The Lede

[Rebroadcast] Catfishing a Killer — with Ugur Umit Ungor, Annsar Shahhoud and Rasha Elass

This episode originally aired May 27, 2022, and takes listeners behind the scenes of a groundbreaking New Lines investigation by genocide researchers Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud. This week, that investigation won the prestigious Chair's Award at the 2023 Drum Awards for Online Media, and so we’re rebroadcasting it for those who might have missed it when it first aired. 
 
When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the weeks unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn’t know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines’ Rasha Elass, they talk about how they used Anna to expose Amjad’s participation in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, carried out by the Syrian regime.
 
Created in 2018 “out of necessity,” Anna was able to build a rapport with dozens of Assad’s perpetrators through an elaborate catfishing scheme, giving the researchers unprecedented access into the minds of people like Amjad, ultimately leading to a chilling confession by the man who massacred dozens of Syrians. “Nobody’s ever done this before,” says Uğur. “There are no examples of people interviewing active intelligence officers.”
 
But “Anna was a double-edged sword,” he adds. “On the one hand we were unable to do any research without her; on the other hand it was also a burden, especially for Annsar, to crawl into the skin of a pro-regime person for over two years.”
 
So when the time came to terminate Anna, a simple Facebook deactivation wouldn’t do. Instead, they performed their own private funeral for her. It is moments like these that helped Annsar and Uğur find relief. They talk about how they also rely on satire and dark humor — exchanging macabre jokes that make sense only to each other — to survive the sort of work that most others will never relate to: “It might seem inappropriate to some people, but trust me, it’s the only way to stay sane.”
 
Hanging over the investigation was the question of what to do with the video when it came time to publish. For some of the countless Syrians still searching for missing family members, the video could yield answers, but it also meant making the victim’s final moments public. They needed to decide: Would it be better to allow the families to confront the graphic last moments of their loved ones’ lives? Or protect the victim’s dignity by keeping those brutal details private?
 
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El Kholy

Why Erdogan Wins Elections — with Nicholas Danforth and Kareem Shaheen

Back in the early 2010s, then-Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented himself as a peacemaker in the long war between Kurdish rebels and the state.
 
“He talked about what a tragedy it was that Turkish and Kurdish mothers were both reading the same Islamic prayers over the bodies of their fallen sons,” says Nicholas Danforth, a nonresident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European Foreign Policy and the author of “The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.” 
 
“He saw the conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurds as a result of the military's hyper nationalist approach. He thought he could carve out a different relationship with them. He used religious rhetoric to do it.”
 
It is a sign of how much Erdogan has changed Turkey that, going into May’s presidential election, in which he faced his most serious opposition yet, both Kurds and nationalists were a prominent part of the coalition against him. And his victory is a sign that the Erdogan formula of religious conservatism and Turkish nationalism remains far more politically potent than his detractors would like to believe, Danforth says. 
 
“He's running a very authoritarian, rigged system,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kareem Shaheen. And yet “he does have real popular support.”
 
The Erdogan brand of religious nationalism stands as a repudiation of Turkey’s traditional secular version, which more devout Turks have long resented, Danforth says. “Erdogan has done a very good job at playing on both a real and imagined sense of victimization amongst conservative religious people in Turkey.”
 
But his political project is much more ambitious than a simple course correction from secularism — and it has much wider appeal, earning him admirers not only within but beyond the borders of Turkey. It is both one that envisions his country as the main regional player in a future geopolitical order and one rooted in the memory of Turkey’s Ottoman past.
 
“What won Erdogan votes was his use of the Ottoman Empire as a symbol of when Turkey, and the Islamic world, were powerful,” Danforth explains. “He's created an image of redressing the wrongs in the global order.”
 
Erdogan, of course, has positioned himself at the heart of that project.
 
“It's left-wing third worldism. It's Islamism. It's Turkish nationalism. And he's become the avatar of all of these,” says Danforth. “That is, I think, part of what's made his appeal so widespread.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

War on a Warming Planet — with Mike Martin and Lydia Wilson

Nobody can predict the future, and warfare is particularly unpredictable. Nonetheless, the stakes involved are too high not to try. Attempts to understand what tomorrow’s wars might look like, and what futuristic weapons will be used to fight them, have long captured the imaginations of military planners, science fiction authors and the general public alike. But, says Mike Martin, a former British Army officer, “technology is often someone we focus on, but it's actually a bit of an addition.”
 
As the author of the book “How to Fight a War,” Martin has spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that makes the difference between victory and defeat. “There are four things that if you get them right, you'll win,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. “And they are strategy, logistics, morale and training.”
 
