It was a difficult Spring for Kurdish farmer Hin Omar. Freak snowstorms destroyed two of her greenhouses, and soggy soil postponed her planting schedule. Then the US-Israeli war with Iran spread to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and upended supply chains. Unable to import seeds or export produce, the 27-year-old felt like giving up.

What stopped her was the food security crisis facing Iraq, as escalating regional conflict threatens to deplete local supplies. That, and the rewards of working on the land. “I never wear gloves to handle the soil; I love the feel of getting my hands dirty and being closer to nature,” she says.

Omar still has two greenhouses left, enough to produce a crop of flowers and vegetables for the summer selling season in July. Operating in such an unpredictable environment is a constant challenge for small start-ups like hers, but thoughts of the country’s farming crisis spur her on. “The current situation is a motivation for me to fight and not give up,” she says.

It could also be an opportunity for Omar, who has a small stash of seeds stowed away. After a good year in 2024, her agricultural business has grown, and she now cultivates a range of crops, including aubergines, broccoli, legumes, peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, as well as various flower species.

Local sellers like her are critical to Iraq’s food security as rising fuel costs and disrupted supply chains threaten to exacerbate local shortages during the war. Iraq relies heavily on imported vegetables, particularly from Turkey and Iran, which announced a freeze on agricultural exports in early March.

Prior to the conflict, some Iraqi markets were dominated by produce from Iran, a key exporter of vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as fruit including apples, watermelons, and dates. Now local farmers must fill the gap. “Weather, war, I must not stop,” Omar says. “The community needs farmers like me.”

The Iraqi government has placed restrictions on the import of certain fruit and vegetables to bolster local farmers, who already grapple with declining soil quality and severe water shortages. Climate change is reshaping the agricultural sector in Iraq, where drought undermines production and desertification encroaches on once-fertile arable land.

In 2023, the government announced that eight of Iraq’s top ten crops, including vegetables and legumes, were in decline and that the country was no longer able to meet its national food market demand. While the Ministry of Agriculture claims self-sufficiency in 48 products, including tomatoes, potatoes, and lettuce, climate vulnerability poses a major threat to long-term stability.

Omar believes that reducing reliance on chemicals and supporting the soil will improve the outlook for Iraqi agriculture. The government currently subsidizes 50 percent of pesticide and chemical costs, while doing little to promote environmentally friendly farming practices.

Supervising projects on large farms after graduating in agricultural engineering, Omar was shocked by the vast quantities of fertilizers and pesticides plowed into the land. “Farmers don’t realize how terrible these chemicals are. You get a short-term benefit, but after that it makes the soil worse,” she says. “You kill off one pest and leave the crop exposed to different types of insects and disease.”

Organic farming is her ultimate goal, but with few resources to support the shift, Omar has adopted a staggered approach. Each season, she reduces the chemical ratio and increases the percentage of organic fertilizers, using animal manure and composting to nourish her soil.

Sourcing organic pesticides and seeds is difficult in Iraq, but she believes the health benefits will drive demand as consumers taste the difference. A friend’s cancer diagnosis spurred her motivation after the doctor advised a switch to organic fruit and vegetables. “If people want to eat healthily, they have more fruit and veg, but the produce here is often full of harmful chemicals,” Omar says.

One giveaway is appearance. “Sometimes you see vegetables that look shiny and beautiful but taste terrible,” she adds. Omar hopes that word will spread as more people make the connection between health and clean veg, but at the moment uptake is low. “A lot of people just don’t care, but I’m passionate about this change,” she says.

Despite constant uncertainty and worrying about the weather, farming feels more like a vocation than a job for Omar. Agriculture is the second-largest contributor to Iraq’s GDP after oil, but farmers are increasingly being forced to abandon land degraded by climate change. Omar believes organic farming methods are part of the solution. In recent weeks, road closures and security concerns have prevented her from making the 45-minute drive to her farm outside Duhok in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. But when a degree of normality returns, she’ll resume daily visits, aware that the future of the country’s food security rests on small-scale farmers like her persisting against the odds.

“The first time I was truly scared was in 2015,” recalled Anas Al Bakri, a Yemeni engineer now based in Lebanon. “One of the largest bombs of the war struck the famous Attan mountain in Sana’a. It was summer, and I was 14 years old. The blast was so powerful that it threw me out of bed, and every window in our house shattered.”

Growing up in Sana’a, Al Bakri’s childhood was deeply impacted by war and uncertainty. Normalcy was a foreign concept. For many Yemenis who came of age after the Arab Spring, instability was not an interruption to daily life but its defining condition.

The 2011 uprising that forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power after more than three decades in office initially raised hopes for political change. In 2012, his vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, was elected to lead a two-year transitional period. But those expectations quickly faded. Economic hardship deepened, political reforms stalled, and public frustration mounted. Hadi’s decision to lift fuel subsidies in 2014 sparked widespread protests, accelerating a crisis that culminated in the Houthi takeover of Sana’a and the outbreak of Yemen’s civil war in 2015.

“For foreigners, it is difficult for them to comprehend growing up in Yemen,” Al Bakri said. “I’ve experienced a lot of trauma, and one of my saddest memories was when one of my best friends died as a result of an airstrike in 2019. A facility that was supposedly housing Houthis was bombed next to his home, and his house was completely flattened. He and his grandma both died, but his parents survived. He was like a brother to me.”

Yemen’s civil war resulted from the country’s failed political transition. In 2014, the Houthis, a Shiite militia later designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, capitalized on growing public frustration over economic downturn and stalled reforms. By September, they had seized Sana’a and gradually consolidated control over key state institutions. President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi was placed under house arrest before resigning in January 2015. He later withdrew his resignation and fled to Aden, appealing for regional intervention against the Houthis.

In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates and Egypt launched a military campaign in support of Hadi’s government. Airstrikes became a daily occurrence across Yemen, and what began as a political crisis became one of the world’s most devastating humanitarian catastrophes.

“You’re 30,000 feet in the air, and you launch a missile toward a place where families have lived for generations,” said Al Bakri. “You press a button designed for ease of use, and an entire family disappears. It’s a very sad reality to accept.”

For Yemenis, the war wrought destruction on a staggering scale. According to the United Nations, more than 377,000 people had died as a result of the conflict by 2022. Roughly 60 percent of those deaths were linked to indirect causes such as hunger, disease, contaminated water, and the implosion of healthcare services, while the remainder were a result of armed violence. The humanitarian crisis continues today. As of 2026, the UN estimates that 4.5 million people are internally displaced. Out of more than 22 million people requiring aid, approximately 4.5 million children remain out of school, and nearly 11 million children urgently require humanitarian assistance to survive.

Al Bakri realized quickly that pursuing a future in Yemen was untenable, so he began searching for ways to spend his college years abroad. Luckily, he received two scholarship offers, one in Turkey and another in Lebanon.

“My sister was already in Lebanon, who was pursuing a similar program,” said Al Bakri. “So, I decided to go there because I didn’t know when I might be able to see my sister again if I decided to study in Turkey.”

Al Bakri arrived in Lebanon in April of 2021. His program was scheduled to begin in the fall of 2020, but the Beirut port blast, which devastated a large portion of Beirut’s infrastructure, delayed his travel plans until the following year. The blast was one of a few major events that tormented the state of Lebanon during that year. The Lebanese uprising that broke out in October of 2019 was followed by a gradual collapse of the Lebanese currency and the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020, severely straining Lebanon’s economy. Al Baqri became increasingly nervous about his choice, with a nagging feeling that he was about to trade one place of suffering for another.

“I remember that during the first night I landed in April 2021, the streets and buildings in Beirut were blacked out,” Al Bakri said. “There was no electricity, and I started to question whether I was in the right place, as I had just left Yemen where power outages were a norm.”

Nevertheless, Al Bakri began his studies at the Lebanese American University in Byblos, slowly adapting to Lebanese culture and making new friends. According to Al Bakri, he came to forget the sound of planes and fighter jets that had haunted him during his days in Yemen. However, those memories began to resurface when Israeli fighter jets started to roam the skies of Beirut in the wake of the horrific attacks on October 7^th, 2023. The chaos and instability Al Bakri had fled from were beginning to catch up with him.

“I loved forgetting the feeling of supersonic sounds of fighter jets before a bomb drops,” Al Bakri said. “But it came back, and I regularly anticipate hearing it again. It will always come back, and you will always be reliving the PTSD. You can’t say that you’re used to it. It’s a painful topic to tackle, and I’d love to forget that feeling like it never existed. But it did exist, and I have to acknowledge that.”

The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel further intensified in early March following the death of Ali Khamenei in a US-Israeli airstrike. More than a million Lebanese were internally displaced as a result, with shelters beginning to overflow, and various schools across Lebanon transforming to meet the demands of displaced families. Many, however, have been forced to sleep in the streets.

Al Bakri ultimately decided he would leave in the coming year. However, he expressed deep love and sorrow for the country that hosted him for the past 5 years.

“My time [in Lebanon] made me fall in love with the country and the resilience of the people.” He said. “They are very similar to Yemenis, where they still love life despite losing their homes, their jobs, or even their loved ones.”

He hopes to start another degree program abroad and continue his work as an engineer, joining many of his friends from Lebanon who have left the country to pursue a better life. He hopes to return and visit when the situation becomes more stable, but it is unclear when either Lebanon or Yemen will offer the stability needed for people to build long-term futures there.

“Maybe we’ll unite Yemen once again,” Al Bakri said. “But for now, it is unfeasible for me to go back home or stay in Lebanon for the long term.”

Al Bakri’s story is far from unique. Across the Middle East, millions of young people have come of age amid war, economic crisis, and political upheaval, forcing them to make difficult decisions about where they can safely live, study, work, and build a future. Leaving is rarely a rejection of home. More often, it is an acknowledgment that opportunity and stability are simply out of reach. As conflicts continue to wreak havoc across the region, many young people like Al Bakri find themselves searching not for a permanent destination, but for a place where they can finally stop running long enough to start building their futures on their own terms.

Middle East Uncovered uses pseudonyms to protect our sources in Iran.

When I first spoke with Kazem earlier this year, he was in Turkey. He and his wife left Iran after the regime shut down internet access in the wake of the January protests and the crackdown that followed. Both had participated in the anti-regime demonstrations and watched security forces open fire on fellow citizens. But it was the internet blackout that made it impossible for them to continue their work online and ultimately pushed them to leave the country.

A few months later, they returned to Iran. Then war broke out.

“We came back, and days later, the war started,” Kazem told me from Isfahan. “It looks like it’s our destiny to be here when there’s no internet.”

Since April, Iran and Israel have operated under an uneasy and increasingly strained truce linked to broader U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. Following the most recent exchange of strikes between the countries—the most serious breach of the truce since it was announced—Kazem told me he was safe and had not heard of any repercussions among those close to him. But the ceasefire is now facing its most serious test since it was announced, with President Donald Trump describing it as being on “life support.”

Despite the ceasefire, Iranian-backed groups have continued to attack American and Israeli targets across the region, and Israel has signaled that it is prepared to formally resume military action if it believes Tehran is rebuilding its nuclear capabilities. Iran is portraying its survival thus far as proof it has weathered the storm. The Strait of Hormuz continues to be severely disrupted, and oil prices have risen again after the latest escalation. In Kazem’s view, Tehran may be betting that time is on its side: that economic pressure, rising costs, and growing public fatigue in the United States will eventually weaken Washington’s position.

Inside Iran, Kazem says he is both deeply disappointed and increasingly afraid.

What will the regime do to its own people now that it has survived?

The regime remains firmly in control, while the political change many hoped for—and that President Trump suggested military pressure might help bring about—has yet to materialize.

In the early days of the conflict, he said, many Iranians believed they were watching the beginning of the end.

“That first night of the war, people came out to celebrate,” Kazem told me.

For years, Iranians opposed to the Islamic Republic had imagined what it would feel like to celebrate the deaths of the rulers who lorded over them. Suddenly, it seemed possible. Senior officials had been successfully targeted, and the regime looked shaken. The fear that normally kept people inside appeared, for a few hours, to dissipate.

Then the motorbikes arrived.

“People were out trying to celebrate, then suddenly we heard the motorbikes. The anti-riot bikes quickly turned up to send people back home,” he said. “They were offended by people celebrating.”

Years of crackdowns on protest movements have left little room for organized opposition or spontaneous celebrations.

“A lot of people have lost hope,” he said. “The last grain of hope for any change was foreign intervention. And that looks like it didn’t work.” He said the only way he sees the regime falling is with American boots on the ground, a scenario that few observers see as realistic.

Kazem says the regime’s current priority is to make sure the next uprising never begins.

Across cities, regime supporters now gather at key intersections at night. Many use temporary religious stalls known as mawkibs, which are normally associated with religious festivals, free tea, and public displays of piety. Now, he says, they have become political checkpoints.

“They’ve set up mawkibs in every corner now,” he said. “They’re present in every important cross section, especially ones where riots happened. They’re holding station at key points in every town.”

Many of those gatherings include armed Basij and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) personnel.

“In many of these mawkibs, there are people with guns, with AK-47s,” he said.

Kazem was stopped once while traveling for a camping trip. The men searched his car, saw camping gear, and let him go. But he does not believe these checkpoints are really about catching spies or dissenters.

“It’s just to threaten people,” he said. “It’s just to create an atmosphere of fear.”

And it’s working.

Kazem told me about women and children being trained to handle AK-47s. In one case near Isfahan, he said, middle-aged women volunteers were taken for weapons training. One accidentally shot and killed another volunteer.

The image of civilian women training to fight US troops is absurd until Kazem explains what he thinks it means.

“You may ask, hang on, how is a middle-aged woman with an AK-47 any threat to an American Marine?” he said. “But they’re not training them to fight Marines. They’re training them to fight me if I come out on the street.”

Kazem describes a regime that has absorbed the shock of war and subsequently turned its attention back to the threat it fears most: its own citizens.

“If we have another 8th of January, it’s going to be over,” he said. “So they’re doing everything they can to prevent that.”

Kazem does not think people will risk protesting again.

He told me about someone he describes as one of the bravest people he knows, a man who has taken part in every major protest movement since 2009. He had been arrested before and continued to protest after his release.

Even he wouldn’t dare to protest now.

“He made it very clear to me that he’s not going to go anymore under these circumstances, and nor should anyone go,” Kazem said. “Even he says we shouldn’t go out because we’re just going to die.”

Daily life, meanwhile, has resumed in the strange way it often does under dictatorships. During the day, Kazem said, shops are open. Food is available. People work, shop, visit relatives, and try to preserve whatever pieces of ordinary life they can.

At night, the mood changes.

“Every night there’s a lot of noise pollution,” he said. “They play loud music by speakers, pro-regime music.”

He and his wife try not to go out after dark.

“We do all our business during the day,” he said. “Because if we go out at night, they create traffic jams. You would think there are a lot of them on the street, whereas we know they’re not. But it doesn’t matter. As long as one of them has an AK-47, that’s enough.”

The economic consequences of the war are felt, though not always in ways outsiders might expect. Kazem said there are no major food shortages where he lives. But prices have risen sharply in specific sectors hit by the conflict.

Plastic goods, he said, have become far more expensive because of the petrochemical companies that were attacked. Disposable plates, cups, and milk bottles now cost much more.

“Milk itself has not seen a price rise,” he said. “But milk bottles have.”

Cars have also become more expensive because steel factories were targeted and production is expected to slow.

But for Kazem and his wife, the most damaging economic blow is lack of reliable internet access. He spoke to me via WhatsApp using an expensive VPN.

“We technically didn’t make any money for the first four months of this year,” he said.

In January, they lost weeks of income. In February, what they earned went toward surviving in Turkey. In March and April, they were back in Iran with no reliable internet. They only began earning again in May.

VPNs, once an inconvenience, are now a necessity. Kazem described buying access to the open internet like buying illicit drugs.

“You have to ask a friend, ‘Do you know anyone who sells VPNs?’” he said. “Do you know a dealer?”

