens and hear the sounds from the other side of the wall, but they do not let it disturb their everyday life.

Life goes on as usual, even though they live next door to the Holocaust.

The film is based on reality. The political thinker Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil. She did not mean that evil is small, but that evil can be ordinary. People continue with their routines and careers, without resisting and without thinking morally.

Arendt was writing about the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann and his trial after the Holocaust, but the concept has endured because it gives language to something universal.

How we can adapt to the gravest crime.

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In our society, we do not need to live beside a wall or a fence to hear the screams and see the smoke during a genocide. In Gaza, the horror can be followed live on social media. Gaza is not the Holocaust, but the principle of the banality of evil is the same.

We see a constant stream of children’s bodies, blood, ash. And still, for most people, life goes on as usual. To speak out can mean risking a career or social standing, losing commissions, no longer being invited into certain rooms.

In October 2025, a new form of front-row view of an ongoing genocide emerged. This time, researchers at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale HRL, were following acts of genocide in the Sudanese city of al-Fashir in real time – from space.

When al-Fashir fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, the researchers saw blood on satellite images for the first time. During that period, the killing moved much faster than in Gaza.

By studying the images, they could see how the bodies of those killed were being cleared away. They counted 150 piles of corpses and saw bodies being burned. RSF was destroying evidence of its war crimes. What could have led to prosecutions went up in smoke.

Yale HRL responded by repeatedly publishing warnings about the massacres on its social media channels.

Around 260,000 people were in al-Fashir when the city fell. Tens of thousands are still missing. Some estimates put the number of missing at up to 150,000. More than 6,000 people were killed in the first three days after the city was taken, according to the UN OHCHR, but reliable overall figures are not available because independent investigators have not been granted full access to the area. A higher, uncertain estimate suggests that at least 60,000 people may have been killed within three weeks.

That is the equivalent of everyone in the municipality of Falun, Sweden being killed and everyone in the municipality of Sundsvall, Sweden disappearing between two paydays. And yet al-Fashir was barely given space in the news flow. Days could pass without it being mentioned in the media at all.

Perhaps, in the future, there will also be a film about this. About how a small group of researchers saw it from space, while people on earth closed their eyes. Like the Höss family on the other side of the wall.

Perhaps, one day, there will be a film about this too. About how a small group of researchers saw it from space, while people on earth closed their eyes. Like the Höss family on the other side of the wall.

How tightly we shut our eyes is not determined by how many people are killed, or by the scale of the catastrophe. According to research on news values and international news flows, it is determined by proximity, power and recognition.

Which places newsrooms cover. Which wars politicians talk about. Which people we have learned to feel for.

Ukraine is in Europe. Gaza has for decades been central to world politics and public consciousness. Sudan is outside. Few people can place the country on a map. Fewer still recognise the names of its cities. Almost no one sees themselves there. And then silence becomes easier.

That is also why warnings of genocide can be issued for months, even years, without producing a response.

Before Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023, al-Fashir had around 1.5 million inhabitants and a further 800,000 internally displaced people. During the war, the city became the last major stronghold in Darfur not controlled by RSF, which is fighting the government army, SAF.

While SAF held the city, RSF besieged it and dug earth berms around it. It was an unusually long siege, lasting 18 months. People were forced to survive on animal fodder, leaves, refuse. Those who did not starve risked being killed in indiscriminate attacks.

The warnings of what would happen if RSF took the city came long before it fell in October 2025. As early as spring 2024, the UN warned that hundreds of thousands of civilians in al-Fashir were in acute danger. The ICC prosecutor said at the time that suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity were already being committed in the city. The world also knew what had happened in other cities in the region, such as el-Geneina, where the Arab-dominated RSF entered and ethnically cleansed non-Arabs. Al-Fashir was home to precisely those groups.

It was not, then, that the world did not know. It knew. It received warnings and reports. When the massacres were then carried out, the world also received satellite images and the alerts from Yale HRL. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, later stated that the human catastrophe in al-Fashir had been foreseen and could have been prevented.

