New Lines Magazine

New Lines Magazine New Lines Magazine – a local magazine for the world. Essays run daily online and quarterly in print.

President Donald returned to power vowing to refocus the energy and resources of the American government on issues at ...
02/20/2025

President Donald returned to power vowing to refocus the energy and resources of the American government on issues at home while abandoning global crusades over human rights. Yet in its first weeks in office, the administration has made targeting South Africa over alleged crimes against its white minority a surprising focus of its foreign policy. This campaign has included suspending foreign aid to the country, public denunciations by top U.S. diplomats and even an order that white Afrikaners be allowed into the U.S. as refugees — a departure from Trump’s otherwise closed-door policy on immigration and asylum.

It is impossible to understand the administration’s approach to South Africa without recognizing the place the country holds in the demonology of the global right wing. Also key is the relationship between the Republican Party and Silicon Valley stalwarts like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks — all of whom trace their origins to the country.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Joseph Dana
📷Elon Musk arrives for Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/Pool/Getty Images)

Facing the ferry station house of Island one sunny day, Augustus Sherman planted his clunky black-box on a tripod to...
02/18/2025

Facing the ferry station house of Island one sunny day, Augustus Sherman planted his clunky black-box on a tripod to take the portraits of a group of immigrants. The skies were clear, and the open space on the island, far from ’s soaring towers, provided better lighting. Sherman, who worked more than one job on the island from 1892 to 1925, including clerk and secretary to the commissioner of immigration, was also assigned to photograph the would-be whose portraits displayed remarkable variations in faces, garments and poses.

Tense and restless, the often kept a straight face. Most of them sought prosperity, having escaped agricultural and economic crises in various parts of Europe. They now awaited the auspicious moment they might find solace. One of them, a dashing tanned man draped in a striated gown with an ornate deep collar and wearing a white turban, stood out among the sullen faces. He was smiling.

The “Algerian Man,” as Sherman dubbed him in his photograph, with no additional biographical details, held a cigarette in his right hand and grinned at the sunny skies. He stood at the threshold of the American Dream.

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✍️Youcef O. Bounab
📷Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

interviewed a survivor-turned-whistleblower from ’s armed forces who took part in clandestine training and survived an...
02/16/2025

interviewed a survivor-turned-whistleblower from ’s armed forces who took part in clandestine training and survived an al-Shabab attack that left over 100 government troops dead; the attack was then hidden from the public.

—

The sun was scorching in the capital of as cars lined the busy junction to pass through the security checkpoint. It was 12:30 p.m. and worshippers left the local mosque in droves following the midday prayer. I made my way down a road near the Sanca junction into a residential neighborhood, where Sharmarke Hersi was waiting.

I sat down next to him, and the traditional Somali custom of drinking tea followed.
After we became acquainted, he began sharing his experiences as a soldier, both in Somalia on the front line against al-Shabab and in , where he underwent a harrowing ordeal as part of a clandestine training program.

“It seemed like a good opportunity, where I could make enough money to support my family and also serve my nation at the same time,” he said. However, in the days and weeks that followed, Hersi would find out that nothing was as he expected when he signed up.

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✍️Mohamed Gabobe
📷Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

Khawar and Iqra, who had been engaged for four years, were expecting their call to drop at any moment. At exactly midnig...
02/15/2025

Khawar and Iqra, who had been engaged for four years, were expecting their call to drop at any moment. At exactly midnight, the line went silent. Phone networks, cable TV and Wi-Fi collapsed throughout Kashmir.

With unrest expected, Kashmir had been put under a lockdown which included a complete communication blackout in the valley.

Weeks passed, and the couple had no way of reaching out to each other. Khawar thought many times of sneaking out at night or early in the morning to see Iqra, but the volatile situation in his neighborhood, along with multiple army checkpoints throughout the city of Srinagar, deterred him. The two had no choice but to wonder how the other person was doing.

Their story is told in “Loal Kashmir,” a book released last month in India. “Loal” means love in Kashmiri, and filmmaker and writer Mehak Jamal has collected 16 true stories of love, longing and loss in the region.

