The Western Allied Nations Bully the World While Warning of Threats From China and Russia

DONETSK, DONETSK PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC—The Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine reached its 90th day and the Western press continues to be inundated with unverified claims of war crimes Russian forces allegedly have committed. Accusations have been lodged against the Russian military for mass graves in Bucha, a narrative which has been widely accepted in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. Despite requests from the Russian government and India, no independent inquiry has yet to take place.

Just four days ago, Newsweek published claims of Russian soldiers “targeting kids’ bedrooms” with explosives. Nestled far beneath the fiery headline is a soft disclaimer: “However, Newsweek has not independently verified any of the claims regarding children and explosives, which come from Ukrainian sources.” Such is the state of affairs in the U.S./EU/NATO aggression against Russia.

Perhaps these deluges of outrage would appear more sincere, if the well-documented plight of the civilians of the eastern Ukrainian breakaway region of Donbass had received passing mention in any mainstream Western outlets. In the Donbass region, two oblasts (provinces) known as Donetsk and Lugansk proclaimed their independence from Ukraine in 2015, shortly after the neo-Nazi-infected Ukrainian military began attacking their mostly Russian populations.

For eight years, war has raged in Donbass, and it has included an endless campaign involving shelling civilian areas, in violation of the Minsk Agreements between the Donbass republics, Ukraine and Russia. As of May 13, the Office of the Ombudsman in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), put the total civilian death toll in DPR at 7,321, including 105 children. More than 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbass region since 2014, according to the International Crisis Group. The Ukrainian military did not respond to Toward Freedom’s multiple attempts to ask about attacks on civilians in Donetsk.

‘We Used to Hide in the Basement… Now, We Don’t Bother’

Toward Freedom sent this reporter to Donbass for nearly a month, and it took less than one day in Donetsk to witness the effects of Ukrainian forces purposely shelling civilians. That first afternoon, April 28, a local Telegram channel devoted to “online information about the current shelling situations by Ukrainian Armed Forces” reported the Sokol Market in the western Kirovsky District had been shelled. At 11:40 a.m., among the market’s busiest hours, Ukrainian forces—just miles away in Krasnogor—fired 10 BM-21 Grad rockets, or Soviet rockets. Initial reports on the scene were two dead, including a local high school teacher, but this has since been updated to five. This reporter arrived at 1 p.m., at which point the wreckage was apparent and two bodies remained on the ground.

No military presence was seen in this neighborhood—no base, no embedded soldiers, no checkpoints. Gennady Andreevich, an employee of the neighborhood safety commission and administrator of the Sokol Market, called it a “sleepy” district, where there is only this market, a strip of shops, a  park, and a number of Soviet-era residential buildings. The area, per Andreevich and numerous local residents, had sustained relentless strikes since 2014. Those hits have only intensified since February. One of the neighboring residential buildings had been hit as recently as two weeks prior.

These sorts of markets are the central point of social gathering, commerce, and employment for working-class people, who cannot afford to frolic in more luxurious, capitalist-developed urban centers. The eyes of bourgeois mass media are never fixed on the poor. As such, the regular targeting of Donbass civilians goes unmentioned.

Even as cleanup efforts went on, artillery fire remained constant in the background.

The following day, April 29, the Donetsk News Agency reported the Petrovsky District, also in the west end of the city of Donetsk, had just been hit with nearly 80 Ukrainian shells, resulting in casualties.

Upon arrival at 8 p.m., this reporter first found a small grocery store, smoking from the roof, completely destroyed. A small clean-up crew was inside, and one elderly woman—the shopkeeper—stood alone and bewildered, and appeared not ready to speak to anyone. Behind the store was a large residential building, also apparently damaged by the shelling.

At the entrance to the building, a husband and wife were slowly cleaning up pieces of glass and wreckage at the main entrance. They were initially spooked seeing journalists, thinking anyone could have been Ukrainian operatives in plain clothes. But when they understood members of the press had arrived, they were eager to share their story of not just what had happened that night, but of the previous eight years. The woman, Elena, identified herself by first name only.

