The Mass Ethnic Cleansing of Syrian Kurds is Collateral Damage From the War in Ukraine

BY PATRICK COCKBURNFacebook

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Photograph Source: DAVID HOLT from London, England – CC BY 2.0

Kurds are suffering the greatest collateral damage form the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees attract global attention, but the Ukraine war has opened the door wide to the mass expulsion of two million Syrian Kurds, which is likely to take place in the coming months. Turkey is threatening to complete the ethnic cleansing of Kurds from northern Syria which it began five years ago.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds have already been forced by Turkish-led forces to flee from their enclaves on the Syrian side of the Turkish-Syrian border. “There is no place for the [Kurdish fighters] in Syria‘s future,” said Erdogan. “We hope that… we will rid the region of separatist terror.” In practice, the Turkish policy during previous incursions into Syria has been to drive out all Syrian Kurds, civilians as well as fighters, separatists and terrorists.

After Turkey lifted its veto on Sweden and Finland joining Nato, the Nato powers are less likely than before to deter Erdogan from a fresh invasion of Northern Syria. In the longer term, they want to recruit Turkey as an ally against Russia.

The US has already largely abandoned the Syrian Kurds to Turkey, though it was they who provided the ground forces that, in alliance with the US, defeated the so-called Islamic State in Syria and lost 11,000 Kurdish soldiers in the fighting.

The Syrian Kurds themselves have no doubt about their likely fate and many are already seeking to escape. Their ethnic cleansing is the most important and tragic piece of collateral damage stemming from the Ukraine war – and one which is being largely ignored by the outside world.

We have interviewed four members of a Kurdish family – father, mother, son and daughter-in-law about their experiences and feelings as they seek to escape the impending Turkish advance for the third time in five years. This time they have been forced to move from the largest Kurdish population centre in north east Syria, Qamishli, to the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Erbil. Their sad reflections about their fate mirrors the feelings of refugees everywhere.

Because they face multiple dangers all names, and other information identifying them, have been removed.

The Father

I am 58, married, have six boys and a girl. I was born in Ras al-Ain and lived there till 2019 when Turkey invaded our town. My first displacement was to al-Hassakah where I couldn’t stay for a long time because it was not safe as well, especially after hundreds of thousands of displaced people (IDPs) from Raqqa and Deir al Zour came to the city after the outbreak of the war in Syria.

Hassakah city used to be the centre of the governorate and it used to be safe and well organised, but after big numbers of IDPs came to the city, crimes of theft, looting, kidnapping and murder increased a lot.

Then I moved to Qamishli in 2020 which was safer and much better. I am a tailor. When I moved to Qamishli, I hired a shop and brought my sewing machines and staff and start work. This was my second displacement. My eldest son is living in the city as well, the others are living in Turkey, Kurdistan, Australia and the youngest one is studying medicine in Latakia.

When I moved to Qamishli, I was happy to feel some kind of stability and had a lot of friends and customers. My work was very good over the past two years. I got to know a lot of people in Qamishli. I feel that I am displaced when I remember my house, the big yard and the big sewing shop in the town, but still I am living in my country and understand the people I talk to and the culture is not that different. It is almost the same.

My eldest son is working with news agencies and humanitarian organisations in Qamishli. I am always concerned about my eldest son in Qamishli and the youngest son in Latakia because they are still in Syria, but I am worried most about my elder son in Qamishli, because the situation in the last two years has not been safe, especially after the kidnap of many kids by masked men and the arrest of some journalists who are friends of my elder son.

Furthermore, the financial situation and the basic needs of life have deteriorated. Electricity, fuel, water and bread have not been available for everyone in the past two years.

Apart of all this, there are the Turkish threats on the media all the time and also the drone attacks and explosions in the region as well as the arbitrary detention of many people every day.

It was not easy to make the decision of the third displacement and travel to Erbil. Our life has been like a train which runs slowly and stops at many stations. At every station we stop, we get to know people, neighbours, friends… and we start to feel comfortable that we are staying at this station, but suddenly we receive a push from the back to run. When you have a long break, it is not easy to do so again. We are not machines. Every break and every new flight consumes a lot from our souls, emotions and also our bodies.

My elder son tried for months to convince me to leave the country. He told me that we need to have passports and some other documents and paperwork. I didn’t have the morale to do all these. He was preparing everything for me. He prepared the passports documents for me and his mum, then he bought visas to Kurdistan, then he bought flight tickets.

I have been working in Qamishli for two years, and I could only save $2,000 (£1,700), and my elder son could save $5,000 only. Two passports for me and his mum, and four passports for him and his wife and kids, each passport costed $500 (total $3,000), while it used to cost only $20 before the war, then each visa $250 (total $1,500), then residencies in Kurdistan for one year, each $600 (total $2,500), so we spent all our savings just to move to Kurdistan.