The prices, he said, have exploded. Some VPNs now cost up to 100 times as much as before because only the most powerful ones can bypass the new filtering systems. Worse, people fear that some VPN providers are tied to the IRGC.

“We heard about some VPN providers that are actually connected to IRGC,” he said. “So they can see what you’re doing.”

One person, he said, was arrested after using an insecure VPN to speak to a foreign journalist. “He did what I’m doing now, and he was caught,” he told me. He said he felt comfortable speaking only because he trusted the security of his VPN provider.

Despite everything, one area where the regime appears to have retreated is the hijab. When I asked whether more women were covering their hair, he didn’t hesitate.

“No,” he said. “No, they’re not.”

But Kazem does not read this as proof that the regime has softened.

“What we fear is that if a peace deal is achieved, and they are to stay, then we’re going to face even more suppression,” he said.

If the regime believes street protests can be crushed and foreign intervention can be survived, it may feel freer to reimpose the social controls it has temporarily deprioritized.

“They know they’re not going to lose power thanks to a street riot,” he said. “Foreign intervention… didn’t get rid of them either.”

The fear now is not that the Islamic Republic will return to normal, but that it will return more confident and brutal than ever before. Kazem says the IRGC is effectively running the country. The formal government, in his view, is secondary.

“President Pezeshkian is basically just a shadow government,” he said. “IRGC is the actual group in power because they are the ones with guns.”

Still, he and his wife are not planning to leave.

Their lives and loved ones are in Iran. Besides, Kazem said, leaving is not simple.

“It’s hard to leave home,” he told me. “Especially when you leave home with a broken heart.”

He knows people who say they will leave if the regime stays in power, and he understands that. But he also knows how hard that choice has become. Countries around the world are turning away migrants and refugees. Politicians win elections by promising to keep people out. Iranians who want to escape are left asking where they can go.

He and his wife try to make life bearable. They went to the cinema recently. They make small projects at home. A few nights before we spoke, they made kiwi jam.

“I strongly suggest you make that or try it,” he told me. “It’s really interesting.”

They used to travel often. In 2024, they camped eight times in four months. This year, they have gone once. Even then, they were stopped and searched.

“If the regime is to stay, life is not going to be very happy,” he said. “Not just for us, for a lot of people in the region.”

President Trump promised liberation at the outset of the war. Instead, Iranians who were encouraged to rise up are trapped inside a country where the regime that was supposed to fall is regrouping, launching fresh attacks against its enemies, and, most concerning to Kazem, turning its weapons inward.

The Islamic Republic has survived the war thus far. What comes next, Kazem fears, will be directed not only at foreign adversaries, but at the Iranians who still hope to see the regime fall.

“What It’s Like To Be” takes readers inside the lives of people working in remarkable and often demanding professions across the Middle East. Each installment offers an intimate look at the realities shaping their daily world. Look for WILTB in your inbox every Sunday.

Two months after launching Rawi magazine, Yasmine El Dorghamy faced a challenge few publishers anticipate. As the first issue hit the stands, uprisings broke out across the Arab world, reaching Egypt on January 25, 2011.

Somehow, Rawi, a boutique heritage magazine that documents Egyptian history, art, and culture, survived this turbulent start. In the years that followed, its audience grew, resisting the shift towards digital-first publishing as traditional magazines closed and Egyptian media moved online.

“The readership has never been a problem. It’s just expensive to produce,” says El Dorghamy, whose passion for history drove her to devise a title that would bridge the gap between academic research and the general public.

“I felt like there was a big disconnect between the world of people producing the knowledge and people who are consuming it,” El Dorghamy says.

Now published annually in English and Arabic, Rawi unpacks Egyptian history for ordinary readers, delving into topics and time periods that have been glossed over by mainstream media.

El Dorghamy wakes each morning, “excited about the things I’m going to read and write about today”—an enthusiasm that permeates the pages of her publication.

She started small, launching the first issue in late 2010. A glossy magazine dedicated to history and heritage was unusual in Egypt, but El Dorghamy felt confident. “There was a real need for it,” she says.

Two months later, the country spiraled. Large-scale protests erupted across Egypt, prompting the overthrow of long-time Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Sustaining a fledgling title amid national chaos proved “extremely challenging,” but El Dorghamy has spent her life adapting to changing circumstances.

The daughter of a diplomat, she moved every few years throughout her childhood, living in Japan, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, and Sweden before settling in Egypt. She credits her fascination with history and culture to this early exposure, but making friends and maintaining her grades in school were difficult.

Each time she was uprooted, El Dorghamy built on the resilience that would prepare her for the “endless uphill climbs” publishers face in a fraying media landscape. “My default mode is to expect things to be difficult. When they are easy, I start to worry,” she says.

So, as political upheaval and economic turmoil gripped the nation, she threw her energies into crafting a second issue that would chime with the public mood. Stories explored topics such as looting and the unrest’s impact on antiquities, connecting current affairs to the country’s ancient past.

“I managed to survive,” she says.

El Dorghamy spent the next few years carving out a space for Rawi with historical deep dives packaged for a contemporary audience. Articles were light on jargon and engagingly written. “I always made sure the language was accessible she says.

As she built a team around her, the magazine developed a reputation for striking design. Determined to incorporate “fun and whimsy,” El Dorghamy looked to the past for creative freedom and variety.

“Editorial design has lost its joy over recent decades,” she says. “The industry standard has become very austere.”

Good design, El Dorghamy believes, is where print retains its edge, offering a tangible experience that digital platforms can’t replicate. Rawi has a strong digital presence, using multiple platforms to share stories and anecdotes, but while other publications moved fully online, Rawi’s identity remained rooted in print.

“A phone screen can never compete with a beautifully printed book,” she says.

The shift from traditional print models to digital-first media has transformed the publishing landscape in Egypt, where a young, highly connected population drives the demand for online content. Broader economic challenges and the rising cost of paper have made magazine production increasingly expensive, accelerating the decline of publishing in Egypt, historically the cultural giant of the Arab world.

Two years ago, El Dorghamy decided to relaunch Rawi as a coffee-table book. Her distribution manager had stopped working in magazines—“he said they no longer exist in Egypt”—and her local newsstands were only selling books.

“That’s when it hit me,” she says.

In 2025, she published the first edition of Rawi, investing in her belief that books will always be a cornerstone of Egyptian culture. “The magazine may be perceived as something archaic, but the book isn’t. They’ve become very expensive in Egypt, but people still respect books the way they always have.”

A book also felt like the right medium for the product Rawi had become. Early editions were lighter and covered a cross-section of Egyptian culture, but in 2016, that changed.

At the time, the art market in Egypt was thriving, but there was very little coverage to accompany the evolving scene. Several people had suggested Rawi tackle the subject, so El Dorghamy plunged herself into research that would result in a bumper issue.

“The eighth edition on modern Egyptian art got out of hand,” she says. “But it turned out this was exactly what people wanted.”

Other hefty issues followed—focusing on Egyptian cinema, Egypt’s culinary history, and the 7,000-year evolution of Egyptian fashion. El Dorghamy immerses herself in every theme, discussing stories with journalists, reading the latest works by academic contributors, and debating angles with editors.

Brainstorming sessions result in noisy WhatsApp groups and Dropbox folders filled with ideas. Even when the magazine runs to more than 200 pages, it feels like they have to “slice Egyptian history very thin.”

El Dorghamy aims to balance the advice of her editors, who insist she has to “kill your darlings,” with her desire to tell the long story of Egyptian history, illuminating lost chapters and forgotten tales. “There’s a lot of focus on Egypt’s ancient history, but we have about 3,000 years separating us from that period,” she says.

This willingness to foreground less trendy topics and resist AI-style summaries resonates with readers of all ages, from university students who turn to Rawi for research and academics who use it as a teaching tool, to ordinary Egyptians leafing through the pages of their country’s past.

One of El Dorhmany’s proudest moments came early on, when she learned that a waiter had stashed his café’s copy of the magazine and covered it in sticky notes. “The guy had hidden it for himself to read cover to cover. I thought it was wonderful,” she says.

There have been many highlights since. The day she learned sales of Rawi in a popular bookshop had outstripped The Da Vinci Code, the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, or when the magazine went on sale at The British Museum in London and The Louvre in Paris.

Unfortunately, these successes don’t translate into profits at the newsstand. El Dorghamy is “not a salesperson” but has to devote considerable time to fundraising. Economic turmoil, currency devaluations, and regional conflicts have made that job harder, but “there are still a lot of very enlightened individuals and entities and foundations that have supported Rawi and kept it going over these years,” she says.

Meanwhile, the Rawi team is finding ways to diversify. They recently produced the catalog for the Suez Canal Museum, and she has expanded into the art space, curating exhibitions that tell the physical stories of print editions.

Working alongside artists and gallerists has inspired new ways of presenting complex historical material for different audiences. El Dorhamy recently curated The Medical History Gallery at Al Nas Hospital, a visual journey through the history of medicine and healing in Egypt. She recognizes that while some people like sitting with a book or scrolling online, others prefer walking through a space and experiencing the information firsthand.

Looking ahead, she will continue to experiment with formats and audiences, but Rawi remains rooted in print, despite the challenges that commitment brings. “I refuse to compromise,” she says. “The day I let go of Rawi will be when I’ve completely given up on life, and thankfully, there are people who won’t let me.”

The decision to launch Jordan’s first remote recruitment platform for women was personal. Six months after giving birth to her daughter, Sawsan Lubani confronted a stark reality: Either relinquish the career she loved and become a stay-at-home mother, or accept a demotion and a salary cut. “I had no choice,” she says.

After getting married, Lubani moved from Amman to Zarqa, an industrial city northeast of the capital where professional opportunities were scarce. The daily commute to Amman was expensive and unsafe for a woman traveling alone. Away from family and friends to help with childcare, she was unable to find work.

“I faced an identity crisis. I didn’t even know who I was anymore,” she says.

Then a former colleague reached out with a remote work opportunity. The report-writing job paid around $250 a month—far below a livable wage in Jordan—but for Lubani, it represented a valuable opportunity. “I could stay at home with my daughter and avoid a career gap in my resume,” she says.

At 5am, the alarm would sound. Creeping quietly to her desk, she worked quickly, trying to get ahead before her daughter woke. Initially, she was simply grateful to be working again, but over time, she realized she could help other Jordanian women balance family life with flexible work.

When the COVID-19 pandemic normalized working from home, she saw an opportunity. In 2023, after completing incubator programs in Jordan and graduating from the Founder Institute in Silicon Valley, Lubani launched iRole, a recruitment platform that connects women with remote jobs and skills training.

“I wasn’t someone who wanted to become an entrepreneur,” the 38-year-old says. “I just had an idea to get myself out of this place and help other women do it too.”

Across the region, startups like iRole are offering an alternative to traditional recruitment systems, filling in where universities and outdated labor laws have struggled to keep pace.

Three years after its launch, iRole has connected women across Jordan to remote roles in fields including accounting, marketing, administration, and design. One woman works as an accountant for a Dubai-based company, while another is a designer advising a Jordanian student doing a PhD in London.

The platform also helps women navigate cultural barriers. In parts of Jordan, conservative norms prevent women from working outside the home. Others leave the workforce after having children because salaries barely cover travel and childcare costs.

“An entry-level salary in Amman might be around $500 a month,” says Lubani. “Commuting from Zarqa, I needed $200 for travel and $200 for daycare. The salary hardly covers the expenses.”

Remote work, she says, affords the flexibility women need to maintain their careers while managing family responsibilities. “I do what I need to do when I need to do it. I have a schedule for me and for my kids, know when to work, when to go to the gym, when to work overnight.”

But new platforms are still colliding with old realities.

In Egypt, Mohammed Orabi founded the recruitment and training platform Matloub after a frustrating period of job searching. He had changed jobs at least ten times in two years, often traveling more than 10 hours from Upper Egypt to Cairo, only to discover that the role was unsuitable or, worse, a scam.

This experience is not unusual in Upper Egypt, a rural region where job opportunities outside the agricultural sector are scarce. The area is home to some of the poorest communities in the country and unemployment rates are high.

Orabi launched Matloub in 2021 to provide young people with real opportunities and to help companies access talent from an often-overlooked pool. They also provide training and mentorship to equip candidates with in-demand skills.

Many young people in Upper Egypt lack access to career guidance or professional training. “People don’t understand job duties and responsibilities,” Orabi says. “There’s a huge gap between education and what companies actually need.”

Orabi believes this disconnect between jobseekers and employers represents an “urgent challenge” in the labor market.

“Universities are not doing enough to prepare students,” he says.

To date, his agency has worked with 60,000 people and secured 40,000 jobs in banking, pharmaceuticals, customer service and sales, among other sectors. Orabi credits this success to a hands-on approach that supports job-seekers through their first few months in a new role.

“We help them onboard and settle in,” he says. “A lot of people feel alone when they start a new role.”

Matloub also acts as a middleman to protect young people from exploitation and scams. Common deceptions include positions in the Gulf that require an employee to cover travel expenses for a role that doesn’t exist.

In Egypt, misleading salary advertisements and workplace mistreatment are frequently reported. Egypt’s 2025 Labor Law has introduced stronger protections for workers, but doubts remain about the legislation’s capacity to change a culture of workplace exploitation. “Employment laws are not enforced,” Orabi says.

Employers, meanwhile, complain that candidates graduate without the necessary soft skills, pointing to exaggerated CV’s and an over-reliance on AI tools in job applications. “Many don’t know how to send an email or how to deal with a problem,” says Lubani. “They lack communication and critical thinking skills.”

Governments across the region are investing in entrepreneurship and digital skills to diversify their economies and reduce the employment burden on bloated public sectors.

In Jordan, startups are supported through funding initiatives that aim to improve the business environment and spur investment. Egypt’s Communications Ministry similarly provides grants and training for students to bolster digital skillsets and meet the needs of the job market.

But founders like Lubani and Orabi believe that grassroots platforms are better placed to understand the challenges that face sidelined jobseekers. “They are enthusiastic, they really want to work and offer something to society; all they need is someone to put them in the right place,” Orabi says.

Similar gaps between education and employment are compounding unemployment and impeding economic growth elsewhere in the region.

In northwestern Iraq, Murad Ismael, now a Member of Parliament, founded Sinjar Academy to fill a vacuum in the labor market and furnish youth with skills to revitalize the economy after years of conflict.

IT and tech skills are in high demand in Iraq, but here too, outdated university courses fail to prepare students for the workforce, and many struggle to find jobs after they graduate.

Sinjar Academy runs courses in programming, digital media and computer skills to help people find jobs and revitalize a community devastated by war. “Overall, it’s not a very technology-supportive environment in Iraq, but we’re trying to create the skills and opportunities to drive this forward,” Ismael says.

Education is also a way for people to process what they have suffered. The memory of the 2014 genocide, when ISIS killed and abducted thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar and surrounding villages, hangs over the community. Many people are still displaced after years of conflict, while efforts to rebuild have been hampered by a lack of funding from the central government.

Equipping the next generation with relevant skills will help reboot the economy and transition away from overreliance on NGOs, says Ismael. “If people have good skills, they will get work. The issue is not having a degree; it’s about the ability and opportunity to make the most of their lives.”

Across Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, these entrepreneurs are addressing problems that governments, universities, and employers have struggled to solve. Their approaches differ, but they share a common belief that talent exists everywhere, even where opportunity does not. The challenge is building the bridges that connect the two.

The Arab world’s employment crisis cannot be solved by startups alone. But by connecting overlooked talent with real opportunities, entrepreneurs like Lubani, Orabi, and Ismael are showing that some of the most effective solutions begin far from government ministries and boardrooms.

Kunafa breakfast sandwiches, folded banknotes, clothes swaps, and communal cooking sessions. For the team, the magic of Eid comes from the warmth of childhood memories mingling with family traditions, even those they would rather let go.

It is a time when people reconnect with relatives, visit neighbors, share meals, help those in need, and temporarily set aside disagreements. Rooted in Islamic faith, Eid is a moment of reflection and prayer, when Muslims remember the Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail in an act of obedience to God.

