Hana Al Badree in her temporary home in Amman, Jordan.

Charity Tooze
AC360° Contributor

Hana Al Badree, not her real name, a 57-year-old Iraqi refugee living in Amman, Jordan, had just received a message from Iraq when I called to check on her. Al Badree’s 12-year-old nephew had just died.

He jumped over a fence attempting to retrieve a ball in his Baghdad neighborhood when he fell on his head. Her last surviving brother, his father, then went into cardiac arrest due to the shock of his son’s death.

Al Badree’s life has spanned two wars. She has lost nearly a dozen family members to violence. She said this was her “fate.” This was not the first time Al Badree had said this. Now, her gravelly voice struggled to conceal the onslaught of emotions that threatened to overwhelm her.

One week earlier, I had served her hummus and black tea garnished with mint at my apartment in downtown Amman. She had been working with me as an interpreter for five weeks while I interviewed dozens of families for a documentary. She translated my questions and lent her credibility with the community to the project. Families, who otherwise might have been less open, welcomed me and shared their stories and pain. Now it was time to interview Al Badree about what had driven her into asylum.

Because of threats of violence, we agreed to change the names of the family members for the purpose of this report.

The “fate” Al Badree talked about began in the early 1980s when her husband was arrested and imprisoned during the Iran-Iraq war. The war began in 1980 and lasted eight years. It claimed an estimated 1.5 million lives, according to various estimates. Thousands of Iranian soldiers suffered from Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons and 60,000 Iraqi troops were imprisoned.

Hana Al Badree making lunch in her Heshmi Shamali temporary home in Amman, Jordan.

Al Badree’s husband was one of them. He had joined the Public Army in Iraq out of obligation after receiving his bachelor’s degree in Europe. He spent a month in Northern Iraq and after completing his tour he decided to become a guard for the Baath party. Al Badree said her husband wanted to serve his country before leaving for the United States to pursue a PhD in pharmacology. “He was a patriot,” she said.

After several months of wondering where her husband was, Al Badree received a letter from the Red Cross stating he was in prison in Iran. She asked everyone if they knew what happened to him. Each person she asked denied knowing anything about him. Eight months later she received her first letter from him. She savored a few letters and then they abruptly stopped.

As she told me this, Al Badree wiped away tears that began flooding her face, her rounded fingernails stopping the eyeliner from betraying her well-sculpted eyes. In 1986, four years after his disappearance, Al Badree said she received a letter from Iraqi military informing her that he had been tortured and executed.

She didn’t want to believe it. For two weeks Al Badree didn’t speak, eat or cry. “I neglected my sons completely.” Her children stopped attending school to be with their mother. “I must be subjected to my fate – this is the will of Allah,” Al Badree said.

Fate’s Vengeance II

When American troops invaded Iraq in 2003, the dark shadow of Al Badree’s fate would again knock her into a tailspin. Her eldest son, Mohammad, worked in the security forces protecting the Ministry of Health – he worked for Saddam Hussein.

One day, three men knocked on her door and said they needed to speak to her younger son, Ali. “They said they were friends of Mohammad’s.” Al Badree said she listened as the men explained that Mohammad had been shot and was in the hospital. She said she burst onto the porch, pulling out her hair, demanding to know what happened. Al Badree said the men convinced her to allow Ali to accompany them to the hospital.

Hour after hour passed and neither son returned. Finally, her eldest son, Mohammad, came home. “Where is your brother?” she says she demanded. They realized, as the sun began to rise, that Ali had been abducted. This was not the first time Ali’s life was in danger. Earlier that year, he had started his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Al-Mustansiriyah when militia members attacked the school and attempted to kill everyone. He hid under the dead bodies of his classmates to survive.

This was the second attempt on his life. She said days passed and there was no word of her son. “I didn’t speak to anyone. I was completely crazy. I didn’t recognize my own family. My jaw went out of place and I scratched my face with my nails,” said Al Badree.

While she waited in her brother’s home for some news, Ali was being held on the other side of town. Later, he told her he was beaten in a room guarded by masked men when a gunfight broke out and he and another man escaped their kidnappers. Ali hid for a day before returning to his mother’s house. Al Badree said when he returned she came out of her daze.

“My jaw immediately went into place. I yelled at him, ‘where have you been I haven’t seen you since this morning’,” she recounted. In reality, Ali had been gone for several days. Al Badree said it took weeks for her to fully understand what had happened.

After Ali’s return, the Al Badrees made the decision to flee Iraq. They sold their two Jeeps because, like many Iraqis, their bank accounts had been frozen. When the war broke out, Iraq’s Central Bank stopped functioning and everyone who had accounts lost their money. (There are currently thousands of lawsuits over the whereabouts of these funds.)

With the money from the sale of the Jeeps, the Al Badrees were able to flee. They left everything: Hana’s home, Ali’s apartment, Mohammad’s house, and their extended family. After she was safely on the other side of the border, Al Badree called her neighbors to check on her home. They told her militia had moved in and sold everything. The horror did not stop there.

Her family was being systematically exterminated in her hometown in Iraq. In Amman, Jordan, she could only helplessly hear the nightmarish news.

Al Badree is one of nine children. Her older sister’s husband was a cleric. When the violence began, Al Badree said he had started preaching about revenge against the Shi’ia and resisting Americans. One morning they found him in the mosque. His long white dishdasha [Muslim robe] was covered in footprints and 100 bullets riddled his body from head to toe.

“They killed all three of my sister’s sons. They were 22, 24 and 26,” Al Badree said.

In 2006, one of Al Badree’s nephews was visiting his mother, her oldest sister, when the militia came to her home in Iraq, Al Badree says. The militia demanded her nephew go with them. His wife protested and they kicked her in the stomach; she was six months pregnant. They hit another family member in the face with the butt of a gun. He went blind. Al Badree said that the next day the militia called and said they were bringing her nephew back. His family looked for a car and all they found was a garbage bag where his body had been chopped into pieces, his tongue, head and genitals removed. Al Badree went on to say that soon after her sister lost her mind and finally died of natural causes. “My family members are still being killed,” she said.

When I went to check on her a week later she was more concerned about me than talking about her loss. I commented on how strong she was and that I was surprised she was still standing. Al Badree then jumped to her feet with a wide smile, light glinting from the blue in her hejab and said, “I am still standing, this is our fate.”

Editor’s Note: Charity Tooze is a freelance journalist. She was the executive producer of Rites of Passage, www.ritesofpassage.tv, a weekly television program by and for young women in the Bay Area. She is producing a documentary and video series on Iraqi refugees.

CNN

The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East and Central Asia visited Pakistan on Monday as the Pakistani army battled Taliban militants in the country's northwest, U.S. Embassy officials said.

Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, held meetings as U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also arrived on a separate visit.

Details about their visits were not immediately available.

Petraeus' and Kerry's arrivals came on the heels of Pakistani troops launching a massive ground offensive backed by air power over the weekend in South Waziristan, a refuge and power base for insurgents operating in Pakistan and along the Pakistani-Afghan border.

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Robert Lacey
Author

I chose these words to open my new book Inside the Kingdom, because I needed to understand the tragedy of 9/11 and the nation that produced no less than fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on those planes. Saudi Arabia has never been a spot that wins much favor in the west. How can you love a country that charges you $70 or more for a product that costs less than $10 to get out of the ground – and then gives you terrorists as well?

