标签： Asia

Beneath the scorching dry-season winds that cut through the narrow lanes of Lucknow’s historic old city, an unmistakable display of solidarity with Iran fills every public space. At Hussainabad Chowk, the city’s bustling central open plaza, towering posters of the recently assassinated Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei billow, one bearing a Hindi inscription that reads: “Heartfelt and tearful homage to the great leader and guide of world peace and humanity, Martyr Ayatollah Sajjad Ali Husaini Khamenei Sahib.” Another poster positions Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, standing protectively behind his slain father, hands resting gently on his shoulders.

Further into the warren of old city alleyways, reverence for Iran’s ayatollahs appears everywhere: hand-painted graffiti, framed portraits, and street-side murals line every wall. In a stark act of protest, Israeli and American flags are painted directly onto the dusty paving stones, alongside portraits of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman, placed deliberately to be stepped on by passing pedestrians. Netanyahu’s image is the most heavily worn, reduced to faint fragments against the tattered blue-and-white backdrop of the Israeli flag, while Trump’s portrait remains partially intact—a vivid visual marker of the relative intensity of public anger toward each figure, shaped by their role in the strikes that killed Khamenei.

This grassroots activism is not a new outburst: soon after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, local shopkeepers in old Lucknow launched a grassroots boycott of American and Israeli-linked goods, pouring thousands of bottles of Coca-Cola down open drains. Today, the only cola stocked on store shelves is Campa Cola, a popular Indian-made alternative. What makes this display of anti-Israel protest particularly striking is its location: it unfolds in the country of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of Israel’s closest global allies.

Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, carries centuries of deep cultural and religious ties to Iran. Once ruled by the Nawabs of Lucknow, a Persian-origin dynasty that governed the Awadh region through the 18th and 19th centuries, the city grew into one of South Asia’s preeminent centers of Indo-Islamic culture, with its art, cuisine, music, and architecture all bearing enduring West Asian influences. Today, it is home to India’s largest Shia Muslim community, concentrated heavily in the old city’s winding neighborhoods.

When news broke on February 28 of the joint U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Khamenei, spontaneous protests erupted across old Lucknow within hours. Chants of “America Murdabad” and “Israel Murdabad”—translated as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”—echoed off the Chowk’s historic sandstone walls. By sunset, thousands of mourners gathered at Bada Imambara, Lucknow’s iconic 18th-century Shia religious site and top tourist attraction, to light candles in honor of Khamenei, whom many now honor as a martyr.

A historic slogan tied to the core of Shia identity was quickly reworked to reflect the moment: the centuries-old cry “Hussaini maaroge, har ghar Hussaini Niklega” (“If you kill one Hussaini, a hundred more will rise from every home”), rooted in the 680 CE martyrdom of Imam Hussain at the Battle of Karbala, became “Tum kitne Khamenei maaroge, har ghar se Khamenei niklega” (“If you kill one Khamenei, thousands more will emerge from every household”). The adaptation sent a clear message: the Shia community of Lucknow views itself as an integral part of the global Shia resistance movement.

“Lucknow’s historical relationship with Iran is such that it was once called the Shiraz of the East,” explains Akbar Mehdi, a young Shia cleric originally from a small town east of Lucknow who now resides in the Iranian holy city of Qom. Mehdi returned to India for the holy month of Ramadan shortly before the strike and has been unable to return to Iran amid the ongoing conflict. “In dining customs, in everyday conversation, an Iranian imprint is clearly visible across our culture here,” he said.

While connections between Lucknow and Iran predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the depth of ideological alignment grew dramatically in the decades that followed, according to Ziyaullah Siddiqui, co-editor of the Urdu-language news portal Qasidnama. His co-editor Shibli Beg explains that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s introduction of the concept of Wilayat-e-Faqih—rule by Islamic jurists as a temporary guardianship before the messianic return of the Mehdi—shifted the entire orientation of Lucknow’s Shia community. After 1979, the community’s center of gravity moved from local religious affairs to an increasingly Iran-centric global outlook, with hundreds of young Lucknow Shias traveling to Iran for religious education, and nearly all of the city’s most prominent senior clerics completing their studies in Iranian seminaries.

