Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ A former British soldier who helped dozens of people leave Kabul after the Taliban’s invasion is stranded in Afghanistan after the Foreign Office bungled the paperwork necessary to evacuate him.” The ‘Taliban’s invasion’? According to Tony Diver and propably The Telegraph itself, Taliban carried out an invasion. I scratched my head: Are Taliban from China or Russia? Or maybe the Taliban have just invaded themselves! No, it is their country you like or not, as it is the country of many who have just fled it.  And it is just a small example of the narrative of the corporate media. 

Afghanistan 1978-2021: A brief summary

A very modest attempt by me. Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t even liberate Afghanistan .. Oh George! Oh Barack! Why did you leave it to Biden? Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t liberate Afghanistan .. Oh Hilary! Oh Hilary! Who would have had a laugh  Other than Bin Laden? Oh man! Oh man! Who will liberate the Afghan If not the Americaaan?* * Plural pronunciation of Americans in Arabic. —Nèdeem Mahjoub

“The PA found itself naked after losing the internal sources of legitimacy - revolutionary legitimacy, the legitimacy of resistance and national consensus, the legitimacy of ballot boxes and the legitimacy of achievement,” he said. “It only had external sources of legitimacy - the legitimacy of power and security - after its political project failed and it did not adopt a new project.” Watch what the corporate Western media would say if Palestinians started a mini civil war. Palestinian Authority loosing control of West Bank

“The situation is very different today as the official oil workers have not staged strikes, the contract workers have mainly socio-economic demands and an organized mass revolutionary movement is absent. Political and economic crisis in Iran has obviously influenced the current strikes, and the protests could involve the official workers and spread to other sectors as well in the future. It is, therefore, important to appreciate the contingent and fluid nature of these strikes, rather than conceiving them as repetitions of the past or project on them particular political objectives in an act of wishful thinking.” Labour organising is on the rise among Iranian oil workers

It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent  estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around  17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated   total of   desaparecidos   was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around  27 million   at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who  vanish  inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed  the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on former detainees’ recollections. The picture that