But, as in history’s darkest hours, it was not enough.

When it was all over, the head of Yale HRL, Nathaniel Raymond, described al-Fashir as eerily empty. Markets that had once been full of life were so deserted that they had begun to grow over. As if the people had been cleared out so efficiently that nature had begun to reclaim the city.

The survivors who managed to escape over the earth berms and through the desert have described what the satellite images did not show. The mass executions. How they hid beneath corpses. The humiliation, the torture, and the many checkpoints where people were taken away. The beheadings, the gang rapes and the rape of children.

The power of The Zone of Interest lies in the fact that the film does not centre the violence itself, but the normalisation around it. It shows how the worst can happen while everyday life continues.

In one scene, a red-haired woman is brought into Rudolf Höss’s office. What happens to her is not shown. Afterwards, Höss walks home through a tunnel and washes himself in the cellar. Pulls down his trousers and washes his crotch. Then he goes back upstairs to his family.

Now Volker Türk has warned that what happened in al-Fashir could be repeated in Kordofan, the region bordering Darfur to the east.

The warnings are there again.

The question is whether we do anything with them this time. Or whether we continue everyday life.

As usual.

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The American lieutenant John Dunbar looks out across the open prairie. The land is untouched. There is harmony between him, his horse and the natural world. Then he sees them. The prairie covered with skinned buffalo. Bodies without hides, rotting in the sun. White hunters have taken the skins and left the rest.

The sight changes something in him. The story he has been given – of civilisation against “savages” – no longer holds. In the end, he turns against his own army.

For the Sioux who lived there, the people labelled uncivilised and violent, the buffalo was sacred. It was spirit, food, clothing, shelter, tool.

The Sioux have a fundamental worldview known as Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning that all things are related, and that human beings do not stand above the world, but are kin to animals, plants, water, stone, sky and earth. Every action therefore, carries a responsibility to the whole.

Now their source of life had been turned into waste. The landscape into a slaughterhouse.

Dances with Wolves (1990) is set during the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. The US army and settlers take land by force, invalidate Indigenous customary rights and make their way of life illegitimate.

By exterminating the buffalo, they deprived the Sioux of what they lived from. This is sociocide: not only the killing of people, but the destruction of what makes a society possible. It was a deliberate strategy to force them into dependency – into reservations.

The wisdom of how to live in balance was erased.

Then the people were erased.

The home of the Fur people

On another continent, in another time, the pattern repeats.

Darfur, in western Sudan, is named after the Fur people: dar means “home” in Arabic; Fur is the historic main tribe.

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In the summer of 2025, Israel and the United States launched a campaign of targeted airstrikes against Iran in what became known as the Twelve-Day War. The stated aims were to eliminate senior Iranian military commanders, politicians, and nuclear physicists, as well as to dismantle the country’s nuclear technology programme.

As the attacks began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Iranians to rise up against the regime and push for regime change. In his address to the Iranian people, he invoked the slogan that had echoed through the streets of Iran during the protests of autumn 2022: 'Woman, Life, Freedom.'

Netanyahu’s appeal went unheeded. People fled in panic, seeking shelter from the bombs. The attacks claimed a large number of civilian lives and triggered a nationalist rallying around the flag after the country was attacked by foreign powers.

Just over six months after the war, popular protests erupted in Iran. The authorities had failed to address the grievances that had driven earlier waves of unrest.

This time, the demonstrations began in Tehran’s bazaar district, where merchants rose up against 50 per cent inflation and a collapsing currency that had paralysed business and driven the cost of living to staggering levels.

Sanctions and corruption

Iran has long been subject to severe economic sanctions. After Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, he imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iran. The purpose of the sanctions was to weaken the Iranian economy to the point where it would trigger popular protests.

These sanctions, together with the Iranian authorities’ general mismanagement of the economy and widespread corruption, have been among the causes of Iran’s recurring protests.