Elena, whose apartment balcony had been completely destroyed, said that this kind of attack was a daily occurrence for the residents of Donbass, many of whom—herself included—considered themselves Ukrainians. She said that U.S./EU arms shipments were the primary cause of the continued death and destruction, and wished to personally address the citizens of those countries, to ask that they might pressure their governments to cease the deliveries of weapons.

“In the beginning of the war, in 2014, all of us in the building used to hide out in the basement when the shells flew; now, we don’t bother,” said her husband. “We just have to go on with our lives.”

Their children had moved east to Russia, away from the front lines. But for them—like many others—old age, a lifetime of attachment to one community and lack of economic flexibility made relocation impossible.

This particular building, in its entirety, was made up of 60 units, and was attached to a school.

As we parted, the couple saw our delegation of foreign journalists off warmly, entreated us to share their stories with the West in any way possible, and wished us peace.

‘God Will Sort Them Out’

In the frontline city of Kirovsk, a mining town in the Lugansk People’s Republic, this reporter visited the home of a man whose home was hit April 26 by a “Hurricane” rocket—another Soviet-era weapon—capable of destroying entire floors of large apartment buildings. But it failed to detonate as it plugged into an outer wall, next to his garden. The home was situated on a long dirt road, with only a handful of similar homestead cottages within range. The man explained that he believed the attack had been targeted from what he called “Ukro-Nazi” positions in the nearby town of Pervomaisk. Victoria Ivanovna, the mayor of Kirovsk, described such shelling as “constant,” and often targeted at schools, or other non-military locations important to the community.

Back in Donetsk, on May 10, a now-notorious U.S. expat-turned-DPR-combat-veteran named Russell “Texas” Bentley gave this reporter a tour of the districts on the edge of no-man’s land. The Petrovsky district was clearly hit the hardest; in places, block after  block contained not a single home untouched. In the center of the district, where a once-active market had since been abandoned, a monument stood for the civilian lives lost from 2014 to 2016. It listed more than 200 names.

Russell was no stranger to this kind of shelling. “They hit us out here, every (expletive) day. They always target schools, markets and grocery stores, never military. We never targeted any civilian areas; even aside from the ethical questions, it would just be (expletive) stupid. These are our people here. This is a fight for liberation. The last thing the DPR or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin want is to piss off the residents of places, which we believe will become liberated parts of the Republics.”

Russell, 62, who served in the explicitly Marxist “Sut Vremeni (Essence of Time)” unit of the DPR army—as well as in the DPR special forces until 2017—lives with his wife, Lyudmila, in the Petrovsky district. Their home has not been hit to date, but a family of six just a few doors down had not been so lucky. The mother of the family showed this reporter the impact point of a shelling from the week before; it had destroyed their front wall, killing their dogs and barely missing the family room behind.

Katya ladnova, 25, a member of Donetsk-based Marxist feminist collective Aurora, said shelling is no longer news.

“We walk right past it,” she said. “Our complaint to Putin is not that he sent Russian troops into Ukraine, but that he sent them eight years too late.”

In spite of 8 years of attacks, and now endless constraints from isolation and sanctions, including a limit on running water to a few hours in the evening, the city of Donetsk, like all of Donbass around it, continues to move on with life; shops remain open, public transport runs, children go to school every day.

“There is absolutely no military reason to strike places like this. They do this to strike fear in our hearts,” said Andreevich, the Sokol Market administrator. “But it does not work.”

Andreevich’s own administrative office had been hit this past March. Two of his co-workers were killed in that attack. At the end of our exchange, he looked sternly and said, “Sooner or later, God will sort them out, the people who are doing this.”

Fergie Chambers is a freelance writer and socialist organizer from New York, reporting from eastern Europe for Toward Freedom. He can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.

November is a month of pleasant weather and festivities in India. But during the final week of this month last year, several hundred thousand farmers gathered on the borders of the National Capital Territory of Delhi—which contains the capital of New Delhi—to confront a huge police force.

They settled down at several points on the border, creating new townships and organizing huge langars, a Sikh concept that involves free meals cooked and eaten together as a community.

This protest sparked a general strike of 250 million Indian farmers as well as workers from other sectors, making it the largest known strike in the world.

