Something remarkable happened last week, though it didn’t get the attention it deserved: A long and brutal war came to an end. For more than four decades, the Kurdish militant group known as the PKK waged an insurgency against the […]
The Long War That Ended Last Week Read More »
Five months after its liberation from the police state of Bashar al-Assad, Syria sometimes looks like a country in civil war. Sectarian clashes have turned into street battles with rockets and mortars. In the southern province of Suweida, local leaders
The Honeymoon Is Ending in Syria Read More »
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. For anyone who has wondered what an “America First” foreign policy looks like, Donald Trump provided a vivid example today when
An ‘America First’ Deal With the Houthis Read More »
At the end of January, Ahmed al-Sharaa stepped up to a podium in the presidential palace in Damascus, dressed in the olive-drab uniform of a military commander. Seven weeks had passed since he stunned the world by conquering most of
Can Ahmed al-Sharaa Hold Syria Together? Read More »
On a winter afternoon in January 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a podium, gazing out at a handpicked audience of the Indian elite: billionaires, Bollywood actors, cricket stars, nationalist politicians. Modi had come to the north-central city of
Why Modi’s Populist Facade Is Cracking Read More »
The soldier, a lanky, dark-haired sergeant named Vitalii Ovcharenko, met me at a gas-station café on an otherwise deserted stretch of highway near Sumy, not far from Ukraine’s northern border with Russia. He looked tired. His unit had been fighting
Ukraine’s Hardest Winter – The Atlantic Read More »
On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo. The woman, Hideko Hakamada, led
Iwao Hakamada Was the World’s Longest-Held Death-Row Inmate. He Was Also Innocent. Read More »
At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and
A Future Without Hezbollah – The Atlantic Read More »
As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli airstrike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the
How Beirut Is Responding to Nasrallah’s Death Read More »
It felt like a science-fiction film, one Lebanese friend told me. At almost exactly the same moment—3:30 p.m. today—pagers exploded all over Lebanon, leaving hideous gashes and wounds on the heads, hands, and hips of their owners. The significance of
The Exploding Pagers of Lebanon Read More »