In early January 2026, demonstrations against the economic crisis evolved into anti-regime protests that quickly spread across the country. They were directed against political repression and the social engineering policies of the political and religious leadership: forced religious indoctrination, restrictions on individual rights and freedoms, and other measures intended to discipline, control, and govern the Iranian population.

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The protests in January 2026 differed from earlier protests in one crucial respect. In early January, the Israeli intelligence service issued a statement in Persian on X, declaring not only its support for the demonstrations, but also that its agents were on the ground among the protesters to assist them in the struggle against the regime.

When Netanyahu’s call for revolt failed during the Twelve-Day War in the summer of 2025, Israel saw the 2026 protests as a new opportunity to topple the Iranian regime – at a time when Iran’s regional allies had been weakened or, as in Syria, removed from power."

As in previous waves of protest, the January 2026 demonstrations were crushed by the Iranian regime. The death toll ran into the thousands.

Following the mass casualties, an increasing number of voices inside and outside Iran called for foreign military intervention. This demand was justified on the grounds that multiple attempts to overthrow the Iranian regime had failed, and that only external action could now bring about regime change. The military intervention was framed as a “humanitarian” operation.

US President Donald Trump promised support. On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched extensive airstrikes against thousands of targets in Iran. The attacks killed Iran’s supreme leader, as well as a large number of senior military commanders and politicians, while thousands of military, industrial, and economic targets – including civilian and critical infrastructure– were subjected to massive bombardment.

Once again, the Israeli prime minister and the US president called on the Iranian people to rise up against the regime and take power. Once again, the military attacks failed to produce a popular uprising.

The United States and Israel appear to have expected regime change after the first wave of massive attacks, which had effectively “decapitated” the regime. That did not happen. Despite being attacked by two of the world’s most powerful militaries, Iran continued to resist. It neither surrendered nor collapsed. Instead, Iran struck back at US bases in countries around the Persian Gulf and at Israel, turning the conflict into a regional war and blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

When the initial plans to force Iran to surrender or collapse did not unfold as the US and Israel had expected, Trump began speaking of objectives other than regime change. He stressed that the attacks were aimed at neutralising Iran’s nuclear programme – the very same programme he had claimed US bombings had obliterated in the summer of 2025 – decimating the country’s missile programme and destroying its naval forces.

Boasting about violations of international law

From the outset, the US-Israeli war against Iran was questioned by experts in international law, who accused the two countries of violating international law because the war was launched in the midst of ongoing negotiations and without UN backing.

A couple of weeks into the war, Trump’s rhetoric increasingly shifted toward deliberate violations of international law.

When reports emerged that a girls’ school in the southern Iranian city of Minab had been hit by American Tomahawk missiles on the first day of the war, killing around a hundred schoolchildren, Trump denied them. When the reports proved accurate, he claimed the Iranians themselves were behind the attack.

When independent international human rights organisations and media outlets were able to prove that the US had carried out the attack, American authorities tried to bury the deadly strike in a drawn-out investigation.

The violations of international law did not end with the school massacre.

Thousands of civilians were killed in strikes targeting homes, hospitals, schools, universities, and other civilian infrastructure. Trump further threatened to target Iran’s energy facilities, power plants, bridges, and additional civilian assets.

In early April, a bridge outside Tehran was bombed. Trump boasted about it on Truth Social, writing: “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again — Much more to follow!” He also shared a video showing smoke rising from the destroyed bridge.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu boasted that Israel had destroyed 70 per cent of Iran’s iron and steel production.

The war rhetoric grew cruder and more dehumanising. Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, adding that this was “where they belong”. He insisted the attacks would continue simply because they were fun.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth used crude Islamophobic rhetoric rooted in fundamentalist Christian beliefs. He said “the US was not fighting with idiotic rules of engagement” and that “no mercy would be shown to America’s enemies”.

According to experts in international law, such statements are clearly prohibited under international law. Hegseth was sharply criticised by Pope Leo XIV, who accused him of distorting the message of Jesus. The Pope stressed that God shows how to give life, not how to destroy it. “The desire for domination often distorts the Christian mission into something entirely alien to the path of Jesus Christ,” the Pope said.

