New Lines Magazine

01/13/2025

A one-minute video, filmed the day after the city of Aleppo fell to opposition forces and just days before the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, captured the attention of the Alawite community across its geographic and virtual presence in late December. The footage shows the shrine of al-Khasibi, the founder of the Alawite sect, burning in Aleppo. Armed individuals speaking the Uzbek language are visible in the video, allegedly linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that toppled Assad on Dec. 8.

The Military Operations Directorate in Syria stated that the incident occurred before HTS had fully taken control of Aleppo. It further suggested that the timing of the video’s circulation was deliberate, aiming to stoke sectarian strife. Iranian factions and remnants of the former regime were implied to be behind this provocation.

The video gained widespread attention a day after Iran’s foreign minister ominously declared that Syria’s current rulers should brace for future surprises. This statement shifted suspicion toward Tehran, which stood accused of agitating the Alawite community. Although Iran has largely receded from the Syrian landscape following Assad’s fall, its influence — and that of its proxies — remains present, which suggests that this provocation may be part of broader regional maneuvers.

For more, please go to our link in bio.
✍️Kamal Shahin
📷Fighters affiliated with Syria’s new administration stand guard in Latakia on Dec. 26, 2024. (Aaref Watad/AFP via Getty Images)

01/09/2025

“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,”

—

When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.

They ended up using an agency run by a welfare worker named .

—

Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.

’s past and present system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s.

Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.

Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry.

✍️ Alessia Cerantola
📷 Leslie Knott

01/09/2025

n the fateful summer of 2020, when the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and police violence against Black bodies dominated headlines in the United States, the word — almost singularly associated in the American imagination with a rigid hierarchical social system in — was reintroduced into the contemporary American discourse about race.

This was the summer Isabel Wilkerson published her bestselling book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” In it, Wilkerson argues that American racism is merely the expression of a caste system such as the one that operates in India — based on both descent and occupation, in which Brahmins, traditionally the priestly or intelligentsia caste, are at the top and Shudras, traditionally the manual laboring caste, are at the bottom.

Three years later, Ava DuVernay released the independent film “Origin,” a dramatized retelling of Wilkerson’s book. The film narrates the story of Wilkerson herself, who must contend with both the personal tragedy of her husband’s death and the national tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s murder.

Both of these rhetorical strategies are effective for making a searing argument about the systemic nature of racism in America, but both should also leave us wondering about the existence of more complex Dalit subjectivities, histories, lifeworlds and politics in India.

✍️Laura Brueck
📷A still from the short film “Geeli Pucchi,” starring actors Aditi Rao Hydari (left) and Konkana Sen Sharma. (Netflix)

01/07/2025

On Dec. 8, President-elect Donald said in an NBC interview that he plans to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol on his first day in office. What shape that pardon takes — whether Trump issues a full pardon or a limited one, or simply commutes some of the defendants’ sentences — is uncertain, but experts on extremism fear that the move may legitimize political violence.

Jan. 6 defendants face a variety of charges as the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeks to hold participants in that day’s events accountable. All face some form of trespassing or disorderly conduct charges, totaling at least 1,583 charges filed for crimes related to according to the DOJ’s most recent report today. An estimated 608 defendants have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement agents, and 174 have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.

In total, 221 individuals proceeded to trial and were found guilty in U.S. District Court for crimes related to Jan. 6.

Katherine Keneally, Director of Threat Analysis and Prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told New Lines that a pardon for Jan. 6 defendants would legitimize the crimes committed that day and the conspiratorial beliefs around election denial that inspired the storming of the Capitol. “It will essentially send the message that what they did was OK, while validating the conspiracy theories that have spread or that led people to get involved that day,” Keneally said.

To read more, please to our link in bio.

