by SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI

My father, a son of the Bakhtiari—the Indigenous people of the Zagros Mountains in Iran—could sense it long before it arrived: defeat. Or perhaps it never arrived at all, because it had always been there, woven into the soil and the air. Like his ancestors, he watched as their land, and the future promised by it, were stripped away. It was the Bakhtiaris’ misfortune that French and British expeditions, wandering through their mountains in the late nineteenth century, found oil shimmering beneath their feet.

William Knox D’Arcy, backed by the British government, started to drill in the lands of Bakhtiari nomads, and in 1908, reached oil in the western part of the Bakhtiari region. The Bakhtiari had for a long time been regarded as a “savage race,” not only by Europeans but also by the Iranian rulers. A savage race is a waste race, and their habitat a wasteland. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company confiscated these lands, and displaced many people, as well as animals. Poor farmers and pastoralists were turned into low?wage laborers. Pipelines were installed on their land to carry the black gold to metropoles. Oil extracted from Bakhtiari lands financed the modernization of Tehran and the consolidation of the newborn nation-state, while the Bakhtiaris themselves received none of the resulting benefits. The old pipelines were left in place after they fell into disuse, debris that discloses the link between colonial rule and the region’s current environmental disaster, between colonial accumulation by dispossession and the poverty and deprivation with which Bakhtiaris were, and are, struggling.

One of the few things of my father that remains with me is a letter he sent in late 1987, while I was crossing borders—one after another, illegally—trying to outrun the Iran-Iraq War. It is hardly a letter; more a brief warning. The last two sentences read:

Life, in general, is about defeat. Learn to face your defeats with an open face.

But how does one prepare for a defeat not yet arrived? For people like him—whose land, whose name, whose time have been taken—defeat is no stranger. It arrives like a season. It is expected. He, an Indigenous man, wanted to ready me, an undocumented migrant, for the rhythm of loss that returns, again and again, through generations. Another defeat is on its way. Learn to meet it with an open face.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes the experience of watching films in which a Black character appears: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me.”¹

The refrain “I wait for me”captures, with stark precision, the anticipation of defeat—the moment the Black body enters the frame and is, at that very instant, thingified by the viewers’ gaze. Throughout Fanon’s work, defeat in the visual field fashioned by the white gaze is ever present: a choreography of looking that reduces, freezes, and unmakes. Thingification is a form of unmaking. And the word defeat itself carries this history: it originates from the Old French defaire, meaning “to unmake,” to undo what has been done.

And yet, the history of the Black body, like the history of Indigenous and colonized peoples, is not only a history of being unmade. Unmaking is never the end of the story. The will to remake again is not born outside defeat but inside it. My father, a man shaped by the Zagros Mountains, had never read Fanon. Yet something bound them across distance and history: a knowledge of how to meet their defeats. With an open face. An open face is an openness to the world, and to all the risks the world contains. Openness is an act, a choice, an invitation to participate rather than retreat. It is the refusal to hide, to withdraw, to look away when disaster unfolds. An open face is the opposite of a closed one. To face one’s defeats with an open face is to live exposed, to accept vulnerability as a condition of being alive. It is to think dangerously, precisely because the enemy is dangerous. An open face is the willingness to look directly into the disaster approaching you—not with the illusion of victory, but with the will to survive. And survival requires knowledge. Those who endure defeat after defeat with an open face generate forms of knowing that emerge only from exposure, from vulnerability, from standing unshielded before the world.

The defeated of the world theorize what they endure. In truth, the only critical thinking possible today is thinking from the standpoint of the defeated. This standpoint is not one of passivity, nor of victimhood. On the contrary, it asks: How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility? What does it mean to transform defeat into a method?

The people of Iran carry a defeated revolution on their shoulders, a defeat that follows earlier ones: that of the Constitutional Revolution in 1911, and of the oil nationalization movement in 1953. It is a defeated revolution because Iranian society remains far from the promises proclaimed in its early days. Today, people confront a precarious social order marked by pervasive corruption, widening class inequality, family fragmentation, mass unemployment, social injustice, financial insecurity, and gender inequity.