It is also, like Christmas, Diwali and many major festivals around the world, a lot of work. Houses grow noisy and people crowd in. There are endless rounds of hugging relatives and children tear from room to room, hyped up on sweets. It is, as Hussein Ibrahim describes, “exhausting and beautiful at the same time.”

Growing up, Eid meant gifts and sweets, the excitement enhanced by mischief-making with cousins as indulgent parents turned a blind eye. For adults, the meaning shifts as they take on the pressures and pleasures of creating the Eid magic in turn.

Planning, hosting, and cooking replace the carefree Eids of childhood but bring a different kind of joy that comes from caring for others. Family rituals take on a deeper significance, connecting loved ones across generations.

“Even the simplest traditions carry emotional meaning,” says Rafal Al Adilee, describing the comfort of familiar voices, the return of childhood memories, and the smell of homemade sweets. Above all, she cherishes the opportunity to bring family together, suspending the demands of everyday life long enough to reconnect and remember the bonds that matter most.

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: Eid in Berlin

President and CEO, Ideas Beyond Borders

I spent Eid in Berlin this year and enjoyed a celebratory meal with our Bayt al-Hikma Editor, Ahmed Reda. In some ways, it felt close to the atmosphere of Eid in Iraq, where I grew up. The Berlin neighborhood of Wedding has a large Arab community, with strong Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish influences. Many of the restaurants were decorated with balloons and families were out in the streets celebrating. Living in New York, I often feel furthest from the Middle East at Eid, when the communal atmosphere we enjoyed in Iraq seems very remote. But walking around this Berlin neighborhood, wishing people “Eid Mubarak,” we found something of the spirit that makes Eid special and reminds me how it felt back home.

Issam Fawaz: Eid in Lebanon

Communications Manager, Bayt al-Hikma, Contributor, Middle East Uncovered

For me, Eid has always been tied to food, family, and the feeling of everyone slowing down to be together. My strongest Eid memories are starting the morning with a warm kunafa sandwich for breakfast—yes we eat kunafa as a sandwich for breakfast—then spending the whole day waiting for those delicious warak enab (stuffed vine leaves) that takes hours to prepare. By lunchtime, the entire family would gather at my grandmother’s house around one table.

As a child, Eid meant excitement, new clothes, sweets and toys. As an adult, I don’t get toys anymore, but Eid symbolizes continuity—the comfort of traditions that remain unchanged even as life around us changes. The meals themselves became symbols of care, patience, and family effort. That is what Eid feels like to me: not just celebration, but belonging.

Hussein Ibrahim: Eid in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

MENA Director, Ideas Beyond Borders

Growing up in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Eid was never simply a holiday. It was filled with anticipation, noise, family, generosity, and a temporary suspension of everyday worries. Even today, despite the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood, Eid still carries the emotional warmth of childhood memories that refuse to fade.

As children, the excitement of Eid often began the night before. One of my favorite memories is placing my new clothes neatly folded beside my pillow at bedtime. It felt impossible to sleep with all the excitement. We knew that the next morning would bring joy in every form imaginable: new clothes, visits from relatives, candies collected from house to house, and folded banknotes given to us by parents and relatives during visits. To a child, that money felt like a fortune. We would spend it on video games, playgrounds, sweets, or small toys that seemed incredibly important at the time.

Eid, during childhood, meant freedom from worry. My world revolved around collecting candies and playing with cousins, neighbors, and visiting relatives. The atmosphere itself felt kinder. Even our mischievousness was tolerated more than usual. During Eid, adults seemed more forgiving, more patient, and more generous. The holiday carried a sense of mercy that extended even to children’s endless chaos and noise.

As an adult, the meaning of Eid has changed significantly. Today, I find myself on the receiving end of responsibility rather than generosity. Instead of waiting for gifts, I think about preparations, expenses, hospitality, and ensuring that others enjoy the holiday. The financial and emotional responsibilities attached to Eid can sometimes feel exhausting and make the holiday less carefree than it once was. Yet adulthood also reveals something deeper about Eid: it is ultimately about caring for others, preserving family bonds, and creating joy for the next generation in the same way our parents once did for us.

Family traditions are what make Eid especially meaningful in our home. In my hometown, we do not begin Eid with breakfast. Instead, an elaborate lunch is prepared early in the morning. By midday, my parents’ house transforms completely. My ten sisters and seven brothers gather with their children, and the house becomes something resembling a kindergarten—crowded, loud, chaotic, and alive. Every room fills with conversations, laughter, crying children, and endless movement. It is exhausting and beautiful at the same time. The noise is part of our Eid.

Some of my most memorable Eid moments took place during one of the most difficult periods in Iraq’s modern history. During the aftermath of the First Gulf War, Iraq was suffering under international sanctions, while the Kurdistan Region was simultaneously facing an additional embargo imposed by Saddam Hussein’s government. Poverty was widespread, and even basic food items were difficult for many families to afford.

At one point during Eid, my mother’s uncle arrived at our home with his family, along with three other families from Mosul. Nearly fifty people ended up living together in our house for almost three months. Space, food, and comfort were all limited, but families survived through togetherness.

Then came one unforgettable Eid moment. My mother’s uncle suddenly began screaming dramatically and clutching his stomach in apparent agony. Everyone believed he was seriously ill. My mother, grandparents, and aunts began crying, fearing he might be dying from severe abdominal pain. In the middle of the panic, he weakly requested Coca-Cola. My eldest brother rushed to the small shop behind our house and bought a few boxes of Coca-Cola bottles—something considered a luxury at the time.

My uncle immediately began drinking one bottle after another while my brother distributed the rest among the crowded household. Then, suddenly, my uncle burst into laughter and announced proudly, “Bon appétit! Drink the amazing Coca-Cola because of me. I am the reason you are all drinking Coca-Cola now!”

The room instantly shifted from fear to outrage and laughter. My grandparents and father began shouting at him, furious that he had pretended to be dying simply to justify buying Coca-Cola for everyone. Yet years later, that absurd moment remains one of the clearest memories of Eid in our family—not because of hardship, but because humor and togetherness somehow survived despite it.

That, perhaps, is what Eid truly represents: the ability of families to create joy, laughter, and unforgettable memories even during the hardest times.

Rafal Al Adilee: Eid in Turkey

MENA Project Manager, Ideas Beyond Borders

The moment I hear the sound of the mosques reciting the Eid takbeer (call to prayer) at dawn, I still get the exact same feeling I had as a little girl: a shiver of happiness and comfort, realizing that Eid has finally arrived. It is a reminder of family, gratitude, faith, and how blessed we are to have people to share these moments with.

In our family, Eid is made special by the little traditions that repeat every year and somehow never lose their magic. The early morning takbeer from the mosques, the trays of Eid sweets prepared for guests, visiting relatives first thing in the morning, and gathering around breakfast together all create an atmosphere that feels uniquely comforting.

This Eid, my husband and I decided to step away from the noise and pressure of everyday life and spend the holiday somewhere peaceful. We booked a farmhouse in the countryside to enjoy quality time with family, away from the rush of the city. As life becomes busier and more demanding, Eid starts to feel less about grand celebrations and more about slowing down, reconnecting, and appreciating the people closest to us. For me, the true spirit of Eid has always been found in those quiet moments shared with loved ones.

Some of my most cherished Eid memories come from growing up in Iraq. They may seem simple, but they carry a warmth and intimacy that stays with you forever.

One tradition I remember vividly was gathering with the family the night before Eid to make kleicha—traditional Iraqi pastries filled with dates, nuts, and sweet spices. The whole house would come alive with activity: kneading dough, preparing fillings, shaping the pastries together, and filling the kitchen with unforgettable aromas. It wasn’t just about the food itself; it was the feeling of togetherness that made it special.

And of course, no childhood Eid memory would be complete without Eidiya—the small amounts of money gifted from parents and relatives to children. As kids, it felt magical. It meant new clothes, family visits, sweets, and the anticipation of celebrations.

Now, as adults, there is something equally beautiful about being able to give back to parents and younger family members and continue the tradition ourselves. Life changes, responsibilities grow, and relationships evolve with time. It becomes harder to gather everyone together as often as before, and people become consumed by work and daily routines. I cannot honestly say Eid feels exactly the same as it did in childhood—but somehow, the emotion still returns every year.

There is also a funny side to it. In many Middle Eastern families, we are not always overly expressive with affection in daily life, so on Eid morning everyone suddenly becomes emotional and affectionate at once. You end up hugging every sibling and relative, exchanging heartfelt wishes, and pretending you are not embarrassed while doing it. Somehow, that awkwardness is part of the charm.

John Aziz: Eid in London

Contributor, Middle East Uncovered

Eid contains a strange tension for me. At its root, Eid al-Adha is inspired by a story about the biblical patriarch Abraham’s willingness out of blind faith to sacrifice his own son Isaac. It’s a powerful story. It carries emotion. But this mentality of blind faith can be dangerous. There are many extremists in the world who seek to convince us to sacrifice ourselves and our families for their ideological goals. This, more or less, is what the leaders of Hamas asked of the people of Gaza in 2023 until now.

As a child from a Muslim family when I was growing up, I understood none of that complexity. Eid simply meant a feast of delicious Palestinian food, family gathering, noise, warmth.

As an adult, I still feel a kind of reverence for the way ancient religious traditions and festivities carry memories, bind families together, and connect us to people and places. But I also see this festival as a warning. Faith in God is one thing. Faith in religious or political extremists who claim to speak on behalf of God? That’s quite another thing.

As Eid unfolds in London, I find myself caught between gratitude for the beauty of these ancient religious inheritances, and concern about those who choose to channel religion into violent ideology, and then demand sacrifices of everybody around them.

Lana al Jaf: Eid in Erbil

Graphic Designer, Ideas Beyond Borders and Middle East Uncovered

When I was a child and during the late nineties, I looked forward to Eid like every other kid. Due to the economic state of Iraq, almost everyone was living paycheck to paycheck, so buying new clothes and shoes was a rare treat. But for Eid, parents had to get their children brand new everything. I remember gathering with my cousins to strategically decide who was buying what so we could trade clothes later and avoid repetition.

On the first day of Eid, we would all gather in our grandparents’ house. After we finished eating, the race would begin to gather as much money as we could from the adults. A rich uncle that lives abroad and doesn’t see us much would give generously to compensate for his absence, while the aunt we see every weekend had little cause to impress us—she already did that by making us food and letting us stay over all the time. After squeezing the adults for every last penny, we’d gather to see who got the most. One time we managed to convince our youngest cousin that larger bills were worth less and swap. He still hasn’t forgiven us for that trick.

As years passed and the security situation made moving around the city more dangerous, it became easier to just call everyone and say “Eid Mubarak!” As a result, those strong bonds and traditions slowly faded in my family. It even became annoying, to the point where we would fake being sleep till noon to avoid the awkward phone call to a distant relative who wishes you the same thing every year—to succeed in school, or to marry well, or to stay healthy and keep your parents safe.

As an adult, living miles away from my relatives, all I can do is call people with well-tailored wishes and send money to nieces and nephews. It’s fair to say that I liked Eid much more as a child.

Ahmad Mansoor Ramizy: Eid in Toronto

Afghanistan Country Director, Ideas Beyond Borders, Reporter, Middle East Uncovered

Eid feels a bit different this year, but in the best way. My aunt and her two grandchildren are visiting from France, and some of us haven’t seen them in more than five years. More than anything, Eid is about coming together and having them here makes this one especially meaningful.

My favorite Eid memory is from the last few years of my life in Afghanistan. Our family had a garden on the outskirts of Kabul, with a beautiful villa surrounded by greenery, fruit trees, and open space. That was where we would gather for the sacrifice and to spend time as a family.

At its busiest, there would be fifty or sixty people feasting, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company. Those afternoons in the garden are some of my most cherished family memories. They were among the last times I remember all of us truly together before circumstances put oceans between us.

When I was growing up, Eid also meant the arrival of “Eidi,” or cash gifted to the younger generation from elders. As a kid, that meant everything to me. It was the highlight of the holiday.

Now that I am an adult, Eid is less of a religious obligation and more of a tradition centered around family and coming together. It is less about what you receive or what you wish from god, and more about who is with you and physically present. This year, with family traveling from far away to celebrate together, that feeling is stronger than ever.

Hela Boubaker knows instantly when her bees are upset. The pitch of their buzzing indicates all is not well in the hive. A beekeeper must be attuned to dozens of these subtle noise variations. “I know if they are hungry, or the queen is sick, or if there is a lack of food in the area, and they need to be moved. It’s like a mother with her babies. I see these bees as my kids,” says Boubaker.

Her decision to work with hives followed a harrowing incident at her sister’s wedding in 2018. As guests laughed and chatted at the venue near their home in Manouba, Tunisia, the scent of sweet foods and juices attracted a swarm of bees. “It was summer, when it’s not easy for them to find food. They were probably stressed and hungry,” she says.

Everyone was stung, including Boubaker, who is allergic to bee venom. She spent the next few days in the hospital on oxygen, recovering from the attack.

The experience stirred something in Boubaker. Studying environmental sciences at university, she understood the risks facing bees in the wild, where estimates suggest that one in ten species faces extinction.

In Tunisia, where more than 300,000 hives are tended by around 13,000 apiarists, beekeeping is integral to the farming economy. Boubaker saw how her skills could benefit both bees and the communities that keep them. “I took it as a challenge to save bees,” she says.

Over the next few years, she developed a multi-pronged approach that would combine an emerging interest in beekeeping with her scientific background. Using the proceeds from her hives, she launched a project to support apiarists in rural Tunisia while developing digital devices to advance hive health.

Today, the 29-year-old owns 280 hives and visits them whenever she can. “Bees can detect whether you’re happy or sad. Instead of talking to my husband or father about what’s stressing me out, I go and speak to the bees,” she says.

Between her responsibilities as a beekeeper, her university studies, and an ongoing project to develop a non-invasive device for the extraction of bee venom, Boubaker’s days are full. But her hard work has already paid off.

In 2021, she was approached by the Ministry of Agriculture to lead a team tasked with developing beekeeping in Tunisia. They were intrigued by the news reports about her work in rural communities, helping local women become beekeeping entrepreneurs.

Boubaker teaches these women the art of beekeeping and connects them with buyers for honey and venom. One kilo of honey sells for around $30, while bee venom, valued for cosmetic and medicinal purposes, fetches around $60 a gram.

Hives cost around $150 each, but with careful upkeep, they provide a steady return. A single hive can produce three to four kilos of honey per year and around 200g of venom every three months—enough to support a family.

“These women are really grateful. They feel more worthy now that they are contributing financially and working on their own,” she says.

Boubaker visits a different village every day of the week, spending at least 3 hours on the road. The work is not for profit, and she often supplies their equipment herself. “It’s the way I have been raised. My mother was always deep in debt but insisted on helping others,” she says.

In these rural communities, patriarchal values prevent many women from seeking employment. Life is tough, and opportunities are scarce for mothers like Fatma, whose husband was reluctant to let his wife work.

Boubaker’s commitment and family-minded approach gradually reassured him, and Fatma now generates a stable monthly income. She is among 23 female beekeepers and 15 men benefiting from Boubaker’s support through an Agricultural Development Group (GDA), one of more than 2,700 such collectives across the country.

Boubaker’s GDA assists rural women across multiple income-generating activities, including beekeeping, farming, and business development. Since launching, she has forged ties with local authorities, regional institutions, and government ministries to open up fields that have traditionally been dominated by men.

Beekeeping is one such profession. “When I decided to enter the field, everyone was against it,” Boubaker recalls. Only her parents were supportive. Over time, friends and relatives witnessed the success of her project and saw the impacts unfold.

A government drive to support beekeeping in Tunisian communities, where the tradition often dates back generations, has enhanced her work. Every loan Boubaker secures from the bank is bolstered by a government subsidy, along with capacity-building initiatives, easy access to forage areas, and field visits available through local programs like hers. “Of course, the sector is not easy, but there is continuous encouragement,” she says.

