Author: Sara Ansari

“I’m 22 years old,” said Saad Salih, a Yazidi refugee from the Sinjar district in Northwest Iraq, “and I have never gone to school.”

Salih arrived illegally in Germany about 5 months ago, after finally escaping the Yazidi genocide by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Sinjar in 2014. Now, he’s trying to educate himself and rebuild his life in Germany while facing the risk of deportation.

According to Salih, he is one of over 50,000 Yazidis in Germany facing the risk of deportation. Over 30,000 Yazdis have already been issued official deportation orders by the German government, leaving them with no formal access to education or work opportunities. “The future of Yazidis [in Germany] is uncertain; Germany is deporting us because they think Sinjar is not a war zone anymore, but simultaneously it is strongly encouraging its own citizens to leave [Iraq] promptly because of instability caused by active militias…the same militias that Germany acknowledged are committing genocide against the Yazidis!”

“When I was 13 years old, the Islamic State attacked my village,” Salih said. “I lost everything then: my childhood, my friends, members of my family; they took my brothers,” he pauses, “for 9 years I didn’t know if they were alive.” In August 2014 ISIS forces conquered Salih’s hometown Sinjar — the ancestral homeland of the Yazidis — and declared an Islamic Caliphate in the region, explains Professor David Simon, Director of the Genocide Studies Program (GSP) at Yale University. “To ISIS, the Yazidis are infidels,” says Professor Simon, “and in their minds this justifies violence toward the Yazidi people; they killed thousands of men and sold thousands of women into sex slavery.”

“We are killed just for our beliefs,” says Salih with sadness in his eyes, “which most people misunderstand!” A revered figure in Yazidism is Tawûsî Melek, a fallen angel forgiven and returned to heaven by God. But “people mistakenly identify Tawûsî Melek with the figure of Shaytan (or Satan)” in Judeo-Christian tradition, says Salih. For this reason, the Yazidis have been deemed “devil worshippers,” making them a target for religious persecution historically. “ISIS attacks on Yazidis are, in fact, genocidal.” says Professor Simon. “Unfortunately, 2014 wasn’t the first, but the 73rd time the Yazidis have faced genocide in their history.”

Like many undocumented Yazidi asylum seekers, Salih cannot attend school or seek employment in Germany because of his “illegal” immigration status. But “I don’t just want to sit around and do nothing all day,” Salih says as he unzips his backpack to reveal books he is currently reading. For 9 years of his life, all Salih had was a cellphone, internet when he’s lucky, a few pairs of clothes, and the resolve to go somewhere he can find an education. “Every child should get the chance to go to school; education is a human right,” said Salih. Over the past three years, Salih has taught himself some “basic math and English by watching YouTube videos and reading online,” he says humbly. “Nothing can stop him from learning,” says his friend Shireen Tôhildan, “he loves it [and] he is so smart he does it all on his own!” Now, Salih is teaching himself German and basic coding in Python, even though he does not have a computer or formal access to language classes.

In response to deportation orders issued by the government, a group of Yazidi refugees organized a hunger strike outside the Reichstag Building, home to the German parliament, where Salih volunteered to be a translator. “I know some German but now I cannot go to German class, so I cannot work, because I’m [facing] deportation,” said Omar Zaidi, a Yazidi asylum seeker who just received a deportation order. Yazidis all over Germany are receiving deportation notices, and as a result their now “illegal” immigration status bars them from taking German classes or working. Many at the protest resonated that this was a major struggle in rebuilding their lives in Germany. Some Yazidis have received notices that give them a deadline to leave the country, while others have received notices without specified deadlines leaving them in limbo.

“In January [2023], the German government passed a memo recognizing the 2014 massacre of Yazidis by ISIS to be a genocide, but now the government is deporting us to the same place we are facing the genocide?” says Salih. “I’m not Iraqi, I am Yazidi. No one in Iraq care[s] about us, the government persecutes us, ISIS kills us, if I go back I will die,” says Firaz Sha, a Yazidi asylum seeker protesting his deportation order at the hunger strike. Professor Simon concurs with Ahmed’s assessment that Sinjar is not safe for return yet, despite the “announced withdrawal” of ISIS fighters in 2019. “The special risk factors for genocide pre-2019 the Yale GSP mentioned in its 2019 report still persist in Sinjar today,” says Professor Simon, “it is not safe for Yazidis to return.” Martin Sichert, a member of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in the German parliament, acknowledging the strikers claim that the Yazidis continue to face genocide in Iraq said, “we are deporting the wrong people.”