Cabinet for more

by CORBIN TRENT

SpaceX goes public today. Bubbles and public assets are creating the first trillionaire in human history.

SpaceX goes public today at around $1.7 trillion. Elon Musk owns enough SpaceX stock that, on top of everything else he holds, Musk becomes the first person in human history to cross the trillion-dollar line. The coverage will be all hype. Unprecedented. A genius. Where’s he going next? What does the future hold?

It wasn’t like Elon Musk invented some amazing capacity. He didn’t do something transformational for the world. He didn’t harness electricity. He didn’t invent the transistor. He didn’t invent rocket flight. He didn’t invent satellite technology. He didn’t even make them much better.

What he did was learn how to game the system. He took what America built through generations of investment and generations of hard work and turned it into a profit center for himself. He took American loans, American intellectual property, American space, American airwaves, and turned them into a wealth engine for one man.

Tesla exists because of a half-billion-dollar loan from the American government, handed over in 2010 when the banks wouldn’t touch him. The deal gave the government the right to buy three million shares of Tesla stock at a locked-in cheap price. That was our cut if the company took off. The company took off, and Musk rushed to pay the loan back nine years early, because under the deal, early repayment canceled the government’s shares. They were worth about $270 million the week he wired the money, and Tesla’s stock has multiplied many times over since. The press called the repayment a triumph. We got our money back with a little interest, and he kept the stock the American people were due.

SpaceX is the same story just bigger. In a purely capitalist system, SpaceX wouldn’t exist. It would’ve died in 2008. The company was broke, three rockets had failed, and Musk was burning the last of his money. Then NASA wrote a $1.6 billion contract for cargo runs to the space station, and that money built the Falcon 9. The people who study this industry say it plainly. NASA is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy.

And NASA by then was an agency we’d been squeezing since the 1980s. We decided, instead of doing things ourselves as a nation, instead of demanding the lion’s share of what we’d developed over sixty years of rocketry and satellites and spaceflight, that we’d hand it off to billionaires and let them compete for the contracts. SpaceX now holds around $22 billion in federal contracts. Across the whole Musk empire the public money runs closer to $38 billion. The launch pads, the airwaves, the satellites overhead, the early customers, the technology our space program spent two generations developing. He built on all of it, and we kept no share of it.

I’m not saying SpaceX is bad at rockets. The rockets work. But outbidding Boeing and Lockheed, the most bloated contractors in America, is a low bar, and he cleared it with technology our space program developed, on contracts we paid for. And China is proving right now that none of it was one man’s miracle. They’re behind on reusable rockets and behind on launch rates, sure. They’re also closing fast, as a national project, with state companies and state-backed startups and satellite constellations in the tens of thousands. Getting to space is something a country can decide to build and own. We decided to hand it to one man instead.

The rest of his fortune sits in Tesla, and that deal is even worse. Tesla is worth more than every other major carmaker on the planet combined. Toyota, BYD, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, all of them together, still short of Tesla. Plenty of those companies earn more actual profit than Tesla does. Toyota alone makes several times Tesla’s money. The valuation isn’t a measure of the business. It’s an obvious bubble, one of those bubbles people will look back on like the tulip bubble and ask how anybody ever believed it.

Meanwhile the tariffs are the only reason Chinese carmakers aren’t whipping us in our own market. BYD passed Tesla as the biggest seller of electric cars in the world, and it makes a good one for around ten thousand dollars. Musk has admitted himself that without trade barriers, Chinese automakers would demolish most of their rivals. The tariff wall protects the whole American industry, and Tesla is its single biggest beneficiary. We’re babying these companies instead of pushing them to get better, and we’re not taking a dime of ownership while we do it.

They’ll tell you the wall is national security. It isn’t. We haven’t kept our means of production. We don’t make enough steel even for ourselves, and that’s while we’re barely building anything. Start building at scale again and we’d be importing even more of it. We can’t build transmission lines or move energy around this country. We’ve lost the machine tools. We shipped the means of production to China and other countries, and now we’re handing what’s left to a handful of billionaires. National security would be making these companies better. It would be forcing them to share the patents we paid to develop. It would be forcing a universal charger. It would be making them earn their money through quality production that competes on the open market, not through bubble valuations.

