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Wound

The story of a civil activist, secretly working as a nurse in a field hospital. Eight and a half intense minutes of strength and weakness, hope and despair, and conflicted emotions that Syrian activists experience, as they fight against dictatorship.

The activist, who used to work in an Intensive Care Unit in one of the most important hospitals in the Syrian capital Damascus, left her job and devoted her time to save those injured in demonstrations against the regime. As soon as her phone rings, she quickly carries a bag stuffed with medical supplies and medicines, and rushes towards another crime scene, passing through regime barriers with unstoppable courage, where she gets detained.

Wound is the tale of a woman who is aware of the brutality of the regime, but simultaneously knows quite well that Syrians can not stop fighting until they get hold of their freedom, because to her “this regime has consumed Syrians’ every breath”. In the short film you can see her crying while stitching wounds amid the shelling and destruction. Still, she refuses to give up saying “for the sake of a friend of mine who was killed yesterday, I must go on. For the sake of a friend who got detained I can’t lose hope.”

Wound was produced by Bidayat corporation and directed by Maher Qadlo, who dedicated his work to his friend: the field nurse who risked her own life to save others, in the hope of turning the wounds of many, into a long-awaited freedom.

Christmas in Saraqeb

Christmas in Saraqeb, Idlib provence, Syria. Happy Christmas everyone, and especially to Syrian Christians. May we all celebrate next year in freedom and peace.

Birthday in Hebron

By Shadab Zeest Hashmi
12.12.12

Mohammad Ziad Awwad Salayme
Mohammad Ziad Awwad Salayme

Stairs vanish before bloodstains come

Before the bullet
or the boot on the dead boy’s shin
he has long been taken
by ghosts passing in lockstep Continue reading “Birthday in Hebron”

Drone Survivors Speak

Martin Bashir interviews family of drone strike survivors

Here is the deceased’s grand daughter Nabila talking about the murder:

On October 24, 2012, a drone strike hit and killed Rafiq ur Rehman’s mother who was tending vegetables in the garden.

For the first time ever, on October 29, 2013, Rafiq ur Rehman, along with his two children, will testify before Congress and share their story with the American public in a briefing called by Representative Alan Grayson (FL-09).

RSVP NOW to witness this historic event: http://unmanned.warcosts.com/unmanned…

On Monsterphilia and Assad

My latest for Guernica Magazine.

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Earlier this month, the British street artist Banksy produced a video on Syria that attracted over five million viewers in three days. At a time of intensifying state repression, the target of Bansky’s satire was not the regime in Damascus but its opponents.  By contrast, the most watched video from the chemical attack in August, showing a traumatized young survivor, managed only half a million hits in over a month.

Six weeks after the attacks on Ghouta that killed hundreds of civilians, regime forces have choked off food supplies to the targeted neighborhoods. Survivors of the chemical attack are now facing the threat of starvation. Children have been reduced to eating leaves; and clerics have issued fatwas allowing people to eat cats and dogs.

The belated discovery of the Syrian conflict by “anti-imperialists” after the US government threatened war inspired impassioned commentary. The strangulation of its vulnerable population has occasioned silence. But dog whistles from issue-surfing provocateurs like Banksy are unexceptional; they merit closer scrutiny when they come from respected essayists like David Bromwich.

In a recent front-page article for the London Review of Books, Bromwich identifies many rogues in the Syrian drama: Barack Obama, John Kerry, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, “the jihadists”.  But conspicuously absent is Assad’s Baathist regime. Vladimir Putin is the closest Bromwich admits to a hero. The Syrian people are denied even a cameo.

Continue reading “On Monsterphilia and Assad”

The Thistle and the Drone

Excerpts from my review of Akbar Ahmed’s remarkable new book.

In the post-9/11 paranoia, many rogues have endeavoured to portray their local adversaries as part of a global terrorist threat. Russia did it with the Chechens; China with Uighurs; Israel with Palestinians – they all claimed to be fighting a “war on terror” against the same Islamist menace that threatened America. Others have followed the template. “Painting their peripheries as associated with Al Qaeda,” writes Akbar Ahmed in his remarkable new book The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, “many countries have sought to join the terror network because of the extensive benefits that it brings. They use the rhetoric of the war on terror to both justify their oppressive policies and to ingratiate themselves with the United States and the international system”.

