The Lede

“Somalia has been in one form of civil war or another for about 30 years,” James Barnett tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin on the first episode of The Lede’s fourth season. “You have this dynamic where the government in Mogadishu doesn't have much direct power or presence in most of the rest of the country.”   The result, explains Barnett, who traveled there in June to report for New Lines, is that large swaths of the country are actually controlled by local independent and autonomous governments that don’t always dance to the beat of Mogadishu’s drum. “Even though there's a veneer of statehood or state authority, a lot of it is essentially clan politics — elders or clan leaders that are building up their own institutions,” he says. Perhaps the most successful has been the Republic of Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991, though it has not achieved U.N. recognition.   With its own legal system, legislature and national anthem, Somaliland has often been hailed as a success story for its multi-party democracy and relatively stable administration. Yet in the border city of Las Anod, captured from the autonomous government of neighboring Puntland in 2007, the Somaliland independence movement now faces an independence movement of its own: the SSC, a militia group formed by the Dhulbahante clan and its allies.     Barnett spoke to dozens of SSC fighters determined to establish their own autonomous state in what they consider to be their ancestral lands.    “Their main goal right now is to break away these lands from Somaliland,” Barnett says. “Then they want to become a federal member state, similar to the status that Puntland has.”   Since the fighting started at the beginning of the year, the two sides were at a stalemate. But on Aug. 25, “the entire battlefield situation changed really overnight.” A shock SSC offensive drove the Somaliland Armed Forces out of Las Anod. “SSC activists are declaring August 25 victory day,” Barnett says. “Even some of them were surprised that it had happened so quickly.”   The consequences may spread far beyond the borders of Somaliland or the SSC’s nascent Dhulbahante state. 

Noor Ghazi was 13 years old when the U.S. and its allies declared war on Iraq.    “We gathered at my grandparents; house, because it was far away from any strategic location that might be targeted by the coalition,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, who also lived through the war. “I was listening to the clock ticking. It sounded very slow, like it was just dragging itself out to stop this war from happening.”   But her family couldn’t avoid the presence of the foreign troops forever. At first it wasn’t so bad — Ghazi recalls soldiers handing out food and toys to neighborhood children. Yet things soon changed as the occupiers fought to quell the mounting resistance. When a passing American convoy was attacked, her best friend, Raghad, was killed in front of her in the ensuing shootout. “They just randomly opened fire, and she fell on the ground, and she died instantly.”    The Americans recorded her death as “collateral damage.”    “For me, it hurts,” Ghazi remembers. “Knowing that she was just buried as a statistic. As a number.”   As the violence intensified, many Iraqis made the painful choice to flee the country. After her father’s cousin was tortured to death by sectarian militants, Ghazi’s own family eventually came to the same decision. “I cried, and I said, ‘But you said we will never go on to leave,’” she recalls. “We came to the United States, and I was in a state of denial. … How do I live in America now? This country who invaded us?”   Today, she still lives in the U.S. She has visited Iraq, but after nearly two decades of war, she no longer recognizes it as the home she left behind. “So I decided that my heart is in Iraq,” she says. “But I'm still living here today, because I want to offer my little girl a better life.”   “I don't want her to suffer or be through what we have all been through.”   Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy 

“I said, ‘I'm showing these images to you for a reason,’” recalls Erika López Prater, a former adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I wanted to demonstrate the rich variety of art-making within Islamic traditions.”   The images in question were medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. At the time it was produced, the art was intended to be celebratory. However, due to shifting religious practices, many Muslims have come to consider such depictions of the prophet to be forbidden or offensive. López Prater says that she tried to be mindful of these sensitivities and warned students before displaying them. But after a complaint was lodged with the administration, university officials turned on her and her contract was subsequently canceled.   After Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay in New Lines condemning the university’s actions, López Prater’s story became a national controversy. In this podcast with New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass, they discuss the rich variety of artistic traditions within Islam and unpack the complicated web of factors behind the current controversy.    “These anxieties around images of the Prophet Muhammad started to really emerge over the course of the 20th century,” Gruber says. Attitudes among Muslims have varied widely across time and place, and aniconic beliefs were far from universal historically. She traces modern concerns back to very recent origins — to controversies over disrespectful cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in France and the Jyllands Post in Denmark. Such depictions should not be conflated with the depictions found in Islamic art, she argues: “The intent behind those cartoons was to shock. And of course it overlapped with xenophobia.”   But another big part of the problem, López Prater says, comes from the increased marketization of higher education in recent years. “Colleges and universities have adopted a customer-service model,” she explains. “They’ve slashed tenure track positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor. Meanwhile, that is accompanied by administrative bloat.” That trend, she suggests, has encouraged institutions to prioritize financial and reputational concerns over academic enquiry and enabled officials to treat academic staff as disposable.    “There is this hugely tragic irony that the administration was trying to sweep this issue under the rug through the quick dismissal of an adjunct professor,” she adds. “And instead have been having to reckon with a long history of racist and Islamophobic events on their college campus and within the Twin Cities and within our country.”