I remember when we packed our bags and headed to Qamishli airport and when the plane took off, I was looking at the city from the plane’s window. I felt we were the souls and the homeland was the body. I felt like a death when souls separate from the body, but the souls are supposed to be in heaven or in paradise, but our souls are flying but suffering.

I already experienced the feeling when we were forced to leave our home town in 2019 and then we heard that somebody from a far place (Deir al-Zour, Ghouta, Aleppo) was living in our house while we were looking for a house to rent or living in a tent. I am feeling the same now when we were getting far from the homeland in the plane.

I am sure the Turks will invade the remaining towns of the region and their militias will occupy our houses. It is very hard when you already have a wound bleeding and when this wound hasn’t healed yet, another stab comes to the same wound.

I was travelling with my wife, my elder son’s wife and his kids (aged six and four). The elder boy asked me, where are we going, I answered him that we are travelling to spend the vacation with your uncle’s kids. The kids were happy. I hope they grow up in another country and don’t see all these conflict and tensions that we are having in our souls and thought.

When we landed in Damascus, I felt a hint of hope that we are still in Syria or that we may not leave our homeland, but again there is a flight from Damascus to Erbil. The wound is still bleeding. We landed in Erbil on 2 May in the evening.

My sons came to the airport to greet us. I am in Erbil now, the language is different and I can hardly understand the Kurdish dialect (Sorani) that people in Erbil speak. Everything here is different. I need years to get used to this country, but we are tired of displacement. I hope this is the last displacement.

The Mother

I spent more than 40 years with my husband to build our house. Every piece of furniture in our house has a story of hardship and how we bought it. When I left my home town in 2019, I was terribly sad and got sick. People say they are mere material and you can buy others when you move to another place. No, those materials have souls, memories and stories. Even the dishes, spoons, glasses have stories and memories.

Turks are taking our home and give it to thieves and monsters and strangers from Deir al-Zour and al-Sfera [a town in Aleppo countryside where the Turish-backed Sultan Murad group came from] who are killing people just because they are Kurds. I never had hatred or enmity against Arabs who have been our neighbours and friends for decades, but those strangers are different. They are taking our houses.

I am traveling to Erbil to join my kids and hope living close to them will relieve the pain of exile and homelessness. I hope if Turkey takes Qamishli don’t hear any news about our house there.

The daughter-in-law

I am very sad and exhausted to leave my home empty-handed. I got married eight years ago and my husband has been working for about 20 years and finally managed to buy a house in Qamishli four years ago and a car last year, and now we are leaving everything behind us. Nobody in the region will buy or sell properties so it is as if my husband has been working for 20 years to offer all his efforts to strangers.

Turkey will come to our region and will give our houses to strangers as gifts. I left the country not only because the Turks will invade our town, but because my kids would be growing up in a war-torn land which is not safe for them. In the past two years, there were many kids kidnapped by armed groups. A relative of mine last year lost her son who was about 12. He was kidnapped by an armed group and so far he is lost.

My neighbour also lost her daughter a few months ago. She was 15 and one day the family woke up and didn’t find their daughter. After searching for her, it turned out that she was taken by the armed group of youth revolutionaries [a PKK-affiliated group conscripting children in northeast Syria]. The family could know where their daughter was, but the armed group refused to return her, and then I heard that the girl was transferred to Qandil mountain in Iraq [where the PKK are training their fighters].

Every morning my husband is taking my son to the school and in the afternoon he brings him back home. My younger son sometimes wants to play in the street below our building, but I cannot let him go out. There are men in big cars kidnapping kids from the streets and selling their organs. A relative of mine in Derik lost her eight-year-old son in Derik about six months ago and later she found her son dead, slaughtered and his organs were taken. His body was found on the outskirts of the Tigris River near the town of Derik.

This is why I moved to Erbil, at least it is safer than Rojava.

I am worried about my kids and husband all the time. About eight months ago, an armed group arrested a journalist who was a friend of my husband and after he was set free, some officials promised him that it was a mistake, but later on he was arrested again and tortured, and his family paid a lot of money to set him free.

The Son

I am really exhausted and don’t know what to say. I think what my family said explain something of what is happening in the region now.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso).

Edinburgh International Festival: Refugee artists demonstrate the importance of freedom of expression 

Artists are often at the heart of movements for social justice and their work illuminates the commonalities and complexities of human experience.

By Soizig Carey
Thursday, 23rd June 2022

Women in Iran face a number of restrictions, with potential prison sentences for those who defy rules on artistic performance (Picture: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

But artists are especially at risk of censorship, harassment, criminalisation and persecution when their work expresses ideas and possibilities that are denied by oppressive regimes. Their work demands freedom of expression and calls to others to speak out too. This can be dangerous work in today’s world.

One of the artists we work with at Scottish Refugee Council, Aref Ghorbani, is a classically trained musician and vocalist from Iran. In his home country, artists and cultural events require permits from the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry, which has the authority to cancel anything deemed immoral.