The ancestral ties binding the two regions run even deeper than the revolution: just a short drive from Lucknow, the small village of Kintoor sits amid the lush, fertile paddy fields of the Gangetic Plains, and it is the ancestral birthplace of Khomeini himself. Khomeini’s grandfather, Syed Ahmad Musavi Hindi, was born in Kintoor in 1790 before migrating to the Iranian village of Khomein at age 40.

In the neighboring village of Rasulpur, Middle East Eye met Rehan Kazmi, a local doctor, descendant of Khomeini, and distant cousin of Iran’s first revolutionary supreme leader, who also founded the Imam Khomeini Foundation to preserve the family’s ancestral connection to the region. “The Kazmi family of Rasulpur and the Kazmi-Musavi family of Kintoor share the same bloodline,” Kazmi explained during an interview in his clinic, where four framed images hang on the wall: a local Sufi saint Haji Waris Ali Shah, a piece of embroidered Islamic calligraphy, Ali Khamenei, and Ruhollah Khomeini. “Around 900 years ago, our ancestors moved to this land from Nishapur in Iran and settled here. We have been Indians ever since,” he said, recalling that even during his childhood in the village, Farsi was so commonly spoken that “even the chickens understood Farsi commands.”

Kazmi recalled that within hours of news of Khamenei’s assassination breaking on February 28, villagers across the region took to the streets to condemn the strike and express solidarity with Iran. They marched carrying portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei, all local shops closed their doors, and the village observed three days of official mourning.

While Lucknow is home to India’s largest Shia community, the city’s overall population is majority Hindu, and Uttar Pradesh is governed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a controversial Hindu nationalist priest-politician infamous for his anti-Muslim rhetoric and repeated actions that stoke inter-religious communal tension. He once claimed “Muslims did no favour to India by staying here.” Yet despite this tense political context, local journalist Siddiqui noted that aside from a tiny number of isolated provocations early on, the widespread pro-Iran protests have seen remarkably little communal pushback. “Lucknow is a city where Hindu-Muslim riots have never taken root. During the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, the city was largely spared the bloodshed that tore apart other parts of the subcontinent. People here are sensible. This is a city of tehzeeb—of civilisation,” he said.

By mid-March, the nature of the solidarity movement shifted: large, public street protests gave way to coordinated humanitarian fundraising for Iranian civilians affected by the ongoing war. Even the poorest members of the community contributed what they could, Kazmi said. “Even very poor daily wage labourers gave whatever small change they had. It shows how deeply people here care about this cause.” One young donor, who himself relied on casual work to support his family and clearly had little to spare, told organizers: “Such is my love for Iran, I could not give less.”

The gap between this widespread grassroots solidarity and India’s official foreign policy could not be wider. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi maintains extremely close ties to Israel: India is the world’s largest buyer of Israeli military equipment, and just three days before the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran began, Modi completed a high-profile state visit to Israel. Standing alongside Netanyahu on February 25, Modi declared: “Israel is the Fatherland, India is the Motherland,” and even noted that his birthday falls on the same date that India first formally recognized Israel, framing the alliance as a personally fated bond. Just two days after that visit, the war on Iran began.

The conflict has already delivered tangible economic harm to India, which relies almost entirely on energy shipments passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Nine out of 10 Indian households rely on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders for cooking, and roughly 60% of India’s total LPG imports pass through the strategic waterway. From the first day of the war, Indian households faced sharp price hikes and long waiting lines for refills, and widespread public panic has gripped the country ever since. When negotiations between the U.S. and Iran collapsed in mid-May, Modi publicly called on Indian citizens to cut energy use by using public transport and working from home wherever possible.

“Both the ordinary people of India and Iran are unhappy with India aligning so closely with Israel,” cleric Akbar Mehdi said. “People here can tell truth from falsehood. Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine—this is the path of truth, the path of Karbala, the path of Islam.”

