Tag: military base
The Law of Worst-Case Scenarios
The present Gaza war, initiated by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, poses important questions about both the morality and laws of war and the language of conflict. People everywhere are having heated conversations involving concepts such as targeting civilians, terrorism, proportionality, and genocide. They deploy these concepts when arguing about broad questions, like whether Hamas’s attacks on civilians are justified resistance, and about narrower ones, like whether a specific Israeli bombing of a refugee camp is justified to … Read more
Bakhmut Is Not Just a Battle. It’s My Home.
“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.
Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at
My Escape From the Taliban
The text message came a little before 5 p.m. It was August 26, 2021. Eleven days earlier, the Taliban had overthrown the Afghan government. My friend—a German writer and academic—had been trying to help my family flee the country. Now she told me she had gotten my two younger sisters and me on the list for a flight to Frankfurt, a last-minute evacuation negotiated by the German government and a nonprofit group.
“What about my mom?” I asked. She