Despite the threat of jail for defying government restrictions on women performing, Ghorbani sought collaboration with women musicians. He organised and performed an unpermitted concert alongside women singers to an audience of 600, predominately women. He felt sick, but did it anyway.

Because of this and other prominent underground activities, he had to flee his country. Ghorbani is now settled in Scotland and will perform as part of Refuge at the Edinburgh International Festival.


Refuge is a series of contemporary theatre, dance, visual art, film and conversation, including artists who found themselves uprooted and now live in Scotland. The programme weaves together perspectives of artists who have taken different journeys, journeys that remind us people are often carrying more than we can see or know. Artists especially are always listening, questioning and making; these are exceptional minds.

Read MoreUkraine-Russia conflict: Ukrainian poet who crossed border to appear at Scottish...

Leena Nammari is an artist and printmaker whose installation It Will Live will greet audiences as they visit The Studio. “My work has predominantly been reflecting quietly on the Palestinian condition of statehood or lack thereof, from a small individual domestic setting. I am an artist who is a storyteller, a truth-teller. It is my job to voice, to prod, to allow others to reflect, without slogans or propaganda the human condition, and in particular marginalised voices,” she said.

Nammari has been settled in Scotland for a long time, but in many ways has never left Palestine.

Sabir Zazai, Scottish Refugee Council’s chief executive, knows this feeling all too well, as well as the significant role that artists have in truth and storytelling, in building an open-hearted culture. “This has been a year of terrible stories. War in Ukraine, unrest in Afghanistan, families stranded and separated by bureaucracy, Rwandan detention centres and people left with no option but to risk their lives on dangerous journeys in a desperate bid to reach a place of safety,” he said.

“In this relentless fight for human rights and freedoms, we must not forget to reflect on hard-won triumphs... Had Rudolph Bing not sought and been granted refugee protection here 75 years ago, this world-class festival may not exist. The cultural fabric of Scotland would be very different. We are in awe of his legacy, and of the exceptional artists performing as part of Refuge.”

We hope audiences will be moved and inspired by this programme, and that they will leave with a greater understanding of what it means to be uprooted in today’s world.

Soizig Carey is arts and cultural development officer at Scottish Refugee Council. Refuge runs from August 12 to 27. See www.eif.co.uk for further details

 IMPERIALISM AND WORLD ECONOMY

A new kind of Belt and Road Initiative after the pandemic

The Belt and Road Initiative is turning from infrastructure financing into an instrument for Chinese soft and hard power

BY: ALICIA GARCÍA-HERRERO AND EYCK FREYMANN 

DATE: JUNE 23, 2022 TOPIC: GLOBAL ECONOMY AND TRADE


Since President Xi announced China’s grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, in Kazakhstan in 2013, it has grown so much in geographic and conceptual scope that it has become difficult to measure. Agreements setting out some form of formal affiliation with the initiative have been signed with 146 countries. Meanwhile, the projects covered by this grand strategy have increased in number but also in terms of sectoral and geographic complexity, from the Arctic to the deep oceans, from Latin America to outer space.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has been a major complication for the BRI. Since January 2020, China has closed its borders to the world, cutting off most in-person exchanges and crippling businesses’ ability to evaluate, negotiate and conclude new deals (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: China’s international air passengers, inbound and outbound (millions persons)



Source: Civil Aviation Administration of China, CEIC

Figure 2: Outbound tourists from China, 2014-2021, millions



Source: Chinese Outbound Tourism Research Institute.

At the same time, negative sentiment about China has grown in many countries, particularly developed economies in Europe and Southeast Asia (see here, for example). Sentiment analysis based on big data from news feeds also showed a clear deterioration globally in 2020 of positive perceptions of China’s and the BRI, though there has been some recovery since (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Big data media sentiment toward China and BRI



Source: GDELT

The pandemic’s negative economic effects on many developing countries have also reduced interest in the BRI. Many prominent BRI partner countries, such as Sri Lanka, now face debt distress arising from unrelated pressures including a strong dollar, high oil and food prices, and a collapse in the tax base during the pandemic. This has made Chinese banks and firms relatively less interested in projects in many of these countries, while undermining the ability of host countries to contemplate ambitious capital expenditures in the BRI’s traditional sectors, such as transport and logistics.

Many BRI projects underway before the pandemic appear to have been abandoned. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) detailed 15 projects worth over $2.4 billion that faced financial difficulties in 2020, including the Kunzvi Dam electricity project in Zimbabwe, contracted to Sinohydro. Fifteen projects with problems is surely an underestimate. Given the opacity of China’s reporting on BRI projects, it will likely be at least another year until the extent of this downsizing can be quantified.

Predictably, Chinese overseas FDI during the pandemic declined everywhere (see data from the American Enterprise Institute and Mergermarket, a provider of information on merger and acquisiton deals globally). China’s investment overseas sometimes includes control (foreign direct investment or FDI) through acquisitions of companies or greenfield investment, and sometimes is poor lending, especially project finance. As Figure 4 shows, all of these measures of China’s outward FDI globally plummeted 72% in 2020 from the average of the previous five years. In BRI countries, Chinese FDI was down 62%.

