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….
I’ve seen it before. The men dragging sandbags in the streets. The eerie sound of the sirens. The half-empty houses with faces at the windows. The thunder of a sudden blast. The shelters full of tears. The check points. The lines of refugees. The silent cold. The smell of fear. I’ve reached Kyiv on Russian-invasion-day-five. Thousands, mostly women and children, packed on the platforms, waiting for the train to come,…
Now it’s the magnetic bombs, homemade devices placed by unknown hands under vehicles. Almost every day in Kabul one explodes, gutting a car, a minivan, a jeep of the Islamic police. Nobody knows who the killers are. Personal vendettas, the inevitable aftermath of a twenty-year civil war? Politically motivated executions? Iskp (the local Islamic State’s branch) generally targets crowded places, mosques, markets, hospitals, to provoke massacres; but it cannot be…
In February 2010 a combined force of 15,000 ISAF and Afghan troops launched Operation Moshtarak, the largest military offensive in the Afghan war. The goal was to remove the Taliban from Marjah, their last stronghold in central Helmand, and mark “the start of the end of the insurgency”. Indeed, the 10 months bloody battle, filmed by a HBO crew embedded with the US Marines (Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment),…
“Are you really going to that shit hole?” Even my hardened fixer in Cúcuta was skeptical. But I was teaming up with Msf on a survey mission and felt safe enough even after the grim security briefing: never walk alone, mandatory 6pm curfew, no pictures unless agreed by the local guerrilla leaders and open windows in the car. “Why?” “To hear the gunshots”. La Gabarra, a remote hamlet in the…
“I’m goin’ to Medellin to join my family” says José. “I’ve never seen my two years old son”. “I go to Peru” says Veronica. “Maybe it’s easier to get a job there”. “I was a nurse in Maracaibo” says Pedro. “My monthly salary was half a dollar. Can you believe it? No way to feed my three children with that”. The massive exodus of Venezuelans, the largest migration crisis in…
“The Angels of Death came down on us one mid afternoon. I managed to slip out of the village with three of my kids but my husband was shot. They gunned down my brother and sister, shooting at random. They burned the houses, stole the crops and the herds. There’s nothing left there but dead bodies”. Salimata is now hanging around the crumbling small town of Nouna, in western…