Over 11 months have passed since then and farmers have maintained their protest sites, although at a smaller level, using this to inspire protests in other areas of India. The movement is the strongest in parts of northern India (states such as Punjab and Haryana, and the western portion of the state of Uttar Pradesh). But it has spread to other areas as well, thereby strengthening the overall opposition to India’s right-wing, sectarian ruling regime. While this movement has raised several demands, the most persistent one has been for the repeal of three highly controversial farm laws, which were passed in 2020, bypassing normal parliamentary procedures.

The farmers say—and several experts back these claims—that these new farm laws greatly increase the possibility of corporate control over the Indian farming and food system. One law strengthens the contract farming system in favor of corporate interests and against farmers. The second law increases possibilities for big corporations to hoard huge quantities of important crops and hence manipulate and dominate their market. The third law weakens the existing procurement farming system while facilitating a new, unregulated tax-free purchase system, which big business can easily dominate. Both local crony capitalists and big multinational agribusiness companies are likely to use these new opportunities to increase their domination, while also entering into collaboration to corner small farmers.

Allowing big business to dominate India’s food and farm system would be a culmination of trends witnessed in recent decades. The advent of Green Revolution seeds promoted by Western—particularly U.S.—pressure opened up Indian farming to big business, but led to an increase in pollution and soil degradation caused by chemical fertilizers and pesticides, escalated costs to farmers, lowered food quality, and the loss of biodiversity as local seeds and mixed farming systems were uprooted. Objections voiced by the most senior farm scientist, Dr. R.H. Richharia, director of the Central Rice Research Institute, were brushed aside with a heavy hand and he was rudely removed from his job.

The next stage of corporate domination came with the ushering in of the World Trade Organization regime, with its rules for international trade and patents. This could not be stopped, but resistance efforts helped save some safeguards for farmers.

The third stage came with the advent of genetically modified (GMO) crops, including the Bt Cotton crop. Next, efforts were taken to introduce GMO technology to grow several food crops, starting with brinjal (eggplant or aubergine) and mustard. A Monsanto partner mounted an aggressive campaign for spreading GMO brinjal, which would have paved the way for GMO technology to produce other food crops. However, a strong resistance movement opposed this and, so far, GMO food crops have been resisted more or less successfully. Professor Pushpa Bhargava, an acclaimed scientist to whom the Indian Supreme Court offered a special advisory role on this issue, warned, “The ultimate aim of this attempt of which the leader is Monsanto, is to obtain control over Indian agriculture and thus food production.”

The longer term trend has been for big agribusiness to try to dominate the Indian farming scene, although this has been resisted with varying success by farmers and activists at different stages. Building on this previous strength, many farmer organizations have shown greater unity and resilience this time for a more determined resistance.

This growing resistance may be one reason why the open announcement of the India-United States free trade agreement (FTA) has been postponed. Earlier prolonged negotiations for India’s proposed FTA with the European Union had to be called off due to strong objections raised by farmers, particularly dairy farmers.

Such fears are even more pronounced in the context of negotiations for FTA with the United States, which have been even less transparent than the European negotiations.

Sections of Indian bourgeois media have been speculating the FTA with the United States will be introduced in stages. Meanwhile, farmers’ concerns have been confirmed by other recent government decisions as well. Recent moves for mandatory protection of staple foods have been opposed in favor of facilitating the growing big-business domination of food processing and a setback to existing systems, which protect farmers and small processors from the pressures of a less regulated market. The Indian government also recently advocated for palm fruit trees to increase edible oil production, which has been criticized for harming the interests of millions of traditional oilseed farmers and disrupting the biodiversity and ecology of areas where palm-oil plantations are planning to be introduced on a mass scale.

Nearly two-thirds of India’s 1.38 billion people remain linked to rural livelihoods. Approximately 115 million farmer households can be counted in India, most of them small family farms. The growing big-business intrusion has led to an ever-escalating rise in farming costs and debt, in turn leading to ordinary farmers losing their land. According to census data, farmers have been turning into landless households at the rate of 100 per hour. From a global perspective, this is part of the worldwide struggle to save small farmer communities. The movement can gain traction if protesting farmers include the concerns of landless rural households, who now comprise almost half of households in the Indian countryside. Another widely felt need is for this movement to move toward ecologically protective farming, the importance of which has increased as the global climate changes.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener of the Campaign to Save Earth Now. He has been involved with several social movements in India. Dogra’s most recent books include Man Over Machine and Planet in Peril.

Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a series Toward Freedom has launched to examine the real impact and reasons for U.S. “humanitarian interventions.”

From the U.S. military intervention launched under the banner of democracy and human rights to restored warlords and the resuscitated Taliban regime, Afghan women have never stopped fighting for their rights.

When Taliban forces entered Kabul on August 15, appearing to have taken control of Afghanistan two weeks before the United States was set to complete its troop withdrawal, shock and fear for women’s fate under the Islamist group’s repressive rule quickly multiplied inside the country and globally.

After nearly 20 years of a U.S.-led coalition’s presence, a costly two-decade war, the very force the United States had tried to push out of power, in the name of its “War on Terror,” took over again. This time it occurred with stunning rapidity, in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s hasty, chaotic military withdrawal.

With the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals were abandoned at the mercy of the Taliban, amid concern the fundamentalist movement would re-impose its hard-line interpretation of Islamic law on women and girls.

But securing women’s rights was used from the beginning to justify the U.S. military intervention. The Biden administration’s irresponsible pull-out in tandem with the swift, untroubled Taliban return speaks volumes about Washington’s lack of interest to secure respect for human rights and improve women’s lives. Humanitarian interventions have been used to deploy U.S. troops and drones in Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries. As a consequence, 1 million people have been killed and an estimated 38 million have been forced to become refugees.

 

Condemning Humanitarian Interventions

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the oldest feminist organization in Afghanistan, stated in its response to the Taliban takeover: “It is a joke to say values like ‘women’s rights,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘nation-building,’ etc., were part of the U.S./NATO aims in Afghanistan!”

The women’s association mentioned the United States’ geostrategic motives for its invasion, namely causing regional instability to encircle its rival powers, China and Russia in particular, and to undermine their economies via regional wars.

“Right from the start, RAWA members have been saying that freedom can’t be brought through bombs, war and violence,” Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission (AWM), a U.S.-based organization that funds RAWA’s work, told Toward Freedom. “How can they liberate women while they’re killing their husbands, brothers and fathers?”

Afghan women have long known that the U.S.-staged war on terrorism—and any foreign meddling—was not going to make their country safer. Women took the brunt of the backlash of war, military invasion and, again, today’s uncertain aftermath.

“[Afghan women] have always rejected outside interference, and maintained that Afghans need to fight for their freedom from inside,” Kolhatkar said.

For decades, active women have been at the forefront of opposing fundamentalism, warlordism and imperialism in Afghanistan.

Leading political activist and human-rights advocate Malalai Joya publicly denounced the presence of warlords and war criminals in the Afghan parliament in 2003 while serving as a member of parliament (MP), which resulted in her dismissal. An outspoken critic of the United States and NATO, she has continued to denounce the 20-year U.S./Western occupation. She has condemned U.S.-led drone attacks and bombings, clandestine raids carried out by U.S. and Afghan special forces into civilian homes, all of which have killed thousands of Afghans.

Between 2001 and 2020, more than 46,000 civilians were killed and 5.9 million Afghans displaced as a result of the war’s ongoing violence.

 

U.S. Brings Taliban Back to Power

Activists at the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), an NGO launched in the mid-1990s, have criticized the United States for allegedly bribing and empowering warlords, then resuscitating the Taliban’s power in the 2020 U.S.-led negotiations in Doha, which translated into replacing one fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan with another.

“I do not understand the United States for undoing and now redoing the Taliban in Afghanistan, whose ruling will affect women’s lives the most, which will be ruined yet again,” prominent human-rights activist Mahbooba Seraj, member of AWN, said in a interview with TRT World.

Talking to Toward Freedom, Alia Rasoully, an Afghan based in the United States who founded WISE Afghanistan, an organization that aims to provide women access to health and education, underlined how the Doha talks were conducted solely in the United States’ interest. She said many Afghans are not aware of the agreement’s details.

“Afghan women feel betrayed,” Rasoully said. “Although some women were included in the negotiations, none of their demands for basic human and Islamic rights are being met today.”