When asked about his future in Germany, Salih said his only hope for a future comes from educating himself and others. “I want to learn so that someday I can get a job and my work can help people; I want to help the Yazidi people, the German people, and most of all I want to teach the children like me who couldn’t go to school,” says Salih. “I don’t just aspire to live in Germany, I aspire to make a difference here!”

I found this week’s readings to be like scenes from a movie — introducing the reader to an alien land far, far, away. They showed a reality few outside the couple million who are compelled to live in it will ever experience, exposing both the cost of war on a very individual level for some and the privilege of indifference afforded to others. Whether it is following the dancers, whether it is the garbage collector, or the Afghan refugee, these stories show a world and a life foreign to most of the intend readership. So, I wonder, how differently the people in these stories maybe experiencing the same events?

I don’t mean to undermine this form of journalism, it’s incredibly courageous, and offers insight to the reader that they wouldn’t otherwise see — but it attempts to capture the experience of a people it need not understand. In a world where power is inherently imbalanced, the experiences of some lives are inherently given more attention than others — perhaps this is the closest mainstream media will get to understanding a foreign (in every sense of the word) experience.

In the story with the dancers, the woman’s need to keep her own daughters safety tucked away and educated using money obtained from selling someone else’s daughter and herself aptly underlines the theme of degradation of morality as a consequence of war present in the piece. From being in a nightclub, to the consumption of alcohol and drugs and sex, and the act of doing “business” in such a setting shows in some way that fleeing a war leaves people with few options for leading a life.

The story of the garbage collector gives an avenue into the state of dysfunction in his society, from the double standard in sexual expectations to a glimpse into a traditional household. And finally, In Naked don’t Fear the Water, the story of Aikins following his translator Omar on his journey to Europe, as Aikins himself notices, there is a disconnect in his Aikin’s expectation of what Omar should react to being given his fully paid opportunity to going to Europe and from what Omar actually reacts like. As Jessica Goaddeua puts it, “Omar is not a stock character — the revolutionary hero calculated to rally Western sympathy,” what Aikins expected Omar to be, “but his friend, sad and homesick.”

One of the most cited concerns when refugees were allowed into Western countries was national security. There was uncertainty in the background of these refugees and whether or not they would bring violence and radical ideologies with them. Even if we chalk up allowing war criminals from the wars the refugees were fleeing into the country to administrative ignorance — and the lack of their ability to do procure intelligence about foreign wars to accurately vet the people they were letting in — why was nothing done afterwards when the country had evidence of someone’s war crimes? I wonder if it is a threat to National security to have a war criminal walk freely on your soil — I cannot imagine it not being so — what if they continue to cause (as the cases cited in the reveal podcast show) in the host country. Another question that I am asking — which may be our of sheer ignorance — is why the war criminals don’t face deportation or expulsion from the country altogether? Will that also require prosecution first? Are there laws against letting war criminals in if that is known at the time of their admission into the host country’s borders?

And even if not before, why don’t host countries care to identify and prosecute war criminals not just with the motivation of punishing them for egregious actions — but for the sake of them not perpetrating them in whatever form against the refugee community now in the country. Why are Western host countries that champion human rights so apathetic to war criminals? Something else emphasized so rightfully in the commons post is this: “Is it more important to prosecute Putin for aggression in Ukraine? Certainly, but at the cost of consecrating the idea that there is one justice for the West and there is another justice for enemies of the West?” The self-proclaimed vanguards of human rights commit them under that banner but when an enemy they paint as an encroacher of human rights they now demand a different  reaction. “International justice kicks in against enemies and outcasts,” says Reed Broody. Paraphrasing Phillipe Sands said on the podcast, if western powers are to create a tribunal that can prosecute the crime of aggression what if this tribunal is then used to prosecute them? Can they claim immunity? And if not, will they ever agree to its creation? If a truly effective universal system is to be set up it requires the cooperation of western powers but with powers slipping from their fingers on an international level by the creation of such a tribunal — it is unlikely they will agree. So we’re stuck in this cycle where hypocrisy fuels selective justice.