“We want better. Reform our institutions.”  Those were the words on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s placard when she was arrested in July 2020 for a peaceful protest against Zimbabwe’s government. Recently she was convicted on a charge of inciting public violence for that act. And yet, the award-winning novelist, playwright, poet and filmmaker— named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women of 2022 by the Financial Times — hesitates to label herself as an activist. “I do not call myself an activist, but I call myself somebody who believes in citizen engagement as a responsible citizen of the country,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “I think that is an idea that they simply do not want to prevail in Zimbabwe. They cannot afford to have increasing numbers of Zimbabweans thinking of themselves as responsible citizens who need to be engaged.” Dangarembga is referring to what she calls Zimbabwe’s current military dictatorship, which came to power after November 2017, when Robert Mugabe was removed and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa as president and party leader of ZANU-PF. While Dangarembga is resolute in her view of those events, she recognizes that not all Zimbabweans share her interpretation. To her, this signals the skill with which the military manipulated the narrative, getting people out into the streets to celebrate the coup. “Zimbabweans will debate anything from here to heaven,” she contends. “They were able to pretend it was not a coup. But what happened was a coup.” While she recognizes that the economic situation in Zimbabwe is dire—and much worse now than during Mugabe’s time—she argues that this is not due to mismanagement, as some might suggest. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to force Zimbabweans to rely on the ZANU-PF for basic survival resources. So why haven’t the Zimbabweans revolted? It has nothing to do with weakness, says Dangaremba. “Zimbabweans are afraid that if they go against the government, the military will retaliate. I think that Zimbabweans have been so oppressed that they are no longer able to access the necessary agency. Yet they are the ultimate power.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

If the urge to travel is a universal human instinct, the urge to tell others of your journey may well be too. In medieval North Africa, travelers and tourists produced a plethora of travelogues and guidebooks for a readership eager to read about their voyages. “There's a variety of reasons why people wanted to read this kind of writing,” Amira K. Bennison, a historian at the University of Cambridge, tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson. For merchants, it was important to know which cities produced which goods and what they could expect on their own journeys. For rulers, it was a source of information or even intelligence about what was happening in their realms. But for many people, it was simply because they wanted to read stories of far-off lands. “It takes them out of what for some readers must have been a much more humdrum existence, with little chance of travel beyond their own town or country.” Not all of these were accurate. “There are tales of a statue in Cadiz which speaks, or cities of bronze in the desert,” explains Bennison. “I don't think that people in the past were necessarily naive or necessarily taken in by these kinds of stories, but the world was much more mysterious. There were lots of places where most people had never been and would never go, and really weren't quite sure whether these things existed or not.” But just like today, travel writing could be as much about the author’s experiences as the place itself. Medieval readers didn’t just want to know what was there; they wanted to know what it felt like to be there too. “I think it's that which really captures people's imagination and gives them the sense of the expansiveness of the world,” Bennison says. Produced by Joshua Martin

As the first nationwide elections since the January 6 Capitol attacks, America’s 2022 midterms were something of a test for the country’s troubled democracy. Americans went to the polls in the shadow of a year of turbulence and rising political violence. With the votes still being counted, journalist Robert Evans joined New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson to try to make sense of the results. “The last time we had a midterm election that went this well for the party in the White House was 2002, in the immediate wake of 9/11,” he explains. Few expected such a successful showing for the Democrats. Between the nation’s economic woes and Joe Biden’s struggling approval ratings, conventional wisdom predicted a “red wave.” But predictions of Republican revanchism turned out to be greatly exaggerated. High youth turnout meant that progressive candidates like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman performed much better than had been predicted, while the increasingly extreme rhetoric of many Republican candidates proved alienating. “The thing that we couldn't have known was the degree to which voters were going to react against the power grabs that the right has made,” says Evans. “And I'm happy to say that it does look like that's one of the stories from last night.” But what that rejection means for the increasingly violent climate of American politics remains to be seen. A recent YouGov poll found that nearly 40% of Americans believe the country is heading for civil war. “I'm still very worried about how hot the temperature has gotten, and how deeply angry American politics still is,” Evans remarks. “The fact that maybe they're not going to continue to win elections doesn't mean that they're not going to keep getting angrier.” “Americans do have a pretty long, proud tradition of murdering each other over politics,” he adds. “The worst thing you can do is assume this terrible thing could never happen here because we're somehow special.”