Then they handed him our retirement accounts. When a company joins a major stock index, every fund tracking that index has to buy it. Nobody decides the company is worth the money. The rule says buy. So every two weeks tens of millions in paychecks pour in on autopilot. SpaceX wanted that money sooner than the rules allow, because Elon Musk is special, apparently. His advisers pushed the index providers to change the rules, and two of the three folded. Nasdaq rewrote its policy so a company like SpaceX can join in fifteen trading days instead of three months. Russell cut its wait to five. Somewhere around $22 to $27 billion in automatic buying will hit a stock with almost no shares actually trading. The S&P 500, the biggest index of them all, refused. It said earn your way in, a company that loses money doesn’t qualify. One gatekeeper said no. Two said yes. The rules got bent for him, and that’s not speculation. It happened. One more handout, except this time the money is yours, pulled out of your paycheck and pointed at his stock whether the price makes sense or not.

We’ve watched this movie before. Amazon went a decade without real profits and the market funded it anyway, because everyone could see the government handing it advantage after advantage. Bezos planted the company in Washington State to dodge sales tax, and for twenty years Amazon skirted sales taxes across most of the country, a built-in discount on every order that local stores couldn’t match, because they had to charge the tax. It crushed them. Then cities lined up to hand the richest man alive billions more in breaks for a headquarters. We supported these guys, who then took everything and ran.

Now we’ve created a class of men who hold more wealth than many states. Musk holds more than many countries. That concentration gives one human incomprehensible power, and we will hand him more of it every year. We outsourced our production to China. Now we’re outsourcing our state itself to a few men, who just sub it back out to us.

America’s Undoing for more

by ZOFEEN T. EBHRAHIM

“I was just 17 when I got married and I almost immediately became pregnant,” says 24-year-old Rukhsar Abdul Wasiq, who is the mother of a six-year-old daughter and an 18-month-old son. Her first delivery, by Caesarean section, is something she remembers with fear. “I was terrified throughout my pregnancy,” she says. “When the doctor mentioned a C-section, I thought I would die.”

Training at the midwifery school at the Sindh Government Qatar Hospital with 27 others, she now exudes confidence. Five months into the two-year diploma, she says her understanding of childbirth has transformed. She, like most of her classmates, is from Orangi Town in northwest Karachi, a settlement where the hospital is based, but the facility also serves the nearby neighbourhoods of Baldia, SITE and Manghopir.

“A mother doesn’t have to die to bring a new life into the world,” she says. “Pregnancy and childbirth don’t have to be traumatic.” Her confidence reflects the vital role midwives can play in transforming maternal care in Pakistan.

However, in many parts of the country, this role is still fulfilled by unregistered dais, or traditional birth attendants, who have no formal training when it comes to delivering babies. The reality is that systemic gaps in Pakistan’s healthcare systems and a lack of public awareness help sustain a parallel, largely unregulated system of childbirth care.

Behind Pakistan’s high maternal and infant mortality rates lies a fractured system, in which trained midwives are sidelined while unregulated practices continue unchecked. As trained midwives struggle to replace traditional dais, their profession is undermined by weak healthcare structures, undefined career paths and a lack of trust in their work

A THRIVING, UNSAFE BIRTH TRADE

In Karachi’s shadows, an unchecked network of untrained, unregistered dais continues to deliver babies — right under the noses of health authorities. With no official data, anecdotal evidence points to a vast, hidden market of unsafe deliveries.

Dr Azra Ahsan, an obstetrician and secretary-general of the Association for Mothers and Newborns, says, “Many dais overstep their scope — some even attempt C-sections and keep patients until it’s too late. Without clear referral pathways — knowing when and where to send patients — cases are often critical by the time they are put in a car and referred elsewhere.”

Dr Fatima Jehangir has run a primary care clinic supported by the Ziauddin University Hospital in Gulshan-i-Sikandarabad (an informal neighbourhood next to Clifton) for the past 15 years. She has observed dais in the area using ultrasound machines: “They double as sonologists and issue reports — I’ve seen these myself,” she says. “I can’t even read what they scribble on printed forms they pass as reports. And nearly every patient is diagnosed as having some infection or another.” Dr Jehangir sees the consequences of such medical neglect daily — such as children with cerebral palsy, which is often linked to birth asphyxia.