But I wanted to go beyond that – to find out how the culture and religion of a society could go so wrong as to produce such a poisonous boiling-over of intolerance and hatred. In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist – its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their government on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops closed for prayer five times a day, executions in the street – and let us not even get started on the status of women. For many the Kingdom remains one of the planet’s enduring – and, for some, quite offensive – enigmas.

But in these notorious distinctions lies an answer that I would urge you to consider – for when you look harder, the differences are not quite as great as they seem. It was not so long ago in the west, certainly in the memory of our parents and grandparents, that women were second class citizens denied the right to vote; most respectable people were devout and rather intolerant believers, scared and suspicious of other races and faiths: capital punishment was considered a necessity – with public lynchings of non-whites in the south; books and plays were censored (our movies still are); people dressed in stiff and formal clothes – a sort of uniform; father knew best, and ‘nice’ girls remained virgins until marriage. For centuries western life was lived within the comfort of those structures and strictures, and it is only in the last 90 years (one modern lifetime) that we have started to look for new values – which we sometimes seek to define by criticizing those who are reluctant to abandon the security of what went before.

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Cairo University students wearing niqab stand outside a university dormitory on Oct. 7

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

The Arab Middle East teaches minorities some tough life lessons and shapes them in ways that might surprise you. While the effect of a conservative patriarchal society is expected to keep people under the thumb of tradition, culture and tribal and religious beliefs - sometimes too much oppression and control yields opposite results.

Having lived in several parts of the Middle East as a child, I learned that a woman doesn’t exist except as someone’s daughter, sister, wife or mother. Her opinion is not required, her emotions don’t count and she has no rights whatsoever – except those granted to her by a male.

With a few recent exceptions, an Arab woman’s testimony is not accepted in court. Most Arab women can’t travel outside their countries without permission from a male guardian, and most Arab women still can’t give nationality to their children. In Saudi Arabia women are not even allowed to drive cars. A popular Arabic saying describes it best: a good woman “has a mouth that eats but not one that speaks.”

The Arab Middle East taught me that sexual expression is exclusive to men. Men can have pre-marital sex, and when they’re married, their extra-marital affairs are ignored, justified or blamed on the wives. Their bodies are their own to do with them what they want. A woman’s body, however, represents her family’s honor. So, girls and women are expected to cover their bodies and repress their sexual feelings to protect the honor of the family.

This is such a deeply-rooted belief that, to this day, girls and women are killed by fathers, brothers or cousins at the suspicion of sexual activity. Even if a girl or woman is the victim of rape or assault, she can be killed under the pretext of “cleansing the family’s honor.” The practice known as “Honor Killing” is still common among all religions in the Middle East; it is even justified under the law and carries no penalty.

As someone who grew up and spent my early adulthood in the Middle East, I also learned that men run the show and they run it for life. Imagine that with the exception of a few, all Arab leaders haven’t changed since I was a child; and those who died were replaced by their sons. So far, the customary behavior has been such that if you wanted change, you had to ask men for their permission, their blessing, their support, their approval, their orders, and their actions to bring that change.

The women in my family were very active in the women’s rights movement of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Men listened to them, gave them a forum to express their desire to become equal through conferences, speeches and occasional articles in the media. They even gave them some rights – like the right to vote in some countries and the right to run for office in others. But, women’s rights were always controlled by men’s approval and that didn’t go far at all. As a matter of fact, a quick look at the Arab Middle East shows you that with very few exceptions it remains a region controlled by the ruling few who are unwilling to relinquish power. They resist change as if it were a contagious disease that will lead to their demise if they ever catch it.

Enter the age of the computer and the Internet, the age of blogging and connecting with the world. The only age that will allow a Saudi female cartoonist to draw pictures depicting how a woman feels when her husband takes on a second or third wife. It simply rips her heart out she draws.

A Saudi female cartoonist's rendition of how a woman feels when her husband takes on a second or third wife.

Islam accepts polygamy and blesses it with a caveat which men enthusiastic about the practice tend to ignore. You can take multiple wives, but “if you want to be fair, marry only one,” the holy Muslim book guides. While not many in Saudi Arabia might care about how Hana Hajjar feels, a whole world outside the kingdom, is paying attention, supporting and perhaps even lending a hand.

The online traffic we witnessed in the aftermath of Iran’s contested elections and the outpour of support Iranian reformists received through social media are perfect examples of the effect of international support on local activism. In the case of Iran, it energized and helped spread the message to far reaching corners of the world.

Other stories that have captured the world’s attention are bloggers jailed in Egypt and Saudi Arabia for speaking up against the Status Quo in their countries and demanding social justice and political reform. We are learning about what’s going on inside the most conservative and most police-controlled countries in the region through bloggers who are not allowing the intimidation of prison, harassment or abuse to silence them.

It is obvious now there is a growing number of Arabs, men and women, who not only want change but they are willing to get to that change on their own. They grew tired of demanding it and not receiving anything in return, so they made the decision to truly become the change and live it in practice.

Now, you have bloggers like Wael Abbas in Egypt who openly criticizes President Hosni Mubarak’s policies and screams out slurs against his country’s secret police that detains him for hours and confiscates his laptop without any explanation or apology whatsoever.

You also have the gay and lesbian Middle Eastern community publishing their online magazine which deals with issues they find important. They discuss sexual orientation out in the open and provide a voice and an outlet they wouldn’t have even dreamed of a few years ago. Their headlines read, “Who we sleep with is nobody’s business” and “Homophobia and Paranoia: Words that Ryhme.”

The Lebanese Association of Women Researchers ‘Bahithat’ just organized what is dubbed a cornerstone of Arab Feminism through a conference at the American University of Beirut. Women from all over the Middle East - including Iraq and Iran - were there promoting the idea that “change will have to be imposed not demanded anymore” says Lebanese Feminist Zeina Zaatari, one of the most vocal voices at the conference.

The Feminist Collective promoted the event online through social networking sites such as Twitter. They drew the world’s attention to hear the voices of powerful women who gave themselves the right instead of waiting for officials to give them permission to speak or express themselves. Zaatari captured the limelight as she linked a woman’s equality with a woman’s sexual freedom and sexual expression. “A woman can’t be free if she doesn’t own her body and has full control of it and if she doesn’t express her sexuality,” she told me in a phone interview from Beirut.

The December 2008 Issue of Jasad.

Another example of women taking matters into their own hands is a quarterly magazine called ‘Jasad’ which means ‘Body’ in Arabic. It’s a racy magazine that was launched by a woman in Lebanon at the end of 2008 dealing with the female body and its deepest sexual desires. ‘Jasad’ is banned and its website is blocked from many Arab countries.

“This doesn’t stop subscriptions from being delivered by courier mail,” founder and editor-in-chief Joumana Haddad told me as she was busily preparing the fifth issue. She says the magazine is doing well despite the fact that “no one dares to advertize” in it. She talks about threats she and her editors receive on a regular basis and unending harassment since they all use their real names. She says it is the support she receives from within the Middle East and outside that keeps her going and that “nothing will stop ‘Jasad’ from being published.”

Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously.... If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.