“This BMW gets hit by a truck in the Aegean region,” explains former U.S. diplomat Josef Burton. “And driving it are a Kurdish clan leader, a police general and a far-right mafia drug baron. And the trunk is just full of Deutschmarks and silenced submachine guns.” The incident caused a major scandal in Turkey, and subsequent parliamentary investigations revealed the existence of a rogue network of intelligence officials, army officers, mafiosos and ultranationalists. Implicated in hundreds of killings over several decades, it was this network that the term “deep state” was coined to describe. “This wasn’t just state repression,” Burton tells New Lines Magazine's Joshua Martin. “The idea of the deep state is that there's elements within the state which are just doing what they want, without any going back to the chain of command. They're just doing it.” For Americans, though, the term has taken on very different connotations. “The meaning shifted between this very specific historical phenomenon to any structure of power you don’t like,” Burton says. It became heavily associated with former President Donald Trump, who uses it to denigrate his political opponents and encourages his supporters to do the same — particularly in the months since August’s FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. “It really raises the temperature,” says Burton. “The more unhinged and irrational these sorts of terms become, I think the more we have to point to concrete historical examples of this defined thing,” he adds. Produced by Joshua Martin

Since the turn of the century, the global tide of democracy has begun to recede. Men like Putin in Russia, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and of course Trump in the United States have all sought to subvert their countries’ institutions and consolidate their own authoritarian rule. “These men have similar personalities,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “They're ruthless. They have no moral code. They are opportunistic. They will be whatever the public needs them to be at that moment.” Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian fascism at New York University, watched their rise with a combination of horror and recognition. In her book, “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” she compares the men behind the current wave of autocratization to their counterparts from the 1930s and the Cold War. “The way they get to power changes over 100 years. But the net effect of what they do is much the same.” She believes there are two main things that define a “strongman”. The first is personalist rule. “These are people who come to power and organize the state around their personal obsessions and needs,” she explains. The second is their appeal to masculinity — “all strong men use machismo as a way of legitimizing themselves.” This, she says, is the reason Putin is so often photographed shirtless and why Trump brags about his sexual prowess. This emphasis on masculinity is why most strongmen tend to be just that — men. But the recent election of far-right populist Giorgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy complicates that picture. “She is actually a strongwoman,” Ben-Ghiat says. “The first one we've had.” Produced by Joshua Martin

The U.K. has had months of political chaos, with Liz Truss not even the first British prime minister to resign this year. In June, MPs began to realize that the only way to rid themselves of the scandal-prone Boris Johnson was to force him out of office. Johnson refused as long as he could manage. For satirist and architect Karl Sharro, recalling the many long revolts against British colonialism over the 20th century, the irony was too delicious to ignore: “It's great that the British are discovering how difficult it is to get rid of British rule,” he tweeted. Sharro’s absurdist humor is aimed at many targets – corrupt politicians and soccer referees among them – but perhaps at the media above all. His observations have resonated widely with those frustrated by patronizing international news coverage, even earning him a book deal — “And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News.’” “It’s just a way of poking fun at certain Western narratives and attitudes,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. It’s something that occasionally gets him into trouble with those who don’t see the funny side. He argues that ”secular taboos” are emerging, stifling creativity and leaving humorists like him with little room for error. “And these sorts of things — you go talk to anyone from a Middle Eastern or Arab background, and these are things you struggle against all your life,” he says. “You struggle against societal norms and restrictions, family norms and restrictions, authoritarian norms and restrictions. You want to be consistent with yourself, you want to say these transgressions should be dealt with through a freer form of critique.” He’s uncomfortable with the idea that any topic should be decisively off-limits: “You can joke about anything; it depends how you do it.” He reserves particular ire for those Westerners who were happy to laugh at his tweets about the Middle East but who failed to see the joke when it landed closer to home. Sharro has greeted the “general sense of dysfunction creeping in the West” with both anger and unabashed schadenfreude, despite living in the U.K. himself. “The collapse of the country has been very rewarding for me personally, in whatever comedic capacity I have,” he remarks.

