Articles inside the category: Ports of Call
on :
Thursday, 6 Oct, 2011
The telephone call came a few hours before the rock concert was due to start. Security trumped ticket sales, backed by the justified fears that Muslim fundamentalists might seek to enliven the on-stage action by contributing a couple of backup actors of their own, perhaps a suicide-bombing stage-diver or a Kalashnikov-waving walk-on.
“Come to Bagh-e Babur for the gig,” were our instructions.
Like well-oiled terrorist cells mobilized by a phonecall, we walked out into Kabul’s ...
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on :
Monday, 26 Sep, 2011
It is a country whose security services are poorly-trained, underpaid, violence-prone and increasingly infiltrated by religious and fascist currents. It invented euphemism and perpetuates it: the feared riot cops are called Units for the Rehabilitation of Order; their Orwellian-sounding directorate is the Ministry for Protection of the Citizen. Nevertheless, they regularly beat up demonstrators, journalists and civil society actors alike, refuse to investigate documented allegations of mis...
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on :
Tuesday, 20 Sep, 2011
All lights were extinguished as soon as the chanting of mystical verses by an amplified voice scraping a higher consciousness subsided. Then, in a thundering, shuffling crescen...
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on :
Wednesday, 14 Sep, 2011
I had just graduated from Oxford in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies and started working in London when September 11 sneaked upon the world. I remember a colleague ente...
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on :
Tuesday, 6 Sep, 2011
Hosni Mubarak had still not resigned on that hot February afternoon in Cairo when I caught sight of Montasser az-Zayyat striding confidently towards Tahrir Square. The Muslim B...
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on :
Wednesday, 31 Aug, 2011
In 2001 they were greeted as liberators by ordinary Afghans (though not once they started accidentally bombing wedding parties and running over civilians with their armored car...
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on :
Tuesday, 23 Aug, 2011
His name is not as important as his life-story. I first saw him sitting at the back of the damaged old airport bus that ferries passengers from the conclusion of a battery of s...
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on :
Monday, 15 Aug, 2011
The flames engulfing English cities in scenes unseen since the riots of Athens 2008 and Paris 2005 mark the conclusion of an era. The same juggernaut that once dominated the wo...
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One day during the revolution, Amor el-Etrebi, one of the young, fluently English-speaking activists who used Facebook to mobilize Egyptians, was called up by an American journ...
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It is dawn in Kabul. As the first sunrays creep over the jagged hills above it, the city stirs from sleep. If the darkness brought back the memories of civil war era bombs slam...
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