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On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly confirmed that the U.S. military had executed a new set of limited targeted strikes against Iran’s Qeshm Island, a strategically critical landmass situated in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint waterway that has faced repeated disruptions ever since the U.S. launched its broad military campaign against Iran back in February. Trump asserted to assembled White House reporters that the operation successfully disabled local Iranian air defense infrastructure in a remarkably short window, estimating the mission took between 5 and 15 minutes to complete.

Shortly before Trump’s public remarks, Iranian state media outlets verified that two distinct explosive detonations had been recorded in the island’s Suza residential and coastal district. The official Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) also relayed an official statement from the Iranian Army, which claimed its domestic air defense units had shot down an American unmanned aerial vehicle operating over Qeshm Island’s airspace during the incident, directly contradicting parts of the U.S. president’s account of the operation’s success.

For its part, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command overseeing all U.S. operations in the Middle East, offered a cautious, restrained statement when pressed for comment on the reported blasts, noting that the immediate operational situation across the surrounding theater was “relatively calm” in the aftermath of the strike mission. Later that same Friday evening, CENTCOM published an official notice on its official X platform account, announcing a reward program offering up to $20 million in cash compensation plus potential resettlement support for any individuals who provide verifiable intelligence related to Iran’s full nuclear program, including hidden facilities, specialized equipment, affiliated scientific personnel, and any movements of those assets or people.

This latest round of military action follows a set of “defensive strike” operations the U.S. military carried out earlier that week on Monday. Notably, it also marks the first overt U.S. military action against Iranian targets since Trump’s Republican Party sustained a devastating, widely unexpected defeat in the recent U.S. midterm elections, a electoral outcome that exit polls and political analysts partially attributed to widespread public discontent over Trump’s unilaterally launched war against Iran, which triggered a steep, global surge in energy prices that strained household budgets across the United States.

In the weeks following that electoral loss, Trump’s public communications regarding the Iran conflict have been inconsistent and contradictory: he has alternated between issuing belligerent threats to “completely destroy” Iranian strategic assets, and making repeated claims that the months-long conflict is nearing a final resolution. Speaking to reporters on the same Friday as the new strikes, Trump doubled down on claims that active, high-level negotiations with Iranian representatives were already underway, stating, “We’re dealing with them now. They want to make a deal. We’ve made a lot of progress with Iran.”

The Qatari Foreign Ministry, which has acted as a long-standing neutral intermediary for backchannel talks between Washington and Tehran, also weighed in on the ongoing diplomatic discourse on Friday. Spokesperson Majad al-Ansari posted a formal statement on X pushing back against unsubstantiated reports that the negotiation process had ground to a halt, dismissing those narratives as “false claims” and noting that spreading such misleading information only benefits bad-faith actors who wish to prolong the destructive war and destabilize the wider Gulf region.

This report originates from Middle East Eye, an independent news outlet specializing in in-depth, on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and adjacent global regions.