Most of the stories in the book are from 2019, though, during the months-long communication shutdown that followed the revocation of Kashmir’s special status. They are significant because so little is known and has been written about the lives of ordinary people in Kashmir during that period.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Surbhi Gupta .gu
📷A couple sits inside Kashmir’s famous Mughal gardens in Srinagar. (Muzamil Mattoo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Many Israelis and Palestinians who yesterday strove — or at least hoped — for a more peaceful and just future now find t...
02/14/2025

Many Israelis and Palestinians who yesterday strove — or at least hoped — for a more peaceful and just future now find themselves living in the tomorrow of their worst fears. What is the present reality they failed to avoid? And can a new and better prospect ever emerge?

In the waning weeks of 2023, Israelis and Palestinians were grappling with events that were newly horrific in scale. At first, though, these events seemed to be occurring within a framework of actors and violence that was so familiar as to seem frozen. But even from early on in the Gaza war, it was clear that Israeli leaders were paving the way for new realities in the enclave. More than a year later, the qualitative shifts are beginning to spread to a regional level in ways that the Lebanese vaguely expected but the Syrians most definitely did not.

Cassandra-like warnings have been a staple of political writings on Israel and Palestine for half a century: A given policy or goal, it is argued, should be adopted to prevent a host of dark outcomes ranging from civil war to apartheid. Of course, the original Cassandra of Trojan War myth was not only given the gift of prophecy but also never believed. Today’s dark writings, however, are not prophecies for the future but descriptions of the current reality.

✍️Nathan Brown
📷The view from a heavily damaged building in northern Gaza on Feb. 5, 2025. (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

By ’s standards, the Bubenec district is relatively sleepy. On weekends, things perk up as tourists perambulate Stromov...
02/11/2025

By ’s standards, the Bubenec district is relatively sleepy. On weekends, things perk up as tourists perambulate Stromovka, the city’s largest park, and fans pile into the Letna Stadium to cheer on Sparta Prague, the Czech Republic’s most decorated soccer team. One event that enlivens the district each spring is Book World Prague, the country’s largest literary festival. Held annually at the capacious art nouveau Industrial Palace, the four-day event draws around 60,000 visitors, hosts 400 exhibitors and represents more than 30 countries. In recent years, one nation in particular has gained prominence.

“In the past, Taiwan was promoted more like a region than a country,” says Tomas Rizek, founder of Mi:Lu, a publisher of translated literature from Taiwan. “Now, our program has aroused great interest in books from and in Taiwan itself,” he says.

The change symbolizes warming ties between democratically governed and the Republic, with abandoning the pro-Beijing agenda of former President Milos Zeman, which was a rarity in the developed world. Today, under Zeman’s successor Petr Pavel, the Czechs have become Taiwan’s strongest European ally, even though they do not recognize the island as a sovereign nation.

Cultural exchanges have been one strand of Taipei’s bid to counter this and foster informal ties abroad, and literature has been an unlikely beneficiary.

For more, please go to the link in bio.

✍️James Baron
📷Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

By ’s standards, the Bubenec district is relatively sleepy. On weekends, things perk up as tourists perambulate Stromov...
02/11/2025

By ’s standards, the Bubenec district is relatively sleepy. On weekends, things perk up as tourists perambulate Stromovka, the city’s largest park, and fans pile into the Letna Stadium to cheer on Sparta Prague, the ’s most decorated soccer team. One event that enlivens the district each spring is Book World Prague, the country’s largest literary festival. Held annually at the capacious art nouveau Industrial Palace, the four-day event draws around 60,000 visitors, hosts 400 exhibitors and represents more than 30 countries. In recent years, one nation in particular has gained prominence.

“In the past, Taiwan was promoted more like a region than a country,” says Tomas Rizek, founder of Mi:Lu, a publisher of translated literature from Taiwan. “Now, our program has aroused great interest in books from Taiwan and in Taiwan itself,” he says.