Today, India presents a picture of two competing national narratives existing side by side. On one side is the BJP government, which has refused to condemn Israel’s military campaign, even as its own supporters grow increasingly anxious about the economic fallout of the conflict. On the other side is the grassroots pro-Iran solidarity movement, whose leaders are hesitant to openly challenge the central government: after 12 years of BJP rule, India’s Muslim community as a whole, and Shia Muslims in particular, are a marginalized minority with very little representation in national politics, and face widespread systemic pressure. “We cannot speak openly against the government, because of the fear and the constant pressure we live under,” Mehdi explained.

Once a leading global voice for Palestinian statehood and the first large country to cut diplomatic ties with apartheid South Africa, India now maintains a deliberate silence on the violation of Iran’s sovereignty, though it has also walked back its early overtly pro-Israel rhetoric in the face of growing domestic and regional discontent. Many critics in Lucknow argue that the BJP’s current foreign policy is unmoored and weak, leaving India increasingly isolated across West Asia as anti-Western and pro-resistance sentiment spreads across Asia.

For Rehan Kazmi, the shift in India’s longstanding principles is the core of the problem. “The leaders who built independent India experienced oppression themselves, they stood with the victims of colonialism. They understood what was happening in Palestine, because they had fought the same fight. Our ancestors sacrificed everything to free this country. Today, the soul of India is under attack. If the soul is gone, the body has no meaning.”

More than three months have passed since the United States and Israel opened military hostilities against Iran, and for ordinary Iranian citizens across Tehran, every day has been defined by a single, draining reality: a liminal state of neither open war nor lasting peace that has left nearly all facets of daily life frozen. For 38-year-old Tehran resident Afshin, his weariness echoes the sentiment of a large swathe of the population. “We’re exhausted,” he shared in an interview. “It’s either been war since last summer, or the constant shadow of war. I hope they reach a deal so we can finally escape this suspended state… I just want life to go back to normal.”

Against this backdrop of persistent instability, many Iranians hold a fragile, tentative hope that indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington, brokered by regional intermediaries including Pakistan and Qatar, will pull the country out of its current crisis. These talks have continued despite major escalations: recent U.S. airstrikes on southern Iran and Israel’s ongoing ground invasion of southern Lebanon have failed to derail the diplomatic process entirely. Over the past week, circulating reports suggest a potential preliminary deal that would institute a 60-day mutual ceasefire, creating space for negotiators to hammer out a more comprehensive agreement addressing longstanding sticking points, including Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the relief of crippling U.S. economic sanctions.

Yet for all the quiet hope, no guarantee of a breakthrough exists, and the endless uncertainty has become a heavy emotional burden that most Iranians struggle to carry week after week. While 27-year-old Tehran resident Hediyeh suspects a preliminary agreement has already been finalized behind closed doors—telling Middle East Eye that “it appears they’re only still negotiating on how and when to announce it”—she remains deeply skeptical of how long any deal will hold. She notes that public speculation already frames the 60-day ceasefire as merely a delay for tougher negotiations on core issues to come later. “But what if there isn’t a final agreement? Honestly, we’re tired. We are tired of hearing about uranium and the nuclear programme and negotiations and ‘informed sources who asked not to be named,’” she said.

For many Iranians, recent history only fuels deep distrust of the ongoing diplomatic process. Both the 12-day conflict last year and the new war that began in late February broke out while Iranian and U.S. diplomats were already engaged in indirect talks through intermediaries. That pattern has left many convinced another outbreak of hostilities could come at any time, even amid current negotiations. “I don’t trust Trump anymore,” 46-year-old Mohammad, another Tehran resident, told Middle East Eye. “Two times he attacked us while we were negotiating. Why shouldn’t it happen a third time? All this uncertainty drags my mind more towards the possibility of another war.”

Trump’s own erratic public messaging has only amplified this uncertainty: the U.S. president has shifted wildly day to day, sometimes posting respectful messages to Iranian officials on social media and claiming a deal is close, only to turn around days later and tell reporters he is unhappy with proposed terms and issue new threats of military action. This inconsistency has filtered through his own administration, creating whiplash for observers both inside and outside Iran. On May 28, the Associated Press cited multiple senior U.S. officials reporting that the full text of a preliminary agreement had been finalized and was waiting for Trump’s approval. Just hours later, Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, an outlet aligned with the country’s Revolutionary Guards, rejected the report entirely. Citing a senior Iranian negotiator, Tasnim confirmed no final text had been agreed, and no such update had been shared with Pakistani mediators. The conflicting reports have only deepened public suspicion across Iran.