More than 100 American experts in international law, including scholars from leading universities such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, wrote in an open letter that the conduct of US forces and the statements of the US administration “raise serious concerns” about suspected violations of human rights and international law, including possible war crimes.

The experts also criticised the Iranian regime for its human rights violations and warned other countries against assisting the United States and Israel in the unlawful war against Iran.

What had been presented as a war of liberation and a “humanitarian intervention” became something else entirely. Trump’s threats to obliterate Iranian civilisation and bomb the country back to the Stone Age provoked deeply hostile reactions among many Iranians.

The hostilities were paused after 40 days. The military campaign shifted into economic warfare. The United States imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, while Iran resumed its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Each side tightened its grip on the other.

The US naval blockade was intended to prevent Iran from exporting oil, the country’s most important source of revenue. At the same time, ships were barred from docking at Iranian ports, a measure expected to cause shortages inside the country. The purpose of the blockade was to pressure the Iranian economy and force Iran into concessions at the negotiating table.

The economy as Achilles’ heel

Iran’s economy was already in deep crisis before the war, and that crisis had helped drive the protests. The war placed an additional burden on the Iranian leadership. Preliminary estimates put Iran’s economic losses at 270 billion dollars. By comparison, Iran’s losses in the war against Iraq in the 1980s amounted to 627 billion dollars after eight years of war.

The damage was not limited to physical destruction. The massive bombing of Iran’s basic industries and economic infrastructure led to widespread unemployment among wage earners employed in those sectors.

From the American and Israeli point of view, the economy was known to be Iran’s Achilles’ heel. The sanctions Trump imposed after the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 had already weakened Iran’s economy. That was why the war included massive airstrikes on industrial and economic targets.

The naval blockade was intended to deepen Iran’s economic crisis, reignite popular protests and force Iran into concessions — or lead to the collapse of the regime.

Iran’s countermeasure, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, halted one fifth of the world’s energy supply through the waterway, while all other maritime traffic to and from the Persian Gulf also stopped. The move placed severe pressure on the global economy, pushing up energy prices and inflation and creating fuel shortages around the world.

The economic war between the United States and Iran has become a game of chicken, with each side waiting for the other to swerve. Whoever blinks first, or gives way first, loses.

The war caused massive destruction and killed large numbers of civilians in Iran. Its horrors and devastating consequences for the civilian population have meant that the groups and actors who called for foreign military intervention are now facing increasingly harsh criticism. They have been accused of warmongering and branded as quislings.

Those who opposed foreign intervention warned that democracy could not be bombed into existence in Iran by foreign powers. Their warning was that those countries had priorities of their own, and that those priorities did not necessarily coincide with the agenda of Iran’s democratic forces.

Already during the Twelve-Day War in the summer of 2025, many democratic forces in Iran regarded the war as a setback. One of their criticisms was that actors such as Netanyahu, himself wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Gaza, and US President Trump do not prioritise democracy and human rights in Iran.

In the midst of the Twelve-Day War, the Iranian Writers’ Association published a statement condemning Israel’s and the United States’ war of aggression against Iran, while also sharply criticising the Iranian regime for repression, human rights violations, corruption and discrimination. The Writers’ Association described the Israeli and American war of aggression as a threat to, and a setback for, Iranians’ struggle for freedom and democracy.

At the time of writing, it is still too early to analyse the consequences of the war. What can be said, however, is that Iran’s political landscape remains unchanged.

On one side stands a battered regime that remains in power despite 40 days of intense military attacks and economic blockade.

On the other stand various opposition groups – left-wing groups, ethnic groups, monarchists and others – seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime, with or without the support of foreign military intervention. What they have in common is that all aspire to power in Iran once the regime falls. Beyond that, they are deeply divided and hostile towards one another.