The importance of those basic principles hasn’t changed, he says, and perhaps never will. But the process of implementing them has. Logistics is a good example. During the Second World War, the United States military used roughly a gallon of fuel a day for every soldier. By the time of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, that number had increased to sixteen gallons per soldier. 
 
“Militaries are not sustainable. They are not eco-friendly,” Martin says. “Wars are incredibly carbon-intensive.”
 
That poses a fairly serious problem when climate change is already at a tipping point. But weaning an army off oil is no easy task, and attempting to do so would mean putting yourself at such a disadvantage that no military could seriously contemplate it. Modern military vehicles are incredibly fuel-hungry, and while electric vehicles are increasingly viable for civilian purposes, the demands of warfare are simply beyond the technology’s current capabilities, he explains. “It'll just get wiped out by hydrocarbon vehicles, because they just perform at a much higher rate.”
 
But climate change has even bigger implications as a driver of conflict.
 
“I think we already are seeing conflicts around climate change,” Martin says. “And these are only going to get worse.”
 
He points to the ongoing conflict in the Sahel as an example, where the devastating effects of climate change on rural communities, especially around the dramatically shrinking Lake Chad, have been deftly exploited by extremist groups. France’s intervention in the region ended last year, having failed to achieve its objectives.
 
“They didn't understand the problem that they were facing,” Martin says. “They treated it as a counterterrorism problem, rather than the problem of collapsing ecosystems.”
 
As climate change intensifies, the pressures will only intensify with it — and they won’t be confined to a single region.
 
“These are problems that we're not really solving,” Martin reflects. “I think many people are going to get quite desperate over the next 30 years.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Sudan’s Democracy Deferred — with Nisrin Elamin, Khalid Mustafa Medani, Kwangu Liwewe and Danny Postel

Five weeks after intense fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Nisrin Elamin and Khalid Mustafa Medani joined New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe and Danny Postel for a deep dive into the origins of Sudan’s nascent civil war. The army is led by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while the RSF answers to Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. After seizing power in a 2021 military coup, the two men had ruled Sudan together for almost two years.
 
“The international community was engaging with these two generals, framing them as potential reformists,” says Elamin, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “When time and time again, they proved that they could not be trusted — that they had no interest in any transition to civilian rule.”
 
Before their coup, Sudan had been well on track. The Sudanese Revolution ended the 30-year military dictatorship of Gen. Omar al-Bashir in 2019, after hundreds of thousands of Sudanese citizens took to the streets. It didn’t happen overnight. Throughout the 2010s, neighborhood resistance committees had been mobilizing not only against the regime but also to demand local public services and to fill the gaps through mutual aid programs. 
 
“We saw them emerge kind of as the backbone of the revolution,” Elamin says.
 
After the coup, it was these resistance committees and other grassroots civil society groups who kept the dream of revolution alive. “Everyday protests continued until these generals were forced, once again, to try to join with the civilian leadership under the auspices of the international community to transition to a civilian government,” says Medani, an associate professor of political science and Chair of African studies at McGill University. “And it is this framework agreement that fell apart by April 15.”
 
The generals, he explains, felt they had been backed into a corner — Hemedti especially. Under the terms of the agreement, the RSF would be integrated into the army command structure, depriving him of control of the force with which he built his considerable wealth and power. 
 
“This war is essentially about them trying to preserve the vast wealth that they both generated through illicit coercive and violent means. And that, of course, is centrally undermined by the Sudanese revolution,” Medani says. “This war is really against the revolution and against the Sudanese people.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Rock, Rai and Royalty — with Tarik O’Regan and Lydia Wilson

It was Christmas Eve when a longtime colleague contacted composer Tarik O’Regan to tell him that the U.K.’s new king wanted him to write a piece for his upcoming coronation. “I thought he was actually winding me up slightly,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. 
 
O’Regan had met Charles III more than 15 years ago, at a performance at Lincoln Cathedral, and he had clearly made an impression on the then-Prince of Wales. The king’s detailed interest in his work surprised him, given the 74-year-old monarch’s reputation as a man with generally conservative artistic tastes. As a composer, O’Regan is known for incorporating a diverse range of influences and inspiration in his work, blending genres and traditions from outside the world of classical music. 
 
“Increasingly, I don't think of the different genres of music or different styles of music, as being separated by how they sound,” he says. 
 
Many of his biggest influences came from childhood, he explains. Growing up with an Irish father and a North African mother, O’Regan explains that rai music was almost always playing on the radio when he would visit family in Algeria. “Those moments I remember very vividly,” he says. Rather than try to reproduce the technical conventions of rai, he wanted to try to capture the way those moments he felt when he was a child. 
 