Neha Mankani, a midwife with 16 years’ experience, has seen similar cases at Baba Island, where she runs a maternity boat clinic. She explains, “It stems from unsafe birth practices — prolonged obstructed labour and misuse of oxytocin [a hormone that stimulates uterine contractions during childbirth].”

Over the past five years, her work has expanded across coastal communities around Karachi, reaching a population of 60,000. She describes a system rife with “dispensers acting as surgeons, midwives performing C-sections, and one where there was almost no pharmacological control, and no oversight of the dais.”

Dawn for more

by ERIC TOUSSAINT

The 20th century was marked by victories of social revolutions with a socialist character: in the Czarist empire in 1917, Yugoslavia in 1945, China in 1949, Vietnam in 1954 and 1975, Cuba in 1959, Algeria in 1962, and Nicaragua in 1979. This sparked major public debates among revolutionaries in these countries over the most effective way to achieve a transition from capitalism to socialism. Between 1918 and 1926-1927, this was especially the case in Soviet Russia and the USSR, with Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, and Nicholai Bukharin making the most significant contributions. In Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a less public discussion of the country’s socialist transition than there had been in the USSR in the 1920s. 

In Cuba, following the 1959 victory, a great public debate on the nature of the economy was initiated in 1963-1965 with Ernesto Che Guevara, Alberto Mora, Ernest Mandel, and Charles Bettelheim. Some of the points discussed were the financing of public sector enterprises, the role of the market and planning, the part played by the law of value, the role of banking and credit, the respective places of individual and collective moral or material incentives, and the role of consciousness. Mandel tried to introduce into the debate the question of socialist democracy and workers’ power.

The various attempts to move towards a socialist society aroused great expectations among hundreds of millions of people. There were vigorous debates on the major economic, social and political choices to be made in the move towards socialism, including among leftists in industrialized countries, even though none of these nations had ever had a victorious socialist revolution themselves. Setbacks, backsliding, betrayals, and degeneration eventually led to capitalist restoration in most cases, except in Cuba, which has remained non-capitalist.

The present study looks back at the great debate in Cuba from 1963 to 1965. All the contributors refer to policies to be implemented after a revolutionary victory so as to move from capitalism to socialism, and hopefully communism. The debate that played out in Cuba stretched far beyond the Cuban context. That is why it is so important to understand it in all its relevance to the present. 

What is the place of the market in the economic policies to be pursued in the future after an anti-capitalist revolutionary upheaval and the beginning of a transition to socialism? To answer this question, Ernest Mandel’s and Ernesto Che Guevara’s contributions are indispensable. Why is the issue of socialist democracy essential? Ernest Mandel’s contribution is indispensable. For reasons of space, we will limit ourselves here to the Great Debate that took place in Cuba, while recognizing the need to examine the later contributions of Ernest Mandel and other authors on the issue of the transition to socialism.

Links for more

by ROBIN ANDERSEN

The New York Times attempted to ‘balance’ Nicholas Kristof’s documentation of the systematic rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces with yet another unverified rape ‘investigation’ claiming that Hamas had weaponized sexual violence on October 7. It was written by the paper’s pro-Israel Jerusalem-based reporter, Isabel Kershner.

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op-ed piece titled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, published on May 11, was based on documentation and grueling victim testimonies of rapes that Palestinianshaveexperienced at the hands of Israeli security forces. Brutal and sadistic acts of sexual torture are described in a piece that triggered enormous attention even though human rights organizations have been documenting these same crimes for years now.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented Israel’s sexual torture of Palestinian men, women and children calling the “Israeli prison system a network of torture camps.” Save the Children reported in July 2024 that Palestinian children in Israeli detention were facing “disease, increasing starvation, [and] abuse including sexual violence.” A Palestinian women’s rights organization warned that their documented 75 cases of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women amounted to about 1% of what was actually happening in Israeli detention. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s extensive report published on April 13, 2026, emphasized that the sexual torture was so bad it amounted to “another genocide behind walls.” They identified its purpose as a “systematic destruction of the body and identity.” The report emphasized the scope of “criminal responsibility,” by the collusion of state institutions that were creating impunity.

