Finland is abandoning a treaty prohibiting the use of anti-personnel mines. Estonia abandoned it recently too, and a few other nations, citing developing security concerns. I felt like that was a load of bullshit, so I decided to do a little reading: blogs.icrc.org/law-and-poli...

Ya Allah!!

READ: With limited resources, Palestinians in Gaza and in exile are funding community reconstruction efforts amid the absence of international aid. “We have to keep trying to help Gaza rise again,” an organizer with the Sameer Project tells Mondoweiss. mondoweiss.net/2025/12/gaza...

Why are you polyamorous? Wrong answers only: To be able to book half a row on flights or a whole row on trains

I have been dissociating to dangerous levels for the past two years following October 7. It has made it hard to express, write, communicate. Even doing basic tasks is a drain. I can only begin to imagine the scale of mental damage inside Gaza and Palestine. I have only watched what they live.

New Substack blog... Some thoughts on love and politics: open.substack.com/pub/thetalke...

I deactivated Twitter, finally

I have turned so many things like food or YouTube into crutches ever since October 7... Constsntly cycling between running from the pain and facing it. The kind of choices one has to make when dealing with transphobia, dysphoria, and sheer trauma at the same time are not fun.

Wie kann man nach 1,5 Jahren Genozid einfach aufstehen und weiter leben, ohne unzählige Trauma-Schaden zu bekämpfen?

I fear expressing anything about Palestine. How can I do justice to it? How can I do justice to the people? I never saw the land, barely know the people. Besides what I inherit of culture or food, etc., all that I experience organically... is suffering.

The more I deal with Muslims in Jordan the more I realise how much patriarchy is steeped into our minds through weakly construed fiqh and badly conceptualised/non-existent understandings of how a society functions.

Wallah if I could exist free, in a free MENA, be irrevocably Muslim, and undeniably a trans woman, I would never think of leaving. Yet it is the Palestinian legacy and the current reality of this region that we have to make stability out of nothing and carve out of stone the right to exist.

Existing in the MENA has become untenable even to those who used to benefit from the extant social contracts. Repression has never felt more in the air. As someone who has to hide who I am 24/7, it's more noticable to me, but even an "average" person feels it more than ever.

If Palestine is just a nationalist cause, purely, and doesn't represent those values people claim - then go ahead and bemoan the Assad regime and its patrons in Tehran. It's really one or the other.

Hear, hear

This is from the Alawite-majority city of Tartous - supposedly the regime's heartland. F**k all the Syria "experts" who said Syrians supported the regime. They lied to you for years. This regime was despised by the vast majority who suffered its tyranny.

ISIS had no chance of growing in Syria were it not for the destruction and widespread suffering caused by Assad. He was bombing rebels who were fighting ISIS at the same time as ISIS was on a rampage against Syrians.

The worst actors benefited from Assad. The Arab absolute monarchies were normalising or already did. Iran was backing him. Erdogan was normalising. Israel had its most peaceful ‘border’ as Assad was not a threat to them.

Just as you cannot understand the growth of Hamas without understanding the Israeli occupation you cannot understand why secular Syrians were cheering on the HTS offensive against the Assad regime. You don’t have to ‘like’ any of the actors to understand why they exist. Again, please grow up.

You can even look at Jolani. That’s not his name. His name is Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a. Jolani is his nom de guerre. What does Jolani mean? It means ‘from the Golan Heights’. Jolan is how we pronounce it in Arabic. Why would he pick such a name? His family is from the Jolan.

To look at what Israel is doing and manage to blame Syrians for wanting to be free is wild. Blame your own governments for backing that genocidal state and covering for it. Syrians have had no say in anything Syria-related since 1970. That was the whole fucking problem.