The question of how the past is remembered will always be unavoidable. But in recent years, it has loomed particularly large and proved particularly contested. These “memory wars” are fought so hard and argued so passionately because, ultimately, they’re battles for control of the narrative. How we remember the past determines who we believe ourselves to be. “There is actually no way to understand who we are and how we think about each other and how we think about our relationship to the world without thinking about history,” says author and academic Priyamvada Gopal. In this conversation with New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson, she argues that we never really leave the past. “I tend to use the word ‘afterlife’ rather than ‘the past,’ because I think that things that have happened in history have a life in the present. It’s ongoing.” Such disputes over history are shaping politics the world over. In the U.K., the death of Queen Elizabeth II has brought to the surface fierce disputes over the darker chapters of British history. Likewise, many of the Commonwealth countries for whom the British monarch is still head of state are now reassessing their relationships with the crown. Conversely, in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has promoted a belligerent and exclusionary reinterpretation of India's past — and wielded the power of the state to suppress competing narratives. "Muslims are a deeply endangered community in India because of this mythology," Gopal explains. "Myths are not innocent." Produced by Joshua Martin

Seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization order has sent shockwaves through a society that had previously still been able to ignore the fighting. “If you were in Moscow this past summer, you wouldn’t know that Russia was fighting a costly, bloody and totally unnecessary war in Ukraine,” Russian-American journalist and author Julia Ioffe tells New Lines Magazine's Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It was easy for Russians to push it off to the edge of their minds, but now it has come home to them.” As security forces battle protests across Russia, about 700,000 Russians are estimated to have fled the country. Traffic jams at border checkpoints, Ioffe explains, have been visible from space. “When they’re asked to actively participate in the war and asked to go into the trenches themselves, they don’t want to take part in it.” For Ioffe, watching Russia’s civil society implode since the invasion has been particularly painful because of her ties to the country — and to Moscow especially. “It was my favorite city in the world,” she says. But now, its once-vibrant society has been driven into exile by the regime. “How long will it take to rebuild a new Moscow, a new Russia, after this one collapses?” But, she adds, it’s nothing compared with what was done to Mariupol and other cities across Ukraine. Produced by Joshua Martin

For thousands of years, most humans were nomads, living their lives on the move. They were raiders and traders, herder and hunters — and conquerors. From Genghis Khan to Osman I, nomads changed the course of history on countless occasions. And yet, says historian and travel writer Anthony Sattin, we still tend to underestimate their influence on history. “Our histories glorify people who build monuments,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “We don’t tend to value tribes in the Amazon, for instance, who didn’t chop down their forests, who maintained an equilibrium and flourished without disturbing the ecological balance in their world.” Plenty of nomad cultures have been literate, but on the whole, most of the societies keeping substantial written records were sedentary societies. Traditionally confined by historians to anecdotes and afterthoughts, oral histories recently have been recognized as just as useful as written histories for reconstructing the past. “The stories are still being told, but the research hasn’t been done,” says Sattin. Those past biases come at a huge cost to our understanding of history, Sattin says: “I don’t think we can know who we’re going to become unless we know who we were, and half of our story is missing, because for most human history nomads have been half of our story, and yet they’re not in our books.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

For two years, Ethiopia has been caught in the grip of a war between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who control the country’s northernmost state. As the power struggle polarized the country along ethnic lines, the number of mass killings and other atrocities led one Ethiopian general to dub it a “very dirty war.” An agreement in March led to a truce, but after five months, fighting was reignited on Aug. 24. Yet hope for a lasting peace may not yet be lost. “Initially, the Tigrayans insisted that they were not going to be part of the peace process,” Dr. Adeoye Akinola tells New Lines Magazine's Kwangu Liwewe. But thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the African Union (AU), both the federal government and the TPLF have agreed to allow the international organization to mediate negotiations between the warring factions. As the United Nations convenes in New York, Ethiopians are watching closely in the hope that diplomacy can triumph. “We cannot hide from this,” says Tedla Asfaw. “We have to face it.” But with neighboring Eritrea, a government ally, launching a new offensive into Tigray, the conflict looks as if it may descend once more into total war. “Whether it’s the AU or the United Nations,” says analyst Chris Maroleng, “It’s quite clear that what is actually required is a reformation of not just the institutions, but the manner in which politics is carried out in Ethiopia.” Produced by Joshua Martin