✍️Alec D’Angelo
📷 Photos courtesy of Ford Fischer / News2Share

01/03/2025

In 2023, when Diljit became the first — and — artist to perform at Coachella Festival, he turned up on stage in a traditional Punjabi outfit of “kurta and chadra,” with a turban. He paired this with a black Carhatt WIP vest, retro monochrome Air Jordans and a pair of neon yellow gloves — effortlessly fusing the traditional with streetwear. It created hysteria among Punjabis the world over, as well as Indians in general, who felt that they had arrived on a global stage as their most authentic selves. People lauded the ode to his Punjabi roots — all the more so when he announced “Punjabi aa gaye Coachella oye,” or “The Punjabis have arrived at Coachella.”

It also seemed fitting that he opened his performance with the 2020 song “G.O.A.T,” in which he flexes his popularity and achievements, from being the first Sardar (turban-wearing Sikh man) to make his mark in Bollywood to waving at crowds of excited girls from his car window and being the first Sikh celebrity to have a wax statue at Madame Tussauds. “You can search up the ‘Dosanjh’ name anywhere,” he says.

While that song entered global music charts in 2020, 2024 became Dosanjh’s banner year. He sold out arenas and stadiums all over the world, including BC Place in Vancouver and The O2 Arena in London, during his highly successful Dilluminati tour that ends on Dec. 29 in Guwahati. Tickets for his multicity tour in India sold out in 30 seconds.

While it was only in 2024 that became a household name in , throughout the course of two decades he has slowly and effectively changed the way people look at Sardars and present them in pop culture.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Surbhi Gupta .gu
📷Diljit Dosanjh performs at Coachella Festival in 2023. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

01/03/2025

In 2023, when Dosanjh became the first Punjabi — and Indian — artist to perform at Coachella Festival, he turned up on stage in a traditional outfit of “kurta and chadra,” with a turban. He paired this with a black Carhatt WIP vest, retro monochrome Air Jordans and a pair of neon yellow gloves — effortlessly fusing the traditional with streetwear. It created hysteria among Punjabis the world over, as well as Indians in general, who felt that they had arrived on a global stage as their most authentic selves. People lauded the ode to his Punjabi roots — all the more so when he announced “Punjabi aa gaye oye,” or “The Punjabis have arrived at Coachella.”

It also seemed fitting that he opened his performance with the 2020 song “G.O.A.T,” in which he flexes his popularity and achievements, from being the first Sardar (turban-wearing Sikh man) to make his mark in Bollywood to waving at crowds of excited girls from his car window and being the first Sikh celebrity to have a wax statue at Madame Tussauds. “You can search up the ‘Dosanjh’ name anywhere,” he says.

While that song entered global music charts in 2020, 2024 became Dosanjh’s banner year. He sold out arenas and stadiums all over the world, including BC Place in Vancouver and The O2 Arena in London, during his highly successful Dilluminati tour that ends on Dec. 29 in Guwahati. Tickets for his multicity tour in India sold out in 30 seconds.

While it was only in 2024 that Dosanjh became a household name in , throughout the course of two decades he has slowly and effectively changed the way people look at Sardars and present them in South Asian pop culture.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Surbhi Gupta .gu
📷Diljit Dosanjh performs at Coachella Festival in 2023. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

12/28/2024

“Adventure tourism is nothing new. Wild walks and wandering the globe have been with us for all time and in all parts of the world. Pilgrims have traveled to places of rapture since significant sites took on their special meaning. This is the universal and ancient historical legacy that drew me to walk the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in September 2024.

I could have taken a different pilgrimage route — perhaps as a secular pilgrim on the picturesque, 630-mile South West Coast Path, the longest marked trail in the United Kingdom. Here, the cathedral is nature, the history is one of smugglers and shipwrecks, and the exaltation is in the breathtaking beauty of seaside villages, jutting Jurassic cliffs and secluded beaches. Or I could have journeyed to one of the other important religious destinations — Rome via the Francigena, or Jerusalem, a holy city to three of the world’s great monotheistic religions.

But it was the Camino that set my mind on fire and the matter of relics that gripped my imagination and nagged at me during the COVID-19 pandemic, when New Zealand’s borders were shut to international flights from March 2020 to August 2021. By the time Kiwis were finally free to move and tickets vaguely affordable, I felt like a shaken bottle of sparkling wine ready to pop its cork. I had ruminated on all aspects of pilgrimage and was about to explode with curiosity and the need to escape.”

