Orhan Kemal Cengiz. On March 31, Turkey will elect mayors for 81 provincial capitals and 957 towns. Under normal conditions in Turkey, local elections are considered to be of…
Dougie Gerrard. By any measure, Leyla Güven is in a bad way. She is assailed by painful cramps, the result of a protein breakdown in her muscular tissue….
Yassamine Mather. Friday March 8 is International Women’s Day, which this year coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first major protest by Iranian women against the Islamic…
Jonathan Cook. Israel’s decision to withhold part of the taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and plunge it deeper into crisis starkly illustrates the hypocrisies…
Maya Margit. Amid worsening diplomatic and economic isolation, Iran is continuing its crackdown on perceived dissidents. Among the targets: environmental scientists. A recent Amnesty International report claimed the…
Conn Hallinen. “Democracy is like a tram; you get off when you have reached your destination.” The comment by Recep Tayyip Erdogan—made more than 20 years ago when…
by Lara al-Kateb and Omar Abbas with contributions from Selin Cagatay, Frieda Afary, Fatemeh Masjedi and socialist feminists inside Iran The Me Too movement against sexual assault and…
Two poems by Solmaz Sharif Lanat Abad / The Place of the Damned By Solmaz Sharif this mangy plot where by nowonly mothers still come, only mothers guard…
Maged Mandour. Scene One President Abdelfattah Al Sissi, Egypt`s military autocrat is having an interview with the American television program 60 minutes, on CBS. Unlike other interviews, with…
Kathy Kelly. On January 27th, 2019, the Taliban and the U.S. government each publicly stated acceptance, in principle, of a draft framework for ongoing negotiations that could culminate…
Bree Busk. It is May 2018 and as winter descends on Santiago, Chile, a new wave of feminist activity is exploding into life. Anti-patriarchal graffiti covers the city…
Kourosh Ziabari. Instagram, widely used in Iran among small business owners, students, influencers and even senior officials, is the latest social media application to come under scrutiny and…
Ramzy Baroud. The game is afoot. Israel, believe it or not, is demanding that seven Arab countries and Iran pay $250 billion as compensation for what it claims was the…
Yassamine Mather. Iranian workers have been staging large protests since early November in two major industrial complexes: the Haft Tapeh sugar plant and the Foulad steel factory in…
Vijay Prashad. On Jan. 1, 5.5 million women in the Indian state of Kerala (population 35 million) built a 386-mile wall with their bodies. They stood from one end…
James Miler. “This is what democracy looks like!”—for some of us protesting Trump in New York on January 21, 2017, this was a familiar chant. We’d heard it…
Sahar Esfandiari. TAs Mehdi Khakyan’s hands move skilfully across the piano keys, the soft chatter in the room subsides to hone in on the melody of a well-loved…
Rushi Kumar. Laila Haidari is considered a criminal, despite never committing a crime. The 40-year-old works with drug addicts in Kabul. “The addicts I work with are considered…
Ramzy Baroud. An eerie video composed of a recorded audio prayer and a photo of one ‘Hajj Jamal Ghalaini’ occasionally pops up on Facebook. The voice is that…
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East. David Kirkpatrick, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. From 2011 to 2015, David Kirkpatrick was the…
Amnesty International. Several Saudi Arabian activists, including a number of women, who have been arbitrarily detained without charge since May 2018 in Saudi Arabia’s Dhahban Prison, have reportedly…
Ramzy Baroud. Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is escalating his war on the Palestinian people, although for reasons almost entirely related to Israeli politics. He has just…
Ayla Jean Yackley. ISTANBUL — Five months ago, Selahattin Demirtas, a popular Kurdish politician jailed for his fiery speeches targeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, staged an unlikely challenge…
Robert Fisk. Rarely can history have dictated that the blood of three beheaded daughters should be injected into a vein of hope. The operation, I suppose, was self-administered…
“Ahmad Shamlou, also known under his pen name, Alef Bamdad, is among the most influential Iranian literary voices of the twentieth century and widely known as the father…
Ramzy Baroud. When Israeli troops stormed the house of Palestinian parliamentarian and lawyer, Khalida Jarrar, on April 2, 2015, she was engrossed in her research. For months, Jarrar…
Patrick Cockburn. One reason Saudi Arabia and its allies are able to avoid a public outcry over their intervention in the war in Yemen, is that the number…
Esen Uslu. Almost two years ago, when the military challenged his rule by attempting a coup and were beaten back, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan famously said: “It was…
Robin Yassin-Kassab. ‘A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution’ by novelist Samar Yazbek is part journalism, part personal memoir, and all literature. It’s literature of…
Nadia Murad. The slave market opened at night. We could hear the commotion downstairs where militants were registering and organising, and when the first man entered the room,…
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