In June, President Obama urged a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and Muslims in a speech in Cairo, Egypt.

Cynthia P. Schneider and Nadia Oweidat
RAND Corporation

“Where are the moderate voices from the Arab world?”

This common lament often leads to nostalgic evocations of the Golden Age of Islam, which stretched from the 7th to the 16th century. President Obama recently harked back to this period of Islamic enlightenment, innovation and tolerance in his Cairo speech, in which he attempted to redefine the relationship between Muslims and the United States.

Actually, there is no need to reach back 1,000 years to find Muslim advocates for tolerance and moderation. There is a need, however, to stop silencing the moderates alive today.

The Arab world is rich in literature - including a surge of new novels and non-fiction - that examines all aspects of Arab life and advocates a vision of a multi-cultural society that respects human rights. These works draw on the traditions of the medieval Golden Age, and of the Arab Renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Cairo was to the Arab world what Paris was to the West.

Eight decades ago, the seminal scholar Rifa’i Al-Tahtawi, once head of Al Azhar (Obama’s host in Cairo and the equivalent of the Vatican for Sunni Muslims), advocated tolerance towards non-Muslims and engaged in vibrant debates with contemporary European intellectuals. In his 1830 book An Imam in Paris, he argued for an open, moderate version of Islam. At a time when Egypt offered only religious education, he also urged the state to make modern, secular education accessible to all citizens.

Such ideas were not restricted to Egypt. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, the pious Syrian scholar Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi urged the separation of mosque and state to protect the purity of Islam from political manipulation.

Today’s Arab authors also bravely delve into taboo subjects from the correct interpretation of Islam to women’s and minority rights, government corruption, extremism and political oppression. Some advocate a more tolerant version of Islam, one that has become increasingly marginalized. Why are these moderate voices not better known in the Middle East or the West? To begin with, they are banned in most of the Arab world. And it isn’t just governments censoring and persecuting them. Equally important are the self-appointed "thought police" who clamp down on ideas they deem too liberal.

In their quest for legitimacy, many other Arab governments have also institutionalized an interpretation of Islam that frowns upon critical thinking, enforces blind obedience to the ruler as an Islamic duty, and ruthlessly silences dissent. This has helped dictatorships across the region to last for decades with no hope for a genuine rotation of power.

The notorious case of Egyptian Islamic scholar Nasr Abu Zayd illustrates how governments collude with or ignore the intimidation of progressives by fundamentalists. Conservatives branded Abu Zayd a heretic for penning a moderate interpretation of the Koran and filed suit against him in a Cairo court. To the shock of Arabs who support a separation of church and state, the court supported the heresy charge and, in 1996, ordered Abu Zayd divorced from his wife. (Apostates are not allowed to be married to Muslim women.) The couple went into exile amid death threats.

In 2006, Egyptian police went from bookstore to bookstore confiscating copies of a book called The Modern Sheikhs and the Industry of Religious Extremism, which urges religious and government authorities to play a more positive role on such issues as the environment, corruption and women’s rights. They were acting at the behest of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Center, which under Egyptian law, has the right to censor books and other cultural products.

Novels such as The Sacred Union, which exposes the lack of religious freedoms and women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, are banned in most of the Arab world. The author, a Saudi woman, wrote under a pseudonym to protect her safety.

Publishers as well are persecuted. Mummad Madbouli, the legendary owner of Madbouli Books in Cairo, has been one of the few who dared to publish and sell banned books. He has faced more than 25 lawsuits and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Due to Madbouli’s acclaim among the public and intellectuals alike, the prison sentence was never carried out.

Yet the popularity of books such as The Yacoubian Building by Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany, now in its eighth reprinting, attest to a growing demand for works that are authentically Arab and not doctrinaire. Like the Nobel Prize winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Al Aswany candidly exposes social and political problems plaguing Egypt through stories about the lives of ordinary people - a refreshing departure from the “blame the West and Israel” bombast that Arab publics are typically served.

Still, with few exceptions, the works of these new Arab writers, as well as their predecessors from the last century, are not found in bookstores in the Middle East today. And the contributions of the Arab Renaissance are unknown to all but a tiny intellectual elite.

What is accessible are religious tracts, both historic and contemporary, from authors such Sayid Qutob, who is cited by Osama Bin Laden, and Yousif al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric who has been banned from entering Britain due to his extremist views.

With a click of a mouse anyone can access entire libraries of jihadi texts available online for free. The banned books of moderates could find their way to Arab readers were they posted online, but they are nowhere to be found. Yet it is these writers, contemporary and renaissance, who offer Muslims a tolerant, open-minded alternative, anchored within their own traditions. And they offer the Obama administration the possibility of forging a genuine connection with Arab publics.

The administration aims to replace the advocacy of American values with a new focus on empowering local voices. Those policies, taking shape at the State Department under a new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith A. McHale, former CEO of the Discovery Channel, represent a promising departure from the failed “spoon-fed democracy” approach that Admiral Mike Mullen rightly criticized recently.

If the U.S. government learns anything from the failure of the U.S.-funded al-Hurrah television station, it should be that foreign bureaucracies should not manufacture messages of democracy and tolerance to be broadcast at the Arab world. Such impulses need to come from within. They should be organic and authentic and free of government fingerprints.

What the United States and its allies can do, however, is help ensure that the voices of moderation are given a platform, equal to that given to fundamentalists such as al-Qaradawi. The Obama administration could start by condemning censorship and persecution of writers, and encouraging investments in education, literacy, libraries and broader Internet access. Non-governmental groups others could support the publication and dissemination of moderate Arab authors through universities and other institutions, such as the Library of Alexandria, which plans to re-issue the Arabic classics.

Westerners cannot and should not attempt to script Arab thought. But they can support a return to the standards of critical thinking and open inquiry that once characterized the Arab world.

Editor's Note: Cynthia P. Schneider, a former ambassador to the Netherlands, is a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, which will publish her forthcoming study, A New Way Forward: Encouraging Greater Cultural Engagement with the Muslim World. Nadia Oweidat is a researcher at the RAND Corporation and a D. Phil candidate at Oxford University.

Ben Wedeman
CNN Correspondent

When President Barack Obama came to Cairo in June and made his address to the Muslim world, reaction in Egypt was wildly positive.

Many Egyptians had fallen in love with the new young American president with an Arabic middle name. Some even picked up the "Yes we can" slogan.

His appeal was fueled by an almost unanimous dislike for his predecessor, George W. Bush, widely perceived in the region as a Christian fundamentalist leading an anti-Muslim crusade.

But that was then. Euphoria has a short shelf life in the Middle East, and Barack Obama is not exempt.

To gauge reaction among Egyptian intellectuals to the news, I called Hisham Qassim, a democracy and human rights activist I've known for many years. He was perplexed at the news from Norway.

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Benjamin Netanyahu, left, President Obama and Mahmoud Abbas.

Fawaz A. Gerges
CNN

Poor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas! He returned to Palestine empty-handed and politically weakened after the tripartite summit this week with President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The New York summit yielded no signs of a breakthrough either on freezing construction of Jewish settlements or restarting the long-stalled Palestinian-Israeli talks.

By laying equal blame on the Palestinians and Israelis for the diplomatic stalemate, Obama undermined Abbas' position at home and exposed his weakness and overdependence on the Americans.