For business owners like 58-year-old clothing retailer Hamidreza, this months-long uncertainty has paralyzed economic activity across the country, from large enterprises to ordinary households. “Everything in our lives is hanging in the air. We don’t know what to do. The market is terrible. We can’t plan ahead. We can’t even visualise the future adequately. Customers are in exactly the same situation,” he explained. Asked if he believes a deal will ever be reached, he laughed bitterly. “Trump himself likely doesn’t know, much less me. Anyone who tells you with certainty what’s going to happen is a charlatan. The world is now dealing with a man who goes into one night’s sleep and wakes up the next morning saying something totally different. How can anyone properly and confidently predict anything, when so much of global politics rests on someone this unpredictable?”

This uncertainty has not only strained public mood and business activity—it has upended concrete, long-held personal plans for many Iranians. Thirty-one-year-old lab technician Sima, who had been planning to pursue a master’s degree in Europe, has seen her dream put on indefinite hold. Visa processing for most Iranians has effectively frozen amid the current crisis, she explained. “Many European embassies in Tehran are essentially semi-shut down. You cannot get an appointment in Iran, they won’t permit you to apply through embassies in neighbouring countries either,” she said. After spending months securing admission to a reputable Italian university, the Iranian rial collapsed in value, completely wiping out her carefully calculated budget for study abroad. Even with an acceptance letter in hand, she cannot book a visa appointment—and the new academic year is just months away.

Not all Iranians are pushing for a rapid deal with Washington, either. Some argue that a hasty agreement could become another strategic trap that leaves Iran surrendering key leverage without gaining any meaningful, lasting concessions. Forty-one-year-old civil engineer Mehdi is deeply pessimistic about the current negotiation framework, questioning what Iran will actually gain in exchange for the concessions it is being asked to make. “If they stopped the war and went back to bargaining, it’s from pressure associated with the Strait of Hormuz and increasing oil costs,” he noted. “So now we reopen the strait and in return they return a tiny fraction of our own frozen cash? That sounds absurd to me.”

Mehdi fears that any temporary ceasefire deal will ultimately weaken Iran’s position without preventing a future full-scale conflict. “I’m not saying I like war,” he clarified. “But do you know what’s worse than war? When they can go wherever they want, blow up parts of your country, and nothing really happens in return. That’s how things played out for years in Syria.” He warns that if Iran eases economic pressure on the U.S. and global markets, Washington and Israel will simply return to all-out military action once Iran has given up its leverage.

For now, the majority of ordinary Iranians are trapped between two equally frightening outcomes: the immediate fear of a resumption of full-scale war, and the long-term fear that a flawed, fragile peace will only delay the inevitable conflict, leaving them exhausted and adrift in limbo for months or years to come.

On a sweltering March afternoon, hundreds of men clad in all black marched in a winding procession through the main thoroughfares of Kano, one of Nigeria’s largest northern cities. They carried framed portraits of Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, waved Iranian national flags, and filled the air with chants denouncing joint US-Israeli military strikes on Iran, declaring unwavering solidarity with what they called “a nation under oppression.”

To casual onlookers lingering at roadside storefronts or peering out from passing public buses, the demonstration looked like a scene borrowed from a conflict drama unfolding thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East. But for Nigeria’s minority Shia Muslim community, the public rally was far more than performance: the US-Israeli campaign against Iran hits close to home, bound by decades of ideological, religious, and cultural ties.

In the weeks following the outbreak of the latest Middle Eastern conflict, nearly identical pro-Iran demonstrations have cropped up across major Nigerian cities, from Kano and Sokoto to Gombe and the federal capital Abuja. Organized primarily by members and supporters of the proscribed Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) — one of the most influential Shia movements across the African continent — these rallies lay bare a stark reality: global geopolitical tensions can reverberate powerfully among local religious communities thousands of miles from active battlefields.

