As I write the hudna, the temporary truce brokered by Qatar is holding: Hamas is releasing hostages in exchange of Palestinian prisoners and badly needed humanitarian aid, slowly trickling through the Rafah crossing. What next? Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to resume the fighting in Gaza “with full force”, ignoring the mounting international pressure and the intense diplomatic efforts to reach a permanent ceasefire. Everybody knows, even in Israel…
While Israelis all over the country are praying for the hostages’ release, mourning the dead and burying the victims of the savage Hamas assault on the Negev kibbutzim, the army is amassing its forces in the south in preparation of a major ground operation in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of tanks and truckloads of ammunitions can be seen in the agricultural fields between Ashkalon and Erez and further south close…
The Ukrainian forward logistics team is hard at work in Chasiv Jar, a small town 10 miles west of the Bakhmut battlefield. In the frigid air and under constant artillery shelling the soldiers dig trenches into the ice-covered ground, set up mobile toilets, cut wood for the stove and a camp kitchen, lace up the generators. The basement of an empty 5-story Soviet-era apartment building is hastily turned into a…
The sound of gunfire starts in the early morning and I spend a reckless day clung to the back seat of a shaky Chinese bike chasing riots all over the city. We aim at the smoke of burning tires, dodging barricades and overturned vehicles, flattening against walls to avoid stray bullets, confronting armed men with masked faces, bandits and rogue cops trying to storm the airport and the police stations….
It was Thursday, March 20, 2003 when at 5:34 a.m. we were awakened by the thunder of the first Cruise missile smashing into the presidential palace on the right bank of the Tigris. It was the beginning of Iraqi Freedom, the bloody campaign launched by George W. Bush against Saddam’s Baathist regime. Twenty years and a million casualties later, Iraq is still at risk of becoming a failed state. Rival…
Tons of rubble. Mountains of rubble. This is what you see walking around the old city of Mosul. Children play among twisted metal sheets, charred cars and shattered facades of ancient Ottoman buildings. Paths of stones and bricks climb through the ruins to the hovels where a few families have returned to live and red flags signal the presence of unexploded ordnance and trunks that no one dares open. More…
Past the block post and the mud trenches a narrow broken road cuts through the open fields towards Popasna. There are tracks of tanks on one side and the charred wreckage of a vehicle struck by a rocket that sits in the middle of nowhere. No cars and nobody around in the combat zone. People have fled. Homes, farms and villages were evacuated. All that can be seen are abandoned…
Day after in Kyiv. A week after Russian tanks and troops withdrew from the northern suburbs, the city slowly returns to a semblance of normalcy. Displaced people begin to trickle back. Sirens are rarely heard. Some hotels, stores and restaurants have reopened. Teams of workers clear the streets of debris. But now that the guns are silent, the horror of war comes to the surface. Yesterday I was in Bucha,…
I took a break from the Ukraine war and flew to Saudi Arabia where I haven’t been since Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Much has changed, much has not. As I ventured from Riyadh to Hijaz and the Red Sea coast through wild and spectacular landscapes, I had conflicting feelings. Yes, the digital age has taken over and yes, the desert Kingdom is moving on: foreigners are welcome, women can…
A mother and her two kids. Their bodies on the twisted asphalt, a blood-soaked hand and a sneaker protruding from a sheet, their small trolley standing among them as an ominous warning: they are shooting at children, at refugees running for cover. The bodies were finally carried away, but the trolley was left behind, amidst the debris and shrapnel scattered at the blown up bridge on the infamous Irpin frontline….