The change symbolizes warming ties between democratically governed Taiwan and the Czech Republic, with Prague abandoning the pro-Beijing agenda of former President Milos Zeman, which was a rarity in the developed world. Today, under Zeman’s successor Petr Pavel, the Czechs have become Taiwan’s strongest European ally, even though they do not recognize the island as a sovereign nation.

Cultural exchanges have been one strand of Taipei’s bid to counter this and foster informal ties abroad, and literature has been an unlikely beneficiary.

For more, please go to the link in bio.

✍️James Baron
📷Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

It is perhaps a surprising fact that and did not cut ties after the former’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought Ay...
01/30/2025

It is perhaps a surprising fact that and did not cut ties after the former’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah to power. Records show that key actors in both countries felt that maintaining a secret relationship would be strategically beneficial. As a result, Iran and Israel continued to engage in trade worth millions of dollars per year after the fall of Iran’s monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, even as Tehran publicly denied Israel’s right to exist.

This shows that the Iranian regime, for all its public zealotry, is deeply pragmatic: The raison d’etre of the Islamic Republic of Iran, post-1979, is regime preservation. The country’s leaders will go to great lengths to ensure that this goal is met.

Israel and Iran, once friendly under the deposed shah, had a bitter fallout when Khomeini took over. The aging cleric referred to Israel as the “Little Satan,” second only to the U.S., which was the “Great Satan.” This makes their secret relationship even more interesting.

The truth is that any newly formed revolutionary government that is immediately thrown into a war will naturally need to compromise to survive — even one that prides itself on nonalignment. Covert cooperation with Israel was more attractive to the Iranian regime than allying with the U.S. or the Soviet Union.

For more, please visit our link in bio.

✍️ Rana Nejad
📷 An Iranian woman carries an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a rally in Tehran on Jan. 10, 2025. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Since the war in began in October 2023, potent images of Yemen’s Houthis firing rockets at Israel and targeting shippi...
01/28/2025

Since the war in began in October 2023, potent images of Yemen’s Houthis firing rockets at Israel and targeting shipping in the Gulf of Aden have catapulted the movement onto a new, global stage. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the eponymous group, has vowed to continue his attacks on ships heading toward despite the ceasefire that came into effect on Jan. 19.

His statement was a reminder that conflict in continues. Despite being overshadowed by ongoing conflicts in , , , and other regions, has been enduring one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in the world since 2014. It has resulted in the death, injury or severe starvation of hundreds of thousands of people over more than a decade, in addition to thousands of persons missing or unaccounted for.

The are at the heart of this war, having emerged from the northern mountains of Saada to dominate the country, with increasing support from Iran. Since their coup in 2014, which resulted in their capture of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, the Houthis have gained control over most of northern Yemen and more than 60% of Yemen’s population. They have maintained this power through a combination of military force and societal influence.

Since rising to prominence, the have fought not only against but also against neighboring Arabia and, more recently, Israel. Yet, despite their significant role in the conflict, the Houthis remain one of the most misunderstood groups in the world.

For more — please go to our link in bio:

✍️ Farea Al-Muslimi
📷 Supporters of Yemen’s Houthi movement raise weapons during a rally in Sanaa on Sept. 27, 2024. (Abdallah Adel/AFP via Getty Images)

As the solid white ice peaks of Passu glacier sprawl down the Karakoram mountains in northern , they resemble a row of ...
01/24/2025

As the solid white ice peaks of Passu glacier sprawl down the Karakoram mountains in northern , they resemble a row of emperor penguins braving the arctic winds. Wave-like blocks of ice encrusted with a black layer — likely collected from debris, avalanches and rockfalls over the centuries — leap down the mountainside.

The glacier’s melted ice water serves as a source of fresh water, irrigation and hydroelectric power for the mountain communities that live in Hunza Valley, located in the Gilgit-Baltistan region in northern Pakistan, which is part of the larger region that has been disputed between and for over seven decades.