Opening with a playful nod to Taylor Swift’s iconic lyric about proving dedication through songwriting, celebrated Asia Times columnist Han Feizi marks his milestone 50th contribution to the publication, tracing his unlikely origin story: three years prior, then-Asia Times writer David Goldman (now Senior Advisor at the US State Department) invited the anonymous Chinese American Twitter persona, once a frequent intellectual foil, to pen a piece on widely misrepresented Chinese consumption trends. Freed from the pressure of sell-side finance’s relentless cycle of churning repetitive talking points to drive revenue, the columnist soon found old professional habits hard to shake, distilling three years and 49 prior columns into five consistent core theses: that China has underreported its GDP for decades to become the world’s largest economy by a wide margin, that decades of sustained human capital investment via education will power China’s long-term growth trajectory, that the US is trapped by its overinflated asset values and faces steep barriers to reindustrialization to compete with China, that the outdated American imperial framework would benefit all parties including the US if dissolved, and that global economic, social and political shifts can be accurately measured by tracking the global automotive industry’s evolution. As a US national with a documented record of public service, Han Feizi frames his work as written explicitly in the best interests of the American public, targeting Western audiences to cut through the conformist, often willfully misleading narratives pushed by mainstream Anglo-American media. He notes the sharp paradox faced by Asian American public figures like 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy: offering constructive, evidence-based advice to improve the US is often misconstrued as acts of sabotage, with large swathes of the public rejecting pragmatic insights out of stubborn spite. At the root of this resistance, Han Feizi argues, is a pervasive, underrecognized “face” culture embedded in modern American society: a fixation on public status, external dignity and perceived respect that is entirely disconnected from actual intrinsic performance, driving public figures and ordinary citizens alike to prioritize avoiding public humiliation over fixing underlying structural flaws. This dynamic is vividly on display in the recent trajectory of Tesla, the US electric vehicle giant. Back in 2017, Elon Musk announced a next-generation Tesla Roadster scheduled for 2020 launch, collecting up to $250,000 per customer deposit with promises of sub-2-second 0-60 mph acceleration, 250 mph top speeds and 1,000 km of range. The 2020 deadline came and went, and by 2026, Chinese EV manufacturers had already released six 1,000+ horsepower sports cars that match or exceed those performance metrics, with the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra priced as low as $80,000. When Musk finally hosted a 2026 demonstration of the long-delayed Roadster, the stunted, non-production-ready prototype that performed gimmicky stunts over parked cars bore no resemblance to a commercially viable vehicle, with Tesla quietly pushing the delivery timeline to 2028 — an 8-year miss on the original promise. This embarrassing face-saving stunt, Han Feizi notes, is far from an isolated triviality for a low-volume flagship model: Tesla sales have remained completely flat since 2023, while BYD’s global sales have surged over 60% to reach nearly three times Tesla’s total volume. Tesla has discontinued the Model S, Model X and Cybertruck lines entirely, now selling just two core vehicle models compared to BYD’s portfolio of over 30 offerings. Musk successfully lobbied the US government to impose a 100% tariff on imported Chinese electric vehicles, a protectionist move that leaves American consumers locked into Tesla’s $99 per month Level 2+ city navigation autopilot (NOA) subscription, the only system of its kind widely available in the US market. By contrast, more than 140 different vehicle models across every price bracket in China offer Level 2+ city NOA, with all but one provider offering the feature as a one-time purchase rather than a recurring paid subscription, supported by a competitive ecosystem of over six independent tech stack developers. Tesla’s vision-only autonomous driving system has proven incapable of navigating China’s dense, chaotic urban traffic full of scooters, pedestrians and tight underground parking spaces, leaving the company unable to offer comparable L2+ features to its Chinese customer base. Han Feizi emphasizes that he is not singling out Musk for personal criticism, but calling out the deliberate willful blindness of Tesla’s fanatical base of American supporters, who allow themselves to be misled by corporate showmanship rather than demanding better, more affordable products, even celebrating overpriced, mediocre offerings from protected monopolies. The root of America’s declining competitiveness in the EV space, he argues, is laid bare by 2025 PISA global math assessment results: the Beijing-Shanghai-Zhejiang-Jiangsu regional cluster in China counts roughly 525,000 Level 6 (the highest proficiency tier) 15-year-old math students, compared to just 32,000 across the entire US and 57,500 across the EU. While the BSJZ region is among China’s most educationally advantaged, even after adjusting for regional disparities, Han Feizi estimates China produces 60 to 90 times as many top-tier math students as the US, a gap far larger than can be explained by minor differences in average national IQ. This massive talent gap explains why China’s market boasts 400 distinct EV models compared to just a few dozen in the US, and why Silicon Valley’s most persistent bottleneck is a chronic shortage of high-skilled engineering talent — a gap so severe that Tesla’s Shanghai engineering teams were dispatched to the company’s Austin and Fremont factories to resolve insurmountable production bugs for the now-discontinued Cybertruck, Model S and Model X lines. Han Feizi notes that US policymakers are quick to debate tariffs, industrial subsidies and H1-B visa rules for foreign tech workers, but completely avoid addressing the low-hanging fruit of radically improving K-12 math education to narrow the talent gap. Drawing a parallel to the century of humiliating decline the Qing Dynasty endured because its ruling elite refused to acknowledge obvious structural flaws, Han Feizi concludes that his 50 columns are only the start of a long effort to push American audiences to move past face-saving denial and embrace pragmatic reforms that would benefit all US citizens.