The decline in FDI hit the Middle East and emerging Asia harder than Latin America and Africa (Figure 5). This is perhaps surprising, as Latin America was the region hardest-hit by the pandemic. Chinese investors have sustained their interest in Latin America partly because many governments in the region have moved to privatise state assets, such as utilities, to repair their finances after the pandemic. Most of the Chinese M&A deals in Latin America announced during the last two years are privatisations of state-owned power or resource extraction companies.

Figure 4: Chinese outbound investment ($ billions)



Sources: Mergermarket (https://members.mergermarket.com/china-ma), American Enterprise Institute (https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/) Note: Averages over period.

Figure 5: Chinese investment in BRI countries, regional breakdown ($ billions)



Sources: Mergermarket (https://members.mergermarket.com/china-ma), American Enterprise Institute (https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/)

Chinese development finance (lending rather than equity purchases) into BRI geographies has also plummeted (Figure 6). This is particularly problematic for countries that are highly dependent on Chinese lending to finance their infrastructure. Some of these countries have growing current account deficits which they will need to finance.

Figure 6: Chinese development finance (lending, $ billions)



Source: Boston University Global Development Policy Center (https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2020/12/07/tracking-chinas-overseas-development-finance/)

Macroeconomic constraints

The BRI faces two main macroeconomic constraints this year. The first is that China is far from exiting the COVID-19 pandemic. Its dynamic zero-COVID policy is impeding cross-border business exchange. China’s economy has rapidly decelerated in the first half of 2022, because of the central government’s draconian restrictions and the attempts of local officials to over-comply with instructions. The slowdown is putting additional pressure on banks to lend domestically rather than overseas. Such lending is essential in the financing of major infrastructure projects overseas. Furthermore, the tighter grip of overseas regulators (especially the US) has been limiting Chinese corporations’ ability to raise funds in hard currency, whether through listings in foreign stock exchanges or offshore bond issuance.

However, the BRI has helped China expand its trade, even faster than for the rest of the world. In other words, the BRI has acted as an important source of external demand since 2015, when compared with the rest of the world.

Figure 7: Chinese trade, value (% of GDP) and growth by partner



Source: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/ReportFolders/reportFolders.aspx?sCS_ChosenLang=en)

What comes next?

What is the longer-term prognosis? Will the current abrupt slowdown reverse, or will the BRI fade into irrelevance? This depends partly on Chinese domestic politics. The longer China remains locked within its borders, and the deeper the Chinese economy slides in the second half of 2022, the harder it will be to maintain the same level of ambition. As long as borders are closed, China’s overseas investment is bound to remain muted, limiting the number of new projects Chinese firms will want to take on. Cross-border mobility restrictions will also hamper China’s ability to send workers overseas for construction and logistics purposes.

Nevertheless, there is a wealth of reasons to believe that the BRI remains central to the global ambitions of China’s leadership. A more plausible scenario is that the BRI is evolving to serve better the interests of Chinese leaders under the current, rapidly changing, circumstances. China’s leadership remains deeply committed to the BRI as emphasised in February 2022 by Politburo Standing Committee member Han Zheng, chairman of the Leading Small Group responsible for the Belt and Road. However, he also advised Chinese banks and companies to focus on projects that “improve people’s sense of gain in participating countries,” and for the leadership to seek “greater alignment” of the BRI and China’s domestic macroeconomic strategies such as dual circulation, while strengthening “risk monitoring and prediction”. These comments were implicit criticisms of how the BRI has been rolled out to date, for two main reasons. The first is the international pushback, both from recipient countries after having increased their debt to finance unviable projects, and from developed economies, especially the US, the EU and Japan, who see their global influence curtailed by China’s expansion overseas. The second reason is domestic, stemming from the rather low return on investment for China as a good part of BRI related projects have failed or been delayed, or have ended up with cost overruns.

Notwithstanding these challenges, the Chinese government does not seem ready to abandon the BRI, but rather to transform into a sort of BRI 2.0. China seems to be losing interest in funding infrastructure and would prefer to increase its soft, and possibly even hard, power through other means of influence. The BRI is also linked increasingly to China’s geopolitical objective of proposing an alternative global order to the liberal order led by the United States.

Power instrument

One example of how the BRI may be an instrument for China to expand its hard power is the signature of a security pact with the Solomon Islands, which could have as objective reshaping the strategic balance in the South Pacific, where security is currently dominated by Australia and the US. While the pact was not formally connected to the BRI, the Solomons joined the BRI in 2019, and China and the Solomons continually referred to the BRI as they negotiated the security deal, suggesting that the two are linked. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi went on a follow-up tour in May, hoping to secure a broader regional security deal, he visited Kiribati where he signed 10 outcome documents, including an expanded BRI cooperation plan. Along the same lines, there are some indications that China wants to establish a naval facility in Equatorial Guinea, as a door to the Atlantic Ocean. Equatorial Guinea is also a recent BRI member. Finally, Chinese media are increasingly explicit about treating the BRI as a soft power tool, instructing party cadres to ‘tell the BRI’s story well’ as part of a broader effort to ‘tell China’s story well’.