Tunisia is already known for high-quality, natural honey. Now, Boubaker wants to raise the profile of its bee venom, often referred to as “bee gold” due to its potent composition and intensive harvesting methods. Research suggests that bee venom may offer a wide range of possible health benefits, from reducing inflammation to treating chronic illnesses.

“I intend to invest to make myself, Tunisia, and the rural women I work with remarkable players in this domain,” she says.

While most systems for extracting bee venom are manual and battery-operated, Boubaker’s Bee Venom Collector is a smart device that offers remote hive monitoring and accurate data on venom extraction in real time.

The machine stimulates the bee gently to extract venom without causing harm. It also assesses the bees’ mood. A stressed queen lays fewer eggs, while hungry worker bees become aggressive and prone to robbing other hives. Understanding these signals is crucial, says Boubaker. “The machine analyzes 36 bee sounds to detect whether the queen is stressed or happy, so we know when to stop extraction and when to resume it.”

It also contains a GPS tracker in case the hive is stolen.

Hive theft is common in Tunisia, where climate change presents new challenges for beekeepers. Some apiarists have resorted to stealing hives after losing their livelihoods to rising temperatures and fires. Police patrols have reduced crime rates in recent years, but creative solutions are needed to help beekeepers adapt.

This is where Boubaker’s approach comes full circle. She plans to make her device available at an affordable price to improve honey bee health and boost business for beekeepers in Tunisia as they confront a changing climate.

By 4am every morning, she is already on the road. The closest hive location is a 200-kilometer round trip, and she needs to get back in time for university, before working on the patent for her Bee Venom Collector in the evening. Finding time for her own bees is difficult, but these are the moments when she pauses and reflects on her work. In the eight years since bee stings landed her in the hospital, she has changed dozens of lives, including her own.

“I’m proud of my personal development,” she says. “I changed from Hela, the shy girl who only does what other girls are doing, to Hela, who founded a company and now helps other women achieve their potential.”

“What It’s Like To Be” takes readers inside the lives of people working in remarkable and often demanding professions across the Middle East. Each installment offers an intimate look at the realities shaping their daily world. Look for WILTB in your inbox every Sunday.

Kanyaw Abubakr is cautious by nature, so her sudden shift from teacher to carpenter came as a surprise. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), carpentry is considered a male profession, but the 29-year-old wanted to “challenge myself and my community at the same time.”

Only a small number of women work in carpentry across Iraq. Traditional ideas around female roles leave little space for less conventional careers in a country where women make up just 14 percent of the labor force. However, recent years have seen a handful of women break barriers in fields traditionally dominated by men as patriarchal norms come under pressure to accommodate a changing workforce.

For Abubakr, the move is more than a career change. After seven years in academia, it’s also a lifestyle choice. At the end of the working day, her mind feels frazzled while her body buzzes with restless energy. Working with wood brings her peace of mind. “I have good hands for making. It feels satisfying to use my body,” she says.

Abubakr has always enjoyed crafts, but this time, a hobby squeezed around work hours isn’t enough. “I don’t want to wait for the future to realize this ambition. I have to start now,” she says.

The former language teacher is not, as she puts it, a natural entrepreneur, though she does have experience as co-founder of a fixer agency that assists journalists in Iraq. Her strengths lie in persistence and a dogged approach to learning. “There are people out there who can make better things, but I’m quick, and I’m interested. I believe everyone can learn if they are dedicated to the work,” she says.

She is relying on this spirit of perseverance to push ahead with her new business, Narewenn, even as the Kurdish region is drawn deeper into the US-Israeli war on Iran. Despite efforts to maintain a neutral stance, the KRI has been targeted by retaliatory strikes due to the presence of US bases and Iranian-backed militias on its territory.

The war has caused major disruptions, exacerbating financial uncertainty, destabilizing oil markets, and curbing economic activity due to prolonged power outages.

Abubakr is usually at the workshop from early morning to late afternoon, but with just a few hours of electricity each day, she has been forced to cut back. The sudden onset of the crisis reinforces the risks that come with investing in a start-up, but it hasn’t dampened her determination. “It’s hard, but we keep working,” she says.

Without start-up capital, Abubakr uses a friend’s workshop while she saves to purchase her own machines. She envisions a large makerspace with sections for woodwork, jewelry, ironwork, and other hand-crafted items. “It feels possible. Such spaces are emerging here,” she says, pointing to flagship projects like the Culture Factory, which have helped establish Sulaymaniyah as the creative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

For now, she is focusing on carpentry, filling a gap in the market for high-quality woodwork.

In the past, almost every community in the KRI had a woodworker who took care of houses in the neighborhood, but many have now closed. Abubakr is confident she can make a living from carpentry, but says that to thrive, she will need to innovate. This means creating unique pieces and harnessing social media to market her work. “It’s not as simple as securing a fund to get going. I have to build the business step-by-step,” she says.

Ongoing economic struggles have undermined the potential of small businesses to succeed in the KRI, though recent steps to streamline the regulatory environment have made it simpler to launch startups. Most of Abubakr’s friends work in offices, but a growing number are launching their own businesses, she says. Some see it as a way to supplement income in a country where soaring youth unemployment, an underdeveloped private sector, and a bloated public sector limit opportunities for young Kurds. Others, like Abubakr, are pursuing long-term goals.

“For me, the thinking process is drawn-out, but when I act, it’s decisive,” she says.

On weekends, she visits the local wood market to educate herself about different materials and indulge in the “guilty pleasure” of running her hands over the smooth surfaces. It fuels her creative energies, but Abubakr wonders whether these materials are sustainably sourced. She suspects not. “Most of the wood is imported, so who knows how it was cut,” she says.

As the impacts of regional conflict upend daily life in her hometown, Abubakr finds solace in the workshop, honing her craft. Her current project, an L-shaped table, was inspired by a mid-century Danish design with two identical units that slide together to form different shapes. The joins must be perfect to ensure a seamless fit, so she has turned to her mentor for guidance. “In a matter of months, he has taught me skills that would take much longer to acquire,” says Abubakr, who hopes one day to oversee a team of carpenters.

It’s a bold ambition in a region where female woodworkers are rare, but Abubakr is already changing attitudes. “People assume that because I’m a woman, I won’t be able to use a saw,” she says. “They are always surprised to see the quality of my work.”

This article is co-published with More To Her Story. Middle East Uncovered uses pseudonyms to protect our sources in Afghanistan.

Each morning, Taiba prepares her family’s living room in Kabul to teach 25 girls who are no longer allowed in school. For the past year, she has woken early, prayed, finished her chores, and set the room for class. A 26-year-old graduate of Kabul Polytechnic University, she began teaching at a public school before the Taliban barred girls from secondary education in 2021. After a brief stint at a private school, she was dismissed as restrictions tightened. For more than a year, she has taught from home—part of an underground network that has reached over 18,000 girls across Afghanistan since the bans took hold.

A few months ago, Taiba’s already challenging routine was upended by a deeply troubling conversation with one of her students. “One of my students, a 14-year-old girl named Sahar, who was a bright girl and otherwise very lively, came to class that day with a frown on her face.” Sensing a difference in her demeanor, Taiba asked Sahar to stay behind after everyone else left the class that day. She sat with her, and Sahar immediately burst into tears, jumping into her teacher’s arms and crying, “My father told me today that I am getting engaged tomorrow.”

Taiba can only do so much as a teacher. Providing solace to a soon-to-be-wed 14-year-old girl was not covered in her training. Still, Taiba decided to speak with Sahar’s father on the off chance she might be able to intervene. “In the evening, I went to their house, and I spoke with her family. Her parents were completely hopeless. They said there is nothing left to do for girls in Afghanistan anymore, and the economic stress on their household pressured them into marrying off Sahar.”

The desperation of Sahar’s family is emblematic of broader challenges in the country. Since the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan for the second time in 2021, women have been systematically banned from all walks of life, including education. The marginalization of women and girls, combined with extreme poverty, is pushing thousands of families like Sahar’s to marry off their daughters—often to men decades older than the girls themselves. For many, it is a last resort to keep their households afloat. “Sahar told me that her suitor was a 30-year-old man living in Germany,” said Taiba.

Sahar’s story is but one in a deeply disturbing pattern emerging in Afghanistan. Taiba’s work sits within a broader, collective effort to respond to it.

She is not the only teacher in this underground network of classrooms, which, aside from their own internal struggles, must listen to and comfort their students as they endure hardships unimaginable to most. Middle East Uncovered recently spoke with Taiba and her colleagues, Arezo and Shukria, both 28, who are also part of the same network of underground schools. Together, they teach an average of 100 students per cohort per year. The majority of their students are young girls who recently graduated from 6th grade in public schools and are now unable to attend high school. Some even have participants much older than 18, including mothers who attend with their daughters.

Building on their shared experiences, these teachers and their students work together to keep the schools operational, all in secret. One hurdle they routinely face is limited access to technology. Only 6-15% of Afghan women have access to the internet and smartphones, meaning a significant number are unable to participate in any form of informal education. This is especially true for those from extremely impoverished families. This imbalance, paired with the Taliban’s tightening, draconian laws, has placed extreme pressure on teachers to provide education to an otherwise neglected half of society.

Arezo, a graduate of Kabul University’s journalism school in the year the Taliban returned to power, spoke about the sense of total isolation facing Afghan girls: “I think we are simply alive in Afghanistan—that is it.”

After experiencing the collective trauma of regime change, Arezo, a skilled journalist, worked at various media agencies even after the Taliban returned. Soon her dreams of reporting and producing were shattered when, one day, a decree from the supreme leader arrived in her office ordering a ban on any coverage of women or women-related activities in Afghanistan. “I broke down in tears that day and could not stop crying. Not because my hours of reporting were wasted, but because I realized how lonely Afghan women have become now,” said Arezo.

Similarly, Shukria’s story echoes the professional setbacks Afghan women face. Like Arezo and Taiba, Shukria was studying to become a software engineer. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in computer science at Kabul University, expecting to finish in four years. But the COVID-19 pandemic and a deadly attack on the university in 2020 stretched that timeline to six. “When the Taliban came, I was already in my sixth year of university. After graduation, nobody would employ women, and everyone started telling me that I had wasted my life studying for nothing,” said Shukria, further adding, “I started teaching computer science at a private school, but then after three years I was dismissed from there as well.”

When reflecting on the past few years, Arezo, Shukria, and Taiba quickly moved between the challenges they face together—running an underground network of informal education for girls—and the personal strains each of them carries.

Arezo said, “After I lost my job at the media company where I was reporting on women and their achievements in Afghanistan, I was at home for about a year, and I went into severe depression. I was at my lowest point in life with absolutely no idea where to go or what to do when I was introduced to the underground school network.” This experience mirrors Taiba’s, who had just finished her last year teaching mathematics at a private school when she was dismissed, but soon connected with the same network. Shukria says that initially her family showed some resentment toward the idea of opening an underground girls’ school in their house. It took more than a month for them to decide whether to accept the offer. “I eventually convinced them by telling my brothers that this is what I want to do, and I will make sure that I fulfill my duty to the best of my ability without raising suspicion,” said Shukria.

Beyond pressures at home, educators in the underground network face shrinking budgets, scarce materials, limited space, and the constant risk of being discovered by Taliban intelligence services. But none of that compares to the psychological weight of teaching girls who feel they have no future. As Taiba put it, “In our society, a teacher is considered a spiritual father or mother.”

This burden makes trust between teacher and student essential. Taiba said, “The relationship between a teacher and student should reach the point where the student truly trusts their educator. Fortunately, my relationship with my students is intimate—they can freely share any kind of matter with me,” while emphasizing her concerns about the growing mental health problems among her students. Arezo and Shukria nodded in agreement as she spoke during a virtual meeting with Middle East Uncovered.

Often, these teachers must listen not only to their students’ stories but also to those of their mothers, who regularly accompany them to class for the sake of the community. Taiba shared one such story, recalling, “One of my students usually comes with her mom. Her mom didn’t show up to class for about a week, and I asked my student where she was. She would repeatedly tell me that her mother is sick.” Taiba continued, “When her mom finally returned a week later, her arm was in a cast, her face was bruised, and her eyes were black. I asked her to stay with me after class, where she told me that her husband came home high on a substance one day and argued with her. After beating her nearly to death, she decided to end her life by taking pills.” Taiba described how this mother, in her late 20s, attempted suicide and failed in front of her young children.

The increase in suicide rates among women in Afghanistan places an additional burden on the teachers. Taiba, Arezo, and Shukria have to stand before their classes and tell them not to lose hope—even though all three of them are slowly starting to lose their grip on it themselves. Arezo says, “But who will give hope to us? Who will talk to us? We are human too. Where can we express our emotions and pain?”

According to a report by the Guardian, “Suicide rates among women in Afghanistan have surged under Taliban rule, with reports suggesting one or two women may be dying by suicide daily due to extreme despair, forced marriages, and ‘gender apartheid.’ While official data is not released, reports indicate that females now make up over three-quarters of recorded suicide deaths.” The hopelessness that prevails over Afghan girls has pushed many to engage in self-harm, as they see life as meaningless and unfair.

According to Dr. Mohammad Nisar Jallah, founder and CEO of Ottawa-Kabul Global Education Center (OGEC), the mental health crisis in Afghanistan is dire. OGEC, founded in late 2024 with the mission of providing a comprehensive online educational solution for girls in Afghanistan, educates more than 20,000 students, according to its founder. 7,000 of those students alone are enrolled in their online medical program, delivered by professors from Kabul Medical University who are now living abroad. What sets OGEC apart from other organizations in online education is its robust psychosocial support program, run by trained, skilled professionals who work with hundreds of students up to four times a month to address their most pressing needs.

“Before we started the program, I would unfortunately hear on average three suicide attempts per day related to people in our network or their loved ones,” said Dr. Jallah, adding, “We are grateful that that number has been nearly zero in the past eight or nine months.” While demand exists, students who have participated in OGEC’s psychosocial support program have shown tremendous improvement in their mental well-being. “The mother of one of my students contacted me one day, telling me that her daughter was suicidal after she was banned from attending Kabul Medical University. She would stay awake at night guarding her daughter, fearing that she might attempt suicide. She expressed her gratitude for our programs that have kept her daughter so occupied and mentally relieved that thoughts of self-harm are not even on her mind now.”

The emotional cost of living without meaning or purpose is beyond most people’s comprehension. Those of us living abroad have the freedom to choose what to study, how to live, who to listen to, which career to pursue, and, most importantly, who to choose as our life partner. Children like Sahar are deprived of those rights and are traded like property or disposable objects out of necessity. Taiba told me, “Sahar eventually got married to that 30-year-old man. He came to Kabul from Germany for the wedding, but soon everyone found out he was already married and had children. After a month of wedlock, Sahar was divorced and separated from her husband.”

Sahar, who has lost everything, including her innocence, recently returned to her father’s house as a divorced 14-year-old. “She was never the same again. She would come to class for a few weeks after her divorce, quieter and more somber. Eventually, she gave up on class altogether, and I could not persuade her to come back,” said Taiba.

These brave teachers, who themselves were just little girls a few short years ago with dreams of becoming software engineers, teachers, and journalists, have had every opportunity taken away from them. Just as they were about to begin the careers they had spent years preparing for—at a time when women still had at least some access to education and work—they were pushed out and confined. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, their voices carried a strain that was hard to miss. They present themselves as strong and composed, and often they are. But beneath that resolve is the weight of everything they have lost, and the reality that they, too, are in need of care and support.

​And still, every morning, they open their doors and wait for the students to arrive. There are no guarantees—only the risk of being discovered, the weight of bearing witness to stories like Sahar’s, and the knowledge that many girls will never make it back to class. But for those who do, the room stays open—until the day girls are no longer forced to learn in secret, and can return to classrooms without fear.

At 79, Paul Mattar has a new idea. He doesn’t know whether it will work. Like much of his creative output, “it’s experimental,” and the audience will decide.

As an actor, composer, singer, playwright, and theater director, Mattar has explored many modes of expression, but he has spent a career searching for a form that’s free from constraint.