It is important to understand the context of Abbas' initial reluctance to attend the tripartite summit in New York. He swallowed his pride and accepted Obama's invitation to meet with Netanyahu, even though he had set a precondition of a settlement freeze, as the U.S. demanded, before agreeing to meet Netanyahu.

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President Obama addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.

Bill Richardson
CNN

President Obama, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, announced the next phase in America's efforts to finally end the decades-long Israeli-Arab conflict and remove one of the greatest destabilizing elements to America's national security interests from the Middle East playing field.

Like health care reform, this is a daunting task, and in order for the president to be the last one confronting this, Congress and Americans of all stripes should be supporting him.

The president made it clear that the United States wants permanent status negotiations to begin without preconditions based on the parameters from past negotiations: security for Israel and Palestine, refugees, borders and Jerusalem. The president added that the United States seeks peace agreements on all fronts, including with Syria and Lebanon.

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Alyssa Fetini
TIME

The split between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims is one of the most important schisms in modern religion — yet in the West, at least, it's one of the least understood. The centuries-old strife sporadically erupts into new bloodshed throughout the Middle East — today, particularly, in war-torn Iraq, where the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein has reopened old wounds. As British-born journalist Lesley Hazleton argues, these wounds have been left to fester by a lack of adequate planning or understanding of the issue's complexities on the part of American policymakers. Her new book, After the Prophet, recounts the epic story of the split between Islam's two main factions and its present role in the Middle East. TIME talked to Hazleton about the history and misunderstandings of this dispute and what, if anything, can be done to extinguish it once and for all.

What's the Shi'ite-Sunni split really about?
It's about who should lead Islam, and it began at the moment of Muhammad's death. As the founder of Islam, he was the undisputed leader. And if he had had a son, the split might never have happened — a son would automatically have inherited his father's authority. But he died without sons and without leaving a clear will. His closest male relative was his cousin and son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, whose followers — the Shiat Ali [followers of Ali], or Shi'ite for short — say that he was the only one with the spiritual authority to succeed Muhammad. The Sunnis believed that the caliphate should go to whoever would be best equipped politically to maintain the burgeoning Muslim empire, backing Muhammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr. In the end, Abu Bakr was named the first caliph. Though Ali eventually assumed the caliphate 25 years later, he was assassinated, power fell to the founder of the first Sunni dynasty, and the Shi'ites felt a terrible, lasting sense of dispossession. In a nutshell, the difference between the two is that the Sunnis tend to respect how power actually works rather than the way it should work in an ideal world. In a sense, the Shi'ite ideology is more idealistic, while the Sunni one more pragmatic.

Read more...

Representatives from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the interior ministry and the UNHCR at the workshop last month.

Charity Tooze
AC360° Contributor

Syria is making significant steps to protect the most vulnerable of Iraqi refugees – women and children who are trafficked or forced into prostitution.

Last month, Syrian government officials met with representatives from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) for a three-day workshop. The purpose of the meeting was to develop laws for the rights and duties of refugees, train local officials on refugee issues and address the growing problem of human trafficking.

An anti-trafficking bill is currently working its way through the Syrian parliament. If passed, it will be the first law of its kind in the Middle East. There are also a number of projects under way to protect women who are trafficked into the country for sex tourism or indentured servitude.

“Women at risk are a priority for the Damascus [UNHCR] office especially in view of their increasing vulnerability to exploitation under economic duress,” said Farah Dakhlallah, public information officer for the UNHCR in Syria.

The anti-trafficking law has been working its way through parliament for more than a year. It includes provisions for victim compensation, the establishment of rehabilitation centers, punishment for beneficiaries (clients), and the creation of an independent administration within the ministry of interior affairs for combating human trafficking crimes.

The Good Shepherd Convent, a Christian church in downtown Damascus run by four nuns, has several projects that support vulnerable woman and children, including a shelter with 22 beds for victims of sexual gender-based violence (SGBV). One of the new projects the government is supporting is an additional shelter specifically for trafficked women and girls. The project is being carried out by The Good Shepherd church, the International office of Immigration (IOM) and the Ministry of Interior.

Trafficking to Syria has garnered attention over the past few years because of reports that an alarming number of Iraqi women have fallen into prostitution and are being trafficked. It is impossible to track how many women are forced into prostitution but the organization Iraqi Women’s Will says approximately 50,000 women and girls have been victimized by this trade. In November, 2008 the UNHCR published a report outlining the various issues surrounding trafficking but did not quantify the issue. In June of this year they reported they’ve gained access to 70 SGBV cases in the Douma Prison in Syria and intervened with seven Iraqi girls in the Juvenile and Rehabilitation Center in Damascus.

“We have 210,000 Iraqis registered with the UNHCR but the Syrian government says there are 1.1 million Iraqis in Syria,” Dakhlallah said.

Syria doesn't require visas from Arab or African countries. " Syria is used for transport to the Gulf region. Gangs smuggle the girls across the border and through Syria," said a representative from the Good Shepherd church.

Without the law in place, if a woman is arrested in Syria for prostitution and doesn’t have a passport she will be charged with a crime and potentially deported, even if she was trafficked.

Minors are typically brought to juvenile detention centers. Local advocates and UNHCR workers have an agreement with the Syrian government to intervene in their cases. The Syrian 1956 labor law prohibits a stranger from working inside a Syrian home. Therefore, the concept of having domestic or sexual labor in the home is new to the Syrian legal system. The anti-trafficking law will change the government’s stance on both issues.

The economic situation for Iraqi refugees in Syria continues to worsen. Survival sex, prostitution and the sale of young women into Mutas or “pleasure marriages” have been on the rise.

A manager of a local NGO, who would not reveal her true identity because she fears retribution by both the traffickers and the government, said there are at least 5,000 trafficked girls in Syria. Like many of Iraq ’s neighbors, Syria has not signed the 1951 Convention on refugees. While Syria actually hosts more refugees than any other country and has opened its education and health care system to Iraqis, refugees are not legally allowed to work. This inability to find legal employment has led to the spike in the trafficking and prostitution of Iraqi women.

The manager said young women are kidnapped from Iraq or sold by family members to traffickers in Syria – who she says are mostly Iraqi. She adds that young women and girls who are virgins are sold for prices ranging from $4,000 – $10,000 U.S. dollars.

“The kids think the parents aren’t doing anything wrong. They think they are just going to go work cleaning someone’s house,” The manager said. The average age of a trafficked girl is approximately 13-years-old. Those sold into “pleasure marriages,” which can be dissolved in a matter of days, are then forced into prostitution.

The manager said the girls are kept in houses until drivers pick them up to take them to a “beneficiary” for the night.

“Usually the male member of a family, who is stronger, will prostitute female family members,” the manager said. Some women work at nightclubs dancing for money, while others are pimped and leave with men at the end of the night.

“A woman found two girls who fled Iraq to escape the violence,” a representative from The Good Shepherd Church said. She drafted fake marriage certificates and then planned to sell the girls. One of the young women overheard that she was to be sold and managed to escape. She is being protected by the Good Shepherd Church and hasn’t heard from her sister since her escape.