Manama, Bahrain – The Gulf Arab kingdom of Bahrain is on the cusp of convening the largest mass trial targeting Shia religious leaders in its modern history, as human rights organizations raise urgent alarms over systemic due process violations, including claims that judicial authorities have extracted confessions through physical coercion and torture. A local national court is scheduled to issue formal verdicts this Sunday for 69 total defendants, 60 of whom are practicing Shia clerics, who face a sweeping slate of charges: affiliation with a purported terrorist organization, conspiring to overthrow the country’s constitutional ruling system, and disseminating Iran’s official political ideology within Bahraini borders. Documented testimony collected by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) details a catalogue of severe abuses inflicted on the detained group during pre-trial detention, including being forced to stand for extended hours on end, being kept blindfolded and handcuffed for days at a time, prolonged intentional sleep deprivation, and repeated threats of physical harm, sexual violence directed at both the detainees and their immediate family members. Multiple detainees also reported that interrogators explicitly threatened to revoke their Bahraini citizenship and forcibly deport them if they refused to confess to the alleged charges. One 62-year-old prominent Shia cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Saeed Al-Taitoon, shared with independent investigators that he was held blindfolded and physically restrained for seven consecutive days, forced to remain standing even as he suffered from severe urinary bleeding and painful kidney stones, and was actively denied access to life-saving surgical care for his condition. A second 57-year-old cleric, Sayed Moosa Jawad Alwedaie, stated that interrogators beat him repeatedly, subjected him to electric shock torture, and left him naked and exposed in his cell for extended periods. A coalition of 20 leading global human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has issued a joint public appeal to Bahraini governing authorities, demanding the immediate release of all individuals arbitrarily detained in the sweep, the full dismissal of all charges rooted in peaceful, lawful religious practice, and a fully transparent, independent investigation into every verified allegation of mistreatment and torture against the detainees. This upcoming trial is the latest flashpoint in long-running international scrutiny of Bahrain’s ruling Sunni monarchy, which has faced consistent global condemnation for its widespread crackdown on the country’s 2011 Arab Spring-era pro-democracy movement. For more than a decade, the kingdom’s ruling establishment has repeatedly targeted religious leaders from Bahrain’s large Shia majority population, routinely framing them as having secret operational ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Recent regional geopolitical tensions, sparked by the outbreak of open conflict between the United States and Israel against Iran, followed by a series of Iranian retaliatory strikes targeting U.S.-aligned Gulf states including Bahrain, have prompted a sharp new wave of domestic repression against individuals suspected of having any ties to Tehran. To date, 69 Bahraini citizens of Iranian heritage have already had their legal citizenship formally revoked as part of this expanded security campaign. Tariq Al Hassan, director of Bahrain’s internal state security agency, defended the government’s actions in a Friday interview with Reuters, stating that the ongoing crackdown is designed to counter “an ideology that demands obedience to Iran’s leadership above Bahrain’s sovereign authority.” Critics of the government’s campaign, however, argue that the high-profile mass trial is a thinly veiled new effort to crush all remaining peaceful political dissent across the kingdom. Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, advocacy director at BIRD, characterized the upcoming mass trial as a direct “attack on the faith and identity of Bahrain’s Shia community” and one of the “ugliest forms of persecution” the Bahraini state has carried out since the 2011 pro-democracy uprising. “When allegations of torture are brushed aside and defendants are denied a meaningful opportunity to challenge the evidence against them, the judiciary becomes an instrument of persecution,” Alwadaei noted in a public statement. “This mockery of justice must end. It will leave lasting wounds and deepen divisions across the country.”