Spozhmay Maseed, a U.S.-based Afghan rights activist, deplored the seemingly unconcerned U.S. pull-out. “It was shocking to everyone,” she told Toward Freedom. “U.S. forces were combating terrorists for 20 years, today they’re dealing with them. Who were they fighting then? What was that fight for?”

RAWA member Salma, whose real name must be concealed to protect her security, relayed similar concerns to Toward Freedom.

“The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was a military operation orchestrated by the CIA that brought in Northern Alliance puppet leaders, who are as extremist and misogynist as the Taliban, and painted them as ‘democratic’ and ‘liberal,’” she said.

“What’s the result of these 20 years?” Salma asked. “[The United States] spent more than $2 trillion on the war to bring back the same Taliban, and it turned the country into a corrupt, drug-mafia and unsafe place, especially for women.”

The façade of democracy the United States had poured trillions of dollars into maintaining was lifted when former President Ashraf Ghani abandoned the presidential palace on August 15 by reportedly dashing onto a helicopter with close to $200 million in tow.

“How breakable that ‘democracy’ was, and how rotten the U.S.-backed puppet government was!” Salma asserted.

 

The Work of RAWA

On its website, RAWA has documented through its reports, photos and videos the horrific conditions facing Afghan women at the hands of the mujahideen and the Taliban, as well as the destruction and bloodshed during the U.S. occupation, which was rarely reported in the media.

“This indigenous women’s movement had long been trying to draw international attention to the atrocities against their people, in particular the ultra-woman-hating acts they were witnessing,” AWM’s Kolhatkar stressed. “It was only after September 11, when the world discovered there were terrible things happening to women in Afghanistan.”

Unlike many other Afghans, RAWA members have stayed, striving to give voice to the deprived women of Afghanistan in the struggle for women’s rights.

RAWA, which was established in 1977 as an independent political organization of Afghan women struggling for women’s rights, is driven by the belief that only a democratic, secular government can ensure security, independence and equality among Afghan people. It became involved in the struggle for resistance following the Soviet intervention called for by the then-socialist government of Afghanistan in 1979. Over the last four decades, RAWA spoke out against the anti-Soviet resistance (known as mujahideen) in the 1980s, fought against the Taliban regime in the mid-1990s, denounced the role of the Pakistani state in creating the Taliban and has rejected the U.S. occupation of the last 20 years.

The women’s organization has been involved in various social and political activities to include literacy classes, schools for girls and boys in villages and remote areas, health and income-generation projects for women to help them financially, and political agitation. It has also worked with refugee Afghan women and children in Pakistan, running nursing, literacy and vocational training courses. In 1981, it launched a bilingual magazine in Persian and Pashto, Payam-e-Zan (Woman’s Message), spreading social and political awareness among Afghan women.

Due to its pro-democracy, pro-secularist and anti-fundamentalist stance, RAWA has always operated as a clandestine organization, including in the last two decades under the U.S. occupation and the so-called “democratic government,” which it never recognized.

Using pseudonyms, concealing their identities, turning their homes into office spaces, often changing locations to avoid attention, its members have been active in different areas across Afghanistan. They would run underground schools for girls and women where they would use their burqa as a way to hide their books, and disseminate copies of Woman’s Message, secretly aiming to raise awareness among women of their rights and change their minds.

As an unregistered organization carrying out political work and home-schooling, if authorities found about its existence and illicit activity they could react punitively with any member caught up.

Since the assassination of its founder, Meena Kamal, the feminist association has been working more underground as anyone openly identified as member would risk being arrested or even killed. Despite it becoming increasingly dangerous to organize, the movement continues to stand.

“This is the time our women need us the most in Afghanistan,” Salma said. “We have to continue to be the voice of the voiceless who are here.”

 

Women’s Rights at What Cost?

Afghan women saw improvement in their lives over the past 20 years in terms of access to education, healthcare and employment, as well as economic, social and political empowerment. But the gap between urban centers and rural areas never really narrowed. In rural areas, where it is estimated 76 percent of Afghanistan’s women reside, women still rely on men in their families for permission to attend school and work. Girls are typically allowed to have primary or secondary education, then their families proceed with arranged marriages. In 2020, as little as 29.8 percent of women could read and write.