It has taken him from the star-studded stages of Golden-Age-Beirut and the cabaret halls of 1960s Paris to bombed-out venues across war-torn Lebanon. Yet even as he swapped national theaters for shelters and school halls, Mattar was frustrated by the same invisible barriers in his art.

“Everything in theater is prepared and fixed in advance. As an artist, I want to feel free,” he says.

Now, Mattar believes he has found a way to unite artist and audience in a common voice. These days, Mattar is “bored” with theater productions. He wants an authentic art form that mirrors the audience’s reality, not a mouthpiece for the writer or a stage for performance.

“I’ve seen my country invaded, its cities destroyed, my economy collapsing. We need real stories that chronicle Lebanon’s history in the words of people living it.”

He’s happy to begin with his own.

The shy second son of middle-class parents, it was Mattar’s talented elder brother who seemed destined for the stage. “I was creative, but it was not obvious to everyone, especially my parents,” he says.

Mattar was happy to stay in his brother’s shadow. The two shared a room and went to the same school. When his brother Pierre took guitar lessons, Mattar learned by watching him play.

It was Pierre who put his younger brother forward for his first role. Mattar auditioned and landed the part, performing alongside professional actors in a 1966 production called Les requins aux Presque, or “As close as possible to the sharks.”

Working at the newly opened Théâtre de Beyrouth (Beirut Theater), he met acclaimed playwright and director Roger Assaf, who helped the aspiring actor find a foothold on Lebanon’s burgeoning modern theatre scene.

The 1960s are often described as Lebanon’s Golden Age, but Mattar disputes this. For him, it was the early 1970s, up to the outbreak of war in 1975. “That was when Lebanon started to be heard in the world,” he says.

This was the height of Lebanon’s Belle Epoque, when the arts blossomed during a period of prosperity. Theater, once the preserve of a wealthy elite, was becoming accessible as literacy accelerated in the 60s and 70s. “We were discovering something we had never had in Lebanon—the power of theater,” Mattar says.

Plays were performed in every available space to accommodate the outpouring of new work. Grand hotels, including The Phoenicia and The Normandy, transformed ballrooms into stages while schools, churches, and town squares hosted smaller productions.

“It was very exciting. I was very lucky to live through this period,” he adds.

The Beirut Theater attracted a vibrant community of thespian talents. Together, they pioneered a bold era of contemporary drama that celebrated Lebanese writers over international productions and creativity over conformity.

Mattar’s mentor, Assaf, saw theater as an extension of popular culture and wanted plays that reflected the issues of the day. Landmark productions like Jalal Khoury’s Juha on the Front Lines and Ousama Aref’s Idrab al-Haramieh spoke to Lebanese audiences and cultivated the interactive spirit of the age.

Artistic expression flourished as playwrights broke new ground with daring productions that challenged social norms. Assaf’s work would push the democratic spirit of Lebanon, then seen as a bastion for free speech in the region, to its limits.

In 1969, his production of Majdaloun, written by Henry Hamati, was shut down by the Lebanese military three days into its run at the Beirut Theater. The plot confronted controversial subjects, addressing the Palestinian armed presence in southern Lebanon as a consequence of the Israeli occupation.

In a moment of triumph for creative freedom, Assaf, his co-director Nidal Ashkar, and the cast walked with the audience to the Horseshoe café on Hamra Street and continued their performance. But the play, which criticized the state’s inertia and called for domestic revolution, tapped into tensions that would continue to rise.

Politically charged works like Majdaloun resonated powerfully as the atmosphere darkened in the months leading up to civil war. The earlier climate of buoyant intellectualism and free experimentation gave way to a more urgent and ideologically driven theater as the stage became a vehicle for resistance against political forces that were propelling the country into conflict.

“The civil war didn’t stop us. On the contrary, it pushed us to perform more but in new, different ways,” Mattar recalls.

Recently returned from a period in Paris, where he acted at Théâtre de la Ville and composed songs for concerts and cabarets, Mattar was ready to forge something new. Inspired by the spirit of the music hall, he staged free performances in intimate venues, bringing audiences closer to productions that were “marginal, weird, unspecific.”

It was liberating to work in the mini-theater format. He felt free to experiment and wrote a play that merged Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with a tale from One Thousand and One Nights. People would sit, sip drinks, and feel part of productions. “It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life,” Mattar says.

This lasted a few years before war broke out and consumed the country’s cultural spaces. For a while, Mattar composed songs about conflict, trying to make sense of the tragedies unfolding in the streets around him. Then he gave up. “There were too many.” He turned back to acting, curating a performance for children that could be staged across the country.

With a simplified set and a cast of three actors, plus puppets, crammed into the back of a tiny VW Polo, they drove from village to village, performing in every available space, sometimes under fire. During one performance for children with disabilities, they only just managed to get the audience to safety as shelling began.

By the time the war ended in 1990, most of the country’s cultural spaces lay in ruins. Yet even as he mourned their loss, Mattar saw the need for something new. “The Civil War changed artistic creation. For a while, nothing else in life existed outside the war,” he says.

When someone offered him a dirty, underground space that was lying empty, Mattar seized his opportunity. Working alongside actress and producer Jocyane Boulos, he oversaw the emergence of Le Monnot Theatre, where he would serve as director for more than two decades.

Friends questioned his decision to move from West to East Beirut, but Mattar was more interested in using art to dismantle the barriers that segregated the city during war. “When you are offered a stage, you have to go.”

And soon, audiences were coming from across the city, as the artistic community drifted back, ready to make sense of the last 15 years on stage.

Mattar is proud of his work at Le Monnot Theatre. On their 20^th anniversary in 2017, he counted over 1,000 performances, showcasing diverse talents and genres that helped revive Beirut’s theater scene.

Today, it is recognized as one of the city’s most enduring creative spaces and a symbol of cultural revival in post-war Beirut. But for theater veterans like Mattar, there are qualities that can never be reclaimed. The exuberant spirit of Lebanon’s theatrical renaissance has vanished. Passing the ruins of the Beirut Theatre in Ain el-Mreisseh, a lump catches in his throat. “I lived the most beautiful moments of my life in this place, and now there is nothing.”

That age of artistic experimentation has given way to a more globalized, trend-driven culture. “The performances we staged in these theaters were different. Today they all look the same,” he says.

He now feels that there are more direct and urgent ways to tell stories than on the stage. Tracing his career from the heady optimism of 1960s Beirut, through the trauma of war and the crises that have engulfed Lebanon since, he has found a form that finally makes sense. “For me, storytelling is the solution,” he explains.

Mattar is planning a storytelling festival that will elevate the audience, dispensing with the artifice of theater in favor of a stripped-back, raw form. He hasn’t decided on a name, but he wants to reflect life in real time, relayed by authentic voices. “The history books are biased,” he says. “I want our history to be chronicled by Lebanese people. We need to hear them talk.”

Perched on the side of a pyramid, Dr. Salima Ikram looks completely at ease. A photograph on her website captures the archaeologist in her element —“crawling down holes and popping out of pyramids.” Even when expeditions go awry, this is where she feels most herself.

“Some of my colleagues are more sedate,” says Ikram, whose voice is slightly hoarse after a month-long illness from inhaling too much mummy dust. She’ll be back to excavating burial chambers and examining remains as soon as her lungs clear.

Occasional setbacks are worth it for working on “extraordinary projects” and making discoveries that reshape our understanding of how people lived 5,000 years ago. Even after 43 years in the field, Ikram remains in awe of the achievements of the Bronze Age. “Almost everything about the Ancient Egyptians is interesting, absorbing, and inspiring… One wants to hang out with them more,” she says.

Ikram’s love affair with Egyptology began in childhood. On her first visit to Egypt at the age of nine, she was captivated by the civilization that built the pyramids and developed hieroglyphic writing.

This began an “endless quest” to immerse herself in a civilization spanning more than 3,000 years. It’s a journey that has shaped her both mentally and physically—falling off cliffs and breaking her pelvis are just some of the tolls on her body—but it’s all part of a career that “makes you open to adventure and less set in your ideas,” she says.

The specimens she studies are ancient, but even across millennia, they feel present. “History is part of a shared past… we learn about ourselves too,” she says, pointing to the way her specialism—human, animal, and food mummies—helps trace the origins of society today.

It’s often the smallest details that resonate the most. Examining the mummy of a mother with her baby tucked into the crook of her knee feels intensely poignant to Ikram. “It’s these moments that remind us of our common humanity,” she adds.

Quiet moments of reflection are interspersed with the excitement of discovery, but the process can be painstaking. Weeks of fruitless searching, as pressure mounts and funds dry up, are compounded by sweltering heat and flies at dig sites. “Sometimes I could do without the bats,” Ikram says.

Yet these discomforts seem negligible when the cry goes up announcing a new discovery. There’s a lot left to find. More than 200 years of archaeological activity have uncovered less than a third of Ancient Egypt. Estimates suggest that 70 percent remains below the sand, hidden beneath modern cities and Nile mud.

In particular, worker settlements, offering a window into the lives of everyday Egyptians, have been overlooked in favor of royal tombs. The world has long been enthralled by the tantalizing potential of priceless treasures buried with the Pharaohs, fuelled by sensational discoveries across the decades.

The most famous of these was in 1922, when British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the doorway to a burial chamber sealed for three millennia. Many royal chambers have been plundered by thieves across the centuries, including by the ancient Egyptians themselves, but Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered intact.

More than 5,000 objects were found alongside the boy king, who died aged 18 or 19, possibly from malaria and a leg injury. Extraordinary treasures emerged from the site in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, including Tutankhamun’s death mask, now considered a masterpiece of Egyptian art. “Before, people would admire Greek and Roman art, and the Egyptians were thought primitive,” Ikram says. Suddenly, the world was mesmerized by Egypt.

The craze known as “Egyptomania” or “Tut-mania” went global as ancient Egypt became a dominant theme in fashion, art, and architecture. Interest was heightened by the ‘curse of the pharaohs’, a rumor fabricated by journalists denied access to the tomb. “The Times had a monopoly, so they made it up,” Ikram says.

A century on, archaeologists have compiled a detailed understanding of Ancient Egypt, fed by more groundbreaking discoveries in the years since. For Ikram, everything is open to question as fresh finds revise our understanding of the age. In her specialist field, studies of mummification materials have revealed a more complex process than previously thought, with resins and oils imported from abroad indicating early global trade networks that were previously unknown.

These scientific inquiries are matched by the thrill of archaeological finds in the field. On a rescue-archaeology mission in Sudan in the 1990s, Ikram and her team excavated at speed in front of bulldozers that were building a new road. When a pair of tumuli was discovered intact, Ikram opened the doors to burial mounds that had been undisturbed for 2,500 years.

“I could smell the incense that was burned as part of the burial ritual. Moments like that are extraordinary,” she says.

She compares archaeology to detective work, analyzing clues to test different theories until one fits. Not all evidence is equal, however. Deciphering the paintings in a tomb can feel like looking at someone’s social media feed. “It’s what you choose to put in there,” Ikram says.

But taken together with other evidence, including the food a body was buried with, the condition of the bones, and the materials they were wrapped in, it’s possible to build a picture of the life lived thousands of years ago. At times, a feeling of familiarity echoes across the centuries. “Things that mattered 4,000 years ago to human beings are still the same things that matter to us today,” Ikram says.

Understanding these motivations and how they shaped Egyptian society has been her life’s work, though it didn’t seem achievable to everyone. Even in a country with the only surviving wonder of the ancient world, her early aspirations to be an archaeologist were considered far-fetched. “My father said you are never going to get a job. What on earth are you doing? But much to everyone’s surprise, I made a career of it.”

Over the years, she has met many people who shared her ambition to become an archaeologist, only to abandon the dream in favor of a reliable income. Many of those who did persevere also teach, like Ikram, to sustain their research.

At The American University in Cairo, where Ikram is a professor in Egyptology, she sees the same pattern play out. There is a lot of interest from students, but parents worry they won’t find paying jobs in the field. Many who major in Egyptology go on to work in business or finance, she says.

Teaching eats into the time she can spend on digs—two and a half weeks is the most she can commit to on-site, but living in Egypt means she is on hand when her expertise is needed, including for television projects.

Advising on films and documentaries, including The Mummy, allows her to bring ancient Egypt to a wider audience and meet interesting people. Describing the attraction of digging in tombs to actor Morgan Freeman, she told him, “Being an archaeologist means that you never have to grow up, and the past is always part of the present.”

She was referring, she says, to playing in the sand and crawling down holes, a process that is both thrilling and unnerving. Bumping down tomb shafts in the dark, unsure of what waits below, fear temporarily takes hold. Then she passes the halfway point, and curiosity triumphs, pushing her deeper into the past to uncover the secrets of Ancient Egypt and share them with the world. Each discovery builds on knowledge gathered across two centuries, with the potential to revise history in ways not yet imagined. It’s an enticing prospect that renders the bats and the bruises irrelevant, when, as Ikram puts it, “suddenly you excavate something and ideas that have been written in stone for at least 100 years have to be tossed out of the window in light of fresh new evidence.”

Bar Ninety-One, nestled in the heart of East London’s iconic Truman Brewery off Brick Lane, isn’t the first place one would imagine hosting an Afghan-themed evening. Yet here we are, 70 diners squeezed together at long tables, our mouths watering as the tantalizing aromas of Afghan cuisine fill the air.

At the center of it all stands Mursal Saiq, a petite, 32-year-old British-Afghan with a black tattoo of her name in Farsi across her chest. It’s bold and unapologetic, just like Saiq. “Until Afghan women get their voices back, we’re their voices. We have to be louder,” she says. For this raven-haired chef, Afghan Nights isn’t just a supper club. It is defiance served over three courses.

Since the Taliban’s return to power in the summer of 2021, not only have they erased women from public life, but they’ve also pursued a policy of eradicating Persian in the country, instead favoring Pashto, their native language.

Saiq’s tattoo, therefore, was a big fuck you to them.

“As a country, you can lose land. But you only really lose when you lose your sense of identity and history. I need us to preserve our history.” Born during the first Taliban rule in the 90s, Saiq grew up as the middle child in a family of six children. They fled the civil war for Mumbai, India, where Saiq fell in love with the country’s rich festivals and traditions.

“We celebrated Diwali and Holi, watching all those colors, and eating sweets,” she smiles.

India was also a creative inspiration, its rich food and spices leaving a lasting imprint on her palate and imagination.

Saiq’s uncle worked in Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry. She grins when she tells me about meeting superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

When she was nine, they left for the UK. Saiq and her mother were separated from half the family, which left the chef with immense trauma that she still struggles to talk about today.

Then there was the racism. North London, at that time, was still hostile to some ethnic minorities. “Me and my brother were around nine or 10 and had rocks thrown at us,” says Saiq. “My black friend, Deb, said, ‘This happens to us every day.’”

Saiq’s first memory of food is white rice served with lubya kidney beans, a “peasant dish” from northern Afghanistan. It was comfort food. “When I took it to school for lunch, the girls said, ‘Ew, what’s that?’” For a while, she rejected the dish that had once soothed her. “As a young ethnic child, it’s difficult to be yourself and to love your food.” Years later, she found her way back. It is now her favorite again.

When her father eventually joined them with the rest of her siblings, the family moved to Hackney in east London. There, she found something different: a place where people from different cultures could all celebrate their differences. “Before, our food was smelly and disgusting, but here it was celebrated. We could wear our traditional clothes. Hackney taught me about integration.”

Returning to Afghanistan for holidays in the 2000s, after the Western invasion had ousted the Taliban, Saiq naively thought she was going home. “When you’re in a foreign country, you usually don’t understand the language, but this wasn’t the case here. I thought, this is another part of me.” Yet, ironically, the locals called her “English girl.”

Between Kabul and London, she realized she belonged fully to neither. “We are called traitors for leaving. Your entire existence feels guilt for leaving. People say to me, you don’t look religious, but I do pray. First, I rebelled against the Taliban and then against the West.”

Instead, Saiq found clarity in food.

After studying history and political philosophy at Goldsmiths College, she worked at the British Museum as an archivist by day. In the evenings and at weekends, she joined Street Feast, learning barbecue craft. But there was just one niggle. The food wasn’t halal or vegetarian. “None of my family and friends could eat it.”