In a discussion about Kristof’s piece, Francesca Albanese, who has also documented brutal Israeli torture sites, told Al Jazeera’s UpFront that she had given a long interview about sexual torture to the New York Times as early as February 2024, but nothing came of it. Albanese went on to say she didn’t understand why the Times piece should have been “more important” than the extensive documentation of human rights monitors. But when Kristof finally acknowledged that Palestinians were being tortured and raped by trained dogs, (corroborated by a soldier) in Israeli prisons, it made headlines in the US and sent shock waves through Israel’s hasbara apparatus.

The agenda setting New York Times is a “paper of record,” with a journalism staff of 3000, about 7 percent of all journalists working in the US. The paper has also been a reliable source of pro-Israel messaging for years, especially after October 7, so when a well-respected human rights journalist wrote such an op-ed in its pages it was a public relations disaster for Israel and its propaganda machine went into high gear to counter the bad press. Zionists and genocide supporters protested in front of the Times building. Netanyahu was so outraged that he threatened to bring a defamation lawsuit against the paper. The Israel Foreign Ministry called the piece “blood liable” and accused Nicholas Kristof of writing “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda” that turned the “victims into the accused.”

The Dissident Voice for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

From Gaza to Tehran, from the politics of resistance to the limits of regional diplomacy, a pressing question has resurfaced amid the 2026 war: why was Palestine not explicitly placed at the center of Iran’s ceasefire framework? In this critical reading, Ramzy Baroud challenges the assumption of abandonment, arguing instead that the answer lies in the fragmented nature of Palestinian representation and the uneven political architecture of the resistance camp itself.

For many years, being accused of being ‘pro-Iran’ was not a terrifying notion only for those living in the West, but also in the Middle East, and yes, including Palestine itself.

The accusation itself was always meant to wound, to isolate, to delegitimize. One was either an “Iranian tail,” an “arm,” or an “agent.” The language varied, but the political purpose did not. It was designed to strip entire movements of their agency, to suggest that no Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, or Iraqi force could ever arrive at resistance on its own terms, through its own experience, its own blood, its own history.

Within Palestinian discourse, this accusation was cultivated most aggressively by the camp of the Palestinian Authority, particularly the Fatah establishment orbiting it. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were not to be debated as Palestinian movements with their own popular constituencies, political traditions, and military choices. They were to be dismissed as foreign extensions, as though collaboration with Washington and security coordination with Israel were somehow more “national” than alliance with forces that actually armed, funded, and defended resistance.

The irony was never subtle. The camp, openly embedded in the American order, dependent on its money and political cover, accused others of foreign dependency. The side that coexisted with occupation, and in many ways adapted itself to it, reserved for itself the monopoly on national legitimacy.

That discourse began to crack—not because its authors suddenly discovered honesty, but because genocide in Gaza stripped the region bare. The Palestinian Authority stood by as a spectator, or worse. Arab governments that had spent decades sermonizing about the centrality of the Palestinian cause, either accommodated the mass extermination or openly worked to disarm the resistance—one of Netanyahu’s central strategic goals all along. As Gaza was starved, bombed, and buried, old accusations about Iran started sounding less like analysis and more like propaganda.

The sectarian language also began to collapse under the weight of reality. For years, anti-Iran forces in the region weaponized Sunni-Shia divisions to poison any possibility of a unified anti-colonial politics. Yet when Gaza became the center of the region’s moral and political horizon, it was not the self-proclaimed guardians of Arabism who rose in any meaningful way. It was Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen, Iraqi groups, and eventually Iran itself that treated Gaza not as a charitable cause but as the nerve center of a broader confrontation.

Thinking Palestine for more

by TAFI MHAKA

As Zimbabwe returns 67 farms to European nationals, the dispossession that created white land ownership remains unrecognised in law.

On May 7, Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Minister Anxious Masuka announced in parliament that the government would return 67 farms seized during the country’s land reform programme to European nationals from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The farms, he said, were protected under bilateral investment protection agreements signed between Zimbabwe and the four European states before the land seizures.