These incremental steps allow the BRI to touch on issues far more closely related to security than was the case before the pandemic. A strong signal of the latter was given by President Xi at the Boao Forum for Asia in April 2022, where he proposed a new Global Security Initiative (GSI). Elaborating on Xi’s comments, Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrote in the People’s Daily that the initiative “contributes Chinese wisdom to make up for the human peace deficit and provides a Chinese solution to cope with the international security challenge”. This is very similar language to the ‘Chinese wisdom’ that propagandists claim is motivating the BRI. In talks with Jordanian counterparts late last month, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Li Zhanshu made a single integrated pitch for the BRI and GSI. These are all hints that the BRI is evolving from an infra-centric strategy to a security one.

In conclusion, since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the BRI has faced short-term macroeconomic headwinds because of China’s much worsened economic situation, and because of recipient countries’ negative sentiments about China as some projects fail to deliver their expected benefits and debt continues to pile up. This, however, should not be read as the end of the BRI. The strategy is just too important for the Chinese leadership. If anything, it is more important than ever as China needs to build alliances in its strategic competition with the US. The BRI is transforming from an infrastructure-led project to a more political one where soft, and even hard, power are central. In other words, Xi Jinping’s grand vision of the BRI is evolving into a more versatile and hard-edged instrument of statecraft. This is much more in line with China’s broader domestic goals, as financial resources are increasingly needed within its own borders. It is potentially also more effective at furthering China’s interests abroad.

Recommended citation:

Freymann, E. and A. Garcia-Herrero, (2022) ‘A new kind of Belt and Road Initiative after the pandemic’, Bruegel Blog, 23 June

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Two Young Women’s Vicious Murders Reveal a Troubling Rot

When one sex is seen as a mere accessory and subordinate to another, it’s no wonder that slaughter of the ‘lesser’ is the result

Kareem ShaheenKareem Shaheen is the Middle East and newsletters editor at New Lines

June 24, 2022

Naira Ashraf / From her Facebook page

Our Week in Review, a newsletter emailed to subscribers every Friday. To subscribe, sign up here.

Ordinarily, this newsletter is dedicated to commentary about one of our flagship essays published over the past few days. 

I couldn’t do that this week, because I was so angry. Let me tell you why.

On Monday, an Egyptian college student named Naira Ashraf was slaughtered by another student in the middle of the day outside her campus in the city of Mansoura. The criminal, Mohamed Adel, stabbed her multiple times with a knife while within ear and eyeshot of dozens of people in a public place, because she and her family had refused his entreaties for marriage.

Then on Thursday, news surfaced of another murder on a college campus, this time in Jordan. Iman Arshid, a student at Amman’s Applied Science University, was apparently shot to death on campus. Details are still murky, but the shooter appears to be at large. 

I will focus in this newsletter on the Egyptian case, simply because we know more about it right now.

Security camera footage and social media videos of the horrific murder are all over the internet. The most complete video, which I regret to say I have seen, shows him stabbing her as she lies on the ground, her head propped up against the pavement. Onlookers intervene, but he holds them at bay with his knife before leaning down and stabbing her again, after which he is manhandled by a college security officer. Now imagine the grief of her parents and family, who witnessed through video footage the brutal slaughter of one they loved so dearly. The rest of Egypt saw it too.

The video left me with an indelible sadness, a sadness that I can already tell, as I write the words of this newsletter, will likely shape who I am for the rest of my life. It’s the kind of sadness that makes you wonder whether you will ever be truly happy again.

Social media has been abuzz with commentary on the horrific crime, this time one in which every painful thrust of the blade was caught on tape. To be fair, most of the commentary has been condemnatory, mournful or shocked, though I am at a loss as to how one can be shocked when one is steeped in cultural and social mores that unabashedly view a woman’s life as inherently worth less than a man’s. Naturally, some imbecilic commentators, such as a celebrity televangelist preacher (in a Freudian slip, I initially wrote “creature”) named Mabrouk Attia, saw fit to publish a psychotic video on social media urging women to wear the hijab to avoid being slaughtered by “drooling” men without means. Others saw little reason for the local media hubbub over the murder since the man had been arrested and took issue with those pointing to broader societal ills to explain the broad-daylight savagery.

But while the crime is horrific, it is not senseless. It is a perfectly logical outcome when society sees women as mere accessories who serve at the pleasure of the male master race.

It is an attitude that pervades societal convention in Egypt, Jordan and the Middle East more broadly, and we should acknowledge it and work to dismantle it instead of hiding behind the victimhood narrative of Arab- and Islamophobia. It is a cultural attitude ingrained in the personal, communal and state structures of our society, and it enables everything from catcalls to an incel like Adel or his Jordanian counterpart thinking nothing of impulsively stabbing a young woman to death outside her college campus or shooting her to death for the temerity of saying no.