A third and decisive actor is the foreign factor, led by the volatile and unpredictable US president. Trump has to deal with domestic opinion opposed to the war. He also faces reactions from the Maga movement, after campaigning on a promise not to start new wars. At the same time, he has to manage the Israeli prime minister, who is pushing for the war to continue.

Finally, Trump must contend with dissatisfied world leaders, including US allies in the West. After their initial silence, and after early expectations of the Iranian regime’s fall failed to materialise, they are now demanding that Trump produce a way to end the war. Their economies are under severe pressure because of Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Since the ceasefire began, negotiations between Iran and the United States have been conducted through Pakistan as mediator. Alongside the continuing economic war, there is also a psychological war and a battle over the narrative.

Both sides have declared victory. Trump has claimed that the United States and Israel have militarily obliterated Iran. His main challenge will be to convince both domestic opinion and the outside world that the war achieved its stated objectives – and to explain how he intends to end it.

Iran, too, has declared victory, arguing that it won the war by surviving. The Iranian regime, however, now has to convince its population that this alleged victory was worth the price.

Since the start of the war, the regime has mobilised its loyalists through evening and night-time gatherings in streets and squares, in order to show the outside world, the opposition inside the country and the Iranian diaspora abroad that it still has popular support.

Death instead of liberation

Even so, the regime faces major challenges. It must manage the post-war economic crisis, as well as the political, social and other factors that have driven recurring popular protests in recent years.

A return to the status quo is without doubt no way forward. It is unlikely to solve the problems, but merely to postpone them until the next spark ignites new protests.

Beyond the struggle over the narrative between the parties involved, one may ask what the US and Israeli war has actually achieved. Trump claimed that the war would liberate Iranians. Instead, it led to the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians, while the regime remains in power, albeit with new and even more hardline actors.

Although militarily weakened, Iran has launched intense attacks against Israel and US bases in neighbouring countries around the Persian Gulf. It also now possesses a new weapon: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Among the losers is Iran’s civilian population, which had to endure the horrors of war while the outside world looked away. Another loser is the rules-based world order. The war has become yet another proof that the world has reverted to an order based on power.

Read a report on the school massacre:

Raha. There were so many facets of the life that was Raha’s. There was the silly, outgoing Raha, dancing on the rooftop, dark brown hair flowing in the wind, arms stretched wide as she sang songs she made up on the spot, rhymes spilling out of her.

She would flash a cheeky grin before laughing hysterically, her father, Reza, behind the camera, capturing it all.

Raha, his only child, the center of his world.

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Thirty-year-old Sueba Abdulrahman says the men who seized her told her: "You are a woman, and we can do whatever we want with you." And so they did. A few days later, when they were finished with her, she began to walk. She walked away from the city of al-Fashir in Darfur, Sudan. Away from the burning houses. The armed men. The piles of corpses. She walked through the desert on foot for two weeks.

Now she has crossed the border into Chad, becoming yet another of the 1.2 million Sudanese who have fled to the neighbouring country. The sand is still on her – in her dress, in her scalp, in the folds of her skin.

Most Sudanese who make it this far carry a story of rape. When Sueba speaks about what happened to her, she smiles. Not because it is easy. But because the soul chooses a smile to keep from breaking.

At night, it all returns. The sounds. The smells. The weight.

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In 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was justified through Afghan women’s rights. The bombers carried feminism’s emblem. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which explicitly opposed the bombings and wanted to speak for itself, was erased from the story. They did not fit the image of the passive victim who needed to be rescued from the outside.

Decades later, we hear voices like that of Sweden’s Liberal Party leader Simona Mohamsson instead, confirming that the veil is the worst form of oppression and that a return to an authoritarian monarchy in Iran, against all reason, will liberate women, since the problem is said to be precisely the veil.

The thinker Frantz Fanon identified the pattern already in the 1950s. In his texts on Algeria, he showed how colonial power weaponized women’s liberation. The French army staged public ceremonies in which Algerian women were made to remove their veils before cameras and audiences, gestures meant to prove that they chose “freedom,” which was made synonymous with Frenchness.