Determined to include her loved ones in her cuisine, she and her partner, chef Josh Moroney—who is of mixed English-Guyanese heritage—founded Cue Point, a British-Afghan smokehouse that blends Afghan flavors with traditional barbecue techniques.

From the outset, they committed to halal and vegan menus. They wanted to reflect Hackney’s diversity in their food and make sure as many people as possible could eat it without feeling left out. Saiq even travelled to the US to compete for Britain in the World Food Championships, where she came second.

Back at Kabul Nights, some diners come for nostalgia, others for politics. Many arrive simply for good food—of which there is plenty. Afghan cuisine is a rich blend of South Asian, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern food.

The first dish is mantu, dumplings stuffed with slow-smoked brisket and garlic yogurt, topped with lentils. The vegan version omits the beef in favor of leeks and onions.

The music comes from Yaz Fentazi on the oud and Samir Nacer on the darbuka, their melodies and drumbeats mixing with the sounds of laughter and conversation.

One diner, named Tia, recalls fondly her time working at a radio station in Afghanistan. “Afghans are the most magical people I’ve met,” she smiles. “I remember seeing men who used to listen to the radio in secret—they’d stick their heads out of the window while wearing earphones, so that the Taliban wouldn’t catch them.”

Laila, a young Afghan woman of Pashtun and Tajik heritage, has brought her English partner. “I feel seen by what Mursal is doing here,” she says, as we tuck into Saiq’s take on the Kabuli pulao, a meaty aromatic rice dish mixed with carrots, raisins, and toasted cashews. The borani banjan, a slow-cooked creamy, tangy eggplant dish with yogurt, is comforting on this rainy night.

Dessert is a mouthwatering caramel-and-pistachio cake.

Laila’s smile falters as she recalls how her mother was smacked by a Taliban member for wearing white shoes in public, her father beaten for listening to the radio and not growing a beard.

“I’m angry at the women’s rights activists who don’t raise their voice for Afghans,” she says, betrayed by the western intervention which did, briefly, lead to some meaningful changes in the central Asian country.

Afghan women made advancements in education, employment, and health care, and were even represented in government. The 2004 constitution guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including ethnic and religious minorities. That all changed when the Taliban returned to power.

Now, says Saiq, there’s a sense things are worse with the “Taliban 2.0”, because “Afghans had that taste of freedom.” A generation learned to dream. Not anymore.

“When the Taliban took over, I felt trapped and lost. I wasn’t sure how to celebrate our culture because I’m also not traditional,” says Saiq. “Someone told me that she doesn’t go to Afghan events because she feels like she doesn’t belong.” Afghan Nights, therefore, is a place for the lost souls who are caught between two cultures and countries.

There is a pause between courses, as some Persian poetry is read on stage. One is Saiq’s cousin, Bazil, the other a young woman named Rokhsar, who recites the words in English as well as Farsi. In a city thousands of miles from Kabul, Persian flows freely and defiantly, far from the eyes and ears of the Taliban.

For this is what Afghan Nights really serves: not just delicious cuisine but language, culture, and shared memories. It’s a space where those who have been silenced are given a voice here in London.

“I feel like the Taliban is my personal enemy,” says Saiq. “The more they do, the more I act.”

“What It’s Like To Be” takes readers inside the lives of people working in remarkable and often demanding professions across the Middle East. Each installment offers an intimate look at the realities shaping their daily world. Look for WILTB in your inbox every Sunday.

Between 2006 and 2007, when the bloodshed peaked in Baghdad, Ammar Karim went out every night. Crossing the city was dangerous after dark, but he went anyway, heading for the small café in Zayouna, where his friends sought a sliver of normality in those febrile years after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

One worked in the defense ministry, another at the oil ministry. There was a company contractor, an academic, and Karim, bringing them breaking news from that day. “I came loaded with information, until they asked me to stop,” Karim recalls. “They were trying to live peacefully, away from all this violence.”

It was 2007, and Iraq had become a hellscape of car bombs, sectarian clashes, and spiralling death tolls. A fresh wave of violence had followed the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, prompting a surge in US combat forces across Iraq. The conflict seemed never-ending, seeping into all areas of life as civilian casualties climbed during one of the deadliest years of that decade.

Karim worked all hours, covering events in Baghdad for the French news agency L’Agence France-Presse (AFP). “For two years, we reported the same story again and again—how another body had been found in the street or pulled from the river.”

The chaos was constant, but reporting on it could be unpredictable. After the fall of the Ba’athist regime in 2003, censorship had eased, and local police began cooperating with journalists. It made helping families locate the bodies of loved ones easier, Karim says. Then, insurgent groups began targeting police stations, and communication broke down. “At some point, the police became so aggressive. They were under daily attack, losing their men and relatives,” he says.

The country, straitjacketed into submission under Saddam Hussein’s ruthless rule, had erupted. From AFP’s sprawling office in the city, the team sent 10 to 20 alerts each day, racing to cover the barrage of attacks that pounded Baghdad at all hours. Still, it was better than life before, says Karim. There was freedom, and the sanctions that starved the population had lifted, but his country was drowning in chaos. “I thought Iraq could never survive those times,” he adds.

Just three years into his career, Karim should have been a cub reporter. Instead, the war fast-tracked him into the role of a seasoned correspondent. While doing ad hoc translation work for the US Army, he crossed paths with AFP bureau chief Sammy Ketz and saw an opportunity to pursue his interest in politics. “I was so optimistic that this country, one day, would be better,” he recalls.

Around him, foreign journalists converged on the city, many making their names in the war that was tearing Iraq apart. “I never saw any shame in that. I help every journalist who comes here,” says Karim, who set up the Foreign Journalists Institute, drawing on his contacts at the interior ministry to assist international media in the country.

Now 47, he has continued to advise and support journalists throughout his career, drawing on a huge network of contacts across Iraq. “Sometimes journalists cross a line, but I always assume it’s not intentional,” says Karim, who has helped secure the release of detained reporters in the past. “We are not a big community, so we have to protect each other.”

He knows too well the risks that accompany this work. Like any veteran reporter in Iraq, Karim can reel off a list of close calls: fleeing masked gunmen on a motorbike, bullets whistling past his ear, sheltering from a shootout at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf as insurgents opened fire.

Other stories are more painful to tell.

The murder of his friend Hisham el-Hashemi still haunts Karim. He eventually found the words to express his grief in a moving story on the respected security analyst, who was shot dead in a car outside his home in 2020. The attack came during another period of intensified violence, when armed actors operated with impunity across the capital.

“I warned him about the consequences,” Karim says, describing the fear he felt for his friend, who had openly criticized the Iran-backed groups that operated outside state control. “Hisham loved Iraq. He was trying to get the country out of the influence of Iran,” Karim adds.

El-Hashemi’s death came as a shock to the media community. He had been a trusted friend and sounding board, advising with extraordinary clarity on the complexities of Iraq’s shifting security situation. “He was a soft, gentle person, and smart—the only security expert writing honestly about what he researched,” Karim says.

News of the murder sparked public outrage and prompted then-Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi to respond to the wave of assassinations and kidnappings of Iraqi activists that followed the 2019-2020 Tishreen protest movement. Journalists, too, were being targeted as militia men stalked the city, ticking people off kill lists then vanishing into the night.

Friends messaged to warn Karim to maintain a low profile. He had already lost friends, relatives, and colleagues in the bloody frenzy that surrounded the protests when more than 600 demonstrators were killed by security forces and armed groups. Now he wondered whether he could find any hope in a country that had dispensed with one of its sharpest minds in a seemingly endless cycle of violence.

El-Hashemi was “one of the finest, most principled men I have ever known, whose honesty and dedication struck fear in the hearts of Iraq’s masked, armed boogeymen,” Karim wrote. Driving to his house that night, blinking through tears at the sight of blood pooling beneath the driver’s window, something in him broke. “I lost my confidence in everything about life,” he says.

Karim leads a large WhatsApp group where journalists share tips and resources. It was where he first read, disbelievingly, of his friend’s death. Usually one of the most active voices in the chat, he fell silent, ignoring the steady stream of alerts each day.

In Iraq, many media outlets are owned by or aligned with political parties or factions that promote their backers’ agendas. Members of the chat come from across the country and span the political spectrum. He knew that some of them could have affiliations with the group that sent men on motorbikes to shoot his friend.

“There is very little neutral journalism in Iraq,” he says.

In recent years, this has begun to change as social media and AI create space for independent journalists to publish without party backing. During the Tishreen protests, social media became the primary source for real-time updates as local channels brushed over state violence towards protesters.

As a democratizing influence, Karim welcomes this shift, but he worries about the quality of future journalism. “People are not writing anymore…this will change us,” he says.

As someone whose life has been shaped by stories, he shudders at the thought of AI-generated reporting. Covering Iraq as a journalist for 23 years has been frightening, and at times traumatizing, but it also affords privileged access to people, places, and information that help him understand his country and the people in it.

Looking back, it has shown him another side to the nation so often portrayed as corrupt and violent by foreign media. One recent freelance job saw him escort British actor and TV presenter Michael Palin for the Into Iraq travel documentary. “We covered a lot of very good things about Iraq, that no one has been able to show—a lot of beautiful things in this country that need to be seen.”

Until recently, a tentative optimism had emerged in Iraq. Security conditions eased, and a period of peace paved the way for new developments in infrastructure, industry, and entrepreneurship. An article in The Economist last year called Baghdad “the world’s surprise Boomtown,” citing the influx of foreign investors reshaping the increasingly stable Iraqi capital.

A sense of possibility reminded Karim of the days after Saddam Hussein’s fall. Growing up under the strict censorship of the Ba’athist regime, he never dreamed of becoming a journalist. “We were completely isolated.” Then the dictator fell, and there was freedom in the chaos that followed. For a brief period, a different future emerged. It was enough to keep Karim in Iraq, while friends and colleagues moved abroad as the country unravelled.

Over the next two decades, that hope would dissipate, and he would consider leaving Iraq for good. He never did.

Now, after a brief period of stability, regional turmoil threatens to plunge the country back into conflict following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. “Every few years, we are back to wartime,” Karim said. “Iraq is not a very lucky country; even if it’s not our war, it still feels like it’s our war.”

Already, Iraq is at a boiling point. Its status as a proxy battleground between Washington and Tehran has seen it attacked from all sides as pro-Iran groups target US assets in Iraq, including the US embassy in Baghdad. The US has also carried out attacks against these groups in Iraq. Karim has watched this play out before and fears the worst. “I don’t think this war will end in a good way. Our airport is under fire, our oil companies are under fire, and I think when Israel and America finish with Iran, we will be next, unfortunately,” he added.

For more than two decades, Karim has reported on a country that repeatedly edges toward disaster and then pulls back again. As tensions rise once more across the region, he continues to watch the same patterns unfold, knowing that if Iraq is drawn into another conflict, he will be there to document it.

In the fall of 2023, Fatima sat alone in Doha’s airport terminal waiting for her flight to Boston when a sudden realization struck her. She looked around anxiously, questioning why she was there and what she was thinking when she boarded that flight to Qatar. The shy, subdued girl that she was, Fatima panicked and hoped that her next flight bound to America would somehow return her to Pakistan, where she had just left her weeping brother behind the airport gates a few hours ago.

Of course, she had reasons to be anxious about the journey ahead. Fatima Wojohat, now 23 years old and living in Franklin, Massachusetts, has lived a life where she has adopted a completely different identity based on a cultural gender construct that defined her for most of her life. Fatima, despite being born a girl, was raised to pretend to be a boy. This practice is known as Bacha Posh, in which a girl is dressed as a boy from an early age, usually for safety, pragmatic mobility, or economic reasons. Fatima’s teenage years were spent trapped in an identity that did not really belong to her. Was she really ready to embark on a journey to America, knowing she struggled to talk to strangers without hiding behind her mother?

In Afghanistan, a deeply entrenched patriarchal culture exists that is rarely acknowledged or discussed in wider literature. In a society where conservative values are widespread and access to education is limited, men have historically been entrusted with guarding family honor—often by exerting control over female relatives, who are frequently viewed as potential sources of shame rather than sources of pride. The arrival of a son is celebrated with gifts for the mother, while the birth of a daughter is seen as much more somber and, in some cases, unwelcome. In lower-income households, especially, mothers who bear only daughters may face mistreatment for their perceived failure to produce male heirs, boys who represent vital working hands for struggling families. In some cases, girls in these households are dressed and raised as boys until puberty.

Fatima was not just any Bacha Posh. Her family did not see girls as liabilities, nor did they suffer from poverty; there was more to it than just that. Born in Pakistan, Fatima returned to Kabul with her family at age 5. “My mom said to me that if I wanted freedom and security in this country, then I needed to cut my hair, adopt a male name (Safa), and become a boy,” she told me.

“I remember the first day of school with my younger brother, who is also my best friend. I asked him where I should sit. With the boys or the girls?” she recalled, “I didn’t know where I would fit.” Fatima’s brother asked her to sit with him because he was afraid the other kids would make fun of his sister if they knew she was a girl without long hair or a dress.

Usually, Bacha Posh starts at a very young age and ends after puberty. But in Fatima’s case, it lasted until she was 17. “My elder sister was also a Bacha Posh, but she stopped being one at a young age,” she said. When asked about why she didn’t stop being a Bacha Posh, Fatima replied: “I noticed that I had tremendous freedom and liberty in that country [living as a boy], so I continued with it until late in my teens.”

Fatima’s parents were both government workers who spent their days at their jobs and returned home at night to three daughters and a young son. During the day, her father worked as the minister’s photographer, and her mother was an administrative assistant at the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. They believed that by pretending their daughters were boys, they would feel more secure in a country plagued by severe abuses and injustices affecting children, especially young girls. Fatima said, “I was indeed mad for some time thinking that a good portion of my childhood was not spent with dolls and femininity, but on the other hand, as I grew older, I realized that we lived in a very wretched society, and it was for my own protection.”

Afghanistan has consistently been ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for women, often holding the very bottom spot in major international indexes. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index ranks Afghanistan last globally, and Georgetown University’s Women, Peace and Security Index has placed it at the bottom of 177 countries every year since 2021. The UN Women’s 2024 Afghanistan Gender Index revealed a shocking 76% gap between men and women in areas like health, education, financial inclusion, and decision-making—the second-largest gender gap worldwide. Afghan women currently access only 17% of their potential in opportunities and personal choices, compared to a global average of 60.7%. Nearly 80% of young women are completely excluded from education, employment, and training.

As she grew up, Fatima slowly realized she needed to become the agent of her own life and direct it as she wished. From a young age, she had a special gift for sketching faces and portraits. “My family and relatives would ask me to draw their portraits,” she told me, “I was not perfect, but I tried my best.” It was clearly an understatement from Fatima, because she would prove not only to her family and relatives that she is truly an artist, skilled and passionate, but also to her city as she won multiple provincial art competitions and was praised by state officials.

Fatima’s mother saw her daughter’s potential and decided to reach out to one of Afghanistan’s most influential and well-organized art collectives, Artlords. She secured a place for her daughter and boosted her social skills by having her join the group. At 17, Fatima was among the youngest members of Artlords, alongside university students and graduates. She described the first day as if “my mom was dropping me off at a day care, she even told them what time I should have my lunch,” showing her initial struggle to socialize after living all her life in a duality.

Fatima’s talent and skills quickly proved she was a valuable addition to the Artlords team. The collective is famous for its street murals across Kabul. Fatima’s first street art was a piece she created with her teammates outside Istiqlal High School, depicting Zalmai Khalilzad at the signing ceremony with Taliban officials in Doha during the 2020 peace agreement—an agreement that ultimately led to the return of the Taliban just a few months later, plunging Fatima and millions of Afghan girls into house arrest.