Other factors reinforce the attitude: laws that allow me to give my son my citizenship but do not allow his mother to do the same; imams and preachers who justify a man beating his wife because of Scripture; all the people who, having learned of yet another crime of sexual harassment or assault against a woman, ask why she was outside by herself or whether she was dressed in a revealing manner (this latter point has always puzzled me ever since a female relative was harassed at the Grand Mosque in Mecca while dressed in full Islamic garb). 

And more: all the countries where honor killings still happen and where laws reduce the severity of such crimes; every family where a failed, useless, trash son questioned his sister after she came home late from work or presumed that divine ordinance gave him control and authority over her life, education and relationships; the images in the family photo albums where the uncovered women have been erased; every hand raised in violence; every unpunished utterance that demeaned and harassed — a plague that almost every woman in Egypt has had to endure; every entitled shit-stain who insisted that the woman’s place is the home while he whiled away his pointless existence at hookah cafes playing cards with other morons of his ilk.

Violence against women is of course not just the province of Arab and Muslim countries. It is also pervasive in the “civilized” West. So is sadistic inhumanity. In America psychopaths wielding legally purchased assault rifles gun down children in schools, protected by psychopaths in power who are determined that they retain the right to do so. In Russia, government troops helped orchestrate starvation sieges in Syria and bombed civilians in Ukraine. China has concentration camps for millions of its Uyghur population. Inhumanity is not a trait unique to one culture or one society.

And yet. The scriptural and legal justifications for both the violence against women and the culture of impunity that are a natural outgrowth of these calamities infuse aggression and violence with a veneer of righteousness they enjoy in our part of the world.

It is that veneer of righteousness — that certainty that she is yours to do with as you see fit — that is the rot and the cancer at the heart of this enterprise.

There are crimes of such gravity that they leave an indelible mark, shaping who you are and how you perceive the world for the foreseeable future. I had thought I was beyond that. I didn’t often flinch when for years as a journalist covering Syria I would scroll through my phone past photos of my fiancée and my cats interspersed with images of dead children or victims of chemical attacks. But I can tell that these twin crimes in Egypt and Jordan have already changed me and will continue to do so in the harshness and pessimism of the worldview one can’t help but conjure in the face of such brutality.

https://newlinesmag.com/

There Should Be a Juneteenth Equivalent in Iraq

With 1 million descendants of African slaves in the country, Baghdad leadership has been slow to officially recognize the region’s role

Rasha Al Aqeedi

Rasha Al Aqeedi is the Middle East deputy editor

June 27, 2022

Iraqi members of the “Movement of Free Iraqis”, a political party formed by the black descendants of African slaves, gather to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black US president / Essam Al-Sudani / AFP via Getty Images

Analogies between the West and Middle East are often lazy, simplistic and beneficial to one party in creating a distraction from the problem at hand. “Just like al Qaeda” or “we have become a theological dictatorship like Saudi Arabia” is in fact a polite way of saying that “we are better than the brown barbarians,” an excuse to not look inward and acknowledge that basic human rights are a global dilemma because human-created power struggles are similar and those with power strive to maintain a status quo that keeps them atop of the hierarchy. In that context, the West and the Middle East aren’t too different. If there was one cynical historic deed that unites the two geographical entities, it would be slavery: in particular, the enslavement of humans from Africa. 

As America commemorated Juneteenth for the second time only, I set out to look for the closest equivalent in the Middle East. I couldn’t find an Arabic announcement stating that the last of slaves were now free. Slavery had initially lost part of its popularity when the Prophet Muhammad made his message public in Mecca. He denounced slavery and declared that all enslaved people should have equal rights. Bilal of Abyssinia, a slave to a powerful Meccan household, heard this message and converted to Islam. He became one of the earliest, and later among the most popular, Muslims in Mecca. Tortured to a near death by his master, Bilal was purchased by another new convert to Islam and set free. Though Islam discourages slavery and encourages freeing individuals, it never outright prohibited enslavement. The concept of enslavement gradually died out on its own over the centuries, but it was the religious establishments’ reluctancy to declare it an inhumane misdeed that opened the doors for it to continue despite Islam’s message of social equality. 

One little-known or little-discussed example of slavery after Muhammad was the Arab slave trade in the Persian Gulf. During the Abbasid dynasty in what is now Iraq in the early 9th century, farmers in the city of Basra bought thousands of men from East Africa to drain the large salt marshes in the city. In Arabic, they were referred to as “Zanj,” derived from the Arabic pronunciation of Zanzibar, which in turn means “land of the Black man.” While the n-word and zanj have different socio-historic contexts that make the first of the two words inappropriate and racist, the second refers to a particular period in which African men were enslaved and lived under miserable inhumane conditions. There should be a “Z” word in Arabic, but till this day there isn’t. I am, in fact, using it quite deliberately writing this article. The Black slaves of Basra endured cruel work conditions with little subsistence for survival for decades, and like most injustices, a rebellion was born from the heart of suffering. Many historians consider the “Zanj Rebellion,” which lasted nearly 14 years, as one of the most violent events of the Abbasid era. Other historians have argued that it was a social and economic revolt and not one led by slaves eager for freedom. Most historians agree that it was a social revolt inspired by slaves who joined other discontented Basrans to stage a huge political upheaval against their Baghdad rulers. 