And it is insulting to ask ‘what about Palestine?’ as if Bashar wasn’t the one to destroy Yarmouk or torture ppl for the CIA post-9/11 or Hafez wasn’t the one to invade Lebanon in 1976 to crush the Palestinians and Lebanese or the one to give up the Golan Heights in 1980 Grow up

Yes person on the internet Syrians are aware that everything isn’t perfect and that there are challenges ahead. I think they didn’t need you to tell them that given that it’s been 5 decades of tyranny and no country ever emerged from tyranny without challenges ahead.

ما أجملهم. عقبالك يا فلسطين، وعقبالك يا السودان.

In these monumental moments, as Syrians in Syria and across the world celebrate the end to 54 years of tyranny, I can't help but think of the Palestinian people, the children of Gaza, who have endured unimaginable horrors, horrors that we as Syrians know all too well. (1/3)

Damascus has been liberated. Syria is free of the Assad regime. I can’t process anything. After 54 years of the Assad family holding Syrians hostage - we are free.

Rania Khalek spent the past 8 years whitewashing the Assad regime, promoting pro-Kremlin conspiracy theories, and denying crimes against humanity But now that the Assad regime is gonna collapse she is pretending to have always been a sober analyst. Disgusting people

This Lebanese man is calling on Syrian rebels to release the name of prisoners they’ve been releasing from Assad’s gulags as they include hundreds of Lebanese who were forcibly disappeared by Assad in the 80s and 90s.

There is nothing more soul-moving than liberating prisons.

Feels all too surreal to witness a 14 months of accelerated genocide and just... exist.

Well, this is scary. Transphobes are really eunnung bots to instalike my posts or follow me. Second time this week. @safety.bsky.app

Between my rage and sadness at the state of the MENA, and my hope for a better future, I'm also finding fuel in personal progress. Academic successes, new thought endeavours and writing, and learning to take care of myself and my beloved humans is huge. We should all be proud of every step we take.

An edited version of this text was published at the New Statesman

Gaza now has the world’s highest rate of child amputees per capita.

www.ibtimes.co.uk/the-united-a... An old article but one that is currently giving me a lot to think about

An idea has been brewing in my mind for.months to create a platform for LGBT+ writers from the MENA, so we can centre our narratives and stories - no matter where we are in the world. An Arabic-first platform, with English available for curated translations and people who want to write in English.

A rambly little post from the heart. Haven't written in months. open.substack.com/pub/thetalke...

لن تحبسوا وردة يا دولة العميان You will not imprison a rose, you blinded state. youtu.be/xOo8BiSLVSE

Multiple attempts to reconcile Hamas with Iran failed, often due to how unpopular that was with their base. They finally made ‘peace’ which always felt more like cynical ‘realpolitik’ to me, but regardless that’s not the same as everyone being besties forever in the so-called axis of resistance

Expect all fascist forces regionally and globally to do what they can to stop Syrian self-determination, especially the genocidal Zionist state, which Assad father and son have served so well

No one's blood is lesser than anyone's. My heart shatters for every drop of Syrian blood just as it does for every drop of Palestinian blood, and just as it does for every drop of blood and every tear and every bit of pain anywhere. 3awnak ya Allah

My Syria is being liberated.

Our land, our people - we’re being liberated from the clutches of regime, Iranian and Russian occupation - as onlookers accuse us of ahistorical conspiracies for having spent decades yearning for this freedom.

Aleppo is being liberated, as the world sleep. Our land is being liberated, as the regime intensifies its bombardment on civilians to make up for its military losses.

Our homeland is being liberated, town by town, at an unprecedented rate. Feelings beyond this world - fear, apprehension, disbelief, excitement, joy, sadness.

anyone telling you anything definitively on Syria is a grifter at best, a liar at worst. everything is escalating so fast, everything is moving beyond everyone’s expectations. never in our wildest dreams did we think it would happen like this, as fast or incredible as this.

Syrian regime's X account saying that Assad spoke with the UAE's MBZ who took a 5 second break from the genocide in Sudan to reaffirm the UAE's support for the Syrian regime