I just got my Canadian permanent residency card, and on the accompanying letter it said "thank you for choosing Canada" and "we hope you do" w/ regards to applying for citizenship and it made me quite emotional and feeling terribly lucky to be here.
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It’s absolutely bonkers as an Arab to watch how many Americans appear to self-loathe America. You guys should try moving to and living under some of the tyrannical regimes you’re idolizing.
Syria drained everything out of me. Faith in humanity, in the moral arc of the universe, the energy to carry on every day and do interesting and exciting things, to react emotionally, care about new things. I don't know how Syrians carry on every day. All I can say is I'm sorry.
If you're shocked by Russia bombing a hospital you shouldn't be. Take a look at this map of attacks on healthcare facilities in Syria. Since Russia intervened in the war in 2016, they and the regime bombed at least 244 facilities
Today is my last day covering the Middle East for the Guardian. I'm not sure I believe the maxim that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. But I sure as hell believe in a sacred duty of telling the world what the powerful ones distorting that arc are doing.
It’s not unthinkable at all. The international community has been tolerating it in Syria for over a decade. Putin and Assad normalised bombing hospitals in war so thoroughly that it’s now almost a customary part of conflict. Over 700 attacks on hospitals from 2012-2022.
7 hospitals/clinics bombed, so far 61 people dead today, over a hundred yesterday, in just 2 days of "hysterical violence" in Syria: 'It's not a war. It's a massacre': scores killed in Syrian enclave
Hug your kids tonight and let them do whatever the fuck they want. You are lucky they were not born into this chasm of endless suffering where their lives were deemed utterly worthless
I wrote a personal essay reflecting on the last decade in the Muslim World, the influence of austere Gulf conservatism, how it robbed many Arab and Muslim lives of joy, & looking ahead with hope at a new era in which the utopias of the past are dismantled
A doc in E Ghouta: "A child was brought to me, blue, his mouth was filled with sand. A 1 year old child, rescued from the rubble, breathing with lungs of sand. This wasn't in any of our medical textbooks. Is this a war? It’s not a war. It’s called a massacre."
Only 8 years after Obama refused to do anything to end slaughter in Syria:
- Half million dead
- Half country displaced, millions of refugees
- Repeated chemical atrocities
- Hundreds or hospitals bombed
- Russian influence maximized
- Iran proxies resurgent
- ISIS metastasized
Only four days into Turkish attack and one week after POTUS-Erdogan call:
* UN: 130k displaced (likely to 3x)
* ISIS terrorists escaping (caught after years of painstaking effort)
* Syrians executed on roadways by Turkish-backed opposition forces
* Main US supply lines cut..
Sorry for the long thread but I need to let it off my chest. Back when we were in Istanbul and thinking of moving to Canada, one question occupied many of the nights I spent contemplating our future: what is the worth of a human life?
I wrote a piece for mental health awareness week about struggling with anxiety, burnout and depression as a journalist covering Syria/Lebanon. Please forgive my self-indulgence in writing about myself, but I thought it might help someone out there
It’s really hard to describe the emotion of impotent rage when you see these images, not only as an Arab or Muslim, but as a human. It’s like a time capsule reliving the images of my teen years watching the second intifada on TV and the stifling oppression of it all
I can’t keep it together watching Beirut from afar. I’m so sorry to all my friends and loved ones. Every friend has posted photos of broken homes. Our old apartment in Mar Mikhail was totally destroyed. My alma mater at the Daily Star is shattered. Everything is broken.
One day, when the history of this war in Syria is written, a record will be inscribed in gold of all the doctors who worked in east Aleppo and eastern Ghouta, on 3 hours of sleep day in day out, and when we are judged and humanity is found wanting, they will redeem the species.
I can’t believe Saudi Arabia is going to arrest all those poor tourists Al Arabiya told me were just visiting Istanbul for the afternoon in their private jets owned by the government.
I know this isn't a popular take amid all the alarmism but I've covered civil war and these whiny cosplayers who think masks are tyrannical with laughable tattoos and viking beards wouldn't last 5 minutes in an actual civil war.
While I was waiting to find out if America will reelect a racist xenophobe I got news that my application for permanent residency in Canada was approved! Canada, I promise to love you, pay taxes, vote for environmentalists, learn to like hockey, and propagandize for poutine.
So here's to Canada. Thank you for being you, for having us, and for taking care of us, in an age of walls and closed doors. I hope we'll be able to repay your generosity one day.
It's quite breathtaking to see the complete silence of Arab and Muslim governments on the plight of the Uighurs compared to their opportunistic use in the past of the plights of Bosnians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Kosovars, Chechnyans, etc.
I have watched and rewatched
@arwaCNN
,
@gultuysuz
and Brice Laine's report from Idlib. The word heartbreaking does not do it justice. That CNN team is an international treasure. Journalism at its finest and most humane
I owe everything to Beirut. Met the love of my life there. My journalism career. Friendships that will last until I die. Joie de vivre. I wish its pain would ease and it would come unbroken.
About Tulsi Gabbard, people need to realize that when we condemn her stance on Syria it’s not because we are fans of American wars in the Middle East. It’s because we aren’t fans of American politicians whitewashing their war criminal du jour.