Author Shahed Ezaydi reminds us how colonial power spread posters with messages such as N’ētes-vous donc pas jolie? Dévoilez-vous! (Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!) to make it appear as though women were choosing freedom – over Islam.

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My name is Timotheus Swagemakers, but people call me Tim, and I am not a journalist. You might wonder why I am writing in this publication, then. Well, people tend to tell me I have a knack for storytelling, a trait that comes with my line of work, and after spending nearly a decade in Afghanistan, including a few years under the Taliban, I suppose I have a few stories worth telling.

Let’s start from the beginning.

I am the black sheep of the family, with three older sisters and three younger brothers. When my parents moved from Holland to France when I was fifteen, they decided to put me in a boarding school in the middle of nowhere.

Boarding school is like cilantro; you either love it or hate it. I loved it.

It was a peculiar place with a diverse mix of nationalities, mainly from France and its former colonies across Africa.

My decision to enter the hotel business has its roots in that school. Encountering such a vast mix of nationalities and beliefs drove me to work with people, and what better way to do that than in the hotellerie.

Yes, that’s me: the guy who ran hotels in a weird collection of countries. Canada, Germany, and Bahrain, to name a few. In 2016, I had to leave the United Arab Emirates and Dubai after a three-year contract expired.

With that contract in the Middle Eastern sandbox gone, I was searching for something new. A fresh start. A better opportunity.

My days were boring, filled with small, repetitive tasks. Updating my résumé, scanning headhunters, and firing off emails into the void. Singapore, Tanzania, Seychelles, Hong Kong … even New York. Names that sounded promising, distant, full of possibility.

Fantasies that so far led nowhere.

I had just shot off another batch when my phone rang, not even ten minutes after I had hit “send”.

“Good morning, Mr. Swagemakers. I noticed you applied for a job in Kabul, Afghanistan.”

Kabul?

For a moment, everything went quiet. My mind scrambled, flipping through mental snapshots. Kabul didn’t appear anywhere. Not even close.

But admitting that now would make me sound careless. Or worse – uninterested.

“Uhhh … yes. Indeed, I am,” I replied, buying myself time.

“Great,” he said, energized. “I’ll connect you with the CEO and arrange an interview.”

I hung up, slightly puzzled, but not overly concerned. I could always decline.

Since my hunt for the breakthrough couldn’t be described as a success, I figured an interview was still an interview. Practice. Momentum. Something.

He suggested I research the hotel. Look into the background. Prepare myself.

I promised I would. I didn’t.

Almost immediately into the interview, the Pakistani CEO said: “You are aware the hotel has been attacked twice by the Taliban?”

His tone was calm.

“Many people died,” he added, almost casual.

A pause.

“Yes, I am fully aware,” I heard myself say.

The words came out too confident. And instantly, I regretted them. I hadn’t read a single thing about the place.

Maybe I had failed this already, with my bluff. Our short conversation ended.

Never mind. I wasn’t going to Kabul anyway.

“YOU ARE NOT GOING TO KABUL!”

My German wife Christiane’s reaction was absolute.

“Are you crazy? It’s dangerous. You’ll die.”

Her words hung in the air.

The CEO had already sent me the contract. “Listen,” I said, trying to sound more assured than I felt.

It wasn’t a perfect argument: “Let me just go and see it. If it’s irresponsible, I’ll get on the very next flight home.”

I stepped off the plane at Hamid Karzai International Airport, the dry air hitting me instantly.

A man was waiting for me – the Chief of Security. No small talk. Just a nod, a handshake, and we were on our way.

The city unfolded.

Kabul.

The word had felt abstract before. Now it was real.

The traffic wasn’t “bad”. It was chaotic. Two-lane roads forced into four, sometimes five. Cars pressed together like they were part of a single moving organism. Almost all of them Corollas. Mine included, a worn 1986 white hatchback that rattled with every movement.

There were no rules, at least none that I could recognise. And yet, somehow, it worked. As it somehow always did in Afghanistan.