A strictly confidential quarterly update from the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, submitted to the UN Security Council last week and obtained exclusively by Middle East Eye (MEE), delivers irrefutable, conclusive evidence that the United Arab Emirates orchestrated the deployment of Colombian mercenary fighters to back Sudan’s abusive Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The investigation traces the elaborate recruitment, training and transit network managed by GSSG, a UAE-headquartered security firm with documented direct ties to Emirati state institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The mercenaries were first trained at facilities across the UAE in Abu Dhabi, Ghayathi and al-Wathba, as well as at the UAE-subsidized Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) base in Bosaso, Somalia – a semi-autonomous territory where Emirati proxies hold de facto control. The fighters were then ferried into Sudan via a multi-stop route spanning Libya, Somalia and Chad, all regions where Emirati-aligned armed groups hold large swathes of territory. Additional arms and logistical supplies for the RSF moved overland through Haftar-controlled eastern Libya, Ethiopia, and the UAE-linked breakaway Somali regions of Puntland and Somaliland.
The report confirms the Colombian mercenaries played a pivotal operational role in RSF’s 500-day siege and subsequent capture of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, in October 2024, providing critical drone operation support, artillery expertise and frontline infantry backing. Multiple eyewitness and victim accounts collected by MEE confirm that during the el-Fasher offensive, RSF forces carried out widespread atrocities including mass rape, summary executions, civilian extortion and even forced blood extraction from detained people. Both the UN and United States have previously formally designated the RSF as responsible for perpetrating genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.
All implicated parties, including the UAE, have publicly denied any wrongdoing. In an official letter included in the leaked confidential report, the UAE formally stated it rejects all allegations of misconduct related to the Sudan conflict and claims it takes reports of mercenary activity very seriously, though it did not respond to MEE’s formal request for comment on the new conclusive evidence. Unlike prior partial disclosures of Emirati involvement, this fully documented, fourth quarterly panel report is far more difficult for Abu Dhabi to dismiss.
The emergence of this damning verified evidence of Emirati interference in Sudan’s 19-month civil war lands directly in the middle of the high-stakes race to replace outgoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, as the UAE’s former long-serving female permanent UN representative Lana Nusseibeh is actively campaigning for the top global diplomatic post. Sudan’s ambassador to the UK, Babiker al-Siddig al-Amin, warned MEE that Nusseibeh’s candidacy must not be used to whitewash Abu Dhabi’s documented support for the genocidal RSF, stating that actors with Sudanese civilian blood on their hands should not lead global governance institutions, and that her election would represent a catastrophic blow to the UN’s institutional credibility.
A highly decorated Emirati diplomat with close ties to the UAE ruling elite, Nusseibeh is a Cambridge and SOAS University of London graduate who previously served as UN General Assembly vice president, head of the UN Women executive board, and twice as Security Council president. She was a key architect of the UAE’s 2020 normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel. For years, she has rejected press reports detailing Emirati involvement in the Sudan war, and when pressed recently on her ability to remain impartial on Sudan-related issues if elected secretary-general, she stopped short of directly addressing Emirati support for the RSF, only stating that she would back full accountability for RSF atrocities and support all UN fact-finding mechanisms.
While Nusseibeh currently trails Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan in informal straw polling for the position, her candidacy has gained significant momentum due to the UAE’s extensive economic and diplomatic leverage over the UN Security Council’s five veto-wielding P5 members. Abu Dhabi has pledged $1.4 trillion in long-term investments to the United States, billions of euros in economic commitments to France alongside hosting a permanent French military base and a Louvre museum branch, and poured tens of billions of pounds into the United Kingdom’s economy, including major stakes in the city of Manchester and ownership of the iconic Manchester City Football Club by Emirati Vice President Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. China is the UAE’s largest global trading partner, while Russia has relied heavily on Dubai and Abu Dhabi networks to circumvent Western sanctions imposed after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Multiple diplomatic sources confirmed to MEE that the US, UK, France and Russia are all leaning toward backing Nusseibeh’s bid, with only China remaining opposed. Unconfirmed prior claims that International Rescue Committee head David Miliband had lobbied his brother, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, to support Nusseibeh’s candidacy were formally denied by the IRC, while the UK Foreign Office stated it would only evaluate all candidates on merit and would not publicly comment on individual hopefuls. Prior tensions between the UK and UAE over Sudan-related diplomatic stances came to light last year, when Abu Dhabi cancelled scheduled meetings with British ministers and forced a mid-flight turnaround of a visiting UK government aircraft after London declined to defend the UAE at a UN Security Council session on the Sudan war.
This latest confidential UN report follows a prior panel document earlier this year that also outlined UAE links to RSF mercenary deployments, which was blocked from public release for months by Bahrain, a close Emirati ally and non-permanent Security Council member. Investigations by AI safety firm Anthropic also confirmed with high confidence last September that the UAE ran a coordinated influence operation targeting UN Sudan experts and independent critics of its role in the conflict. The New York Times also recently revealed that GSSG, the security firm that deployed the Colombian mercenaries, was founded by a senior official in the Emirati presidential office.