I wrote a tribute to James Le Mesurier and White Helmets: "I only wish that, in those final moments, he knew in his heart of hearts that he had done immense good, that he experienced love and gratitude. That he saved humanity so many times."
Dear pundit,
Iranian-backed militias in Syria have played a key role in the mass killing of half a million Syrian civilians, starvation sieges, sectarian cleansing, and mass displacement that created the refugee crisis. Pls find another avenue to opine.
End of transmission
7.1 million Syrians fled because Bashar Al Assad bombed them with sarin, chlorine, barrels filled with shrapnel and TNT, starved them to death, destroyed their hospitals and schools, tortured detainees, and murdered opponents, and nobody stopped him. Not "because America".
I don’t really understand these post-facto takes that Soleimani was bad but this is too risky. What more can he do to instigate a possible American military response than a decade of covert and overt warfare, direct attacks against US allies, and abetting a genocide in Syria?
It’s breathtaking to realize quite how terrified the Europeans are of the refugee bogeyman. The EU and its leaders are truly a cowardly, worthless lot.
900,000 people had fled the Assad regime's advance in Idlib since Dec 1, according to the UN. 900,000. Nearly a million people fleeing for their lives. That is the sheer terror of Assad's Syria.
I write for a living, and I am left speechless by the beauty, courage, humanity and generosity that New Zealand has displayed this week and today especially.
The disingenuousness is amazing. Soleimani destabilized region for years and facilitated death, starvation, exile of thousands by pursuing Iranian expansionism that was same as US imperialism (and paid for it). The intellectual lengths ppl will go just because Trump did it...
This report is staggering and chilling. 1.2 million Syrians have been detained or arrested by the criminal Assad regime. It was so creative in its torment that 72 different torture methods were documented in its dungeons via
@snhr
I have been filled with utter nausea and despair this week after the murder of two college girls, in Egypt and Jordan, for the temerity of saying no to two men. I wrote some words to get the demons out for
@newlinesmag
Dear Western world, please use the coronavirus outbreak to join the civilized world by abandoning toilet paper in favor of the bidet/shattafa technology we've had in the Arab world since time immemorial. It is time. You'll never run out of toilet paper again.
It’s quite insane that a large scale program of rendition of Saudi government critics is being presented as the reasonable alternative that they were pursuing and it only became bad and unacceptable when they killed someone.
I became a Canadian citizen today. I am grateful to this wonderful country for welcoming me, and I'm excited about the prospect of living my citizenship, the idea of which still leaves me marveling at it.
My first essay for
@newlinesmag
is out. I started by trying to think through why anti-Americanism in the Arab world is a more powerful ideological force than anger at China's Uighur genocide and Russia's Syria atrocities
This is my last week with
@guardian
. After 3.5 years working for this incredible, honorable institution in Beirut and Istanbul as Mideast correspondent, I'll be moving to Montreal for some time. Very grateful to my mentor and best journo in the region,
@martinchulov
.
I wish this piece by the Lebanese journalist Hazem al-Amin, titled "New Zealand's wolf, and our wolf", was translated into English. It argues that violent white supremacy is a parallel form of ISIS, motivated very often by the same instincts
That's why the Beirut thing fills me with nausea every time I think about it. They leveled a fucking city, and it wasn't even because they plotted to do it, it was literally because they didn't give a shit. About millions of lives.
I thought I had numbed myself to the region’s tragedies until Beirut shattered it into a million little pieces today. I’m so sorry.
من قلبي سلام لبيروت
These are the conditions Syrian refugees in Lebanon (Arsal) have to deal with. Desperate cold that seems to surprise UN aid agencies every winter. And they still don’t want to go back to live under Assad. Imagine their fear of being forced to return.
Jamal Khashoggi’s son announces that the family will forgive and pardon the killers of their father. What this family has been put through is something that should shame every decent human being.
If you are in awe of
@clarissaward
's immense courage knocking on the door of a Russian assassin, you should read her memoir "On All Fronts" chronicling her human and empathetic and incredible courage as a war correspondent
Turkey is using its 4 mil refugees as a scarecrow to terrify the Europeans, dehumanizing them in the process.
Europe paid Turkey billions of dollars to keep all those brown people close to the war zones they came from.
As far as I’m concerned, EU are primary moral cowards here.
Every expert and analyst advocating engagement out of realpolitik with the regime of Bashar al-Assad should have to deliver their remarks or write their articles while staring at a rotating series of images of thousands of tortured human beings from the Caesar files.
Nothing breaks my heart about leaving the region than the inability to tell more of Syria's stories. I'm sorry everyone has failed you. I pray you find peace one day.
Atrocities carried out by warring parties in Ethiopia’s civil war haven’t gotten the attention they deserve.
@ZekuZelalem
interviewed families and witnesses of the Mahbere Dego massacre, carried out by government forces and omitted from a recent UN probe
Why do people find it so objectionable that young men are also seeking refuge outside of their war-torn countries? Believe it or not most young men also don't want to die in a barrel bomb by Assad's helicopters.
Reports out of Syria today is that the government has bombed school buildings, some used by displaced families in Idlib. Doctors in one town (Ma'arat Masrin) say 11 dead and 27 injured, mostly women and children. There is no end to the savagery of this regime.
But there is great evil in this profound absence of justice. The world cannot stand like this. It will collapse in on itself one day because these sins are too grave, and there are too many of them.