Final project idea: Impunity for Russia’s war crimes in Syria caused a repeat in Ukraine.

I aim to analyze Russia’s involvement in Syria and its invasion of Ukraine. I want to draw parallels (and point out differences) between the weapons, the method of warfare, the objective of warfare of Russia in Syria and Ukraine. The goal is to show how the world’s legal or other inaction on Russia’s worst crimes allows it to commit them all over again (because repetition is if not prevented, certainly hindered by punishment). I want to include withness accounts of war crimes, open source intelligence reports of Russia’s war crimes, published stories, and perhaps if I can find sources who are currently preparing the legal case for Russia’s war crimes in Syria and Ukraine to interview.

There are many well-known Russias practices like bombing critical infrastructure in key cities to force people to flee or shelling entire towns until they are razed to the ground that Russia performed in Syria and then did again in Ukraine. What was done in Aleppo was done again in Mariupol. The lack of a way to hold Russia accountable for its war crimes in Syria caused them again in Ukraine. The world had more than half a decade to develop or seriously consider building international machinery for accountability for the worst of crimes that can possibly be committed but they didn’t (for reasons I may explore in my piece). I want to go into the details of what was done in Syria, and then exactly how it was repeated in Ukraine, and if I can find evidence for it what could’ve been done in Syria to prevent the repeat in Ukraine — it is perhaps true that Russia would’ve invaded Ukraine despite being punished for Syria because the objectives of the two wars do, at face value, appear different. Syria was done for retaining its only way to have an influence in the Middle East and Ukraine was to assimilate territory Russia believed to be its own. Determining the extent to which each of Russia’s most well documented war crimes in Syria could’ve been prevented in Ukraine had they been punished by the international community in concrete ways (which I also hope to enumerate) is essentially what the core of my piece will be. The parallels in the war crimes themselves will be the context.

My source list at the moment is: Tobias Schneider, Lubna Alkanawati, Mouaz Moustafa, Fred Kaplan, and Syrian and Ukrainian refugees I can meet in Berlin. (And more contacts Professor Amos gave me in our meeting today that I didn’t have the time to type up).

I think it’s interesting how open source intelligence allows for reporting crimes that can not be reached by journalist, reporters, or most people other than those directly affected. Of course, open source reporting needs verification and that teams are dedicated to corroborating footage to document war crimes to fight disinformation or propaganda campaigns (which mainstream journalism from either side is used to disseminate).

Perhaps open source data, if taken at face value, could be the best bet to access objective facts about the war. Some things I thought were cool was using facial recognition to identify military personnel, enabling citizen reports through government apps, and corroborating data procured through uploads by satellite footage. It is amazing how data and narratives from both sides of the war can be used to construct a fuller picture — which mainstream journalism perhaps forms just a part of. It is amazing to me how much can be understood from the data, entire buildings reconstructed, timeline of army advances revealed, people in command identified, the use of chemical weapons and based on impact photos whether they were dropped from the air or the ground revealed. Open source intelligence just widens our scope of knowledge by an exponential amount, casting this wide data net and then sifting through it to create a story. The common narrative I found in the readings was that of justice — that open source intelligence allows us to document attack on hospitals, use of chemical weapons, and other war crimes perpetrated by either part in the conflict.

There is a sense in which the agents in the Al Jazeera documentary were looking for very specific things in the data set, it is a directed search. It is interesting, then, to me that open source intelligence is often directed by the intent of documenting crimes so that they may one day be presented in court and justice will be administered to those who suffered so incredibly. Generally, we document for historical reasons — and until the Nuremberg trials we didn’t think prosecution for crimes on an international level was feasible. Information is hard to have concentrated ownership of in today’s world — which is a blessing — but to think that power isn’t concentrated would be astray. With the current international order it appears we require the cooperation of the perpetrators (or their allies) to prosecute them in any meaningful way — this leaves us at a standstill. It is difficult to say, when, or if the global powers will be brought to justice. I’m not hinting that open source intelligence should not document the war and war crimes, I think they should — but perhaps not just with the focus of creating a case. Perhaps if we used this treasure trove of data in other ways, I wonder what we would unearth.