This failure to distinguish regional struggles from global militancy allowed many states to harness US power to settle local disputes. The conflict between a centralising, hierarchical state and a recalcitrant, egalitarian periphery is not unique to Pakistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In the multi-ethnic Orient, geography rarely corresponds with identity. Many tribal societies have been left excluded on the margins. In turn they have resisted modernisation, seeing it as the centre’s tool for expanding its authority. Some of these conflicts, as in Chechnya, have simmered for centuries. But in most places, modus vivendi were evolved guaranteeing the autonomy of tribes while upholding state sovereignty.

Continue reading “The Thistle and the Drone”

Ellie Goulding, I know you care

The wonderful Ellie Goulding sings a heartfelt song for Syrian children.

Donate to Save the Children’s Syria appeal now by downloading Ellie Goulding – I Know You Care #song4syria at http://bit.ly/1euLyJ3

The civil war in Syria is now in its third year. Nearly 7,000 children have died during the conflict, more than 2 million children within Syria have been forced to leave their homes and another million children have fled the country altogether. Many are traumatised, hungry, in urgent need of shelter and protection. Children are, once again, the innocent victims of war.

Save the Children is working inside Syria and neighbouring countries to ensure that Syria’s children get the food, medicines and protection they need. To donate to the Syria appeal and for more information please visithttp://www.savethechildren.org.uk/abo…

Continue reading “Ellie Goulding, I know you care”

How not to argue against war

children killed in ghouta
Two recent articles I’d like to bring to readers’ attention. The first is my debut article for Al Jazeera America in which I write about the misuse of the Iraq analogy:

Of the many lessons Iraq taught, only two are fundamental: one must not hype threats that don’t exist, and one must not introduce war where there is none. The former diminishes public trust; the latter creates human suffering it is supposed to prevent. Neither is applicable to Syria. The regime has shown both the capability and the willingness to deploy proscribed weapons, and Syria is already at war.

In yesterday’s frontpage article for The New Republic I write that in their justifiable concern over (the highly improbable) military intervention in Syria, some opponents of the policy (or Obama) have crossed the line into victim-blaming.

There are perfectly good arguments for opposing military intervention—and some have been made persuasively, on moral or national interest grounds. There are also good reasons to be skeptical of humanitarian conceits that might be used to justify intervention. But there is more than a fine line between skepticism and cynicism—and not even the otherwise noble concern with preventing war, or the less-noble determination to oppose a president regardless of policy, justifies excusing the Assad regime’s well-documented crimes. While war must always be an option of last resort, and it is right to be concerned about its unforeseen consequences (as long as one is mindful that inaction too has consequences), the national debate over whether to wage it in Syria is not helped by spreading ideologically driven lies.

My argument that the relevant analogy is not Iraq but Bosnia has also been echoed by Rory Stewart in what I consider the most sensible article written by a non-Syrian on the subject so far.

As regards the regime’s use of chemical weapons in last month’s massacre, those who think the jury’s still out might want to read Human Rights Watch’s detailed analysis of the regime’s culpability which was already well established by respected independent munitions experts like Eliot Higgins. As regards the regime’s motivations for using CW, check out Kim Sengupta’s stellar report on developments in Ghouta before and after the attack.

Thinking of Spring in Summer: Martyrs’ Day in Kashmir

by Huma Dar
July 13, 2013

for Naheed Shah-Sheikh

in conversation with the attached photograph by an anonymous photographer…

Frisking Ghosts: India Prepares for Martyrs' Day in Kashmir, July 13, 2013. Photographer Unknown.
Frisking Ghosts: India Prepares for Martyrs’ Day in Kashmir, July 13, 2013. Photographer Unknown.


In my homeland
beloveds are planted as seeds
singly, or in mass
23, 54, 77, 131…
(each madness has its method —
each massacre its algorithm)
marked, unmarked, empty graves
or those packed like sardines
in football fields where children once played
or open meadows where people once prayed. 

In my homeland
the bodies of my martyrs
even in death
are deemed seditious,
dangerous, explosive.    Continue reading “Thinking of Spring in Summer: Martyrs’ Day in Kashmir”