The gatherings also underscore the persistent ideological pull Iran has maintained among segments of Nigeria’s Shia population, nearly 50 years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran inspired grassroots movements across the Middle East and large swathes of Africa. “We believe Iran is standing against oppression and foreign domination,” explained Ibrahim Musa, a 32-year-old local trader who joined the Kano march. “As Shia Muslims, we feel connected to their struggle.”

Nearly 100 days have passed since the February 28 US-Israeli attacks on Iran ignited a broader regional conflict, and its economic and political aftershocks continue to ripple far beyond the Middle East. In Nigeria, where the vast majority of the country’s large Muslim population identifies as Sunni, the Shia minority has cultivated deep spiritual and ideological bonds with Iran for generations, viewing the country as a global symbol of anti-imperial resistance. These ties solidified in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the IMN emerged under the leadership of Sheikh Ibrahim el-Zakzaky.

Drawing direct inspiration from Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Zakzaky built a movement centered on grassroots political activism, community social welfare programs, and uncompromising opposition to Western political influence in West Africa. Over decades, the IMN built formal educational and religious partnerships with Tehran, with hundreds of members traveling to Iran to pursue advanced Islamic theological studies. Today, Iran remains a potent symbolic touchstone for much of Nigeria’s Shia community.

“Supporting Iran is not only about politics. Many people see it as defending Muslim dignity against powerful Western countries,” noted Abdullahi Sani, a Shia cleric based in Sokoto, in an interview with Middle East Eye.

Moses Abolade, a leading African geopolitics scholar and peacebuilding consultant with the Peace Education and Practice Network, explained that Iran has spent decades carefully building ties across African nations through religious training scholarships, investment in local religious institutions, humanitarian development projects, and targeted diplomatic outreach. While Tehran’s overall influence on the continent pales in comparison to global powers like China, the United States, and Russia, it has successfully nurtured deep loyalty among Shia minority communities in countries including Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania.

“The recent protests by some Nigerian Shia Muslims over the US-Israel-Iran tensions reflect how global conflicts increasingly shape local identities, emotions, and public discourse far beyond the Middle East,” Abolade told Middle East Eye. “For many participants, Iran represents not just a sovereign nation, but a symbol of transnational religious and political solidarity. While these demonstrations may not shift the balance of global geopolitics directly, they deliver symbolic morale boost and reinforce narratives of international solidarity that strengthen Iran’s ideological standing against Western powers.”

Even so, Abolade emphasized that the rallies do not represent the views of all Nigerians or all Nigerian Muslims, and warned that framing the conflict through a sectarian lens risks deepening existing domestic social divides. “The deeper concern is how transnational narratives, social media amplification, and global political tensions can worsen polarization, spread misinformation, and stoke sectarian mistrust within already fragile Nigerian society,” he said. “Nigeria’s extraordinary religious and ethnic diversity demands that these issues be approached with extreme caution and responsibility to avoid importing foreign conflicts into local community dynamics.”

For Nigeria’s Shia community, which has long faced official suspicion and repeated government crackdowns, the protests also serve a quiet domestic political purpose. The IMN has endured years of tense, often hostile relations with the Nigerian federal government, particularly after a 2015 clash in Zaria where Nigerian army forces killed hundreds of IMN members. The government formally banned the movement in 2019, and in the years since, IMN members have organized regular public demonstrations to demand accountability for the Zaria killings and greater official recognition of the movement. For many members, global developments connected to Iran act as a natural rallying point, creating space to reaffirm their shared religious and political identity and reinforce collective unity.

Not all observers view the demonstrations as benign, however. Retired Colonel AY Gwandu, a senior security official at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, noted that “there is inherent concern whenever foreign conflicts begin to shape the activities of local religious groups.” He added that many ordinary Nigerians fear the rallies could deepen domestic sectarian divides or create new domestic security risks.

Nigeria has struggled for decades with violent insurgency linked to Sunni extremist groups including Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province. While the IMN holds distinct ideological positions that separate it from these extremist organizations, Nigerian security agencies have continued to closely monitor the movement’s activities. Although authorities have occasionally dispersed IMN gatherings over public safety concerns, the recent pro-Iran demonstrations have remained overwhelmingly peaceful.