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Joanne Drayton
📷Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines

12/26/2024

“I’m sure, at some point, they’ll come for the cultural heritage. They’ve learned how to hide things, and this time they won’t make the same mistakes. It’s terrifying. They’ve got a twisted kind of intelligence, and they know exactly how to destroy it all.”

—

The morning light pours into the small room in the northern California home, illuminating a stack of videotapes and music cassettes on an Afghan carpet. Each tape has been meticulously labeled with green stickers marking the date and name of the singer, in both and English. Posters of singers crowd the walls, a reminder of a time when Afghan fashion and culture were at the forefront of the country’s artistic identity.

In the wake of ’s recent political shifts, one man’s mission to preserve the country’s cultural heritage has taken on a new urgency. Omid J., an Afghan-American vinyl, TV and radio collector, has spent years gathering and sharing the sounds, memories and visuals that have defined his homeland — treasures now at risk of being destroyed forever.

Growing up as the first generation of his family to be born outside of Afghanistan, Omid J. absorbed the poetry and music of Afghan radio. It was more than just entertainment; it was something he held onto, a cultural thread that bound him to his roots. He developed a passion for the legendary singer and songwriter from the 1970s, Zahir, revered as Afghanistan’s Elvis Presley, and loved watching old music videos where people stood and lip-synched awkwardly. “It was so cool and different from MTV, but because it was ours, it was something special,” he says.

In a world where memories can fade and where history is often erased by the forces that seek to control it, Omid J. reminds us that preserving stories — whether through songs, films or simple moments captured on a cassette — can be an act of resistance, one that ensures the survival of a culture and the voices of those who came before.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️@‌taimz_ayazi
📷A compilation of Afghan music cassettes. (Courtesy of Omid J.)

12/25/2024

“It was 3 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 5, a normal day for our neighborhood, but tinged with anticipation after events in , which opposition fighters had rapidly and unexpectedly seized a few days earlier. Everyone was at work, trying to convince themselves that things were normal and that the military conflict was far away.

Then news spread via official state TV that the city of had fallen. Hama is about 30 miles away from Homs, where I serve as pastor of the Fathers Monastery Church in Bustan al-Diwan. There was panic in the hearts of the people of Homs, and rational thinking had no place. Everyone tried to pack a bag or two, bitterly abandoning what they had tried to rebuild after returning from their first forced exile at the beginning of the revolution in 2011, when old Homs was under siege.

The monastery of the Jesuit Fathers in Homs has a special character and history. It was the shelter of dozens of and , with whom Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who dedicated his life to coexistence, shared an epic of steadfastness before he was martyred in 2014 at the hands of a gunman, having lived through the turmoil of his beloved city. There, he gave and continues to provide a testimony of what it means to be a Christian for the sake of others. On the day of his death, he was temporarily buried in the monastery yard. Still, it was a prophetic sign of what he wished for the future of Syria: a rooted and courageous presence that realizes that there is no freedom without sacrifice.

Back in Homs, most people were uncertain: Is it a departure without return? Is it our destiny to live one displacement after another in our home country? All I could do then was to go out into the street and say loud and clear: The monastery door will never be closed. We’re staying, it’s going to be all right.”

For more, please go to the link in bio.

✍️Tony Homsy
📷Father Tony Homsy with his congregation in Homs. (Courtesy of Tony Homsy)

12/20/2024

In the summer of 2018, the musician Hozan Cane traveled from her home in Germany to Edirne, a city in northwestern Turkey, to sing for a pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party election campaign. She said she was singing traditional songs in her usual stage costume: a vibrant and flowing dress adorned with intricate patterns and shimmering sequins. As the event wrapped up, around 50 supporters boarded a bus to head to their next campaign location. Kurdish songs filled the bus and voices rose in unison before the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and the music died.

