Spotlight
Benghazi Hits the Big Leagues
As Benghazi hosts European soccer giants and boxing celebrities, Khalifa Haftar’s regime in eastern Libya is betting on sports and reconstruction to win over Libyans and the West.
Ripping Up Rent Controls
For nearly a century, Egypt maintained one of the most protective rent regimes in the world, shielding families from housing precarity and price shocks. Now, a law abolishing old contracts and liberalizing the market threatens millions of tenants with eviction, displacement and unaffordable new rents.
How the Sound of Drones Inflicts Psychological Trauma in Ukraine
Russia’s drone strategy has created a nation on permanent, exhausting alert. Every Ukrainian is now an involuntary sound engineer, acutely sensitive to the ambient noise, trying to mentally calculate a threat’s distance from a high-pitched buzz or a faint whistle.
In Raqqa, Damascus Returns as the Rojava Project Recedes
A Jan. 18 agreement between Damascus and the Syrian Democratic Forces may signal the end of Kurdish-led administration in Syria’s northeast. While thousands of residents celebrated what they called Raqqa’s “liberation,” Kurdish neighborhoods emptied, and symbols of Kurdish self-rule were removed.
Iran’s Protest Movement and Diaspora Politics
Following weeks of nationwide protests fueled by economic collapse, internet blackouts and a deadly crackdown, Iranians face a country in ruins. From the streets of Rasht to the Iranian diaspora abroad, the question now is not only whether the regime can survive, but what might come after it.
The White Helmets’ Search for Syria’s Disappeared
Between 100,000 and 300,000 people are still missing in Syria. One year after Bashar al-Assad was ousted, families are searching for their loved ones with the help of the White Helmets, while a new national commission seeks to build the infrastructure to trace, exhume and identify the disappeared.
In Syria’s Desert, the Islamic State’s Shadow Persists
In its former Syrian stronghold of Palmyra, an Islamic State group attack underscored the diffuse — and largely unseen — threat the group continues to pose. “They exist, but they don’t exist,” said one resident. “You don’t see them.”