We crawled forward. At two, maybe three kilometers per hour. Roundabouts became battlegrounds, with cars entering from every direction, horns blaring constantly. Sharp, aggressive bursts of sound, staking claims to invisible rights of way.

The air was thick. Exhaust fumes clung to everything.

And slowly, it hit me.

The dirt. The disorder. The unspoken awareness that somewhere, at any moment, something could happen. An explosion. An attack.

You couldn’t see it. But you could feel it.

It was already draining. Imagine being Afghan, having to live with this constantly.

But I had a choice. So what am I doing here? I thought, as I sat cramped in the small car, inching forward.

“Hotel.” The driver pointed ahead.

I didn’t recognize it as one. It was just a high wall. A barrier. Two armed guards.

We stopped. The men with weapons took a quick glance inside. The barrier lifted.

A few meters later, another stop. This time, a mirror check. A guard slid a round mirror, the size of a large pizza, under the car, scanning for explosives. (Later, I’d learn they were called MIEDs, Magnetic Improvised Explosive Devices, or sticky bombs.)

The mirror guard’s attention seemed divided. His eyes kept drifting upward, studying me. The new General Manager. News travels fast. Apparently satisfied, more with the GM than the car, he waved us through.

Five meters forward. Another barrier. K9.

(Security specialists tend to abbreviate a lot. Once I was traveling in Kabul in my Toyota when a warning came that there was an explosion at HKIA and one should avoid the area. How am I going to avoid an area when I don’t know where HKIA is? Apparently it is Hamid Karzai International Airport. So the K9 is for canine, or dog.)

The animal circled the vehicle methodically, its nose working, searching for anything out of place. I was spared the interior inspection that was otherwise mandatory. Already VIP.

Another signal.

Then, the airlock. A massive sliding gate moved aside, and we rolled forward over a heavy metal bump. The underside of the car scraped loudly. (This was a deliberate design meant to dislodge anything that might have been attached. Just in case the pizza-mirror and the K9 had missed something. A camera captured everything from below. Still, as the CEO had pointed out, the hotel had been attacked twice.)

The first gate closed behind us, and for a brief moment, we were sealed in.

Then the second gate opened.

The transformation was immediate. An Afghan doorman in traditional clothing greeted me with a warm smile, as if none of the tension outside existed. (I wonder if I had felt different in that moment, had I known that one day, a Taliban would be standing at that very door to greet me.)

The man guided me in. Marble floors. Hand-carved wood. Clean lines. Quiet elegance. Windows opened onto gardens. Courtyards with roses. Pockets of stillness.

It felt like a hidden world. One I felt drawn to.

And for the first time in a long while, I thought I might not have made the worst mistake of my life after all.

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.

Our rituals for days at the beach are simple, but sacred. Before we even reach the sea, we stop at one of the many watermelon stands along the road. We move from one vendor to another, searching for the “perfect” melon.

We tap and listen for that distinct, hollow sound that tells us whether it will be good or not. Everyone wants to take part, and our laughter fills the air as we debate over which one to pick.

As soon as we arrive, my mother-in-law walks off to bury the melon deep in the wet sand to keep it cool. After our swim, the game begins when she asks the children to search for the hidden “treasure”.

The moment when my son Abood, who is five years old, finally finds it is one of pure joy. He insists that no one else is allowed to cut it open.

Still too small to slice it on his own, my mother places her hand over his to help him push the knife down. It is his first great victory, and his face shines with pride.

We serve everything with simple grace on a large aluminium tray, and eat the melon with sheep cheese we make ourselves from scratch. We bring our own bread, too, kneaded and baked by hand. Bread from the shop is something we hardly ever have.

Tea with fresh mint, sweetened just right, comes with us in a thermos. We refuse, however, to drink from plastic cups, so instead we bring real glasses, carefully wrapped in old newspapers we have finished reading, so they won’t break in the bag.

Everything tastes of sunshine, careful hands, and togetherness.

Then we wait for the cart with grilled sweet potatoes. The lovely scent of smoke and sweetness drifts on the wind, reaching us before we can see it. The children rush to meet it.