Passu is one of over 7,200 glaciers that dot the region, which is spread across three mountain ranges — the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram and the Himalayas — making Pakistan home to the most glaciers in the world outside of the Arctic and Antarctic. Together, they form the “Third Pole.”

Meltwater from these glaciers across the Karakoram and Western Himalayas provides water to over 300 million people in the Indus River basin, which feeds the world’s largest system of irrigated agriculture, stretching across India and Pakistan. It also feeds rivers that account for about 75% of the stored water supply in Pakistan, a country with a population of over 200 million.

However, as temperatures rise due to climate change, these glaciers, including Passu, are melting rapidly.

Fifteen million people worldwide are at risk of glacial lake flooding according to a study published in Nature Communications, and 2 million of them are in Pakistan.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Aina J. Khan
📷Photos by Usman Zubair

The war in has forced a conversation about among American Christians.Christians make up 72% of the United States ele...
01/22/2025

The war in has forced a conversation about among American Christians.

Christians make up 72% of the United States electorate, and 56% of Americans who identify as Christian voted for Donald Trump in 2024, according to a report by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. Although this conservative segment initially signaled strong support for Israel’s war in Gaza, its thinking on the issue is becoming increasingly diverse. With the stratification of echo-chamber outlets and unfiltered, instantaneous news, multiple social, ethnic, religious and political cleavages are starting to tear up Trump’s big tent.

As the president forms his new administration, he is stepping into a very different Middle Eastern landscape than he encountered in his first term.

For more, please go to our link in bio

✍️ Amanda Kadlec
📷 Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

Since Donald Trump’s election victory, the Democratic Party and numerous pundits have been arguing about why Kamala Harr...
01/20/2025

Since Donald Trump’s election victory, the Democratic Party and numerous pundits have been arguing about why Kamala Harris lost. Some have argued that Harris failed to emphasize progressive economic policies. Others have insisted that she should have more explicitly disavowed the left. Perhaps most convincingly, writers like Financial Times columnist and data reporter John Burn-Murdoch have noted that this has been an unfavorable time for incumbents globally, from the United Kingdom to Japan, as an electorate angry with the economic dislocations of recent years has rushed to toss out sitting governments that they blame for inflation and other ills.

Whatever the direct cause of Trump’s victory, though, one thing is clear: Millions of people in the United States see Trump as a reasonable choice for president. This is disturbing, since Trump has repeatedly and forcefully attacked democracy and regularly presents himself as an authoritarian strongman. Why aren’t voters taking the fact that they just actively chose to live under an authoritarian regime more seriously?
Maybe it is because, in the places where they spend 40 or more hours a week, they already are.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon
📷Donald Trump works the McDonald’s drive-through line during a campaign photo op in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A large white warehouse towers over , northwest of , the capital. Long, dusty roads wind their way up to this solita...
01/17/2025

A large white warehouse towers over , northwest of , the capital. Long, dusty roads wind their way up to this solitary structure, standing tall in the vast emptiness of brown mountains. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters stood guard at the entrance and demanded a press permit from one of us to enter the factory, which our fixer said was understood to make “Captain Corn” chips during the reign of former President Bashar al-Assad. The irony of the name — strikingly similar to that of the amphetamine-like stimulant known as — is not lost on us.

In 2015, reports by several media organizations documented significant Captagon production within Syria. For many years, the Assad regime thrived on the drug; a 2022 AFP report estimated the value of its market at around $10 billion in 2021.

On our way to the factory, we asked multiple people on the road for directions. Often, they would guide us. Three weeks ago, speaking out loud about Captagon, closely associated with Assad and his supporters, would have been inconceivable.

Inside the building’s basement, millions of white pills were scattered across the floor, stretching as far as the eye could see. The first ones we noticed were lying on an old Syrian flag being trampled on by a rebel. They repeated this gesture in front of the cameras of other journalists several times.

“This is the largest Captagon factory we’ve found so far,” said Khalid, an HTS member from Idlib who accompanied us on the tour.

