Second day of “temporary ceasefire” here in Damascus. Most front lines appear to be silent, although the truce has been already breached both by pro-Assad forces and rebel groups. Some scattered shelling was heard in the past 24 hours south of the capital and a number of “incidents” are reported in several places all over the country, mainly around Alep. Welcomed as a turning point in the five-year civil war,…
Stuck in the muddy banks of the Euphrates river, ducking in long trenches with guns and mortars at hand, and with just a few wind-swept tents to rest between the battles, the Shia fighters of the Ansar al-Marjia Brigade are holding ground. Only the red and green banners portraying imam Hussein’s grim face distinguish them from the warriors with the black flags of the Caliphate, some two miles away. You…
San Salvador is a place where even a shoe brand has a gloomy meaning: a pair of worn out Nike sneakers hanging from a lamp post hints you’re crossing into Mara Salvatrucha’s turf; a line of shabby Adidas swinging from a suspended electric wire warns you are entering a Pandilla 18 stronghold. Other sinister signs, painted or carved on the walls, mark the the local clica’s hunting grounds: a cross,…
Day after day newspapers and social networks relate of murders, assaults, kidnappings, bloody clashes between rival drug cartels. And everyday new narcofosas, or mass graves, are unearthed: this time in Acapulco, with hundreds of corpses and rotting human remains. But almost nothing comes out from Estado de Mexico, the huge overpopulatd suburban belt of the federal capital. Unthinkable gaps cut off the posh and relatively safe downtown neighborhoods of Coyoacan…
Eight-month-old Wazir was a desperate case. Born with a severe congenital heart disease, he had no chance to survive. But his stubborn Yazidi parents, who last year fled their mountain village, barely escaping the Islamic State bloody slaughter in Sinjar, managed reach the Children’s Hospital in Duhok. Wazir was in very poor conditions and the doctors thought he was going to die in a matter of days. Luckily a young…
Past the small peshmerga check point the road winds up a narrow valley tucked away in the sparsely forested hills of northern Kurdistan. Rocks engraved with symbols representing the sun pave the way leading to Lalish, the sacred mountain hamlet that is to the Yazidis what Mecca is to Muslims, or what Jerusalem is for Jews and Christians: the holiest site of one of the oldest religions on Earth. Their…
Narcos-related violence has somehow gone down here in Ciudad Juárez: the “murder capital of the world” now records a monthly average of 30 killings, ten times less than two-three years ago when the war for the control of drug routes into the US was at its peak. The Juárez and Sinaloa cartels have apparently realized that too much bloodshed was harming the business. And money is what they are looking…
“Those homeless! I don’t understand them…” Manhal was my Iraqi driver during the 2003 war in Baghdad. Then he was forced to leave with his family and after years of hardship in Jordan ended up as a refugee in Seattle. He has worked 16 hours a day-7 days a week driving buses for Microsoft, shuttles to the airport and huge trucks across the States. Now he rents a nice house…
“We don’t like journalists” he says with a sharp American accent. “You come here just to fit us in your already written story”. The sturdy man in a long robe who confronts me at the entrance of Gornja Maoca, a small mountain village in Eastern Bosnia, flaunts a full islamic beard and a wry grin. “You should convert to islam” he cuts short, and desappears in the mosque. The flags…
It wasn’t easy to reach Mabass. Past the sprawling refugee camps and the dusty market small town of Mokolo, the road becomes a broken track climbing the rocky hills. The soldiers at the check point were suspicious of my presence, they hadn’t seen “blancs” on that trail, but after some bargaining I could go ahead. Mabass is at the heart of the military red zone where the Cameroonian army fights…