After over a year of repeated requests from Kyiv for the American MGM-140 ATACMS, U.S. President Joe Biden has finally agreed to send these long-range missiles to help Ukraine with its counter-offensive.

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 27 — U.S. President Joe Biden told the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Washington will soon provide Kyiv with a small number of Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to help its counter-offensive against Russian forces in Russian-occupied Ukraine, according to an NBC news report which cited three U.S. officials and a congressional official. The White House, Pentagon, and Zelenskyy have not publicly announced or confirmed the move.

Biden’s decision comes after over a year of Kyiv’s pleas with the Biden administration for long-range missiles to help its counter-offensive. ATACMS are long-range ballistic missiles with a range of up to 300km (as per the website of Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of ATACMS) which will allow Ukraine to fire far beyond the front lines into command headquarters, weapons repositories, air bases, and supply networks like the railway in occupied territory.

“Ukraine is running out [of long range missiles] because it used up a sizable number in the summer,” says Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of the Economist, “it probably has long-range firing capabilities for another 6 months at best.” Ukraine’s already small arsenal of long-range missiles consisting mainly of the British Storm Shadow and French SCALP cruise missiles has depleted after use in the counter-offensive this Summer making America’s supply of MGM-140 ATACMS critical to Ukraine’s long-range striking ability. “Ukraine will need long-range missiles especially in the winter,” according to Joshi, “When Russia is likely to move its facilities farther behind the front lines since ground fighting becomes more difficult due to inclement weather.”

ATACMS are also different from the Storm Shadow and SCALP long-range missiles given to Ukraine by Britain and France respectively. Storm Shadow and SCALP are cruise missiles powered by a jet engine with a flat low flight trajectory. ATACMS, however, are ballistic missiles which have a projectile trajectory and are much faster in hitting their target which will allow the Ukrainian military to strike moving and time-sensitive targets.

“What’s neat about the ATACMS is that they can have warheads of different types,” says Joshi, “and the cluster warhead can do a lot of damage.” The cluster warhead ATACMS explode in the air over a target releasing submunitions that detonate over a large area surrounding the target, as opposed to the unitary warhead which is filled with a single explosive. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. will be giving Ukraine cluster warhead ATACMS. “Cluster Munitions are especially bad because undetonated submunition in an area persists after the attack, often later killing civilians that walk through it,” says Princeton History Professor Yana Prymachenko. Many human rights groups have also voiced their concerns about the U.S. supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions even outside of the most recent cluster warhead ATACMS.

Even though the White House announced a new $325 million military aid package for Kyiv on Thursday when Zelenskiy visited Washington for talks with Biden, the announcement did not include and wasn’t succeeded by a statement on the supply of ATACMS. For over a year now, Washington has been hesitant on providing Ukraine with ATACMS for “three main reasons” according to Joshi.

The first is the risk of escalation and potential for Ukraine to attack Russian territory as opposed to just Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova said, “if Washington decides to supply longer-range missiles to Kyiv, then it will be crossing a red line, and will become a direct party to the conflict,” in a briefing earlier this month reported by Reuters. The stakes of the escalation are immense considering that both Russia and the U.S. are nuclear powers. The second, is that America’s own stockpile of long-range missiles is limited and supplying ATACMS to Ukraine may undercut America’s military readiness.

The third, and “very important” reason for the delay in the provision of ATACMS to Ukraine according to Joshi is that currently most military aid to Ukraine is funded through presidential drawdown authority which is capped. “Even with the increase [in Presidential drawdown authority] to $11 billion by Congress in Fiscal Year 2022, the authority is limited and Biden probably considers it fit to fund more critical military aid like air defense, artillery, and ammunition which is of much greater priority than long-range missiles,” says Joshi. This opinion was echoed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who urged allies to send artillery ammunition and air defense systems which are Ukraine’s most urgent needs after a meeting with the Ukraine Contact Group this month.