Slavery was officially abolished in Iraq under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. Yet the stereotypes persist to this day despite growing social awareness in many other sensitive topics such as religious fundamentalism and our less-than-ideal but over-glorified history. There could be many reasons this part of history is not discussed in Iraq. 

One is that most Iraqis of African descent live in the Zubair district of Basra, where most of their ancestors were brought in. The restriction to one area in south Iraq made this issue more local and less national. Second, and perhaps more damaging, is how racist tropes and stereotypes in Iraq are so common that it is hard to distinguish a light-hearted joke based on a stereotype from a hurtful, racist comment built on “othering.” There are stereotypical jokes about certain attributes and characteristics of Mosul, for example, but none attacks the very being of a citizen from Mosul. That is categorically different from using the word “abed,” which literally means “slave” to describe an Iraqi of African origins. There are an estimated 1 million African Iraqis in the country today, but they have no political representation. Though most identify as Iraqi Shi’a and are allowed to vote, they do not possess the same status in Iraq’s society as their Shi’a fellow nationals of Arab background. With social discrimination and near-invisibility from the rest of Iraq outside Zubair, seeking political representation sounds logical. Yet all attempts to establish political representation in the post-2003 order were silenced, literally. In 2007, inspired by the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama in the U.S., the “Free Iraqi Movement” was established to defend the right of African Iraqis. The party ran in more than one local election in Basra but failed to win any seats. In 2013, its founder, Jalal Thiyab, was assassinated. According to a study by the International Republican Institute, African Iraqis experience high poverty and low educational attainment rates. 

I learned of the existence of Iraqis who were originally from Africa in the ’90s while listening to the songs “Khala w ya Khala” by Basim al-Ali and “Ridit minek Tiji” by Haithem Yousif. Both songs feature an up-tempo catchy beat that generates what I refer to as “the shoulder factor,” a reaction in which your shoulders automatically move to a certain rhythm. The videos include a group of joyous Black men dancing. I later learned that the “khashaba” dancing was one of many dances in Basra that were made mainstream by African-Iraqis. Though I was initially thrilled at the discovery, it quickly reminded me of a time when African Americans and Latinos were seen as just entertainers and athletes. Despite the historic significance if the Zanj Revolution, there is no mention of it in Iraqi history textbooks. There has not been, to the best of my knowledge, an issued acknowledgement or apology to the offspring of these slaves who live in Basra today. Granted, they are full Iraqi citizens and enjoy, theoretically, all the rights that any Iraqi citizen has, but do they not deserve a Juneteenth of their own? An Iraqi Juneteenth is overdue. If there is not a certain date, there are many consequential dates to choose from. As part of the celebration, maybe we could outlaw “zanj” and “abed” from our social vocabulary, too.

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Western Homophobes Denigrate Others But Act the Same

Pride month has turned into a useful tool for nations to telegraph an image of civil cohesion and national exceptionalism, but nothing else

Amrou Al-KadhiAmrou Al-Kadhi is a British Iraqi-Egyptian screenwriter, author and drag performer living in Los Angeles

June 20, 2022

Rainbow arch installed over No. 10 to mark Pride month / London, 2021 / Leon Neal / Getty Images

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Iloathe Pride month. Before you jump to any conclusions, I’m not some conspiratorial right-wing reactionary. I’m queer, nonbinary, Iraqi-Egyptian and am firmly on the left when it comes to my political positions. But I really do hate Pride.

It’s not just the fact that even Udon noodle brands pretend to be bastions of gay rights for the month of June or that meaningless political platitudes like “being you is worth it” are blasted performatively by investment banks and hedge funds — mind you, only until July 1, when the rainbow posters are hastily ripped down, our pink profitability no longer potent — but it’s the sheer Western exceptionalism of it all that gets to me.

As Western democracies currently wither — yes, even in the U.S. and the U.K. — with civil rights being eviscerated by governments and courts at alarming speed, the month of Pride is a useful way for nations to telegraph an image of civil cohesion and national exceptionalism.