Syria cannot fight this issue alone. The manger of the local NGO said the government needs the support of the global community and international donors. “Because of the traumatic memories and negative stigma from being trafficked, the best option for young women is to be resettled in other countries,” she said. The UNHCR has a fast-track resettlement program for young women who have been trafficked.

“There was a young woman who was undressed and paraded in front of potential buyers,” the manager said. “She said she felt like a piece of merchandise and felt bad because they didn’t want to pay that much for her.” The psychological implications of sex and domestic slavery will be with these young women forever. To support the healing process the UNHCR along with the Syrian Red Crescent covers all psychological costs for women who’ve been trafficked or forced into prostitution.

Another positive step is a partnership that is developing between the UNHCR and the Syrian Women’s Union, which seeks to empower refugee women, especially women at risk.

Without a trafficking law, few pimps or traffickers are ever prosecuted. Many women are often prosecuted for prostitution, unless an aid organization intervenes on their behalf. If the new law is passed these women will be protected rather than prosecuted.

Editor’s Note: Charity Tooze is a freelance journalist currently working in Jordan . She was the executive producer of Rites of Passage, www.ritesofpassage.tv, a weekly television program by and for young women in the Bay Area. Last month she was in Syria , reporting on Iraqi Refugees as part of her master’s thesis.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi (second from left) arrives in Tripoli, Libya.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

It’s been hard to convince Arabs that Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was released only on compassionate grounds. They’ve been calling his release a deal and they’ve been discussing the facts as well as the fallout, the noise and controversy that ensued.

For Libyans, it was no doubt a victory. On the same day, they descended on a palace of their leader Moammar Ghaddafi, cheered him on and called him their “happiness maker.”

For the rest of the Arab world, it was considered a deal early on. First, the timing was suspect. His release occurred one day before the beginning of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, about a week ahead of Libya’s 40^th anniversary of the revolution that brought Moammar Ghaddafi to power, and a month before Ghaddafi’s planned trip to the US where his visit - and the air-conditioned tent that will house him - are already the subject of controversy.

Then came the hero’s welcome, which effectively sealed Arab suspicions. And if that wasn’t enough, Ghaddafi’s son and heir apparent, Saif al-Islam, spoke to a local station and said that al-Megrahi’s release was part of every negotiation with the British government. He said it was part of a “trade deal” struck between the two countries. These comments angered the UK and the US but overjoyed the majority of Libyans and got some Arab editors and commentators talking.

For most Arabs, this is a business deal. Columnist Obaidaly Obaidaly says “al-Megrahy is just one element of this deal which involves closing the Lockerbie chapter forever and opening a new chapter in relations between Libya and the west.” According to Kwaileet, oil, gas, technology and defense contracts involving primarily U.S. and British companies are likely to be signed, if they haven’t been signed already.

The facts remain the same. The only man convicted in the Pan Am flight 103 which killed a total of 270 people, mostly Americans, walked free with a big smile. He received warm congratulatory hugs by one of the most influential people in his country, and the first words he uttered publically were a declaration of his innocence.

In his opinion piece for Al-Arabiya.net, Obaidaly concludes that “al-Megrahi is the key to the future relations between Libya and the west” which the author has no doubt “will become obvious in the near future.”

So, if Scottish authorities cite compassion as the grounds for his release and Libyan leaders talk about his release as an integral role in “deals,” does that make al-Megrahi’s release a compassionate deal?

As the tension rises between the US and the UK over this high-profile release, an Arab world watches in awe and disappointment. One opinion editorial described what happened last week as a “cautionary tale.”

“It is not about the rights and wrongs of the decision taken by the Scottish Justice Minister” the piece argues. “It is not about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s clumsy handling of the matter and it is not about sending a positive signal to terrorists as a handful of US senators and FBI director Robert Mueller have suggested.” The author then concludes, “It is simply that when the truth is absent, division, heartache and anger remain.”

The Arab world has a history of searches for the “truth” between assassinations, coups and revolutions that bring leaders to power for decades or for life. Many Arabs, especially intellectuals, think that they can trust western governments with the truth. Judging by the reaction, this is one case that’s making them re-consider.

Most of the Pan Am 103 victims were Americans. It is in this country that the outrage is loudest against the release of al-Megrahi and the hero’s welcome he received in his native Libya. So how will Americans welcome Ghaddafi when he lands on US soil and heads to his mobile home (an air-conditioned tent that travels with him wherever he goes) in New Jersey in September? One can only imagine.

Follow Octavia on Twitter @OctaviaNasrCNN

Fawaz Gerges says the U.S. downplayed the serious political and economic difficulties of Egypt's regime.

Fawaz A. Gerges
Special to CNN

After smiling broadly for the TV cameras and complimenting one another, U.S. President Barack Obama and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak provided little food for thought about what really transpired between them in an Oval Office meeting Tuesday.

Historically, the atmospherics of presidential summits are as important, if not more so than the substance. The Obama-Mubarak get-together is an example of where symbolism trumped political reality.

The American president warmly welcomed his Egyptian counterpart to the White House, his first visit in five years, and praised him as a "leader and a counselor and a friend of the United States."

Mubarak reciprocated by saluting Obama "for all his efforts with regard to the Palestinian issue." He said that Obama's address to the Muslim world from Cairo, Egypt, was "great and fantastic" and removed all concern in Muslim minds that "the U.S. was against Islam."

Beyond the rhetorical hyperbole, there are underlying structural tensions and differences in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship that both camps consciously played down and ignored.

Keep reading...

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

Have you ever heard of Klash the rapper? If you haven’t it could be because he’s from Saudi Arabia. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest shrines and host to the yearly Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam.

Klash sings about love and other things usually not openly discussed in Middle Eastern society; definitely not a topic of conversation in his native kingdom. Saudi Arabia is known more for its strict Islamic rule and ultra conservative society than for its men and women seeking earthly pleasures of any kind. Saudi women can’t even drive cars in their country or be seen in public with unrelated males by blood or marriage.

Like many of his fellow rappers around the world, Klash pushes the envelope. Take these lyrics to one of his popular songs for instance:

“Women are like cigarettes
Once you smoke them
You step on them
with your shoe.”

Saudi authorities were “offended” by such lyrics. They jailed Klash and forbade him from singing until he promised to clean his act.

Turki is another Saudi man who sings about love but only in his spare time. He appeared on Lebanon’s contentious show Thick Red Line to talk about the first and only woman who stole his heart. “She is the love of my life,” he told the reporter. Turki talks with passion about the many times he met his Saudi girlfriend and how they spent hours together on a beach, hidden away from a society where they knew their relationship may have been misunderstood.

But Turki has no illusions about Saudi Arabia’s culture. He says, "According to our traditions and our religion, loving a girl or kissing her without being married is a sin... But we didn't care."

Confessions like Turki’s have become routine on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation’s Thick Red Line – the station's most controversial show.

On his shows, seen in Saudi Arabia and other countries across the region, host Malek Maktabi tackles some of the most taboo subjects of the Middle East. Most guests, fearing repercussions, appear in disguise. Even women have spoken openly about experiences that are rarely discussed in that part of the world. In one episode, a fully covered 26-year-old Badriya talked about spousal abuse.