The measure forms part of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s effort to restore relations with Western governments and international financial institutions after more than two decades of crisis, sanctions, isolation and debt default linked in part to the fast-track land reform programme of the early 2000s.

Zimbabwe is trying to restructure about $11.7bn in external debt, including $7.7bn owed to multilateral and bilateral creditors. On May 20, the International Monetary Fund approved a staff-monitored programme to support reforms and debt restructuring.

Resolving disputes linked to land reform has become central to that re-engagement process. In July 2020, Zimbabwe signed a $3.5bn compensation agreement with former white commercial farmers for infrastructure and improvements on acquired land. Last year, it began compensating treaty-protected foreign farmers, including claimants from Germany, Switzerland and Belgium.

But this development also exposes a deeper contradiction embedded in the global order governing land and property rights in former settler colonies: European claims arising from postcolonial redistribution are treated as urgent, enforceable and respectable, while African claims arising from colonial dispossession remain largely outside the same legal and moral framework.

The colonial dispossession that created white land ownership in Rhodesia never received the same urgency as the one now directed at restoring European claims after postcolonial redistribution. At independence in April 1980, no comparable mechanism forced Britain, Rhodesia or settler beneficiaries to compensate Africans dispossessed through conquest, racial legislation and forced removal. Yet once postcolonial Zimbabwe attempted to redistribute that land, its protection suddenly became tied to legality, investor confidence and international respectability.

Al Jazeera for more

Our movement stands shoulder to shoulder with activists across this country in condemning the brutal, calculated assassination of Comrade Mokoena Letsie in Potchefstroom.

Comrade Mokoena was cut down in a hail of bullets by the enemies of the poor and working class. This was an execution carried out by hired guns and cowards who saw in Comrade Mokoena a threat to the system of predatory politics tied to the system of capitalist plunder that keeps our people in chains. He was a threat to the tenderpreneurs, the extortion networks, the mafias that appropriate land to rent and sell it, the corporate bosses, and the corrupt officials who enrich themselves while our communities starve. He was also a committed internationalist who built grassroots support for Palestine.

We refuse to let his name become another statistic in a police docket gathering dust. We refuse to let his murder be washed away with empty statements and candlelight vigils. The state must investigate without delay. There can be no more delays, no more ‘we are investigating’. The people demand the names, motives, and the full network behind this assassination. The killers and those who ordered the hit must be arrested and prosecuted, whether they sit in council chambers or backrooms. They must be brought to justice.

The state must also provide immediate protection for community activists. The blood of Comrade Mokoena will be on their hands if they continue to leave us exposed while our enemies operate with impunity.

To those who pulled the trigger and those who paid for it: you can kill a comrade, but you cannot kill the demand for freedom and you cannot kill a movement. Every bullet fired at us forges more revolutionaries.

To the state: you either investigate, arrest, and bring these killers to book, or you stand exposed as complicit in the war against the poor.

As right-wing forces advance in a pincer movement from parliament and the streets we will continue to work to unite the forces of the principled and democratic left grounded in the membership based organisations of the working class and poor.

Abahlali for more

by P. RAMAN

West Bengal will lose its historic status as a state with an independent political administration. A state which was ruled by stalwarts such as B.C.Roy, syndicate boss Atulya Ghosh and Marxist stalwart Jyoti Basu will now be ruled from Delhi.

Adi Shankara’s sarpa-sutra nyaya (snake-rope analogy) propounds two levels of truth: what the common man perceives and the absolute truth known only to those who have realised the Brahma (ultimate reality). Big media under prime minister Narendra Modi depicts only what the prime minister’s office (PMO) wants them to portray. Nothing more or less.

Consider the voluminous election analysis churned out by the pro-government big media ever since the election results were declared on May 4. People, they said, voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because under the Trinamool Congress (TMC) they were suffering due to unemployment, price rise and lack of minimum facilities. Some narrated how young voters, Gen Z, restive youth and the aspiring women saw better opportunities under the new double engine government.