Joshi says that ATACMS are “just another long-range missile to add on to Ukraine’s inventory” and “will not affect the course of the war by much” especially if only a small number of ATACMS are provided but artillery and ammunition are critical to Ukrainian defense. According to Joshi, the future of American funding for Ukraine looking grim. “At the moment the vast majority of democrats and Republicans support military aid for Ukraine, but aid to Ukraine is becoming a partisan issue with Republican voters increasingly questioning support,” Joshi says. “So considering the political climate in the U.S.,” Joshi adds, “prioritizing long-range missiles may not be a strategic move.”

“If Halabi is the highest-ranking Syrian war criminal who can be arrested, it is only because the greater monsters are protected.” Ben Taub’s piece on the Halabi brings to attention the ways — and the extent to which — war criminals are protected, and in a way how impunity and protection enables them in committing horrific crimes. The higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more you have to offer any side that dominates the war in any given moment, if you are willing to sacrifice loyalty. Ben Taub’s latest piece along side the Halabi piece gives a close up of is the role of individual people in the war — whether the role is as the perpetrator of some of the horrors of the war or as the documenter of the crimes with the hope that someday the perpetrator may be brought to justice. The Halabi piece especially is almost fictitious, almost. It has all the featured of a Netflix thriller, a war criminal, chased by CIJA, but elusive to their grasp because of a wide, corrupt or incompetent, network of institutions and authority figures offering him shelter. The end? The bad guy gets away — but this of course wasn’t on accident, just the way a director engineers the plot, Halabi’s story was engineered to end this way by his protectors.

The reading on the Beekeeper brings forth the stories of a different set of individuals in the war — the powerless. Most civilians are powerless in a war, and women and children are perhaps the most vulnerable but the way ISIS exploited the vulnerability of Yazidi women in Sinjar is just unfathomably inhumane. The stories from the Beekeeper show the many levels at which the women were tortured, the first was the individual sexual violation they experienced, the second was the risk they put the women’s children in (like making bombs and connecting wires which if done wrong would most certainly result in the child’s death) to force compliance from the women, the third was forced cultural cleansing and starting a new family with another man. And the escape from this tortured life was not any less perillious. Diving deeper into stories of escape, Patrick Kingsley’s piece sheds light on the plight of refugees on their treacherous journey to the West. Death is perhaps the most known outcome of the journey to news readers in the West, but Kingsley closely follows the journey in its many stages, revealing the challenge of a journey which someone who could hop on a flight to Europe couldn’t fathom being so difficult.

“America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.”

The message that comes from Azmat Khan’s articles on American airstrikes in the Middle East is a very clear one: civilians aren’t compromised in air-warfare by bombs that miss their targets, they are compromised by the personnel, the institution, deploying them. And, as inevitable as collateral damage is in warfare, to characterize the civilian lives lost in air warfare waged by America in the Middle East as “collateral damage” would be amiss. It is blatant institutional apathy that caused civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria. As Azat Khan notes, “What I saw after studying them [the pentagon records] was not a series of tragic errors but a pattern of impunity: of a failure to detect civilians, to investigate on the ground, to identify causes and lessons learned, to discipline anyone or find wrongdoing that would prevent these recurring problems from happening again.”

The air campaign was launched with the promise that it would “allow the military to kill the right people” and minimize harm “to the wrong ones.” When this promise is construed in the greater context of what inspired the air campaign – the unpopularity of the “forever wars” in the American public due to the loss of American service members – an unsettling message is conveyed. The replacement of American lives from the equation of loss by “an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers” prompted such a different attitude to lives involved in the war. When 6,000 American lives were lost an effort was made to minimize the harm to lives, but when the lives of Syrian and Iraqi civilians were lost in the air campaign launched as an alternative to sending troops no effort was made to mitigate that loss. In practice, the promise of the campaign was saving American lives, not innocent lives, because as Azmat Khan says, “while many [civilian deaths] might have been averted through additional precautions — widening the surveillance camera’s field of view or deploying additional drones — the phenomenon continued unabated, amid the intense pace of battle and a shortage of surveillance aircraft.”