“Progress was slower in rural areas,” Rasoully remarked. “We worked hard in advocating to convince parents that their girls could safely go to school in a very culturally appropriate environment that they were comfortable with.”

She called for greater efforts to address the urban-rural divide, noting the international community made the mistake of taking an inequitable approach to offering educational opportunities to Afghan girls, as it directed its programs at young women in cities.

In her view, the insecurity brought on by the war into rural communities was a major impediment that kept girls out of school and prevented women from working.

Many villages experienced for years the devastation of heavy fighting between the Taliban, foreign militaries, government forces and local militias. The loss of husbands, brothers and fathers to the war further compromised women’s ability to go about everyday life.

Salma made clear progress in women’s status in the past two decades has been the result of a “natural process.” During that time, Afghan women acquired basic freedoms that had been withheld from them under the Taliban regime. But the foreign military presence could not be credited for that.

Kolhatkar specified that while the United States had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and it supported women’s rights on paper, the United States allowed the opposite in practice by “working with fundamentalists every step of the way.”

She explicitly said the issue of women’s rights was never a concern for Washington. Rather, it was a pretext to make its long, protracted occupation “palatable.”

“RAWA had been warning the Americans since the early phase of the invasion not to embrace the Taliban, nor the warlords,” Kolhatkar, AWM’s joint director, reminded. “It shouldn’t at all surprise us that the U.S. administration finally left Afghanistan, with misogynist hardliners in charge once again.”

With the Taliban back in control on August 15, a wave of civil resistance mainly was initiated by Afghan women. The protests have built momentum, hitting different parts of the war-ravaged country in the last month.

Further, a new generation has grown up in a country that is connected to the rest of the world through the Internet. That has increased political and social awareness among the general public, especially among young people.

Today, groups of women—small and large—are disobeying Taliban restrictions, protesting in Herat, Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif and other Afghan cities to demand their fundamental rights. They are bravely defying the extremist group, refusing the idea of returning to the grim days that women lived through.

Under the Taliban’s previous rule (1996-2001), the Islamist militants enforced strict rules on women and girls, forcing them to cover their bodies from head to toe, prohibiting them from leaving home without a male family member, and banning them from going to school or work. If they did not abide by the rules, they could face severe punishment, such as imprisonment, torture or execution.

Rasoully expressed concern that the progress made by 35 million Afghans throughout the last two decades, especially young women and girls, may go to waste. She personally mentored girls in medical school, in areas like Kandahar, over the last five years. 

“But today, we are being told girls cannot go to school beyond sixth grade,” she said. “This will take us back to the stone ages.”

Maseed, the U.S.-based Afghan activist, insisted today’s Afghan women are better educated and more politically aware than in the 1990s, and will keep pushing for their rights.

“If women go backward, they think it’s better to come out on the streets and be killed than to follow these regressive rules and die inside every day,” the activist affirmed.

Resisting oppression with exceptional resilience—even under the new Taliban rule—they intend to keep up their struggle. They also are appealing to the international community not to grant recognition to the Taliban as a legitimate political actor.

In the past weeks, Afghan associations and supporters in the diaspora have joined Afghan women’s calls to refuse to recognize the Taliban. But they also have criticized the U.S. role in creating a disaster, at both political and humanitarian levels. And it is clear from U.S. machinations that ordinary Afghans will suffer starvation with recent efforts at keeping the Taliban from accessing funds stored in foreign banks.

“Perhaps things were better for many Afghan women under a U.S.-supported government, but it is also the United States’ violent intervention, which has led to the situation in Afghanistan today,” Nida Kirmani, a feminist sociologist and professor at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences, wrote in a tweet. “One cannot disconnect the two.”

 

Using women’s rights again as a means of framing US imperialism. Perhaps things were better for many Afghan women under a US-supported government, but it is also the US’s violent intervention, which has led to the situation in Afghanistan today. One cannot disconnect the two. https://t.co/RYNX9COIvL

— Nida Kirmani (@NidaKirmani) September 11, 2021

Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. She was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017, and since 2018 has been based in Tunis.