Headlights flooded the bus through its windows as soldiers stormed aboard, their boots thudding on the steps. They scanned each face, eyes sharp, and combing through the passenger they repeatedly shouted, “Hozan!”

Hozan was arrested and taken to a remote military post, where she was held in a wooden shack. A thick file was placed in front of her and she was told that if she signed the documents, she could leave immediately. “I knew it was a threat,” Hozan says, adding that she feared she could be falsely implicated in numerous crimes. “I refused to sign anything in the end.”

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️ Rabia Gursoy
📷 Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for

12/20/2024

In the summer of 2018, the musician Hozan Cane traveled from her home in to Edirne, a city in northwestern Turkey, to sing for a pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party election campaign. She said she was singing traditional songs in her usual stage costume: a vibrant and flowing dress adorned with intricate patterns and shimmering sequins. As the event wrapped up, around 50 supporters boarded a bus to head to their next campaign location. Kurdish songs filled the bus and voices rose in unison before the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and the music died.

Headlights flooded the bus through its windows as soldiers stormed aboard, their boots thudding on the steps. They scanned each face, eyes sharp, and combing through the passenger they repeatedly shouted, “Hozan!”

Hozan was arrested and taken to a remote military post, where she was held in a wooden shack. A thick file was placed in front of her and she was told that if she signed the documents, she could leave immediately. “I knew it was a threat,” Hozan says, adding that she feared she could be falsely implicated in numerous crimes. “I refused to sign anything in the end.”

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️ Rabia Gursoy
📷 Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for

12/18/2024

On the morning of Dec. 4, a young man lurked in the streets of midtown Manhattan, creeping up behind Brian Thompson and gunning him down outside his hotel. The brazen attack first generated shock, but within hours, the rawness of shock turned into a kind of glee on social media, accompanied by jokes and potential justifications for what one criminologist called a “symbolic takedown.” The killing represented not so much a personal grudge against a single individual or the company he led but a strike against America’s widely loathed private health system.

Graffiti honoring appeared from the streets of Seattle to the University of Turin in Italy. Suddenly, murder ballads became a tool to understand or even join the general lionization of the suspected killer. Americans have always supported murder, we learned, as evidenced by songs as different as “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks), “Hey Joe” (made famous by Jimi Hendrix) and “Pretty Boy Floyd” by Woody Guthrie. Whereas “Goodbye Earl” is about a woman murdering an abusive partner, “Hey Joe” describes a man’s murder of his unfaithful spouse and “Pretty Boy Floyd” tells the story of a folk hero robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Moral differences aside, these tropes blend into a common matrix of murder.

Some have even drawn parallels to other periods of conflict in postwar history.

For more, please go gto our link in bio.

✍️Alexander Reid Ross
📷Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, after an extradition hearing. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images) Additional images sourced from social media.

12/18/2024

Unlike , where members of the media and families of prisoners swarmed through the prison gates in large numbers, access to this prison was heavily restricted. The first time I went to the Branch, armed guards demanded a press permit issued by authorities. When I returned two days later with my paperwork, they expressed a reluctance to let me in, but after a few minutes of waiting and insistence, they agreed to show me around.

Yasser, a member of , and another rebel accompanied me to the prison building. I asked them if conditions in this prison were similar to those in Sednaya. “They’re worse,” they replied, barely glancing back at me.

Yasser, who used to be a business administration student before the Syrian revolution began in 2011, told me that back in 2012, he himself was a prisoner at the Palestine Branch. Pulling wide the side of his mouth with his index finger, he pointed out missing molars. “They broke my teeth — three on the right, one on the left, and one on the top, five in total,” he said. “They wanted us to admit that we were terrorists. Everyone from the Free Syrian Army had to admit to being terrorists.”

✍️Anagha Nair
📷Anagha Nair

12/16/2024

Alleged classified documents belonging to Bashar al-Assad’s regime and uncovered after its fall offer a glimpse into a covert “mechanism” managed by Russia to limit Israeli military intervention in . At issue was ’s increased reliance on and its proxies, such as Hezbollah, to maintain his hold on power after a decade of crippling civil war.