She described in graphic details how her husband whom she married at the age of 15 abused her for years before he divorced her and threw her away. "He used to beat me up and burn me with the iron” she said. She then described how her whole body is disfigured. She also said that her husband used to lock her up in the bathroom for days without food. “He was a monster” she said, but explained that she didn't dare complain of fear that he would kill her and she didn’t want to leave the children with him.

Last month, a Saudi man appeared on the show and claimed to have picked up dates around Saudi cities and brought them to this room where they allegedly engaged in wild sex.

The episode drew harsh criticism from conservative quarters inside the Kingdom. The man was arrested and he might face the death penalty for "bragging about sinful behavior."

The Saudi offices of The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation were shut down in outrage, despite the fact that the station is half-owned by Saudi Billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

Change comes slowly to this Kingdom but it seems like people are doing their part.

Turki offers a romanticist’s approach to very serious - and even deadly - societal restraints. "With the exception of my love and this ocean, everything can change” he says.

In the meantime, many Saudis like Turki are taking risks and living their lives outside traditional cultural boundaries, hoping they won’t be discovered.

Follow Octavia on Twitter @octavianasrCNN

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

Have you had a Falafel sandwich lately? I have had at least five in the past month alone. You see, Falafel is my favorite food and I won’t miss an opportunity to enjoy the vegetarian sandwich. From Beirut to Singapore, I’ve tried all kinds of local twists and turns on the richly spicy chick pea and fava bean-based deep fried ball patties.

There is something wild about Falafel. I’m not the only one devoted enough to admit my love of this spicy vegetarian food; there are people all over the world posting silly videos of themselves idolizing the Middle Eastern specialty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV9y24S_NF0&feature=related

Falafel is comfort food for Arabs and Israelis alike. Each group claims to have the best and tastiest mix of ingredients. On both sides you can find the Kings of Falafel; and if this weren’t enough, I did eat once at a shop called “King of all kings of Falafel.”

But where did this recipe originate? The jury is out. Serious debates are raging on this subject. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism uses Falafel in a campaign to lure tourists to the country; while the Lebanese Industrialists Association launched its own campaign called, "hands off our food" threatening to sue Israel for what they call their signature ethnic foods - Falafel, Tabbouleh and Hummus. http://www.ali.org.lb/

In Egypt, Falafel is such an indispensable staple that even the local McDonald's carries a special sandwich called - what else?– MAC Falafel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfFXK1V6mNM&NR=

In Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other Israeli and Palestinian cities, people enjoy a local pita pocket stuffed with the small deep fried vegetarian patties and a variety of other ingredients - from fried eggplants, fried cauliflowers, pickles, French fries and hummus.

In Lebanon and Syria, the sandwich - with falafel, tomatoes, greens and Tahini sauce - is served tightly rolled and ready to be wolfed down.

A man at a popular Falafel stop in Beirut expressed what many Falafel enthusiasts feel, "I came in from Dubai” he said, “ I've been here for a couple of days and I don't want to leave before having one of these sandwiches."

Falafel is such an important staple in the Middle East, it inspired Falafel, the movie.

http://www.falafelthemovie.com/Synopsis.html

Author and Director Michel Kammoun chronicled the life of a Lebanese man whose life he compared to a Falafel ball trying in vain to escape its fate. In the movie, Kammoun makes up tales glorifying the importance and even miraculous role of Falafel in the life of the masses. In a scene, one of his characters boasts, "In the island of Sumatra once, it rained Falafel for 30 straight minutes over poor areas."

Not to be outdone, an Israeli company created an online game of Falafel for those who just can't get enough of it.

http://www.falafelgame.com/eng/falafel.html

And one company took the Falafel experience to a whole new level.

http://www.maozusa.com

It used the unique recipe to describe a history of the company with the ingredients as props. Take the case of an image of its worldwide stores, drawn with Tahini sauce.

Trying to understand why this modest food has such a following in the region – and all over the world – is a mystery to some. What is certain is that for Falafel lovers like me, just mentioning the word conjures up images of a delicious sandwich and a favorite place that offers it; and THAT there is no arguing about.

So, are you a POCKET or ROLL Falafel person? Where is your favorite Falafel store? What is your Falafel story?

Marium Al Wata, 32, used to own a pharmacy in Iraq.

Charity Tooze
AC360° Contributor

Marium and Hassan Al Wata* are stalked by their shared past. They are haunted by memories of death threats and murder. In 2006 they fled the violence in Baghdad in search of a safe haven. They settled in Amman, Jordan but their security quickly turned to imprisonment.

They say their modest apartment in the city’s Heshami Shamali neighborhood feels like a cage. Their days and nights are spent within the confines of sheet rock, sweat and anxiety. “We never leave the house during the day,” Marium said, “At night we’ll go on the balcony and talk about how we’re feeling.”

During the escalation of sectarian violence between 2005 and 2007, thousands of Iraqis fled to Jordan and other neighboring countries. According to a Fafo Research Foundation report, commissioned by the Jordanian government, there are between 450,000 and 500,000 Iraqis living in Jordan. But many of these people find themselves isolated in their new homes, fearful of deportation and waiting in limbo. The United Nations now recognizes the situation as the largest urban refugee crisis in history.

After their arrival three years ago, the Al Watas discovered layers of bureaucracy that made their life in Jordan difficult. Jordan did not sign the 1951 Convention on refugees and while it has been historically welcoming to displaced people, Iraqis are not officially recognized as refugees and therefore cannot work legally. The large influx of Iraqis was a shock to Jordan’s infrastructure and the country quickly changed its immigration policies and began requiring visas for Iraqis. The visa requirement - and the inability to work legally - has made it nearly impossible for an Iraqi to live some semblance of a normal life in Jordan.

Because of their traumatic past and the threat of deportation the Al Watas spend nearly all of their time in the confines of their apartment.

“We don’t have any friends that come over,” Marium said. The Al Wata’s windows are covered and their 3-year-old son, Hamsa, has hardly left the house since birth. “He’s never been to a playground. He’s not socialized very well. He doesn’t know how to play with children his own age,” she added.

Hassan, 32, holds a masters degree in mechanical engineering and worked with the General Motors distributor in Iraq’s Green Zone. Marium, 32, is Iraqi but spent her childhood in Iowa. She owned a pharmacy in Iraq. Their lives resembled that of a middle class American family. “We would go to work, the children went to school, and we had a nice life.”

After 2003, Marium began receiving death threats at the pharmacy. The Al Watas are Sunni Muslims and they lived and worked in a predominantly Shiah neighborhood. Hassan also received death threats, like this one: “If you want to go back to your family leave your work with the American dogs or we will bring your head to your wife.” Marium recounted her reaction, “I only have one man, so I begged him to quit.”

Hasam Al Wata was born shortly after his family arrived in Jordan.

The Al Watas, like many Iraqi refugees, said prior to the war there was no difference between Shiah and Sunni in their neighborhood. This problem, they claim, came from outside Iraq. “I didn’t know I was Sunni until I was 20-years-old,” Marium said. “But now it’s different, the children are growing up with this concept. It will be very difficult to heal.”
Iraq was a secular state prior to the war, and although more governmental positions were held by Sunnis, the Al Watas claim there weren’t many conflicts between Shiah and Sunni.