One of the UK’s most high-profile religious and political content creators, Mohammed Hijab, has come forward with formal public allegations against British counter-terrorism authorities, claiming officers sought to recruit him as a confidential informant following a prolonged seizure of his personal electronic devices. Operating under the public moniker Mohammed Hijab, the creator — whose legal name is Mohamed Hegab — identifies as a religious philosopher currently pursuing a doctoral degree in the subject at the University of Birmingham. Boasting a YouTube subscriber base of over 1 million, he has built a widespread public profile for his rigorous, often high-stakes public debates spanning religious theology, global geopolitics, and Middle East policy, including recent high-profile appearances on Piers Morgan’s broadcast programs where he faced off against former Israeli military international spokesperson Jonathan Conricus. In a public, on-the-record post to his X (formerly Twitter) account dated November 4, 2026, Hijab laid out a timeline of the alleged encounter: on May 12, 2025, he was stopped at Gatwick Airport by officers operating under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, a legislative provision that grants border and counter-terror teams broad authority to detain, question, and search individuals at ports of entry without requiring pre-existing reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity. During the stop, officers seized all of his personal electronic devices, which Hijab states were used to access and review more than 10,000 of his private messages. The devices were not returned to him until nearly four months later, on September 11, with no follow-up questions or formal charges filed against him. Following a formal subject access request for records related to the stop, Hijab received heavily redacted documentation from Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP). One unredacted handwritten line in the examining officer’s case notes explicitly reads “Doesn’t want to be an informant”, a detail he shared alongside a screenshot of the partially redacted CTP document, which bears the official agency watermark. He also published a second screenshot of an official letter dated May 18, 2025, from the Gatwick Borders Team under Counter Terrorism Policing South East, which formally notified him of a legal adjustment to the authority used to retain his seized property, with two full paragraphs of the correspondence redacted. The letter explicitly notes that the retention of his property does not confirm he is currently the subject of a criminal investigation, and pledged to return his belongings at the earliest possible opportunity, though no timeline was specified. Hijab has since elaborated on the incident in a YouTube address, disclosing that he was summoned for a voluntary police interview under caution as part of an ongoing active criminal investigation, which he asserts is largely focused on his pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli public activism. He went on to claim, without providing accompanying corroborating evidence, that the state of Israel was actively interfering with his work to curtail his public advocacy. At the time of publication, Middle East Eye (MEE) reached out to CTP London for an official statement addressing Hijab’s allegations, but no response had been received to the media outlet’s inquiry. It remains unclear whether the extensive redactions on the documents Hijab shared were applied by Counter Terrorism Policing prior to releasing the records to him, or if Hijab redacted the remaining content himself to protect the privacy of third parties and sensitive operational details.

Traveling north from the Syrian capital of Damascus toward the Lebanese border, the route winds through desolate, untended apple and cherry orchards before climbing steeply into the rugged Qalamoun mountain range. It is here that the historic rebel stronghold of Rankous sits, where 33-year-old Abu Jad, a former Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighter who took up arms against longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad, waited on the main thoroughfare to greet the visiting reporter. Abu Jad, who lost full function of his right arm to a 2014 bullet wound, waved from behind the tinted window of his SUV with a tight, weary smile, and welcomed the visitor to what he called “the revolutionary capital of the Qalamoun region.”