Take, for instance, the U.K. Home Office, the racist institution now run by the demagogic and genuinely frightening Priti Patel; unsurprisingly, it currently boasts the rainbow flag on its Twitter avatar, while this week the European Courts of Justice halted a barbaric deportation policy that would have had an Iraqi man potentially sent to his death. While British Conservatives broadcast glossy Pride signifiers throughout the sunny month of June, what’s happening on the ground in Britain tells a different story. The U.K. has fallen down Europe’s LGBTQ+ rights ranking for the third year running, with the Conservative party this year greenlighting abusive conversion therapy practices for transgender people around the country. I lived in the U.K. until very recently, and it was nearly impossible to avoid the way in which transgender lives are weaponized by right-wing political actors to fuel culture wars, stoke division and mask their terminal socio-economic program. It has been such a successful campaign of moral panic that pretty much every liberal publication, such as the Guardian, to the supposedly “neutral” BBC — which recently pulled out of the Stonewall diversity scheme meant to protect its own LGBTQ+ employees — is now complicit in this full-throttled demonization of transgender people.

As the U.K. becomes increasingly inhospitable for its LGBTQ+ citizens, its hardening immigration policies depend on the image of non-Western nations being primitive or stuck back in time; the performative politics of Pride are an excellent way to imply this imperial superiority.

I experience this firsthand as a queer Arab voice in the media; whenever I am critical of British immigration policies, I am hit with one of those intellectually disingenuous “what ifs” — “if you were back in Iraq, you’d be executed, wouldn’t you?” It’d be easier to take this line of argument in better faith if the U.K. hadn’t been so complicit in making life actively harder for Iraqi LGBTQ+ people. It’s no secret that the Western intervention was the perfect storm of conditions to create the Islamic State group in Iraq, who have brutally murdered LGBTQ+ Arabs in acts of violence that go beyond all comprehension. Much has been documented about the way extremist religious groups in Iraq have furthered their homophobic and transphobic efforts since the Western occupation. It’s no surprise that religious extremists have conceptualized homosexuality as a kind of Western export, fueled as they are by their anti-Western hatred, a lot of it in response to a senseless war that decimated a once-prosperous country.

Now I was raised in Bahrain and Dubai, and I know firsthand the difficulty of being a queer person living in an Arab country that treats my very existence as criminal. And I’m not writing this under the false pretense that Arab nations present a queer utopic offering. What is hard to stomach, however, is the way in which Arab countries are denigrated as barbaric by Western political parties, all while they legislate against LGBTQ+ people in similarly oppressive ways.

The U.S. Republican Party is a stark example of this flagrant hypocrisy. While right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro have long used Islamophobic tropes in their bid to project American supremacy — “[Syrian Muslims] are not people who are engaged with Western values” — one has to wonder what “values” he’s actually referring to. To those of us on the left, “values” might connote civil rights victories for minorities or the fundamental tenets of a functioning democracy. Yet it’s hard to stomach the right’s fight to protect Western civil values when they mirror the very regimes they paint as primitive. While Western commentators look dismissively at the Arab countries that have banned the latest Pixar animation featuring a gay kiss, Republican legislatures are at this very second fighting to ban children from seeing drag queens, as well as having already prohibited the mentioning of all LGBTQ+ people in Florida’s schools (AR-15s are still permitted, though). In fact, here’s Ben Shapiro in a tweet critiquing Pixar’s inclusion of homosexuality, as if taken straight from the Saudi censorship playbook: “Disney works to push a ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’ and seeks to add ‘queerness’ to its programming, according to executive producer Latoya Raveneau. Parents should keep that in mind before deciding whether to take their kids to see ‘Lightyear,’ which hits theaters this week.”

Then there’s Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate, whose political project was founded on anti-Islamic sentiment. Such statements as “Islamism is a monstrous totalitarian ideology” were part of her strategy to create a fictitious threat to the French republic. Notions of Muslims as an existential affront to the liberal way of life, in particular, allowed her in 2017 to grab 26% of the gay vote in Paris, with one third of all married gay men voting for her. The astonishing contradiction here is of gay voters co-opted into protecting their liberal “values” through supporting a candidate utterly opposed to all forms of legal migration, the routes that would in fact allow LGBTQ+ Arabs to find safety. Liberal hypocrisy at its finest.

In Israel this June, Tel Aviv saw 170,000 people come out for Pride. On its own, this mass celebration of queer diversity is something to be celebrated.

But then consider the politics. Government millions are channeled into Pride in Israel, again to promote an image of Western supremacy and to mask the horrors of the Palestinian occupation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly remarked that the Middle East is “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.” As Palestinian children are mercilessly bulldozed out of their homes, innocent Palestinian journalists murdered in cold blood and no doubt LGBTQ+ Palestinians are being forced into further precariousness, the illusions of Pride are conveniently used as a liberal smokescreen for apartheid.

In the abstract, of course I support what Pride stands for. But right now, in this very moment in 2022, it is a lie. For what, really, is there to be proud of, when Western nations aggressively strip LGBTQ+ citizens of their human rights, all while contributing to the plight of LGBTQ+ Arabs — in fact, all Arabs — around the globe? It’s critical that we resist Pride’s glossy erasure of troubling realities and instead pour our collective focus and energies into the thorny political fights that are — quite literally right now — life or death.

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