When ISIS militias swept into Mosel, Iraq, in June 2014, Ibrahim Mahmoud plotted his flight, along with his whole family, which included 11 children. Once upon a time, Ibrahim was himself a child escaping another violent campaign carried out by equally angry militias.
The Turkish government’s attacks on Kurdish-populated areas in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, as well as the recent arrests in Turkey of academics who protested anti-Kurdish measures, has focused attention on the role of Kurdish movements in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, and on the role of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).
On January 2, 2016, the Sunni government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) executed the leading imam of the Shia community in KSA. The Shiite government of Iran denounced this execution, as did governments throughout the world, and avowed there would be consequences. Since that time, the rhetoric has continued to escalate.
Emelline Mahmoud Ilyas is an outgoing 35-year-old mother of three from Syria. Sitting in a community centre in Zarqa, Jordan, where she just held a meeting with Jordanian and Syrian parents on the subject of childcare, she remembers the ‘journey of death’ that led her family to the Hashemite Kingdom.
When I was a little boy, I used to dream of being reborn outside the hardship of the Refugee Camp in Gaza, in some other time and place where there were no soldiers, no military occupation, no concentration camps and no daily grind - where my father fought for our very survival, and my mother toiled to balance out the humiliation of life with her enduring love.
Throughout her hunger strike, that of exactly 47 days, Hana Shalabi never slept consistently for a number of hours. Hana was born in 1982, the same year that Palestinian factions were driven out from Lebanon and the refugees of the Sabra and Shatila Camps were slaughtered en-masse.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019