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️Anagha Nair
📷Aubin Aymard

It is a sunny afternoon in the Algerian port city of Oran (Wahran in Arabic), and I am poking around the ruins of the Pa...
01/15/2025

It is a sunny afternoon in the Algerian port city of Oran (Wahran in Arabic), and I am poking around the ruins of the Palais du Bey.

First things first, I want to see a Rai show. Nowhere is Oran’s fusional joie de vivre more apparent than in Rai, which originated in the Mediterranean port city back in the 1920s. It is unapologetically b***y, even taboo.

“The people adore God, but I [adore] beer,” once sang the legendary Rai artist Cheikha Rimiti, whose 1954 song “Charrak Gatta” is considered a reference to young women losing their virginity. Rai is performed by women as well as men; traditionally, it drew on Jewish and Andalusian, classical Arabic and bedouin musical traditions. Newer artists fuse styles with hip-hop, but Rai is still king in Oran. It is distinctly countercultural: Singers adopt the titles cheb and cheba, meaning “young” — a play on classical honorifics cheikh and cheikha, or “elder.”

—

“There’s this one bar — Le Cardinal,” a waiter, Lounes, confides over mint tea. “A classical Rai singer named Redouane is always there. Listen, go in and ask for the manager, Nabil.” He pulls out his phone and shows me a muscular guy with slicked-back hair. “Tell him Lounes sent you.”

For more, please go to our link in bio.

✍️ Ariel Sophia Bardi
📷 Ariel Sophia Bardi

A one-minute video, filmed the day after the city of Aleppo fell to opposition forces and just days before the collaps...
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)

“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,”—When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Cent...
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

n the fateful summer of 2020, when the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and police violence against Black bodies dominated hea...
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)

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For The Lede's first in-studio interview, international TV anchor and correspondent Hala Gorani @hgorani (from CNN’s “Hala Gorani Tonight”) sits down with New Lines’ @faisalalyafai for a wide-ranging discussion on how international coverage has changed since she was a correspondent, her Arab identity and her new memoir, “But You Don’t Look Arab.” Visit the link in bio to watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the episode on-the-go with Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

For The Lede's first in-studio interview, international TV anchor and correspondent Hala Gorani @hgorani (from CNN’s “Hala Gorani Tonight”) sits down with New Lines’ @faisalalyafai for a wide-ranging discussion on how international coverage has changed since she was a correspondent, her Arab identity and her new memoir, “But You Don’t Look Arab.” Visit the link in bio to watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the episode on-the-go with Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

How has Rishi Sunak's "Rwanda Plan" –– which is to send all of Britain's asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing –– impacted voter sentiment in the upcoming #UKElection? On the latest episode of Global Insights, Lydia Wilson joins Kwangu Liwewe to discuss the various issues that are affecting Britain's election which, despite potentially heralding a change in government for the first time in 14 years, is feeling a bit ... boring?

Why were almost half of the Hajj pilgrims who died from extreme heat travellers from Egypt?

Sudan's crisis has just entered the second year – with no signs of slowing down. As the world continues to focus its eyes on Russia and Ukraine or Israel and Gaza, Sudan is receiving little to no mainstream media attention.

The impact of the war in Gaza has been felt in Turkey, Egypt, Iran and the Gulf. On latest episode ofThe Lede, @guardian's @msrmichaelson, @financialtimes' @ChloeNCornish and independent journalist @tarakangarlou join New Lines' @FaisalAlYafai to trace the ripples across the Middle East. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

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Introducing Newlines

Newlines Magazine, published by the Center for Global Policy, is a forum for the best ideas and writing about the Middle East and beyond.

We specialize in long-form essays, including reportage, arguments, and memoirs, which bring together politics, culture, and history.

The Middle East is central to our focus, with an emphasis on voices that have an intimate relationship with the region. But we aim to include work from or about other parts of the world. Our only requirement is thoughtfulness and good prose.

With Newlines, we aspire to create a platform for original writing and thinking about a complex and often misunderstood and caricatured region. We consider the popular Arab uprisings of 2011 and their turbulent aftermath to be pivotal points of modern history.