We buy the potatoes warm. As we walk along the water, the notes of the sweet potatoes mingle with the fresh saltiness of the sea. The sun warms our skin, and we toss a volleyball between us.

These days with my children, friends, and family are full of love. Here, I experience the most beautiful moments of my life.

The sea is our only refuge. Even though our fishermen are not allowed by the occupation to sail beyond three nautical miles, and risk being fired upon if they do, we feel a boundless freedom here, looking out over the vast blue.

To us, the coast of Gaza is like no other. Its golden sand, the waves that caress the shore so gently, and children running, playing, and swimming everywhere.

In my work as a journalist, the sea also gives my life a different flavour. Living near the harbour, I am close to the sea’s every detail, its touch at once harsh and tender, and the endless stories of the fishermen who call it home.

The sea soothes our worries, embraces our exhaustion, and washes our hearts with every wave.

It is at once a sanctuary and an escape, yet also another wall. The loveliest wall of our prison.

I have been among the lucky few to travel to many countries and see many places, but I have never found a beach as vibrant as Gaza’s.

Today, everything is different. Families have been torn apart, and homes lie in ruins. The beach is strewn with the tents of the displaced.

The sea is still there, right before our eyes, but no one can go down into it anymore, as death lurks constantly in the swell. Machine guns on the navy boats aim at anything that moves, and the occupation’s artillery spares no one.

It is as if they take pleasure in watching us die, unable to endure our will to live amid the destruction.

We are like fish that can no longer reach the sea. We die a hundred times each day, in a life without breath, under blockade, cut off from land, air, and water.

Now, only our memories of those days on the beach remain, beautiful yet painful. And I find myself wishing that life, in all its simplicity, might one day return.

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.

Read the next postcard:

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Gad World is a fearless media platform born from a simple, uncomfortable realisation: the world is becoming more unstable and unjust – shaped by war, climate change, systemic upheaval, democratic decline and the erosion of international law – just as on-the-ground journalism is becoming increasingly rare.

Free media are now under threat in ways we have not seen before: from billionaires, global tech companies and a growing authoritarian order. Foreign reporting is often the first to be cut. The Washington Post is laying off correspondents. AFP is reducing costs. In Swedish newspapers, presence – at home and abroad – is being replaced by cut-and-paste journalism.

Gad World moves in the opposite direction: into closed worlds that many people have opinions about, but few understand beneath the surface. We report from the ground, far from the desk, speaking with people rather than about them.

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At a time when international law is being eroded and the conditions for human life are under threat, this kind of journalism is needed more than ever. We do not produce content for quick clicks. We do not replace knowledge with opinion. We place facts, presence and people’s own voices at the centre, in order to build a more informed and aware public.

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Together, we make the world visible.

Magda Gad is an award-winning journalist, war correspondent and honorary doctorate holder who has reported from the ground in some of the most violent conflicts of our time, including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Myanmar.

She has received more than 30 awards and nominations for her work, including the Swedish Grand Journalism Award, the Kristallen Award, Journalist of the Year, the Stig Dagerman Prize and an honorary medal from the Nordic Veterans’ Associations.

Magda Gad’s journalism centres on the people who live with the consequences of war, violence and political decisions. She is known for amplifying voices that are rarely heard, and for combining investigative reporting with powerful storytelling. This has made her one of the most prominent voices in international journalism.

She often works under extreme conditions, using a method built on presence, trust and long-term relationships in conflict zones. Magda Gad has not only travelled to war zones. She has lived in them for years.

Her reporting has exposed war crimes, sexual violence and abuses against civilians, as well as the geopolitical forces shaping conflicts. She has documented both victims and perpetrators, often in places where few journalists operate and where the outside world has the least insight.

In Somalia and Ethiopia, she has shown how climate change intensifies war, poverty and human suffering. She has met mothers burying their children during drought, and was also on the ground when a city in Libya was swept into the sea by a storm intensified by global warming.

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