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….
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…