That hard-won peace the town had cherished in the months following Assad’s ouster was shattered in the pre-dawn hours of 22 October, when Syrian internal security forces launched sweeping raids across Rankous, storming private homes and local businesses, detaining 45 residents and killing five young local men. The Syrian Ministry of Interior released an official statement framing the operation as a counterterrorism action, claiming the five deceased men held ties to the Islamic State, espoused extremist ideology, and had formally denounced the Syrian state as un-Islamic. But local residents paint a drastically different picture: three of the victims were completely unarmed at the time of the incursion, while the other two opened fire only after security forces breached private property, killing two members of the security detail in the exchange. Many families told reporters they initially mistook the raiding party for members of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, which had occupied large swathes of Rankous during the civil war, explaining the split-second decision to resist.

In the days after the raid, hundreds of Rankous residents flooded the central town square — a space that had been scheduled to host a collective mass wedding for 12 local couples in less than two weeks’ time — to hold a multi-day funeral for the five slain young men. Instead of celebrating new life and the long-awaited end of 14 years of brutal war, the community was gathered to mourn sons who had spent their entire childhood and adolescence under bombardment, siege and regime persecution, only to be gunned down months after Assad’s government collapsed.

For Rankous, a town that lost more than 600 residents to the war, either killed in combat, detained, or disappeared into the notorious Saydnaya prison 15 minutes away, the October raid has deepened a pervasive sense of unmet justice and marginalization in the new post-Assad political order. Once a core hub of anti-regime resistance, where local rebel commander Firas al-Bitar rallied hundreds of residents to drive Assad’s forces out of the town in late 2012 and later fought off a full-scale Hezbollah incursion in 2014, Rankous’s fighters returned triumphantly alongside rebel forces from Idlib on 8 December 2024, only to find themselves systematically sidelined in the new national security architecture. As historic rivals of the now-dissolved Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) faction that leads the new transitional government, FSA-affiliated fighters including Bitar’s Sham Liberation Brigade have been largely locked out of recruitment for the new national Syrian army, leaving thousands of former combatants unemployed and excluded from state support.

In interviews with grieving family members, almost all rejected the government’s claims that their sons held ties to IS. Ahmad al-Khattib, whose 21-year-old son Youssef was killed in his own living room after returning from dawn prayers, described a gentle young man who practiced taekwondo, danced at local weddings, and never even reprimanded his father for smoking, a behavior he noted would be unthinkable for a strict IS affiliate. Youssef had previously worked as an informant for HTS during the war, and briefly joined the new national army after Assad’s fall, but left after just a few months due to extremely low salaries and a deployment hundreds of miles away from his family. For 25-year-old victim Majd Suleiman, who was gunned down at the small local supermarket where he worked, his father recalled he had attended anti-regime protests from the age of 10, spent years in hiding to avoid Assad’s mandatory military conscription, and had never been accepted into the new army due to a lack of open positions. His long-planned wedding, scheduled for mid-November, was supposed to take place in the exact town square where his funeral was now held.

Local leaders say the transitional government has provided almost no resources for reconstruction in Rankous, forcing the community’s newly formed local development committee to fund all basic repairs for roads, street lighting, schools and mosques using only private resident donations. The World Bank has estimated total national reconstruction costs for Syria will reach $216 billion, a sum the transitional government has no current capacity to fund. Nihad al-Shahin, head of the Rankous local development committee, has called for a full, transparent public investigation into the raid, noting that even if authorities could produce verifiable evidence of alleged extremist ties, the heavy-handed, unannounced violent incursion was completely unjustified, and reflected the same oppressive security state mindset that defined the Assad era. As Syria approaches the second anniversary of Assad’s ouster, widespread unaddressed grievances among war-scarred former rebel communities across the country are creating vulnerable conditions that extremist groups like the Islamic State are actively seeking to exploit to rebuild their support networks.