Producer and screenwriter Hayat Aljowaily joins New Lines Magazine's Ola Salem and Anthony Elghossain to talk about cinema, identity and the making of Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” The Emmy-nominated show stars Oscar Isaac as the titular protagonist, a man with dissociative identity disorder who finds himself sharing a body with a mercenary battling Egyptian gods. “Portraying Egypt accurately was really at the core of what we were trying to achieve,” explains Aljowaily. With much of the action taking place in the country, the creators were determined to avoid the usual cliches. “That meant not going to shoot in Morocco and pretend that it’s Egypt, because then it’s not going to look like Egypt. And so we built Egypt.” The crew started with a vast empty set in Budapest and set to work. “And within two weeks, it was Cairo.” But perhaps the biggest responsibility of all was the portrayal of the protagonist’s love interest, Layla, the first female Arab superhero to appear on television. “It was a big responsibility to create Layla, because we knew how important it was to young Arab women — to Arab women, period.” “Having her was such a game changer,” adds Ola. “Just having someone with curly hair, that kind of resembles you, and you kind of can see yourself in, is such a big deal.”

Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, has died. For 70 years, the queen was a fixture in the national life of Britain and indeed the wider world. The world changed immeasurably in the decades since she came to the throne in 1952. The country when she first ruled was quite unlike the one she died in. She inherited not merely a country but an empire and presided over its dissolution. Although her death was expected, as the ritual of its declaration demonstrated, it still leaves the country in a deeply uncertain state — an uncertainty that extends to the 14 other countries in which she was the head of state as well as the wider Commonwealth. As the crown passes to her son, Charles III, New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai speaks to Lydia Wilson outside Buckingham Palace and talks to Amie Ferris Rotman and Kwangu Liwewe about what the passing of such a consequential figure may mean for the world. Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

Since October 2021, Iraq’s politics have been deadlocked in a showdown between two of its most powerful political factions. The rivalry between the Coordination Framework, a pro-Iranian Shiite bloc, and the supporters of populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has left the country’s Parliament paralyzed since last October’s elections, unable to form a government or elect a new president. But after Sadr announced his withdrawal from politics at the end of August, the rivalry turned deadly as protesters from his movement marched into the heavily fortified Green Zone and paramilitaries battled each other in the heart of Baghdad. Only after Sadr called for the violence to end and for his supporters to withdraw did the fighting die down. New Lines Magazine's Rasha Al Aqeedi joins host Faisal Al Yafai to talk about what this latest escalation may mean for Iraq’s future. Produced by Joshua Martin

In May 1948, at the onset of the Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian soldiers crossed into Palestine at Rafah as military leaders promised a swift victory. Yet despite their defeat by the year’s end, this war would give way to military rule less than four years later. “A military loss was not what Egyptians expected,” historian Chloe Bordewich tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. Egyptian media carried images and footage of successful operations, helping to reinforce pronouncements of imminent victory. But victory never materialized. In the face of official obfuscation, alternative explanations for why the war had been lost began to circulate among the public and in the press. One rumor in particular began to take on a life of its own — “that Egypt had lost the war in Palestine because political leaders had procured, profited from and knowingly supplied their own troops with dysfunctional weapons.” The rumor tapped into something that resonated deeply with the Egyptian public. As time went on, it migrated from page to screen and into popular memory. The government’s reputation never recovered, and in 1952, a group of mid-ranking officers overthrew the king. Produced by Christin El-Kholy

Tunisia was the cradle of the Arab Spring, and had been hailed as its biggest success story. But President Kais Saied’s new constitution, narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last July, has changed that. “Kais Saied has unchecked power,” Mohamed-Dhia Hammami tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. “Even under Ben Ali, we used to have some sort of balances and checks. There are some people who even compare his power to the North Korean leader’s.” Saied ran for president as a political outsider in 2019, vowing to tackle ‘moral and financial corruption’. The country’s continuing economic crisis left many Tunisians disenchanted with the status quo, and Saied’s populist platform won him the election. Even as he suspended parliament and began ruling by decree in 2021, he continued to attract support. But, Hammami says, his latest move may have been a step too far. “Saied is having serious problems consolidating his power.” Produced by Joshua Martin

One year after the fall of Kabul, this special anniversary episode of The Lede looks back on the momentous events of Aug. 15, 2021, and explores how Afghanistan has fared in the aftermath. New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai talks to Afghanistan correspondent Fazelminallah Qazizai, who was in Kabul the day it fell, about what the first year of Taliban rule has looked like from the ground. He also speaks to human rights specialist Nazila Jamshidi about how the millions of Afghans in the diaspora have been affected. Finally, Rasha Elass catches up with Chris Sands, the magazine’s South Asia editor, about ISIS’s plan to weaken the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into war. Produced by Joshua Martin

What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years. “It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.” They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy