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The responsible agency treats the National Archives like a state archive, not a national archive owned by and serving the public.

The situation at the National Archives is reflected in all public institutions. Their mandate is not to serve the public, but to subject them to constant surveillance.

the security mentality in countries that respect the public is countered by a mentality that pushes back in the opposite direction, that respects the right to privacy, academic research and free expression. This mentality circumscribes the security mentality with numerous legal and administrative regulations.

In Egypt the security mentality runs amok. Just mentioning national security is enough to shut down a conversation instead of initiating it. Voices defending academic freedom and the freedom of research are few and far between (though brave and strong) — most importantly the March 9 Movement (a working group on university independence), the Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Field research is infinitely more difficult. If a researcher wants to conduct a field study or distribute a questionnaire or opinion survey, she needs the approval of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Its very name shows the perceived intimacy of the association between knowledge and the war effort.

When I first saw Giulio Regeni’s photo on Facebook, when he was still missing, my heart skipped a beat. A foreign researcher who speaks Arabic fluently, living in Dokki and moving about the city at will, one who is working on the extremely sensitive topic of workers’ right to form independent unions, and one who is also a political activist who writes anti-regime articles for a communist paper under a pseudonym. If the security authorities knew of him, I thought, they would consider him a spy.But Giulio wasn’t a spy. He was a doctoral student. I never met or corresponded with him, but I know Giulio and know him well. He’s like the students I’ve taught for 20 years. Having now read and become familiar with his work, I can say that not only is he not a spy, he’s an exemplary student, one who loved Egypt and Egyptians and made efforts to help them.

we know that we’re living one of the worst moments of our modern history and that our rights, liberties and lives are under threat at all times by our own government.We know that our government, in the name of defending national security, has attacked universities and killed students demonstrating on campus. We know that our government, in the name of defending national security, has shut down the public sphere, appropriated political activity, and prevented people from expressing their opinion and peaceful demonstrating — unless the demonstration’s purpose is to give Abdel Fattah al-Sisi a mandate to do whatever he likes.

waging war on civil society organizations, accusing them of foreign collaboration, treason and getting rich off foreign funding. But it’s the government itself, specifically the army, that is the biggest beneficiary of foreign funding. No one dares make a peep about that.

arrested tens of thousands of members of Islamist groups and sentenced hundreds of them to death in trials lasting just a few minutes, trials that dealt a mortal blow to the integrity of the Egyptian judiciary and people’s faith in it

arrested hundreds of journalists, writers and political activists, and sentenced them to years in prison

we, the people, the true owners of this country, are insisting on knowing what happened to Guilio Regeni and are holding on to our right to be consulted about our own national security.

Tunisia could be the most "laique" eligible country , more than many other arab and some european countries. Women emancipation and civil family laws are an example. Education rate is very high, and the gdp per capita is good.What's missing : transparency, freedom and real democraty.Please don't think that the regime of Ben Ali is the bastion againt extremists .. the unique bastion against all extremists are education , freedom , respect and well being. Fighting extremists by guns , fire and jail is a complete failure. Please note that the modern governments in maghreb countries have destroyed the islamic in-country traditional institutions known by their moderation and their knowledge of the religion whick maked the influence of "eastern islamic schools" like wahabism from saudi be predominant on the new era of staellite channels .. which is not very good news for all of us ..

Saudi leaders likely hope that Sultan Haitham will be more amenable to a Saudi-led Gulf, and without U.S. support, Oman may feel pressure to acquiesce or face potential repercussions. Omani officials have privately expressed concerns that Oman could be the next target of a Saudi- and Emirati-led blockade

Despite precipitating the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has used its military presence there to declare its intention to build a pipeline through the Mahra region and construct an oil port on the Yemeni coast. Saudi Arabia currently ships oil through the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb strait, whereas the proposed pipeline would allow direct access to the Indian Ocean.

Mahra has close links to the adjacent Dhofar region of Oman, which has long viewed the province as an informal buffer from the instability in other parts of Yemen. Sultan Qaboos offered aid as well as dual citizenship to residents of Mahra as a means of eliminating the potential for another conflict resembling the Dhofar War of 1963-1976, which drew cross-border support from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen operating from Mahra into Dhofar

Inhabitants of Mahra have expressed frustration with the presence of both the Saudis and Emiratis, given that these kingdoms’ alleged foes—the Houthis as well as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—are not present in Mahra

The UAE has taken control of the Yemeni island of Socotra, building a military base in a unique ecosystem nominally protected by UNESCO. The UAE is also building bases in Eritrea and Somaliland as part of a plan to develop a “string of ports” that will allow it to project power and escape possible pressure from Iran in the Persian Gulf.

Other Emirati ambitions include the Musandam Peninsula, an Omani enclave that forms the narrowest point in the Strait of Hormuz. The inhabitants of the peninsula have close ties to the UAE, as Musandam connects geographically to the emirates of Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah, rather than Oman. Oman’s control of the strategic chokepoint reflects the sultanate’s history as an empire whose territory once stretched from southern Pakistan to Zanzibar. 

The border between Oman and the UAE was only formally demarcated in 2008, but Omanis see a circle of potential threats arising from Emirati activity in or possible designs on Musandam, Mahra, and Socotra.

the UAE may feel that Oman’s new sultan may be more receptive to alignment with Emirati objectives than his predecessor

Oman has failed to significantly diversify its economy

As in many oil-dependent economies, unemployment is high, especially among young people

During the popular uprising of 2011, which brought thousands of Omanis to the street for the first time, the government used its nest egg to pay for a massive expansion of the government payroll.

there are no available resources to try to finance a transition away from oil, and the low price of oil has further impeded the government’s efforts to meet its obligations

As Robert Fletcher concludes in his study of interwar borders, “Freedom of grazing and nomadic migration was written into all major boundary agreements in the 1920s.” Moreover, he argues, “These terms were assiduously observed by local frontier officials, even to the point of risking conflict with demands from the center.”

The Turkish-Syrian border experienced a similar transformation. The story is perhaps most familiar to Turkish audiences from the 1999 film Propaganda, which shows the disruptive impact of the new border that came into being with the Turkish annexation of Hatay in 1939. The film offers a dramatic parable of neighbors and lovers separated as their village is torn apart by an arbitrary and unnatural line. But in fact, after 1923, the Turkish-Syrian border was relatively open until the ongoing conflict over Hatay itself caused both sides to gradually close it.

In World War II, wartime security concerns led to new restrictions, with religious minorities in particular carefully monitored amidst accusations of espionage. Finally, in the 1980s, after Turkey’s Sept. 12 coup, the Turkish government for the first time laid mines along the border in order to prevent potential Syrian support for illegal left-wing groups in Turkey. Mining the border half a century after it was first drawn showed the deadly and disruptive result of Cold War politics, as well as Turkish-Syrian tensions arising from the Hatay dispute.

To blame Europeans for creating many of the Middle East’s problems yet simultaneously recognize that they presided over a period when you could simply board a bus from Haifa to Beirut is not necessarily paradoxical. Rather, it helps articulate the difficulty, and possibility, of resolving these problems today. We must constantly struggle to overcome the injustices around us while remaining constantly alert to the risk of creating new ones. Nationalism promised former Ottoman citizens self-rule, but instead brought them continued oppression in smaller states. Likewise, the resistance movements that proved necessary to overthrow European colonial rule carried with them the seeds of the conflicts that compounded some of colonialism’s worst features.

We don’t need to change the lines on the map to mitigate their human toll, whether by making them easier to cross or helping people fight for their rights within them.

Malek said his organization was also trying to broker a solution to Cairo's debt to foreign energy companies producing oil and gas in Egypt such as BP, Gas Natural, Petronas, Shell and Dana, that has accumulated since the 2011 uprising.He disputed the figure of $9 billion cited by consultancy Executive Analysis and European diplomats for the total energy debt, saying it was far less, but declined to give a number."Some of their contracts needed to be reviewed because they were not balanced to cover both the national interest and the company interest. So some licenses were suspended when they expired, which made a bit of a problem," Malek said."We tried to encourage them by giving them more concessions and rescheduling these payments (owed by Egypt). We opened other opportunities in the same field such as refineries and other projects they can take. Up to this moment, none of these companies has decided to leave," Malek said.He acknowledged that most foreign energy companies were still holding back on new investments in Egypt. "They want to see these problems tackled first. They want to see a clear road map, which is normal in such an environment."

13,752 complaints of arbitrary arrest have been filed, as well as 6,367 allegations of unfair trials

mapping has highlighted the appearance of the so-called "roast chicken" torture method since the 1960s, and has proved that sexual violence was almost systematic in the Cap Bon region at the north-eastern tip of Tunisia

“We are not targeting the executioner, but the executives. Those people are sometimes dead, retired or still in office."

no one has confessed to the most serious crimes, which would lead to a special trial

"There is a huge disagreement between the state and the IVD," Boughattas told MEE - he highlighted the economic reconciliation bill wanted by President Beji Caid Essebsi, which would mean that corruption cases aren't heard by the IVD in the first place.

The IVD says it is still in the process of setting up a consultation service to deal with compensation claims.Its leadership says it wants to set up a consultation service to "use reparations according to a development approach". The objective will be to ensure that money that is given back is used not as a compensation fund but as a sustainable resource.

“When his advisers show him the map, will he realise supporting Putin means supporting the Iranian agenda? And this is what Saudi Arabia is concerned about, to stop Iranian hegemony.”

Khashoggi is a well-established Saudi writer and journalist. He has extensive political and media experience and held the position of editor in chief of a number of Saudi newspapers, including the Arab Times and Al-Watan.

Khashoggi’s weekly column in Al Hayat newspaper was not published this week, although it has appeared every Saturday for almost five years. His last tweet appeared on 18 November.

In March, for example, two journalists were arrested on charges that they had been in contact with military officers who were plotting to overthrow the government. Soon afterward, several thousand people marched down Istanbul’s main street protesting the arrests. They held placards reading “Free Press, Free Society,” and “Turkey Rates 138 in Press Freedom”—a reference to a recent ranking by Reporters Without Borders.The next day, Erdogan delivered a speech in Istanbul. It was an ideal moment for him to reassure panicky citizens and foreigners worried about press freedom in Turkey. Instead he denounced defenders of the arrested journalists, accusing them of launching a “systematic defamation campaign against Turkey” shaped by “evil-minded intentions and prejudices.”This demagogic language disturbs many Turks, including some who admire what Erdogan has achieved. “I have never been as positive and enthusiastic as I am now,” one of the country’s visionary business leaders, the octogenarian Ishak Alaton, a lifelong human rights campaigner, told me in his office overlooking the Bosphorus. But he also lamented that Erdogan has begun to govern with “the sense that he’s invulnerable and omnipotent and all-powerful.”

None of the dozens of people I met during a recent visit suggested that Turkey is in danger of slipping toward Islamist rule. Turkish society has defenses that most Arab societies lack: generations of experience with secularism and democracy, a growing middle class, a booming export economy, a still-lively press, and a strong civil society based in universities, labor unions, business associations, and civic, human rights, and environmental groups. The emerging conflict in Turkey is not over religion, but styles of power.

Partly because the EU has slammed its door in Turkey’s face, Erdogan’s government has been looking elsewhere for friends. This has helped draw Turkey away from half a century of subservience to Western foreign policy. Its first act of defiance came in 2003, when parliament voted against allowing American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. Since then, Turkey has broken ranks with the West on two important issues. It favors negotiation with Iran and stronger pressure on Israel to change its policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Banu Eligur, who has taught courses on political Islam at Brandeis University and is the author of The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, believes that Erdogan’s government has “mobilized against the secular-democratic state” by naming pious Muslims to be “high-ranking civil servants in public administration” and by bullying the press, the judiciary, and universities. In fact, much of what Erdogan is doing seems popular. A recent opinion survey taken by an outside group found 62 percent of Turks in favor of Erdogan’s foreign policies. In another, when people were asked to rate their level of religious belief on a scale of one to ten, 71 percent rated themselves at seven or higher. In Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, the historian Carter Vaughn Findley observes that Erdogan’s government has surpassed the old secular establishment “both in recognizing the value of a religiously neutral government as a guarantee of pluralism and in espousing the reforms required to advance Turkey’s EU candidacy”

. The plot to destabilize the country, and the cases connected to it, are popularly known as “Ergenekon,” a reference to a mythic Turkic homeland and the name that plotters allegedly gave to their subversive plan. Mike King Many Turks greeted the opening of this case with both astonishment and jubilation. Investigating the military and its corrupt allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy was widely seen as a major step toward consolidating democracy. As the case has dragged on, however, it has taken on a different tinge. The authenticity of some incriminating documents has been challenged. Prosecutors have cast their net so widely that people have begun to wonder whether the true purpose of the case is to punish conspirators or to intimidate critics of the government. Since the government has been slowly replacing prosecutors with people it favors, there is suspicion that politics is once again intruding into the judiciary.

“I can no more believe these two guys were part of Ergenekon than I can believe Obama is part of the Ku Klux Klan,” said Hakan Altinay, a former director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, which is supported by George Soros. “It’s an important episode for left-liberal opinion, which has up to now been part of this government’s core support. It’s a tipping point.”If intimidation is a goal of this case, it may be working. “I wonder, is my phone tapped?” a young journalist told me at the end of an interview in Istanbul. “Should I censor myself?”

In Streets of Memory, a recent study of cultural attitudes in an Istanbul neighborhood that was a jumble of nationalities, Amy Mills writes:The price of belonging, in Turkey, comes at a cost—the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed. She finds troubling evidence of “polarization in thinking about national identities and minority histories.” People shy away from recalling, for example, the infamous pogrom in 1955 when rioters backed by police attacked homes and businesses owned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. But she also notes “an increasing curiosity and desire among Turkish citizens to learn more about places and pasts in Turkey.”

Attacking the government on sensitive issues like Kurdish rights, criticizing its handling of the Ergenekon case, and ridiculing Erdogan personally are not the only ways Turkish journalists can endanger themselves these days. There is another subject some fear to probe too deeply: the power of Fethullah Gulen, a shadowy but immensely influential Turkish religious leader. From a secluded estate in Pennsylvania, where he moved to escape possible prosecution for alleged antisecular remarks in the 1990s, Gulen directs a worldwide movement that is one of the most remarkable forces in modern Isla

This movement may be, as its sympathizers insist, a benign force that stabilizes Turkish life. But some Turks mistrust it, and their suspicion deepened when it turned out that one of the journalists arrested in March, Ahmet Sik, was about to publish a book about its rising influence called The Imam’s Army. Police confiscated advance copies. The text, which among other things alleges that Gulen sympathizers dominate the Turkish police, quickly appeared on the Internet, setting off what one blogger called “a frenzy of downloads.”

The mayor, Yilmaz Buyukersen, a former university rector, told me that while some other Turkish cities are not as open to pastimes like late-night drinking, he has no doubt that Eskishehir represents Turkey’s future. Like many Turks who are not part of the ruling party or the Gulen movement, though, he worries about what is happening in Ankara.“Reading the newspapers depresses me,” he said. “Everything is about accusing, arguing, fighting.”There is pressure on the press, on labor unions, on professional organizations, on NGOs, on universities. The justice system responds to the ruling party. All of this creates fear in people’s minds. But I’m still optimistic. The new generation is aware of everything, open to the world, and totally in favor of freedom and democracy. Journalists and others are resisting the pressure they’re under. There is absolutely no going back.

Erdogan’s party won 326 seats in the 550-member parliament. This was far short of the 367 that would have allowed him to push through whatever constitution he wished, and also shy of the 330 that would have allowed him to call a referendum on a draft of his own. So his triumph at the polls was mixed and his authority is not absolute.

Salami, born in 1960, said in January that Iran’s strategy was to wipe “the Zionist regime” (Israel) off the political map, Iran’s state TV reported.

new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric

As in Russia and Germany, the arrival of the totalitarian state was prefaced by the arrival of totalitarian architecture

a modern city, another piece of anywhere

Architectural modernism fed into the Arab inferiority complex: concrete high rises, plazas, geometrical patterns, energy-intensive fenestration, sometimes with a mihrab or a dome stuck on in deference to a history that is no longer really believed in—all these have become part of the new vernacular of a hasty urbanization. The basic idea has been to abandon the great tradition of the Ottoman city, with its many communities in their tents of stone, and to “catch up” with the West

architect Marwa al-Sabouni, whose book, The Battle for Home, tells the story of how the conflict in Syria has overwhelmed her own city of Homs. She shows that you cannot destroy the serene and unostentatious forms of the Levantine city without also jeopardizing the peace that they symbolized and which to a measure they also protected

The old rabbit-warren city of the Middle East was a conflict-defusing device, a continuous affirmation of neighborhood and settlement. The new city of jerry-built concrete towers is a conflict-enhancing device, a continuous “stand-off” between competing communities on the edge of a place that does not belong to them and to which they in turn cannot belong.

Rarely, in any of this, however, has provision been made for the migrants from the villages, who have been compelled to survive in unplanned and unregulated structures, heaped up around the cities with no thought for how they look or for the character of the public spaces beneath them

We should remember that the idea of replacing the organic city of customary styles with cleared spaces and blocks of concrete, while it originated among European intellectuals, was first tried out in the Arab world. Le Corbusier, who had attempted in vain to persuade the city council of Paris to adopt his plan to tear down the entire city north of the Seine and replace it with an assemblage of glass towers, turned his attention to the North African city of Algiers instead, which was at the time under French colonial administration. As architectural advisor to the French Vichy government during the war he was able to overrule the elected mayor of Algiers and impose his will upon the city—though the Allied victory abruptly put an end to his plans.

Le Corbusier’s scheme is still studied and even treated with reverence in modern schools of architecture. It involved erasing the old city from the map, replacing it with great square blocks that negate the Mediterranean coastline and the contours of the landscape, and surmounting the whole with streets along which automobiles fly above the population. No church or mosque has a part in the plan; there are no alleyways or secret corners. All is blank, expressionless, and cold. It is an act of vengeance by the new world against the old: not a project for settling a place, but a project for destroying it, so that nothing of the place remains

the glitzy restaurant style of Dubai, in which vast gadgets, belonging to no known architectural language but looking like kitchen tools discarded by some gigantic celebrity chef, lie scattered among ribbons of motorway

Care for one’s place is the first move towards accepting the others who reside there. The thoughts “this is our home,” and “we belong here” are peacemaking thoughts. If the “we” is underpinned only by religious faith, and faith defined so as to exclude its historical rivals, then we have a problem. If, however, a resident of Homs can identify himself by the place that he shares with his fellow residents, rather than the faith that distinguishes him, then we are already on the path away from civil war.

decisions are made by officials, and officials belong to the great system of Mafia-like corruption that is the true cause of the Syrian conflict, and which has encouraged the Syrian political elite in recent times to look to Russia as its natural ally

Capitalism’s “creative destruction” is the anti-conservative claim that nothing that exists could not be improved easily in a short time by fast, profitable and “efficient” total replacement.

in the 1990s there were many popular Syrian TV drama series about how people lived and interacted with each other in the neighborhoods of the old cities in Syria during the late 19th and early 20th century. They depicted the days when the Levant society as it existed in its centuries-old Ottoman era make-up, just prior to the transition into colonial and post-colonial modernity and showed how rich and poor lived together in the same neighborhood, it showed the old houses, the shops & the markets.

Roger Scruton is romanticizing. He therefore completely misunderstands the expressive functional reality of ordinary homes and security by focusing on public architecture, which everywhere expresses elite ideals instead of common ones. Take Florence and the Italian Republics. Frequent wars and not infrequently with Muslim empires meant homes had to be defensible and closed off from streets. Only later, briefly, and elsewhere later like in Britain and the US were isolated farm villages open to welcome trade, or US farm homes isolated away from the necessity of group protections because genuine threats had become to rare to proactively defend against them. Similarly, the divide in the Muslim world is between open plans in port cities secured through trade by larger powers that could ensure protection, versus homes way from ports, deliberately closed off against strangers so as to be defensible against frequent invaders. Most of the Islamic world remains like unstable and insecure early Florence. And homes throughout MENA reflect their isolation and insecurity through closed plans, just as much as Spanish ones from Moorish times do, even in the New World.

The government is expected to play a "crucial" role in tourism development by injecting $6 billion over 25 years to trigger $43 billion worth of investments from the private sector.

the promises to allocate 223,000 direct tourism jobs to Omani nationals by 2040 does not align with Oman's undersized tourism education sector, which graduates only a few hundred students per year, mainly from the Oman Tourism College

although the number of tourists visiting Oman has doubled since 2008, the industry employs less than 17,000 Omanis.

“Corruption was also an issue since local authorities requested me to pay imaginary taxes," he said. "I am an ordinary man so I had to shut up and comply.”

“The concept of SMEs [small and medium enterprises] does not exist in the field of tourism anyway, the whole system is designed for large corporations,” said Christopher Chellapermal, a French entrepreneur. Chellapermal ran a scuba diving business in Oman for 15 years before being forced out of business in 2017.

The country’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product is rated junk by all three major agencies, as it has multiplied by 12 since 2014. Moreover, the Omani economy is ranked the worst performing among Gulf countries

For Chellapermal, Oman "makes the crazy wager" of luxury tourism by prioritizing premium visitors when the backpacker segment would be a better fit.

“Chinese and Indian tourists are very much interested in culture and heritage destinations," Hollister said. "Oman could focus on this segment to make it their niche, a differentiator.”

wealth of cultural and natural assets. The Ministry of Tourism promotes Oman as a hidden jewel at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. 

regional tensions had very little impact on tourism

As Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said takes power, analysts worry that Oman’s foreign policy of neutrality could be at stake. Will “any of Oman’s more assertive neighbors seek to sway Haitham to align more closely with their own approach,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen wrote for Al-Monitor.

The prospect of tensions between Muscat and neighboring states does not please tourism actors, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are Oman’s key source regional markets for tourism. In 2018, Gulf citizens accounted for about half of international arrivals.

Saudi Arabia’s aggressive push to develop its leisure tourism industry and attract 100 million visits by 2030 collides with Oman’s ambitions

“Censorship cannot be regarded as a country’s internal matter. Information control in a given country can have consequences all over the planet and we are suffering the effects of this today. The same goes for disinformation and rumours. They make people take bad decisions, they limit free will and they sap intelligence.” 

RSF has taken measures to ensure that it remains as fully operational as possible while guaranteeing the safety of its personnel and partners. The data RSF collects comes from its network of bureaux and correspondents. Tracker-19 offers an interactive world map on the press freedom situation, constant coverage of developments and analyses of key issues. 

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said at least 21 “Iranian-backed terrorists” were also “neutralized” in Idlib, in a reference to Afghan, Pakistani and other Iranian-backed Shiite militias that have been fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Idlib

As war raged on in Idlib, a humanitarian drama was unfolding at Turkey’s border with Greece. On Thursday, Turkey announced that its borders were open for millions of Syrian and other refugees in Turkey to leave. It justified the move on the grounds that it could no longer cope with the burden, with up to a million civilians fleeing regime violence in Idlib remaining massed along Syria's border with Turkey. Thousands of migrants have gathered near Greece's Kastanies border crossing, some getting there by taking free rides on buses organized by the Turkish government. Turkey’s state-owned Arabic-language broadcasting channel, TRT Arabi, provided maps for migrants showing various routes to reach the border.

Erdogan lashed out at the EU for failing to fulfill a 2016 deal under which Turkey undertook to care for nearly 4 million mostly Syrian refugees in exchange for 6 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in financial support

the effect of this new blackmail is a complete disaster. One because the Turkish leadership is officially misleading migrants, telling them that ‘borders are open.’ Two because this is now an additional state-organized humanitarian disaster. There is total bewilderment in Europe at what the Turkish leadership can do when finding itself in a total, self-inflicted dead end

“The term that best characterizes Turkey’s current foreign and security policy is kakistrocracy, that is, government by the least qualified,” he told Al-Monitor. “The only silver lining in the Idlib crisis is that now [the Turkish government] can blame Turkey’s looming economic crisis on exogenous factors, allowing Erdogan to deny that his son-in-law Berat Albayrak, who is in charge of the economy, is to blame for his incompetence and mismanagement.”

“Aleppo is ours and so is Hatay,” declared Ibrahim Karagul, a fellow Erdoganist scribe on his Twitter feed. He was responding to an article by Russia’s state-run Sputnik news agency, which opened to debate Turkey’s 1939 acquisition of Hatay — also known as Alexandretta — in a disputed referendum following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire by the allied powers. The article is believed to have spurred today’s detention of the editor-in-chief of the Turkish version of Sputnik. Mahir Boztepe was released following a phone call between Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

the consensus among military experts is that Feb. 27 airstrikes were likely carried out by Russian jets. “Russia flies at night, the regime can’t. The Turks were bombed at night,” said Aaron Stein, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Middle East Program. Both sides have chosen to blame the regime for the attack, presumably to avert a direct confrontation that neither side wants.

Did Putin underestimate Erdogan when the pugnacious Turkish leader set a Feb. 29 deadline for Syrian forces to move out of Idlib? Is he merely letting Erdogan save face? Or does Ankara have more agency in its relations with Moscow than it is credited for? It’s probably a bit of everything, said Kevork Oskanian, an honorary research fellow at Birmingham University who is writing a book titled “Russian Empire.” He told Al-Monitor, "Russia’s reluctance to intervene in the regime’s favor does appear to be designed to allow Erdogan to save face while also softening Assad up for compromise.”

America’s sanctions had hurt people, of course. Average monthly salaries were worth less than a pair of imported shoes. I saw people sleeping rough or hawking junk on the streets. One former university lecturer I met had been reduced to busking. But few people went hungry and there seemed to be a joie de vivre among many of those I talked to. Cafés, theatres and music halls were packed. An earlier bout of sanctions had forced Tehran’s Symphony Orchestra to disband but I wangled a ticket for the opening night of the reconstituted Philharmonic.

It was liberating to have the run of Tehran, without minders, deadlines or chores. But of course, I wasn’t truly free. I policed myself on behalf of the regime, becoming my own jailer and censor, aware that any lapse could have consequences. Sometimes I tried to speak over colleagues or relatives who were saying things that I feared might enrage my captors. I felt the presence of hundreds of electronic eyes. The friendliest faces who greeted me might be informers. And I could not leave Iran. It is an odd experience to know that you can be caught out at any time. But this was the way of Tehran. Some avenues open up, others close. Everyone feels like a captive. There are those who say that it is all a grand plan of the ayatollahs to keep people on edge.

Self-censorship ranks as one of an authoritarian regime’s strongest tools, and I was complicit.

Despite Iran’s pious reputation, Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible. There has been a rampant campaign to build new mosques, yet more people flock to art galleries on Fridays than religious services. With the exception, perhaps, of Tel Aviv, I had visited nowhere in the Middle East where people read as voraciously as Tehran. “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable of women enslaved to a theocratic caste, is a particular favourite, the owner of one bookstore told me.

Life in Iran has always swung both ways. Nothing goes and everything goes. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza.

The space for veil-free living had grown since I last visited. In the safety of their homes, women often removed their head coverings when chatting over the internet. Darkened cinema halls offered respite from the morality police who enforce discipline. In cafés women let their scarves fall languorously. The more brazen simply walked uncovered in the streets, risking imprisonment. And, in an unusual inversion of rebellion, ties have made a reappearance some 40 years after Ayatollah Khomeini denounced them as a symbol of British imperialism.

The listing of plays in Tehran was almost as long as London’s West End and I devoured them. Directors are adept at finding ways to evade the censors. A striking number of plays and films I saw were set in prisons – a commentary on the Iranian condition – but under bygone regimes. Opera was taboo, but a performance one evening in the red-cushioned opera house of the former shah, which was billed as Kurdish folk music, included Verdi. Beneath a vast glittering chandelier the audience threw bouquets of flowers at the Iranian singer, who is acclaimed in both Rome and Berlin; for an encore, she finally dared to sing a solo.

Of course not everyone got away with pushing at the strictures. In my first week in Tehran the authorities pulled a production of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” – the play is about suicide, which is forbidden in Islam – and another about poor women reduced to hawking to feed their families. Cafés that hosted live bands risked closure until they had paid off fines. Women without head-coverings who were spotted on one of Tehran’s many surveillance cameras received police summons by text. But the morality police, who drove around town in new green-and-white vans, seemed too stretched to suppress every challenge.

as well as being an intelligence officer, he was an academic and wrote a newspaper column

There was a Jewish café, two kosher restaurants and a maternity hospital funded by the Jewish community in the south of Tehran, where less than 5% of those born were Jewish. A Jewish sports centre was also under construction

Over the course of four days the men spent most of their time glued to phone-screens, watching Bollywood films, or American or Chinese schlock full of street fights, which they accessed through virtual private networks to evade the censorship they were supposed to enforce.

I feared either that the Revolutionary Guards thought they could use my presence to negotiate some kind of deal, or that I was becoming a pawn in the internal rivalry within the Iranian government. I was beginning to see at first hand the glaring tensions between the two arms of the state. My hotel seemed increasingly nervous about hosting an over-stayer without a passport. In an attempt to evict me one evening, they cut the lights and blamed an unfixable electrical fault. The following morning the Guards arrived to transfer me to another location. En route we were chased by two motorbikes and careened up and down the alleyways of northern Tehran. Only when we pulled into a cul-de-sac did the Guards succeed in shaking them off.

A new interrogator – toad-like and clad in leather – told me that the Guards had found incriminating material on my laptop that touched on matters of national security: he had found a note from a conversation I’d had with a government flunkie about smuggling rings connected to the offspring of senior Iranian officials. This proved, he said, that I had crossed the line from journalism to espionage. They were reopening the case.

Notes he had discovered on Iran’s spiralling brain drain confirmed, to his mind, that I was seeking to undermine national morale.

I wasn’t even sure how genuinely religious many of those I had met were. When we drove about town, Ali talked of his student days, his young family and his passion for British football. Ideology rarely came up. Within the parameters set by the vice squads, Tehran’s dominant culture was defiantly secular. Iran called itself a theocracy, yet religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority.

For ten nights in Muharram these passion plays were performed with growing fervour. Even an irreverent man who taught me Farsi, who devoted much of his spare time to picking up waitresses in cafés, said Muharram was the one religious occasion he observed. The streets were lined with mokebs, stalls offering tea and dates and decorated with tragic representations of the battlefield using decapitated toy soldiers. At one mokeb, I came across a camel being readied for sacrifice. Many of these rites drew on ancient folklore rather than Muslim practice, akin to the celebration of Easter in the West. Since its inception the clerical regime had sought – and failed – to purify Iran of its non-Islamic elements.

“You feel a direct connection between people and God here,” a 40-year-old programme manager told me. He had stopped going to government mosques altogether, he said. Like some other pious Iranians I met, he feared that politics had sullied their religion rather than elevating it.

Panahian preached from a cushioned, teak throne beneath a vast chandelier while his acolytes crowded around him on the floor. He projected so much power, I got the feeling that if he’d read from a phone directory his disciples would still have sobbed. “Are you a servant of God or of man?” he said, scanning the crowd for suspects. “Choose between the tyranny of westernisation and God.” After he’d left a woman in a black chador took me aside. I steeled myself for an ideological harangue. Instead, she held up a plastic bag of bread and a plastic container of beans that the Husseiniya distributed after the sermon. “That’s why we came,” she said. “If you ask about the contents of the sermon, no one can tell you. If you ask about the contents of breakfast, they’ll all remember.”

the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in the Muslim world. Since the ayatollahs toppled the shah, Iran’s Jewish population has shrunk from 80,000 to around a tenth of that number. The ayatollahs have largely kept the remaining Jews safe, but they have also confiscated some of their property, particularly that of those who have left the country. Tensions between Iran’s Jews and the regime ebb and rise depending on the country’s relationship with Israel. But over time the Islamic Republic seems to have grown more at ease with the community

Iran has 22 mikva’ot – pools for ritual immersion. Many of Tehran’s dozen active synagogues are vast and packed with worshippers

I was caught in a political game involving high-seas tankers and international diplomacy that far exceeded my ability to influence it.

By rare coincidence the first service of selichot, the penitential prayers recited for a month in the run up to the High Holidays, began on the first day of the solemn month of Muharram. The synagogues were packed. At 1am Iran’s largest synagogue still teemed with families. At 2am the congregation swayed in prayer for Israel and its people. The communal chest-beating was gentler than in the Husseiniya, but more ardent than in Western congregations. Women walked up to the ark and kissed the smooth Isfahani tiles painted with menorahs and stars of David, acting like Shia pilgrims at their shrines. People milled around on the street outside chatting. I must have recited my prayers for forgiveness with conviction.

two men in black entered and introduced themselves as officers from another branch of intelligence. They apologised profusely for the difficulties I had faced and blamed the Guards for the inconvenience. They hoped that I had been well treated and expressed outrage that the Guards had made me pay my own hotel bill. They assured me that they’d been working strenuously for weeks to fix matters. My ordeal was over, they said. But could they just ask a few questions first?After 40 minutes of interrogation, they disappeared. Ten minutes later they were back with embarrassed smiles. One awkward matter needed resolving. Because I had overstayed my visa, I needed to pay a fine of 4m toman, about  $200.“Of course, the Guards should be paying since the delay was of their making,” they said.I called Ali and asked him to clear the fine.“No way,” he replied. “Can’t they waive it?”The intelligence officers apologised again but remained insistent. There were regulations. They couldn’t foot the bill for a mistake of the Guards.

Only when the flight map on my seat-back screen showed the plane nosing out of Iranian airspace did I begin to breathe normally.

Demonstration events account for 99% of all disorder in the country, with the remaining 1% consisting of violence against civilians, predominantly perpetrated by state forces; rare clashes between the authorities and anti-government militia groups, such as Saraya Al Ashtar; and sporadic bomb attacks. More than 20 fatalities are reported between 2016 and early 2020

The most active group involved in demonstrations is the February 14 Coalition, a decentralized organization primarily consisting of youth activists. Named for the start date of Bahrain’s 2011 uprising,3 the Coalition is not affiliated with any formal political groups and contains both Shiite and Sunni members

Many demonstrations are also led by the Shiite community at large

Despite accounting for a majority, the Shiite community is marginalized and often faces discrimination by the government, which is dominated by the Sunni royal family

The data show spikes in demonstration activity around executions and extrajudicial killings committed by the government