“I was interested in trying to write pieces of music that are not ethnographic,” he explains. “So they're not interested in authenticity but more about focusing on the haze of memory and recollection and the inaccuracies that creep into recollections and memory.”
 
Rock and roll also featured. “I was born in ’78, but my mother was playing a lot of Led Zeppelin, which she'd grown up with in the late ’60s,” he says. “When you're 5 or 6, you're very reliant on what is played around you.”
 
Despite the long history of monarchs using music to shape their image and legitimize their rule, O’Regan says that he thought little about those dynamics while composing. 
 
“One of the biggest things I was thinking about was not just how it's going to fit into the service, but how other people might be drawn to it,” he reflects. “You want to write a piece that then lives on.”

Beirut’s Scarred Heritage — with Nadine Panayot, Lydia Wilson and Joshua Martin

In August 2020, a catastrophic port explosion tore through the Lebanese capital of Beirut,  leaving more than 200 dead, thousands injured and 300,000 without homes. In a city renowned for its history, Beirutis take particular pride in their city’s almost unparalleled heritage — something that unites them across the country’s deep religious and social divisions. 
 
Fearing that they might lose the physical past forever if they didn’t act, a massive volunteer effort began to protect, restore and preserve the historic buildings and artifacts that had been caught in the blast. It was hard and painstaking but also inspiring work. 
 
“We all felt some sort of healing taking place, unconsciously,” said Nadine Panayot, curator of the Museum of Archeology at the American University of Beirut, at the time. “Somehow we felt that there was a meaning to what we were doing, there was hope for the future.” 
 
Three years later, New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson visited Beirut to see the results for herself. She joined Panayot at the museum, which showed little sign of the devastation it had suffered at the time. The glass that had once been scattered across its floor has been cleaned up. The doors, which had been blown off by the force of the explosion, have been replaced with near-perfect replicas. 
 
“We're the third-most-ancient museum in the Near East, and we've survived so many wars. We have survived direct shelling on the campus, but seeing it destroyed like this over corruption is important,” Panayot says. (Evidence strongly suggests that negligence and corruption on the part of officials led to the explosion.) “I mean, this is also part of the history. This is part of today's life.”
 
That, she says, is why she made the decision not to fully repair everything in the museum’s possession. A collection of Roman-era glass flasks, for example, were sent to the British Museum for restoration, but Panayot requested that it be as minimal as possible. The damage, she specified, should be clearly visible. “I call them scars,” she says. “And everybody has started calling them scars, because this is exactly what they are. Because they represent the scars of every Lebanese person.”
 
In the years since the explosion, there has been no accountability for the criminal negligence that caused it. The official investigation has stalled, and the corruption that led to the blast continues to plague the country as its financial system collapses. 
 
“As long as justice hasn't been done,” says Panayot, “I think these scars should remain.” 
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Telling Stories of a Distant Homeland — with Heather Raffo

“I didn't feel I had a torn identity at all, I felt a part of the fabric of this nation. I felt very Michigan,” says Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American playwright, filmmaker and actress. But then, she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s forced her to grapple with what it meant to have her identity split between two nations at war. “And it was really what has come to define me as an artist.”
Raffo finished her award-winning play, “The Nine Parts of Desire,” just as the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. “I made a point of telling American citizens about Iraqi citizens and sharing very personal stories,” she says. “I think having an American perspective, having that much of a distance, I was able to write something that could communicate directly with the Western audience, which was an audience that needed to hear the material the most.”
As if to underscore Raffo’s point, at first no theater would take it. “It was a dangerous time. Nobody wanted to be humanizing Iraqis.”
Two decades later, she had the chance to adapt the play into a movie, which is streaming on PBS until the end of May. It tells the story of a young Iraqi-American woman in Michigan struggling with the loss of her father — a far cry from the war movies that have dominated American depictions of Iraqis since 2003. But attitudes have changed a lot over the past two decades, and Raffo is part of a generation of artists from Middle Eastern diaspora communities pushing that change forward. 
“They are helping define the cultural narrative for Americans, for the West,” Raffo says. “And they're uniquely positioned to tell complex stories of both sides.”
Yet there is also a darker reason that Americans have become more open to such narratives, Raffo suggests. In 2003, political violence and mass death weren’t issues Americans had any real frame of reference for. That has changed. 
“We're in a different psychological space,” she explains. After the pandemic, she says, “Americans knew loss in a more intimate way than they ever had before. And loss is tragic, but it's also a moment of connection.”
“When things are happening that need to be spoken about, often it's the artists that will understand that first,” Raffo adds. “And I really think Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Americans are some of the first to know what happens when a society suddenly dissolves into sectarian identities.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

Sudan’s House Divided — with Dallia Abdelmoniem, Sharath Srinivasan and Kwangu Liwewe

After widespread protests led to the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan seemed to be on track toward civilian rule. But in 2021, a coup ended the country’s brief respite from military dictatorship. Since then, power has been concentrated in the hands of two men — Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto leader of the country, and the ambitious Gen.  Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, commander of the notorious paramilitary known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 
 
The relationship between the two rival generals had long been strained, but earlier this month, the tensions between them boiled over and a shooting war between the army and the RSF began on the streets of Khartoum. 
 