But the loyal media has obligingly avoided mentioning newly-crowned chief minister Suvendu Adhikari’s dubious background. He has the distinction of having been neck deep in two of most vicious scams in Bengal: Saradha Ponzi scheme and Narada cash-for-favours scam. The BJP had officially labelled him a ‘chor’ (thief). In 2020, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had alleged that he ‘jumped into’ Modi’s washing machine’ to escape the probe by central agencies.

Look at some of brilliant explanations in godi media for the state voting for BJP: Government employees expected better deal under Modi; people hoped to get liberated from the entrenched goonda groups under TMC in villages and towns; how Mo-Shah’s rallies helped expose Banerjee and other opposition leaders; how many rallies they addressed and how the suffering poor and women waited hours for their leaders and so on. Also, how the BJP’s top two identified themselves with the common people by eating fish and Jhalmuri.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Then there were stories of how Shah strenuously scripted the BJP victory with meticulous planning at different levels and how the BJP had worked to save people from TMC’s ‘goondaraj’. Also, there were plenty of stories on the Opposition’s governance failures, extortion by the ‘mafia syndicates’, Banerjee’s selection of unpopular candidates under duress – all of which led to vitiate the atmosphere, according to these reports.

After the results came out, sections of the media wrote long stories about outgoing chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s ‘centralised’ model for his failure to win in Kerala. But the same media, understandably, carefully avoided mentioning the much more brutally concentrated power system under the Modi-Shah duo.

MEE for more

by OMAR ASHOUR

French operations and Wagner’s repression helped turn JNIM into a sophisticated force that blends drones, blockades and political strategy – tactics now spreading across the Sahel

“Unite against the terrorist junta.” That rare French-language appeal, attributed to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) after the April 2026 offensive across Mali, was more than propaganda. It was an operational communique: a call to see Mali’s military regime not as the “shield” of the republic, but as the target of the “revolution”.

In Mali today, the multi-layered insurgency is no longer merely raiding outposts. It is learning to blockade, surveil, strike, film and politically choreograph warfare.

This is the new military reality of the central Sahel. The Algerian jihadist genealogy – GIA (Groupe Islamique Arme) to GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat) to AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) – failed to overthrow the Algerian state. But its Saharan remote successor has helped produce a far more dangerous architecture in Mali.

JNIM was formed in 2017 as an al-Qaeda-aligned merger of AQIM’s Saharan branch, Ansar al-Dine, al-Mourabitoun and the Macina Battalion. The new coalition fused Tuareg jihadist leadership, Fulani/Macina mobilisation, Saharan smuggling networks and local grievance ethnopolitics.

Rather than a simple “Fulani group”, JNIM is a multi-ethnic jihadist-light coalition with a powerful Fulani engine in central Mali and an experienced Tuareg-Saharan command layer.

France saw the first phase of this war more clearly than the second. Operation Serval in 2013 was a relative success, halting jihadist momentum and retaking northern cities in a short, hard intervention.

Operation Barkhane, which launched in 2014 in Mali and expanded to four other Sahel countries – Burkina Faso, Niger, Mauritania and Chad (together called the G5 Sahel) – became a long-running counterterrorism campaign aimed at resolving a crisis of political sovereignty, rural governance and social rupture through raids, airpower and partnered operations.

France killed major leaders, including AQIM emir Abdelmalek Droukdel in 2020, but it did not kill the insurgency. By the time French forces withdrew and Mali’s junta turned to Wagner and later Africa Corps, the insurgency had mutated rather than disappeared.

Drones over the Sahel

Mali now has three armed coalitions. The first is the status quo coalition: the Malian Armed Forces and security services – army, air force, gendarmerie, National Guard, police and regime protection units – estimated at roughly 40,000 active personnel, with further recruitment planned, anchored politically in Bamako and increasingly dependent on Russian support.

Around it sits Wagner Group (now Africa Corps), providing trainers, convoy escorts, assault detachments, close air support, intelligence support, propaganda infrastructure and a counterinsurgency model rich in coercion and repression but poor in legitimacy and strategy.

Drone footage becomes propaganda; propaganda becomes recruitment; recruitment sustains blockade warfare

The second is the anti-status-quo mosaic.

MEE for more