Even so, many residents of northern Nigeria still worry that these displays could heighten sectarian tensions in a country already grappling with chronic insecurity, rising religious extremism, and deep political instability. Political analysts add that the demonstrations also put Nigeria in a diplomatically delicate position, as the country maintains formal ties with Western nations, Israel, Gulf Arab states, and Iran simultaneously. While open public displays of support for Tehran by local groups are unlikely to shift Nigeria’s official foreign policy directly, they highlight how increasingly global power rivalries are reshaping domestic political discourse in African states.

Political scientist Abdulqodir Yunus explained that the Nigerian government is currently navigating pressure to “balance respect for freedom of expression with legitimate domestic security concerns.” He added that “these protests make clear that international conflicts now have unavoidable local dimensions” across the globe.

For the protesters themselves, however, the movement is as much about collective belonging as it is about geopolitics. In Kano, demonstrators of all ages — including women and children — marched through crowded commercial streets under heavy police observation. Some carried large banners accusing the United States and Israel of unprovoked aggression, while others called on the international community to stand with Iran. Similar scenes were documented across Sokoto and Gombe States, where participants chanted for unity and condemned Western military intervention in the Middle East. While solidarity with Iran was the rally’s official central theme, the gatherings also doubled as public assertions of religious identity and resistance to what participants frame as global injustice.

“If another Muslim nation is suffering, we cannot ignore it,” said Musa, the Kano trader. At a rally in Gombe, religious chants filled the afternoon air, punctuated by large posters featuring images of Iranian leaders alongside portraits of IMN founder Zakzaky.

To outside observers, this display of transnational solidarity may seem striking in a West African nation grappling with its own severe economic struggles and security crises, but protesters insist their shared struggle transcends geographic borders. For Tehran, these public displays across African cities confirm that the Islamic Republic’s ideological message still resonates globally, even amid decades of diplomatic isolation and crippling economic sanctions. For Nigerian Shia, the rallies reaffirm their connection to a broader transnational movement.

“These protests give us a voice,” said Fatima Aliyu, a university student who joined the demonstration at Abuja’s National Mosque. “Even though we are far away, we want Iran to know they are not alone.”

On a Sunday in May 2026, a contingent of at least 199 Israeli ultranationalists carried out a deeply provocative incursion into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, under the direct protection of Israeli police. During the raid, the group raised the Israeli national flag, sang the country’s national anthem, and multiple participants openly conducted Talmudic prayers — actions that directly violate long-standing agreements governing the holy site.

Al-Aqsa Mosque ranks as one of the most sacred sites in Islam, and its governance has been guided for decades by a globally recognized status quo arrangement. This binding international framework, widely accepted by major world powers, explicitly designates the entire mosque complex as an exclusively Islamic place of worship, where only Muslim followers may conduct religious rituals. While non-Muslim visitors are permitted limited access under specific conditions, all administrative, maintenance, and worship oversight falls to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, which operates under the custodianship of Jordan’s king, with Jordan holding formal protection responsibility for the site.

For years, however, Israel has faced growing international condemnation for systematically eroding this status quo. Successive Israeli governments, and particularly the hard-line administration led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that took office in 2022, have increasingly facilitated near-daily incursions by ultranationalist Jewish groups into the compound, allowing activities that were banned for decades to prevent regional unrest. For generations, Israeli leaders enforced restrictions on displays of the Israeli flag and formal Jewish prayer at Al-Aqsa, out of explicit concern that such actions would ignite widespread violence across Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories. But ultranationalist factions, which openly advocate for the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque to build a Jewish temple in its place, have pushed relentlessly to lift these restrictions, and Netanyahu’s government has largely capitulated to their demands.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency following Sunday’s incursion, Omar Rajoub, media department director for the Jerusalem Governorate, framed the action as part of a deliberate, state-backed campaign to reshape the identity of East Jerusalem. “Raising the Israeli flag inside the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, along with performing provocative rituals, is part of a systematic and deliberate official Israeli policy led by the extremist occupation government,” Rajoub stated. He added that these targeted practices are intended to forcibly impose new realities on occupied East Jerusalem, and fundamentally undermine the site’s centuries-old historical and legal status quo.