“We all knew it was going to happen,” former journalist and activist Dallia Abdelmoniem tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe from Port Sudan. “The world should have paid attention to the Sudanese, when they were saying after the coup of 2021, that you cannot deal with these two men.”
So far, attempts to mediate have failed, with neither side showing any sign of backing down. Many fear it could be the beginning of a new civil war.
“I think that it's very hard to get inside the heads of the warring generals,” says Sharath Srinivasan, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge and the author of “When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans.” 
 
“They have a tremendous sense of their coercive capacity and their right to rule,” Srinivasan says. “They have faced off in a way that makes it quite hard for one to retreat without the other taking advantage. We certainly are standing at a precipice.” 
 
With the country teetering on the edge of that precipice, many in Sudan have made the painful decision to leave the country while they still can, Abdelmoniem and her family among them.
 
“People are just fleeing. They're just leaving. I mean, I don't think I have one family member left in Khartoum,” she says. “We've all gone off in different directions, but there's no one left.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Russia’s Ultranationalist Youth Army — with Ian Garner and Amie Ferris-Rotman

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s government has intensified its efforts to secure the hearts and minds of its citizens — and, most of all, its young people. 
 
“History and the myths of the past have been very carefully constructed by the state,” Dr. Ian Garner, a historian and analyst of Russian war propaganda, tells New Lines Magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It's a mythological narrative of death and rebirth of utopias created through sacrifice and martyrdom, and of Russia’s supposedly holy mission to be at the vanguard of history.”
 
Garner is the author of the forthcoming book “Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth,” which dissects the state’s efforts to reshape the minds of Russia’s young people.
Casting Russia as the defender of tradition and righteousness in a civilizational battle against a treacherous and decadent West, the state seeks to legitimize its aggressive foreign policy and quell internal dissent through a fervent barrage of ultranationalist messaging.
“The power of the propaganda machine is immense. The weight of social pressure and peer pressure in Russia is terrifying. And the state pushes it in schools with propaganda lessons,” Garner explains. “It pushes it on television. It pushes it through sort of semi-mandatory volunteer activities in youth groups.”
Those youth groups, he explains, are the heart of the Kremlin’s nation-building project.
 
“There are now 1.3 million members of the youth army,” says Garner. “And the organization's website explicitly says we intend to pipe boys into the army.” Children are taught to use Kalashnikovs and compete to win prizes for partaking in patriotic activities. Most alarmingly of all, Garner believes, they are being taught that to be a good Russian means being willing to sacrifice yourself for the state. 
 
“It is re-creating children from the ground up. It is preparing them for war.”

Borders, Romance and Freedom — with Anna Lekas Miller and Joshua Martin

Anna Lekas Miller is a journalist covering borders and migration as well as the author of the upcoming book “Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World.” She had been reporting from Istanbul at the height of the Syrian Civil War when she met the Syrian journalist who would one day become her husband. The two quickly fell in love. But after he was deported by the Turkish authorities, they were forced to navigate a kafkaesque international system of borders, papers and passports, with no idea what their future together might look like. 
 
“We were very much living in limbo; we did not know where we were going to go,” Miller tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin. “And I was really curious about how people's relationships do survive and how people do stay together.”
 
Yet though they rule so many people’s lives today, the systems governing migration were not always so restrictive. It was only during the First World War that the passport as we know it today entered widespread use, she explains, and it was conceived as a wartime security measure. Once the war ended, the League of Nations held a conference to consider its abolition. “It is powerful to imagine what that world might look like,” Miller says. “Instead, things started becoming more and more restrictive.”
 
Today, she says, those century-old questions are even more urgent than ever. “There are so many more people moving than ever before, and so many reasons that people are being pushed out of their homeland,” she says. Likely foremost among them will be climate change, which threatens to displace millions in the increasingly less-distant future. 
 
“If coastlines are disappearing, and people's homes are being swept up,” says Miller, “and you're not allowing them to transit to somewhere to be safe … I don't see how that's going to be physically sustainable in the future.”