In the The Other Afghan Women, Anand Gopal brings to attention a story from a different kind of American warfare: Intervention turned occupation. In the story of Shakira’s life in Afghanistan, she went from considering the Americans (before their arrival in Afghanistan) the liberators, a view the Americans held of themselves, to viewing them as supporters of the terrorist “Dado” after interacting with them. This shift in perspective of American intervention evident in Shakira’s account of events was applicable outside of her own experience, and was a result of America’s ignorance of the local dynamics. As Gopal summarizes: “the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other.” Conversely, she also went from despising the Taliban when they banned the production of opium in her village to having hope on their side of the fight, perhaps because in the countryside their fight against the injustice done by the foreigners took the only form of fighting accessible to them – joining the Taliban. On the other hand, the story of Taban Ibraz in the kitchen sisters – a journalist dressed in modern attire working in Kabul on the day the Taliban took control of it, had a very different reaction. To her the Taliban taking control didn’t just mean she had to quit her job, but also forgo her freedom. Something I find Gopal emphasizing really well in his piece is the distinction between lives in the countryside from those lived in the cities during American occupation, and after American exit. Because when I read coverage of the war, the general narrative shifted from relative political stability and liberation of women during the occupation to violent chaos and oppression of women after the exit – which while true of the cities, eclipsed an entirely different side of the lived experience of the war by people like Shakira in the countryside.

“But we’ve been at war for eight years already.”

An important message that is conveyed by this comment in Lindsey Hilsum’s letters is that the Russia-Ukraine war didn’t start with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it resurfaced in public media then. The Russia-Ukraine war has been ongoing since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. I guess this was a detail that surprised me more than it should’ve because every war is preceded by history, tension, and preparation (which sometimes hides in plain sight). As Alan Little says in his BBC article “The evidence has been building for years.” The alleged murder of exiled Russians, the invasion of Eastern Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. He then creatively reveals his version of how Putin thinks about Ukraine, how Putin was mistaken in his estimates (causing the invasion to prolong from days, as Putin was expecting, to over a year now) by drawing an analogy between the relations of Russia and Ukraine to those of Serbia and Bosnia in 1994. Little’s article gives a concrete example of how sometimes history repeats a showing of the same play on the stage of the world, just starring different actors this time around. How little we learn every time, how predictably we act every time, but this isn’t a zero-sum game. There is a net effect of increasing harm that comes from the technological progress we make in defense. Before we stood at the brink of World Wars, now we stand at the brink of Human Extinction.

In her letters Hilsum talks about the destruction of Mariupol and the war crimes in Bucha. She was able to talk to many people fleeing Mariupol while she was in Zaporizhzhia, how desperate they were to talk about their stories of escape and to narrate their suffering to another human. A mother with her daughter who was so needlessly shot by the same Ukrainian soldiers that then tried to help her get medical attention for her wound. But I suspect that there was suffering in Bucha and Mariupol which Hilsum doesn’t have much testimony of in her letters, not for lack of trying, but perhaps because this kind of suffering had the opposite effect on people – it silences them. As Professor Amos reports, the crime of rape is perhaps the most difficult to prosecute because people hide their stories out of shame. It is a unique suffering in that in addition to the trauma of deeply physical and personal violation, it can be a shameful one even in today’s society.

As Hilsum reports in her letters most people fleeing were women and children while “most [men] would rather stay and fight (from what I can tell).” And men from all walks and stages of life appeared to be just as willing. Someone as amateur as Slawa, Lyndsey’s local producer from a previous visit to Ukraine was on the frontlines, and on the other hand (from the diaries of Yevgenia Belorusets featured in This American Life) someone as old as the 66 year old veteran Yevgenia encounters (who was in that moment taking care of his ailing wife) was willing to relive the horrors of fighting on the frontlines. I think seeing how the war changes people’s priorities in a way that is so drastic, poses them with hard choices, and leaves them with difficult losses through the human stories in This American Life was eye opening to the realities of war. When war is punctuated and remembered by the big defeats and conquers, it is easy to forget there are days in-between where dogs are walked, jokes are cracked, drinks are had, all experiences of the everyday felt now with a melancholy and grief left in the wake of the big days.