The Al Watas thought the violence in Iraq was just a phase but it continued to escalate. Marium’s brother was killed by a bomb when he was on his way to a job interview. He had just finished his bachelor’s degree. Marium said his death left a huge scar on her mother, who was terrified the same fate would find Marium’s two young sons. She begged them to leave Baghdad.

It took them 19 terrifying hours to drive to Jordan. In addition to traveling with their two sons, Marium was nine months pregnant and didn’t know when she would give birth. “It was a very difficult journey for us. We had never left our families,” she said. They were given a two-week visa. They cannot afford to pay the $1.50 Dinar - roughly $2 U.S. dollars - per day to legally extend their visa. They attempt, like thousands of families, to live outside the gaze of the government.

After several years in exile most families have exhausted the resources with which they fled. “As time goes on the situation continues to get worse,” said Fusayo Irikura director of the Women’s Federation of World Peace.

Sarah Al Wata is the youngest of Marium and Hassan's children.

Marium puts her newborn baby, Sarah, to sleep on a converted coffee table next to the foam cushions that constitute their bed. “I wake up every hour to check on her. Now that she is getting older she can roll over and I am scared she will roll off.” They worry about their two oldest children who continue to show psychological symptoms from the violence they witnessed in Iraq.

“Our children faced a lot of terror in Baghdad. They saw killings in front of them, they saw bodies – dead bodies in the streets and once when they were in school, armed people came inside the school and killed the gym teacher because she was wearing pants and training clothes.” Annes, 11, continues to suffer. He can’t sleep without the lights on and sleepwalks. Marium holds her tears back when she talks about how the boy’s only uncle, her brother, was killed. She said his death aggravated her son’s fears.

The Al Watas wait. They don’t know when or if they will ever be free from the confines of their apartment’s drab walls. They are registered with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) for resettlement. Resettlement to a foreign country seems to be their only glimmer of hope.

“Our children refuse to return to Iraq,” Hassan said. They hope to be resettled in the U.S. where they will be free to work and rebuild their lives.

*The names of the subjects in the story have been changed for their protection.

Hana Al Badree, a translator, contributed to this story.

Editor’s Note: Charity Tooze is a freelance journalist currently working in Jordan. She was the executive producer of Rites of Passage, www.ritesofpassage.tv, a weekly television program by and for young women in the Bay Area. She is currently in the Middle East developing a body of work on Iraqi Refugees as part of her master’s thesis.

Khidir, now 8, was kidnapped and held hostage for two years by operatives with al Qaeda in Iraq.

Khidir and his father, Abdul Qader, recently talked to CNN about his ordeal.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Middle East Affairs

He looks like any 8-year old at first glance. He likes to play with his toy car and he dreams of one day becoming a police officer just like his dad. But, if you look closely into these innocent-looking eyes, would you be able to guess that this little boy was kidnapped, tortured and forced into hard labor before being rescued by Iraqi forces? Physical scars from nails being hammered into his legs and cigarettes put out on the bare skin of his shoulders, are visible on his tiny body. But can you see the psychological scars much deeper underneath? Can anyone?

I grew up during Lebanon’s civil war and I’ve seen and heard many horror stories of some people who survived torture and others who weren’t as fortunate. There is still something terribly touching about every story I hear, especially when it involves children and innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with the war or its games. They don’t carry guns, they don’t shoot at anyone, they are in no one’s way, they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Khidir was in the wrong place at the wrong time when al Qaeda operatives in Iraq gave his father an ultimatum. They wanted the Iraqi forces to release some prisoners and because Khidir’s father is a police officer they kidnapped his six-year-old son to pressure him to release the prisoners. But Khidir’s father said he would have preferred his son to die a martyr than to release the terrorists. He didn’t realize his son would remain in captivity for almost two years. Khidir endured physical abuse and was made to work in the fields for his captors. Last December, he was rescued by Iraqi forces.

Eight-year-old Khidir now describes, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, how his nails were pulled out of his fingers and his bones were broken from the beating of a shovel. His teeth were pulled with pliers for no specific reason. He was laughed at when he suffered the most. He tells CNN all these horrible tales almost with no emotion. He points out the healed scars on his legs, back, shoulders and hands. He tells CNN what kept him going during his ordeal was just the thought of his mom and dad. He then hugs his father and laughs just like any ordinary 8-year-old. He smiles and enjoys the warmth of a parent and the thought of unconditional protection and love.

His father, Abdul Qader, tears up as he speaks with the CNN crew. "When he tells me about how they would torture him, I can't tolerate it. I start crying," he says.

Many people would feel the urge to cry when they hear the story of Khidir and how much he had to endure at such a young age. What we might never know is how Khidir really feels about his ordeal, and what kind of an Iraqi adult man he will become. How long and how deep will his scars serve as reminders of a date and place where people went to war and committed atrocities – in this case against an innocent child – who, on the surface, seems to have moved on.

People ask me often how I survived the war and its atrocities. Mine is a simple answer - which might apply for Khidir too – “I didn’t have a choice.”

Ahmed Awa, on the border of Iraq and Iran, is near the area where the three were hiking Friday.

Shon Meckfessel
The Nation

I'm writing this statement to help people understand what happened to my three friends, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, who went missing by the Iran/Iraq border. I have been close friends with Shane and Sarah for years, and recently met Josh, a longtime friend of Shane. Shane is a language student and freelance journalist; Sarah is an English teacher, and Josh arranges student exchange trips. All of us have done some writing about our travels, and all of us share a deep appreciation for Middle Eastern cultures.

In late July the four of us decided to travel from Damascus, Syria to Iraqi Kurdistan for a short vacation. Sarah had to return to work in a week. While going there might seem strange to Americans, the Kurdish territory is actually very beautiful and quite safe. Since the Kurds gained autonomy in 1992, no American has ever been harmed there. The city of Sulaimania is increasingly popular with tourists, and a friend of ours told us it was the most beautiful area he'd ever seen.

We arrived in Sulaimania the night of July 29 and stayed at the Hotel Miwan. Walking around town the next day, we asked a number of people–taxi drivers, hotel staff and people on the street–for good places to experience the mountainous terrain in the area. Every one of them told us to visit a place called Ahmed Awa. Not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border. In fact, on the wall of our hotel there were three photos of tourists standing near the Ahmed Awa waterfall.

Read more...

Ahmadinejad waves after being sworn in as Iranian president for a second time.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Middle East Affairs

In his inauguration speech at the Iranian parliament, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had something to say for almost everyone - his supporters, his opponents and those he called "enemies" without naming names.

He hailed what he called an "epic election" but didn't go into the turmoil of the past two months that ensued.

No word on the reformist movement calling the vote rigged or demonstrators who chanted for weeks slogans such as, "Death to Ahmadinejad." No mention of those who demanded new election and posted messages on the Internet as they did repeatedly today on the social networking site Twitter saying, "This is the voice of Iran, Ahmadinejad is NOT our president."

Instead, Mr. Ahmadinejad stressed that, "The victor is all the people, the revolutionary values, and the Islamic establishment."

Keep reading...

Editor's Note: On Wednesday, a Saudi court  sentenced Mazen Abdul Jawad to five years in prison and 1,000 lashes for bragging about his his sex life on television, according to Ministry of Information officials. Read Octavia Nasr's blog about the incident – and the uproar it caused – below.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

This is one for the Middle East’s record books; a story that falls under the ‘unbelievable but true’ category.