Fatima described her mother as brave, outgoing, kind, and a poet at heart. Her mother remembers all too well the first time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. One evening, while Fatima’s mom was visibly pregnant with her elder sister, she went to see her parents on the other side of the city. Of course, Fatima’s father had to accompany his wife. “My mom said Taxis would avoid couples at that time, fearing that they might not be in wedlock,” she said. “So my mom and dad decided to walk all the way to Khair Khana from our house in Share-e-now.” The journey was abruptly cut short when a Taliban truck pulled up next to them and immediately started questioning the couple separately. When asked to provide marriage certificates, the couple had nothing to show as the papers were at home. “They started beating my father with the Kalashnikov stock while they kicked my mother in her belly, hoping to terminate the pregnancy; they said this child is a bastard.”

In August 2021, as the Taliban rolled into the streets of Kabul again, Fatima’s mom rushed home, remembering the first regime and thinking about the future of her children. Fatima’s mom cried to her father, “Last time they wanted to kill our daughter, this time they will take them away.” Her mom refused to work at the ministry anymore.

Fatima turned to art once again to avoid the depressive cycle of waking up and going to sleep in the confinement of their own home. “Life became dull,” she described the first weeks of Taliban rule while adding, “My biggest dream was to attend the American University of Afghanistan, study political science, and secure a job as a diplomat with the foreign ministry.” Fatima’s art was always personal to her, and she was hoping to keep it that way.

After witnessing the Taliban’s brutality and their oppression of women in Afghanistan, Fatima decided to push back and resist, starting with the Taliban’s supreme leader. “I learned how to do digital art on my phone and started drawing with my fingertips,” she added, “I used to publish on Instagram, and then delete everything and turn off my location because I would get death threats from the Taliban telling me that they are going to find me.” For 3 years under Taliban rule, Fatima courageously drew, sketched, and painted the Taliban’s supreme leader, their draconian laws, abuses, and human rights violations in the context of caricatures and political art. She grew her Instagram following from a few supporters to thousands, even attracting the attention of diaspora media such as Afghanistan International.

“We did not feel safe after 3 years in the country because our own family and relatives would tell me to stop my work,” she said. “I honestly did not care if I was caught, but I did not want my family, who are innocent, to be persecuted because of me.” At that point, the family had received confirmation numbers for their humanitarian parole applications to the United States—a program that allowed vulnerable Afghans to request temporary entry but has since been halted by the new American administration. Believing they might soon be able to leave, they sold all their belongings and moved to Pakistan.

The family endured economic hardship in Pakistan, where everything is twice as expensive for Afghan immigrants, and where the Pakistani landlords constantly ask Afghan families to marry their daughters. “The owners of the houses would ask us to be married to him if we wanted to live in their building,” she recalled. But Fatima did not lose hope. A few months later, the director of Scholars at Risk asked Fatima to apply to Dean College. She did, and a few weeks after, she found herself on the doorstep of the American embassy in Islamabad, waiting in line to acquire her student visa.

“I never stopped working even while in Pakistan,” she recalls, “I was told at the time that the Pakistani police have a connection with the Taliban, but I still worked and posted my art online.”

In September 2023, Fatima left her family behind to seek a better future in the United States. The girl who had once lived as a boy named Safa, caught between the freedoms and contradictions of the Bacha Posh tradition, suddenly found herself alone. At the same time, her family waited another year before they could meet again, this time in California. Fatima is in her 3rd year of studies at Dean College, where they formed a new art department just to accommodate her, instruct her, and save her life. They requested that Professor Amy Adams, whom Fatima has spoken highly of, take on the challenge of elevating an already gifted young artist from Afghanistan who stood against the Taliban’s supreme leader.

Fatima held her first exhibition at the Franklin Public Library—America’s first public library, founded through a donation by Benjamin Franklin, who believed deeply in the power of knowledge and education for democracy. For Fatima, an Afghan artist who had defied the Taliban through her work, the exhibition was a powerful moment. Three months later, she held another show, displaying more than 50 original pieces.

She was quick to point out one thing, however: Her artwork is not for sale. “The artwork that I create is for me personally; they have extreme meaning to me and are of importance,” said Fatima while adding, “If people want me to paint for them, they just have to ask; I don’t want my paintings to be sold because they are precious to me.”

Fatima’s story reflects the complex reality many Afghan women currently face. Living as a boy gave her a glimpse of the freedom and independence typically reserved for men in Afghanistan’s deeply patriarchal society. Yet despite the barriers placed before them, Afghan women have repeatedly shown their determination to resist a system that seeks to strip them of their agency.

Fatima used her art to challenge the Taliban and their oppressive ideology, a choice that ultimately forced her to flee her country. Now in exile, she continues that fight from afar through work that confronts dominant narratives about Afghanistan and amplifies the voices of Afghan women. Her story reflects the breathtaking tenacity of thousands of Afghan girls navigating a society shaped by restrictions many around the world can scarcely imagine. This International Women’s Week is a reminder that true gender equality remains out of reach while regimes like the Taliban continue to deny women their fundamental rights.

“What It’s Like To Be” takes readers inside the lives of people working in remarkable and often demanding professions across the Middle East. Each installment offers an intimate look at the realities shaping their daily world. Look for WILTB in your inbox every Sunday.

When Ranja Ali left school aged 17, freelancing was tantamount to unemployment in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). At best, “people thought it meant volunteering,” says Ali, 25. As a freelance filmmaker in the southern Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, he was familiar with the obstacles this mindset presented, particularly when it came to raising funds for his film projects.

After shooting movies on shoestring budgets despite winning awards for his work, he decided to press pause on his passion for filmmaking and focus on improving the working environment for young people in Kurdistan. “People say, ‘Why don’t you go abroad?’ but I don’t want to leave. I want to give other people a reason to stay and invest their skills in developing Kurdistan,” he says.

His start-up, Wedonet, set out to create a market for freelancers and provide Kurdish and Iraqi talent with a platform to craft fulfilling careers on their own terms. Launched in 2022 with a handful of subscribers from Ali’s personal network, it has grown into a national platform that connects local and international clients to a pool of 400 self-employed people.

In three years, “We have changed the culture around freelancing, and the life stories of many people,” says Ali.

Unemployment among young people has reached critical levels in the KRI, with over one-third of young job-seekers unable to find work. The situation is reflected across Iraq, which has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the region.

Scarce opportunities in the country’s underdeveloped private sector and a bloated public sector have led to despair among young graduates who struggle to secure employment.

In 2019, frustration boiled over when a group of students began protesting outside the Prime Minister’s office. They were met with heavy repression from security forces, triggering Iraq’s Tishreen Movement, which became the largest social movement since 2003 and forced the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

Ali was 19 at the time, struggling to make ends meet as a filmmaker. Having left school early because he found the Kurdish education system outdated and “boring”, Ali was looking for opportunities to pursue his passion for film.

Sulaymaniyah is considered the cultural capital of Kurdistan and a hub for artists, writers, and other creatives, but entry-level jobs in his industry were nonexistent. So Ali badgered his family to buy his first camera and learned through YouTube videos before volunteering on film projects and offering his services for free.

Gradually, he built up his technical skill and was rewarded with recognition when his short film Stowe Vermon won Best Experimental International Short Film at the Scout Film Festival in Boston, USA. The barriers he confronted at home suddenly seemed surmountable. “It was motivating to realize that someone, somewhere, was appreciating my movie.”

Ali spent just $75, working with a team of 10 volunteers to make his short film A Piece of Land, which maps the experience of a man from Rojava displaced by ISIS. Ali wanted to evoke sympathy for the plight of refugees amid a hardening of attitudes as the war dragged on. “I couldn’t fight like the Peshmerga, I wasn’t a doctor, but I realized that with my movies I could help by evoking emotional support,” he says.

Many of his contemporaries, though, were less fortunate. Other people his age bemoaned the lack of opportunities to cultivate creative talents in a country where jobs were already scarce for young people. Many, like Ali’s friend Mohammed, resorted to working long hours in poorly paid jobs.

A talented photographer, Mohammed was working as a motorbike delivery driver when Ali set up Wedonet. As word of the platform spread, he contacted Ali to ask about photography work. “I pushed him to create a portfolio, and in less than a month, he secured a long-term project in a government office in Erbil. Now he is one of the top-five videographers in Kurdistan,” Ali says.

The success stories quickly built up. One freelancer on the platform fulfilled their desire to travel with a three-month commission in Thailand, while a young student was able to give up long hours as a cook and pay her student fees by establishing one of the leading content creation companies in Kurdistan.

“Wedonet is not just a business. It is changing people’s lives, including mine,” Ali says.

His first trip abroad to Poland for a film festival crystallized this vision. Meeting people from all over the world in Poland reinforced his belief that creatives make their own opportunities. “I suddenly saw what was possible.” Returning to Kurdistan, he enrolled in several accelerator and incubator programs to hone his business skills before founding Wedonet in 2022.

There were barriers—launching a start-up in the KRI is not easy, and Ali’s platform challenged the traditional work culture in Kurdistan. But it also identified a glaring market gap for a reliable portal that connects young talent with work opportunities at home and abroad. “I made clients trust freelancers,” he says.

In three years, the company has delivered more than 260 projects, including filming a recent documentary for Al Jazeera and providing media for the Board of Investment (BIP) Summit in 2025. It has quickly become the leading freelance platform in the KRI, Ali says, managing projects for clients with diverse skill sets ranging from video and photo production, content creation and direction, to sales, marketing, and app development.

Ali can do many of the jobs that come in himself, but he outsources everything to others. “I want to focus on growing the business,” he says.

Eventually, he hopes to return to filmmaking and use the proceeds from Wedonet to fund features that showcase Kurdish culture. But for now, all profit goes back into the business, which is transforming the landscape for freelancers in Kurdistan and Iraq. “Even if you live in a village, you can work,” Ali says. “We’re giving talented people a reason to stay in Kurdistan.”

When Meridel Rubenstein’s neighbor drained the marshes around her family farm in Vermont nearly 20 years ago, she could not have known it would trigger an idea that would eventually lead the American artist to the arid wetlands of southern Iraq.

It was September 2006, and Rubenstein awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of howling coyotes circling the newly destroyed wetland and beaver pond. For some time, her neighbor had been claiming that these marshes were encroaching on her land, so she had just taken it upon herself to drain them and breach the dykes. (Engineered, linear embankments of earth, rock, or other materials designed to hold back tidal waters or river flows, protecting the land behind them from flooding.)

Rubenstein was devastated. To her, the “wild grasses, beaver, geese, ducks, heron, bass, turtles, frogs, otters, and muskrats had made this area a paradise,” she wrote in her 2017 book Eden Turned on Its Side. It was a place where her friend, Dickie, made his daily jaunts to feed the birds and “watch the evolution of this swamp into an oasis.”

But no more. By draining the wetlands, the actions of Rubenstein’s neighbor sent acres of muddy water, sediment, and alien bass into the town’s main (trout) stream and water supply.

A few years later, she saw a startling parallel on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, which was telling the story of the vast drained Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq. Just as her neighbor had altered Vermont’s landscape for personal gain, Saddam Hussein’s actions were reminiscent of this small-scale, localized devastation, but on a geopolitical scale.

In the 1990s, the Iraqi dictator deliberately drained the Ahwar, the ancient Mesopotamian marshes in his country, to punish Shi’a rebels hiding there.

The Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq, a vast wetland system between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are considered by many to be the location of the biblical Garden of Eden and a, if not the, cradle of civilization.

For thousands of years, the Marsh Arabs, or Maʻdān, had hitherto relied on its waters for fishing, hunting, and building their iconic reed homes. When Saddam’s forces diverted the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates, burned reed beds, and poisoned lagoons, the ecosystem was devastated. Thousands of Marsh Arabs were killed, and many more forced to flee. By the early 2000s, only 20 percent of the marshes remained.

After the 2003 US-led invasion, attempts to reflood the marshes regenerated about 30–40 percent of the original wetland area. Yet today, the Ahwar face a second, slower crisis: climate change and upstream dam construction in Iran and Turkey. Reduced rainfall, higher temperatures, and rising salinity threaten both human and ecological survival. The UN Environment Programme ranks Iraq as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to decreasing water and food availability and extreme temperatures.

Nature Iraq, the country’s first and only environmental NGO, was attempting to restore the marshes, but needed some help.

Enter Rubenstein. In 2011, she was teaching at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore when she learned about the initiative. So when she received a grant of $65,000, she used it to assemble a multidisciplinary team: Jassim Al-Asadi, managing director of Nature Iraq; engineers David Tocchetto and Mark Nelson; and Iraqi-Dutch project manager Zahra Souhail.

Together, they launched Eden in Iraq, a project that combines wastewater garden technology with ecological knowledge to regenerate the area. Once completed, the 6.4-acre site in Al-Chibayish, a town on the Euphrates River, will serve up to 10,000 residents.

Getting a visa to Iraq back then was a mission. “On the day we arrived in Baghdad, Osama bin Laden [founder of al-Qaeda] had been killed!” she laughs, as she recalls the events of May 2011. Her colleague advised that they hide their Jewish identities “just in case.”

However, all their fears dissipated once they headed into the marshes.

“Once you get in the boats, you’re hooked forever,” says Rubenstein. “All these canals, tall reeds, and pomegranates.”

But in many places, the water gave way to bare, cracked earth. There were other things that gave Rubenstein cause for concern. The rapid return of residents in the 2000s led to serious health problems, as many areas lacked a proper sewage system.

“The town councils said there was no sewage collection, just rubber pipes dumping sewage into the Euphrates, then into the marshes. There are no septic tanks.”

Waterborne diseases such as bacterial diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever are common due to high levels of pollution from solid waste, including household and industrial waste.

To solve this issue, Eden in Iraq uses a “subsurface flow wetland” to transform wastewater. Bacteria break down organic material into minerals, which both purify the water and fertilize plants and fruit trees. “The reeds are ‘eating’ the sewage - they’re the kidney of the land!” Rubenstein explains. “It’s basically a natural, sewage ecosystem.”

Wastewater gardens are a proven technology, first developed in the Biosphere 2 project in the early 1990s and now implemented in over 200 locations worldwide.

This can be replicated all over the Middle East, says Rubenstein.

To pay homage to the area and its traditions, the garden design draws deeply from Marsh Arab culture: reed architecture, earthen brick, and patterns inspired by Sumerian cylinder seals and embroidered Mesopotamian wedding blankets.

At the entrance will be a brightly colored panel featuring Inana, the Sumerian goddess of love and war.

“I’m all about peace building and communities,” says Rubenstein. “My belief is that beauty can change things.”

Phase one, completed in 2023, involved constructing perimeter walls, laying pipes, and planting the first reeds, which now reduce odor and clean around half of the wastewater. Phase two, yet to be started, will add an underground pipe network and additional plantings.

The garden will not just serve as a functional wastewater treatment system, but as a “symbol of hope,” says Rubenstein. “In a land devastated by conflict and climate change, we wanted to create something that renews life and honors history.”

The project has already received recognition: in 2020, UNESCO listed Eden in Iraq as one of its outstanding Global Green Citizen projects. Beyond cleaning water, the garden reconnects people to the marshlands they call home and preserves techniques and designs that stretch back 3,000–5,000 years.

Yet challenges remain. The team still needs just shy of $3 million to complete the garden and ensure long-term maintenance. The Iraqi bureaucracy has delayed the release of the $2 million in funding once promised by a former minister.

Then there’s the destabilizing role of neighboring Iran, which has led to some setbacks. “The state thinks any environmental work is being funded by Israel,” says Rubenstein. “You have local militias who are funded by Iran. Jassim [of Nature Iraq] was kidnapped for a brief period in 2023.”

Rubenstein last visited in 2022. The October 7 attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza have made it difficult to return.

“You might wonder why I’d stick with this after all these years,” says the 77-year-old, predicting my next question. “I have the world’s greatest team; they won’t give up, and neither will I. I believe art can transform poison into nectar.”

Rubenstein and her team certainly have their work cut out for them.

Nevertheless, Eden in Iraq represents a model of what is possible when art and science intersect to restore both ecosystems and human dignity.

Through Meridel Rubenstein’s vision, the Ahwar may once again flourish, not just as a marshland, but as a living testament to the enduring spirit of the Marsh Arabs.