The newly surfaced papers, marked “top secret and urgent,” reveal a mixture of threats and after-action memos detailing what had just destroyed in 2023 and why. They offer the first real glimpse of what had long been suspected but never proven: that Israel, content to leave a weakened Assad in place and allow the Syrian Arab Army to meet its security “needs,” was dead set against the flow of Iranian weapons and the strengthening of militants loyal to Tehran in Syria, especially in the Heights.

An Israeli operative code-named “Mousa” (Moses in English) directly messaged former Syrian Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Ali Mahmoud Abbas, the documents show. , who had served as the defense minister from April 28, 2022, then forwarded the communiques on to Ali Mamlouk, Assad’s notorious intelligence chief.

The series of documents examined by based on screenshots circulating on social media, is dated from May to July 2023 — just a few months prior to Hamas’ atrocities against civilians in Israel on Oct. 7, followed by Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Oct. 8.

While we have not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents, several factors lead us to believe they are genuine.

For more, please visit our link in bio.

✍️Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss

📷 [sourced from screenshots circulating social media]

12/15/2024

“When I visited, Tokludede was in the process of being scraped away, its wooden buildings demolished and its gardens erased, with new homes replacing them, along with a large hotel. These “urban renewal” projects were happening all over .

Usually justified on the grounds of earthquake preparedness, their animating principle was more often the profit margin of the stakeholders involved in them.

Over the course of several years, I visited and witnessed its transformation from a historic neighborhood with a deep-rooted social and urban fabric into an ersatz version of itself, with its original community scattered to the winds. The story of its transformation is that of the erosion of traditional community bonds occurring across Turkey as a byproduct of the nation’s embrace of a relentless neoliberal development model. A national program of urban transformation has served the ruling government’s aims of generating economic growth, but has come at the cost of both the character and amenity of historic neighborhoods, as well as social cohesion.

Residents of Tokludede were enticed or coerced into leaving, their homes taken from them in exchange for a sum far below market value. Often, they were shepherded into tower blocks on the fringes of the city, supposedly more valuable than their old homes, and burdened with hefty loans. Tokludede’s historical connections made it desirable real estate and were almost certainly among the reasons why it was targeted for urban renewal. Even before the neighborhood had emptied out, the municipality started digging up roads and cutting off water, electricity, streetlights and finally sewage, until the place was all but dead and only the desperate or uniquely obstinate remained.”

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Alexander Christie-Miller
📷Across Turkey’s historic neighborhoods, like Fatih, seen here, redevelopment is changing the social fabric. (Diego Cupolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

12/14/2024

Weekend long read:

“Hybrid warfare” brings trash, violence and death to a fragile ecosystem.

12/13/2024

At al-Mujtahid Hospital in , families are desperately searching for their missing loved ones, confronting the atrocities committed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Just moments inside the complex in the capital are enough to reveal that what awaits them will leave an indelible mark.

Since the fall of the regime on Dec. 8, hundreds of Syrian corpses have been transported from the jails recently liberated to hospitals in the Syrian capital.
Al-Mujtahid Hospital is just one of the many health facilities in Damascus that collect the remains of thousands of detainees from Syrian prisons. In northern Damascus, Hastara Hospital is overwhelmed with them.

“We received 35 bodies today because they didn’t have refrigerators to store them there,” explains al-Kassem.

With his team, al-Kassem collects DNA samples, takes dental impressions, lists tattoos and looks for any unusual marks that could help identify the victims.

Families often search for relatives who disappeared at the start of the civil war in Syria. Most of the disappearances date back to 2012, when the regime went on a killing spree to silence opposition voices.

“The problem is that those who entered the jails more than 10 years ago have changed a lot over time. Families struggle to recognize them,” he says. “We ask families for old photos where their loved ones are smiling because, as a body rots, the face starts to smile.”

✍️Aubin Eymard and Cian Ward
📷Photos by Cian Ward