In August, a 32-year-old Saudi man appeared on an Arabic satellite channel and discussed – without reservation and in great detail – his sexual likes and dislikes, his favorite sex toys and how he lost his virginity to a neighbor at the age of 14. Mazen Abdul Jawad described how he picked up women in the ultra-conservative Muslim Kingdom, brought them to his bedroom and had sex with them.

But in a region where sex is considered taboo, Jawad’s public admission of his sexual exploits outraged religious conservatives in the Muslim state. He was arrested more than a week ago and now faces charges under the strict Islamic sharia law code.

As soon as the Jawad appeared on A Thick Red Line, a popular social taboos show on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), people all over the Middle East were quick to condemn his comments and the station that gave him a platform to commit the “sin” of “bragging about his wrongdoing.” The LBC has refrained from commenting on the situation.

The story, not surprisingly, made headlines around the region. Jawad subsequently denied it, claiming the station had fabricated the story and taken his words out of context. Saudi authorities then arrested Jawad and launched a full-fledged investigation into his real crime and tried to determine how to manage the major image crisis he had created for the kingdom.

While most people were simply shocked by his stories, others used the opportunity to discuss the antiquated societal norms of the Middle East that don’t respect people’s sexual freedoms. Others called for Jawad’s severe punishment. Suggestions ranged from flogging him on live television, to stoning him in a public place, to cutting off his sexual organs and hanging him to teach the masses and send a clear message that this type of behavior would not be tolerated in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest shrines.

Although Jawad’s fate has become the topic of the hour in many circles around the region, what really is the basis for the investigation? What crime did he commit? Is it his sexual exploits or the fact that he bragged about them? Judging by commentaries and religious explanations, it seems that the punishable-by-death act was the bragging.

Muslim clerics and scholars quote from the Hadith – a collection of stories and tales that Prophet Mohammed’s Companions told about his time on earth to which clerics usually refer in order to come up with rulings or edicts also known as “Fatwa” – that it is a sin to brag about a wrongdoing or an offense if Allah has already covered for you by not allowing others to find out about it. It’s a complicated story and millions of Arabs - especially in Saudi Arabia – find themselves grappling with its meaning.

The show that aired Jawad’s story is as popular as it is controversial in the Middle East region. It tackles taboos sometimes never discussed in public. In most cases, the show’s guests appear wearing oversized dark shades or wigs and strange clothing to disguise their identities as their lives can be endangered for talking about such taboo subjects. Previous topics on the show have included homosexuality, polygamy, spousal abuse, deviant sexual behaviors, forced marriages and honor killings.

The host is a popular young man who talks to his guests as if he’s known them forever. Think a Middle Eastern version of Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer: he has the ability to get guests to reveal shocking things about themselves and admit to their most hideous behaviors. In one instance, a guest admitted he put up his children for sale and tried to justify why he continued to look for the highest bidder even though his kids were begging him to change his mind and promised to go to work or beg in order to help him with expenses.

Jawad did not use a disguise when he discussed his sex life on the show. And in a society in which sex is never discussed, that fact alone could have been the most shocking piece of this bizarre story. Jawad invited the crew to his red-themed strangely decorated bedroom where Mickey Mouse meets stuffed bears in sexually suggestive positions. The cameras gave audiences a glimpse of the room’s nightclub-like chandeliers mixed with seafood-shaped wall sconces, perfume bottles, sex toys, condoms and a book in Arabic that Jawad calls his “reference” entitled ‘101 Questions About Sex.’

On the show, Jawad, wearing a red shirt, explained that he put his number and car details (a red Mini Cooper) on his mobile's bluetooth. He said that women usually call him to ask if the car is for sale. He went on to boast, “some go out with me that same night, others take longer and in all honesty some don’t work out.” At the end of the report Jawad walked away saying, “Time to check out my luck,” – in reference to whether or not he’d be able to pick up a woman that day.

Right now, the fate of Mazen Abdul Jawad hangs in the balance. Will he get the death penalty for bragging about his sexual life? Will he be held responsible for the acts he allegedly committed?

In Saudi Arabia, terrorists such as captured al Qaeda members - whose intentions are to kill and maim in the name of religion – are given the opportunity to repent and to be set free after undergoing special rehabilitation. With such an extreme “merciful” side, it sounds strange that a man caught bragging about his alleged sexual exploits could be sentenced to death by hanging.

Elise Labott
CNN State Department Producer

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blasted Israel Monday for evicting dozens of Palestinians from homes in East Jerusalem, calling the move a violation of Israel's obligations.

"I think these actions are deeply regrettable, Clinton told reporters following a meeting with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh. "The eviction of families and demolition of homes in East Jerusalem is not in keeping with Israeli obligations. And I urge the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions."

The U.S. protested the evictions Sunday to the Israeli embassy in Washington, which are complicating U.S. efforts to jumpstart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The U.S. believes the move is not keeping with Israel's obligations over the U.S.-backed roadmap for peace, which calls for an end to all settlement activity.

"Both sides have responsibilities to refrain from provocative actions that can block the path toward a comprehensive peace agreement," Clinton said. "Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot be used to prejudge the outcome of negotiations. And they will not be recognized as changing the status quo."

An Israeli government spokesman rejected international criticism Monday in defending the evictions of the Palestinians from their homes, where some of them had lived for generations.

"I think a lot of the criticism is simply not fair," Mark Regev told CNNI.

He described the dispute as a legal one between two private parties over who had title to a property in East Jerusalem. "As you know, the Israeli court system is independent and professional," he said. "Many times it goes on the Palestinian side if they think that's where the justice is and, in this case, they ruled in favor of the Jewish side."

But Jordan's Foreign Minister Judeh condemned the evictions, saying they present an obstacle to peace and urged Israel to reverse course.

"East Jerusalem is occupied territory. It is part of the territory that was occupied militarily in 1965 - in 1967, and it is very, very important that people bear in mind that this is part and parcel of the discussions that will take place when negotiations are re-launched," he told reporters.

Drawing on her legal training, Clinton suggested Israel could be taking the move to strengthen its hand before negotiations with the Palestinians begin.

"I was a lawyer in a prior life. Very often, people try to stake out even more strong and difficult positions going into negotiations. We understand all of that, and we intend to continue on the path that we are on," she said.

Tensions have erupted between Israel and the United States over President Obama's insistence that Israel halt all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank. President Obama's Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell is trying to negotiate an agreement with Israel over a settlement freeze which could allow some existing construction to continue.

Mitchell is also trying to get Arab states to make some gestures to Israel to create a climate for peace, which could include opening trade offices in Israel and allowing tourist visas for Israelis.

Foreign Minister Judeh said while such a climate was important, it was time for Israel to reciprocate to the 2003 Arab peace initiative which offered it relations with all Arab nations in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state and ending the occupation of all Arab land, including Lebanon and Syria.

"In the Middle East, there has been in the past an overinvestment,perhaps, by the parties in pursuing confidence-building measures,conflict-management techniques, including transitional arrangements, and an overemphasis on gestures, perhaps at the expense of reaching the actual end game," Judeh said.

Quoting Jordan's King Abdullah, he said, "There has been too much process and too little peace, a situation that most certainly is no longer sustainable."