“What It’s Like To Be” takes readers inside the lives of people working in remarkable and often demanding professions across the Middle East. Each installment offers an intimate look at the realities shaping their daily world. Look for WILTB in your inbox every Sunday.

Pounding music filled the room in Riyadh, where people were partying hard. It was the first time Maher Harb had seen this side of the city, and it unnerved him. Watching this hidden hedonism unfold, he felt a powerful urge to escape.

He got in his car and drove. The world began to spin as he lost control, his body turning, again and again. Somehow, he survived with only a scratch, but the crash was a wake-up call. “The policeman let me off too; it was really strange. I took it as a sign,” he says.

Months later, breathless and sweating, he heaved his bike over the rugged terrain of St. James Way in Spain. The historic pilgrimage trails gave him space to think. It was steep and hard, but that was the point. “I had all the answers I needed,” he recalls.

It was time to go home. Harb quit his job as a telecom consultant in Saudi Arabia and embarked on a new career as a winemaker. He knew nothing about running a vineyard, only that this was how he would honor his father and their land.

Would he recommend it? Harb, now 43, has spent years building a lifestyle many dream of—immersion in nature, rolling views, and rustic cooking—sustained by a homegrown business that feeds his soul. It’s everything he imagined, but not everyone finds what they are looking for. “Whether it’s a vineyard or an office, you eventually go back to facing the same problems,” he says.

Flexible work arrangements and the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated a counter-urbanization trend in countries around the world. Drained by digital overload and frantic schedules, people are seeking rural lifestyles in pursuit of a slower pace. But reality doesn’t always live up to the Pinterest board expectations.

“It doesn’t work if you’re not ready,” says Harb, who credits perseverance for his success. “You need to have faith in what you are doing and truly believe this is what you want in your life.”

In 2014, he traveled extensively, earning an OIV Master in wine management in France and developing his philosophy as he went. “There’s a lot of pretension around wine. In my mind, wine is rural, linked to nature, and accessible to everyone,” Harb says.

When he wasn’t traveling, he was back in Nehla, the tiny mountain village in north Lebanon where his father had left him a parcel of land. In 2012, when he began work, it hardly resembled a vineyard. Trees and bushes covered the ground, and the terraces had almost disappeared.

But he had overcome challenges before. Harnessing the ancient agricultural practices of the village, he brought balance back to the land.

The natural rhythms took him back to his childhood in these hills, where villagers discussed the phases of the moon in relation to planting cycles. Their gentle cultivation methods were in keeping with the principles of biodynamic farming, which uses organic practices guided by philosophy and cosmology.

Harb had learned about biodynamic farming on his travels and knew the movement was gaining momentum worldwide. Mounting demand for sustainable wine was fuelling interest in organic varieties, and Harb saw the potential to infuse contemporary viticulture with traditional methods that honor the origins of Lebanese wine.

In 2017, he launched Lebanon’s first biodynamic winery, focusing on indigenous grape varieties that offered a true taste of Lebanese terroir (land, soil, climate). This holistic approach, which views the vineyard as an ecosystem and farming as symbiotic with the land, proved a path to self-discovery.

“It’s an honest expression of the terroir, in complete harmony with the place and the human work,” he said.

Harb named his winery Sept, guided by a spiritual belief in the significance of the number 7 and the forces that drew him back to Lebanon. He had been abroad for 17 years, trying to escape the trauma of growing up during the war.

Harb was 17 when he left for France. He “couldn’t bear being in Lebanon anymore.” Ten years earlier, his father was killed while trying to save his brothers in the final battle of the Lebanese civil war. “He was hit by a bomb and died a week later in hospital. I have spent all my life trying to heal those scars,” he says.

Living abroad, he could block out the past, but whenever he returned home, he felt a powerful draw. “I needed to find a lifestyle that would put me at ease with the memory of dad; all my thinking took me back to the village, where he built our house,” he says.

To the outsider, it’s easy to see why he loves this place. The scenery grows more beautiful as the road curves upwards, winding through mountain villages surrounded by vineyards and wild flowers.

Sept today is an established name on the Lebanese wine scene with an award-winning Merweh that celebrates one of the country’s ancient grapes. Harb only works with Lebanese varieties. “I want to show the value of our heritage. This is wine from our land, not an imported Chardonnay or Merlot.”

In a country that has become synonymous with conflict and crisis, he is helping to revive the national image, reminding people that “we should be proud of what we have in Lebanon and take back what is ours.”

Navigating the challenges of recent years has forced him to build a business that’s resilient, though he doesn’t welcome that word. Like many Lebanese who have endured the impact of economic collapse, COVID-19, the Beirut Port blast, and now the conflict with Israel, he is tired of being patted on the back. “Stop saying we are resilient. Let’s change something so we avoid these challenges in the first place,” he says.

It hasn’t all been uphill. The best year, by far, was 2023. Sept had a reputation for food as well as wine, and word had spread about the farm-to-table culinary experiences Harb and his wife, Krystal, created.

Marriage was barely featured on Harb’s agenda before Sept. He saw it as a solo project. But when a journalist visited in 2016 to interview the rising star on Lebanon’s wine scene, the connection was immediate.

Together, the couple has created a seven-phase farm-to-table menu anchored in authentic village cuisine. As with wine, Harb’s food is about relishing what is truly Lebanese. “I think Lebanese food has been locked in this international presentation all over the world, and it didn’t really evolve,” he says.

These days, the business consumes most of his time. With a growing staff, what preoccupies him most is being a good employer. When the pandemic crisis prompted salary cuts and job losses across Lebanon, Harb responded by giving his team a raise and believes he has reaped the rewards. “Instead of trying to optimize my margins, I invested in this beautiful team that trusts me,” he says.

In 2023, when business was booming, he created a company in France to sell Sept wines to their expanding European market. “I had a feeling things might not keep going in the same direction,” he says. When war broke out in 2024, this safety net offset the dip in Lebanese sales.

Yet even in difficult times, people still come to Sept. Harb. It has built a dome with a roaring log fire so it can host visitors year-round. It’s not enough that he has created his own idyll; he wants others to share in it, too. But he is frank about the everyday stresses that accompany this way of life. “Today I am proud and happy, not because I live in a vineyard, but because I overcame the obstacles and I love what I do.”

His favorite time of year is harvest, when he casts everything aside—including, on occasion, his clothes—and connects with the natural world. It’s a personal, powerful moment of gentle harmony, when the balance he has restored in the land nourishes his spirit. But there is only so long he can stay still. There are many things that make Harb happy, and he has relinquished the idea of a single end goal. “I realize today life is not a destination. It’s about finding that alignment, with yourself and the things you love the most.”

Middle East Uncovered uses pseudonyms to protect our sources in Iran.

The first thing Kazem told me was that no one believed the regime would use live ammunition against unarmed civilians.

“We thought it would be tear gas,” he said. “Maybe rubber bullets. That’s what everyone prepared for.”

Kazem had never protested before January 8. He and his wife were not activists nor part of an organized movement. Like many middle-class Iranians, they were getting by materially, working, planning home renovations, living within the narrow space the Islamic Republic allows people who keep their heads down.

That changed after the Twelve-Day War in mid-2025, when Israel struck Iranian targets, and the regime claimed victory despite visible military humiliation. Something shifted in the country afterward—people were beginning to see cracks in the regime’s facade. It felt like a window of opportunity to fight for something better might be opening. To Kazem and to many others, the Islamic Republic emerged from those twelve days exposed and diminished.

“After June 2025, many women stopped wearing their hijab,” Kazem told me. “Many women stopped covering their hair at all… including my wife.” One reason, he said, was technical. “Their surveillance cameras stopped working.” Another was psychological. “They lost a lot of power. They didn’t feel as scary anymore.”

When Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince, called on Iranians to march on January 8 and 9 (the Iranian weekend), Kazem heard something different from past appeals. This time, people around him were actively preparing to make their voices heard.

“Everyone was talking about it,” he said. “Neighbors. Family. Friends. People were saying, If we don’t go out this time, then we shouldn’t complain anymore.”

So they prepared for what they believed the regime would do. During the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the regime notoriously fired rubber bullets at protestors, often injuring or blinding those who were hit. That was the level of force Kazem and his wife were expecting.

So they bought workshop goggles to protect their eyes, layered their clothes to blunt the impact of pellet rounds, and watched videos on how to neutralize tear gas. They left their phones at home so they couldn’t be tracked. They were preparing for brutality, yes—but not for war. War implies two armed sides.

“We started watching tutorials on how to protect yourself in a protest,” he says. “If you get tear gas, what you should do… Don’t take your phone; leave your phone at home. We learned about the precautions. We asked ChatGPT. No one in their darkest mind thought they would bring machine guns onto the streets,” Kazem said.

What he would go on to describe to me was nothing short of a blood bath. An unchecked, brazen, brutal assault on the citizenry by the very forces supposedly charged with protecting them.

On January 8, Kazem went out with his wife to protest. Every kilometer or so, they would set a new meeting point in case they were separated.

“We were holding hands,” he said. “We couldn’t afford to lose each other.”

Kazem describes what protesters were trying to do in those early moments: disable cameras, silence propaganda, target symbols of state control. “We were part of the crowd that went for the TV… state TV complex,” he says. “People thought, let’s silence this regime. Let’s stop their propaganda. That way, they can’t lie and call us terrorists.”

They were, he emphasizes, “empty-handed. No guns, nothing.”

And then the regime arrived. What followed went beyond crowd control. The regime agents seemed to have been given orders to shoot to kill. He tells me about the trucks first—Toyota pickups with mounted machine guns. He saw them close enough to measure the distance in meters.

“I was 15 to 20 meters away from one of the trucks when he shot warning shots,” he says. “And the bullets are so powerful that they lit up the sky. They’re like fireworks, basically.”

In Rasht, a northern city where one of the deadliest massacres unfolded, witnesses told The Guardian they saw Toyota Hilux vehicles with machine guns move into the crowd, and that security forces fired on people fleeing burning streets.

Kazem’s account confirms that. They were being hunted.

“Why are they still shooting?” he remembers thinking on the second night. “We’re clearly running away.”

He tells me about a friend in Isfahan who ran with six others into alleyways as shots rang out. A motorbike with two men followed them—one driving, the other holding a gun. They turned. The bike turned. They ran again. The bike followed again. They hit a dead end and scattered behind whatever cover they could find.

And then the gunman fired into the alley and left.

The next morning, Kazem says, his friend went back and found a bullet embedded in the brick, and a spent casing on the ground. He kept it and made it into a necklace.

“He says, ‘I’m a dead man walking,’” Kazem tells me. “‘Here’s the casing of the bullet that was going to kill me.’”

Kazem tries to explain the feeling that haunted him most: that the shooters seemed incentivized, as if murder were a quota to be filled.

“It’s like someone says, ‘You know that man? If you shoot him, I’ll give you a million dollars,’” he says. “Or the more men you kill… I give you money. I can’t prove this, but it’s how it felt.”

He also described something more chilling than money: devotion.

“There are reports of them being foreigners, not even Iranian people,” he said—men he believes may have been recruited from militia networks supported by Tehran across the region. “So they are devoted to Khamenei himself,” he said. “They see him as the living imam of Shias.”

And then he added something that corroborates our reporting last week about regime agents “finishing” wounded protestors: “And you know about the reports that they walk amongst the injured… and give them a last bullet.”

Kazem tells me one story he did not witness directly, but that came from someone he trusts—his uncle, who went to see what remained after a machine gun was used in a small town in Isfahan province.

An individual on a motorbike, Kazem says, threw a Molotov cocktail toward one of the regime’s trucks and fled the scene. The soldiers, enraged, turned their heavy weaponry on the crowd.

“They pointed the machine gun at people and fired,” he says. “One bullet could pass through three people easily.” He described the guns as anti-aircraft weapons designed to bring down planes—being fired at people.

When the chaos subsided, the regime started scrubbing the evidence.

“They took the bodies away,” he says. “Cleared the evidence. They even washed the street. They washed the blood away.”

In the morning, his uncle went to the area and noticed that the once blood-red pavement was wet and clean.

“So it’s very clear that they washed the street,” Kazem says. “And my uncle saw parts of human bodies in the canal,” Kazem says, his voice tightening. “They were washed away from the street as if they were cockroaches.”

In Rasht, witnesses similarly described bodies being removed by dawn, with families later resorting to secret burials or struggling to retrieve remains due to fear of extortion. ABC News reported that internet and telephone access across Iran was cut on January 8, creating the longest digital blackout in the country’s history, with NetBlocks reporting outages lasting more than 400 hours. It still hasn’t been fully restored.

Kazem describes what that meant on the ground: isolation, rumor, and the sense that each neighborhood was being crushed one by one.

“With the internet shut down… people quickly figured out how to speak in code,” he says.

He and his wife ultimately left not only because they feared what might happen next (regime officers reportedly came to arrest participants after the fact, with many disappearing without any information about their whereabouts being shared with their families), but because they needed to keep working and required the internet to do so. And yet, Kazem tells me, the hardest part of leaving wasn’t distance from home.

“The hardest part is now we have access to the internet, and we can see there’s so little support,” he says. “There’s a huge lack of support for the massacre that happened in Iran. The same people who come out on the street and support people of Gaza… where are they?” he asks. “We’re human too.”

He isn’t asking for ideological conformity, but the lack of moral consistency enrages him.

“My countrymen didn’t die in a war,” he says. “Most people died defenseless on the streets where they grew up… at the hands of the armed forces that are meant to protect them.”

“I think I speak for a lot of Iranian people when I say… we just want revenge now with this regime,” he says. “We want them gone, but we also want revenge.”

He is careful to clarify that he doesn’t mean chaos or civil war, or weapons flooding the country. He doesn’t want to see what happened in Syria and Libya happen in Iran. He believes Iran is more cohesive than outsiders assume.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a civil war in Iran,” he says. “One, people don’t have guns. If we had guns, we would have fought back… Two, we don’t have anything against each other. Iran is the country of peace and love, trust me. Iran is the country of poetry. It’s not the country that supports terrorism. We’re not. And we are just so sick and tired of being called the number one terrorist supporter of the region.”

What he wants—what he believes many want—is targeted pressure against the regime’s repressive machine.

Then he says something that, to me, feels like quite the opposite of revenge.

“The love that exists among people in Iran is what holds this nation together,” he says. “What’s holding us… helping us to get through these hard times.”

Sanctions, he argues, crush ordinary people more than they restrain the regime. He lists the small humiliations outsiders don’t think about: the medication you can’t find, the cheap, unsafe cars you’re forced to drive, the impossibility of ordinary modern conveniences.

“There are things that are day-to-day ordinary things for you,” he says, “that’s a dream for an Iranian person.”

And still, he wants to go back.

“I feel like abandoning the ship is not what a good man should do,” he says. “We should stay… spread the love… enjoy the love that we give to each other.”

It is a beautiful sentiment, and also a tragic one, because it comes from someone who had to run for his life.

At one point earlier, Kazem compared the world’s silence now to Europe watching Hitler rise—an analogy that may sound extreme until you consider what it would feel like to be inside a country where the state is firing machine guns into crowds, washing blood from streets, arresting suspected dissenters indiscriminately, and turning off the internet to prevent images and testimony from leaving the country.

“We haven’t learned our lesson from history,” he tells me.

Maybe he’s right.

Or maybe the lesson is simpler, and more damning: that the world always learns—just too late, and at innocent people’s expense.

In the days since January 8th and 9th, the outlines of what happened have begun to emerge through satellite channels, leaked footage, phone calls on landlines, testimonies from people like Kazem who escaped, and the work of human rights groups trying to count the dead in the middle of a state blackout. In the coming days and weeks, we will continue to learn more about what really happened.

For now, Kazem is alive. He is safe. And he is speaking out. And he is doing it with the same dogged determination that has carried Iranians through decades of living under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. He believes that if enough people tell the truth, the truth will eventually become harder to kill than the people who bear the burden of having had to carry it.

And maybe one day, Iran will truly be free.