Rajoub warned that the repeated incursions by settlers and ultranationalists are a core component of an ongoing colonial project to Judaize Jerusalem and erase the city’s existing Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic religious and historical identity. He emphasized that these incursions, which are enabled and protected by Israeli security forces, amount to a clear violation of international law, and held the Netanyahu government fully accountable for any subsequent escalation of tensions in the region.

On the day of the incursion, Israeli police imposed additional strict restrictions on Palestinian worshippers seeking entry to the mosque, multiple witnesses confirmed. Several worshippers reported that their identity documents were seized by officers at the outer gates of the compound, barring them from accessing the site for worship. The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf added that the Israeli settlers deliberately provoked on-site guards and worshippers by taking photos throughout the mosque courtyards, including in front of the iconic Dome of the Rock, one of the most recognizable and sacred landmarks in the city.

In the wake of the December 2024 lightning rebel offensive that toppled 50 years of Assad family rule in Syria, a quiet crisis over land ownership is unfolding in northern Hama, the historic core of Syria’s once world-leading pistachio industry, threatening to derail fragile efforts to build intercommunal peace.

The conflict traces back more than a decade to the earliest days of Syria’s civil war, when northern Hama’s pistachio-growing hills became a brutal frontline between regime forces and opposition factions. What were once scenic, multi-sectarian villages descended into sectarian bloodshed between majority Sunni communities, which made up most of the anti-Assad rebellion, and Alawis, the Shia offshoot sect to which Bashar al-Assad belonged. By the end of Assad’s rule, thousands of Sunni landowners had been displaced from their properties, while Alawi landholders fled en masse after the regime’s collapse, fearing retaliatory violence from returning rebels.

For Ahmed Ali, a former Syrian civil servant who lost his government job in 2019 for refusing mandatory military service on principle, the collapse of the Assad regime should have cleared the way for him to return to his 15-hectare family pistachio farm, a plot that has been in his family for more than half a century. Instead, Ali has become one of hundreds of landowners trapped in the messy new system of property administration implemented by the new Syrian government, led by former HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Ali’s story is familiar to many displaced landowners. When he returned to his property after Assad’s ouster, he found his former Alawi neighbor Karim al-Khattib occupying his home, after Khattib’s own property was destroyed in the fighting. Ali initially agreed to let Khattib stay in exchange for a share of the annual pistachio harvest, only to discover that the state-owned agricultural investment firm Iktifaa had seized control of his land, branding him an Assad-aligned “shabih” without providing evidence of any crime.

Khattib, who has signed a new contract with Iktifaa to farm Ali’s land for 2026, says he will vacate the property once he earns enough to replant his own destroyed pistachio orchard. Last year, a weak harvest worsened by Syria’s worst drought in decades yielded around $4,000, 60% of which went to Khattib, with the remaining 40% going to Iktifaa. Ali estimates his losses from 2025 alone top $50,000, and he has been blocked from even selling the land he has owned for decades.

Founded in 2021 through a merger of two Idlib-based agricultural firms active in former opposition-held territory, Iktifaa is now the central body managing “absentee lands” across most of Syria, under the oversight of the newly created Illicit Gains Committee. The committee, an extrajudicial body independent of Syria’s court system, is tasked with investigating ties to the former Assad regime and seizing assets from those linked to the old government. It is overseen by Abraham Succarieh, a Lebanese-Australian national who remains under Western sanctions over allegations of terrorism financing, and all revenue from seized assets flows to the Syrian state’s sovereign wealth fund.

During the war, Iktifaa and its predecessor firms managed lands owned by displaced Druze and Christian minorities in HTS-held Idlib. While those properties were returned between 2020 and 2023 as HTS sought to improve its standing with minority communities, many landowners reported they never received compensation for years of use of their property, with all revenue going to the former Syrian Salvation Government, HTS’s pre-2024 governing body. Today, Iktifaa applies the same model to lands abandoned by displaced Alawis who fled after Assad’s fall.

Monzer Khattab, head of Iktifaa’s Hama and Homs branch, defends the firm’s approach, arguing that state oversight was necessary to prevent widespread land grabbing and chaos in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s collapse. He acknowledged that 2025 was a chaotic year, with much of the harvest in Hama and Homs stolen due to the firm’s limited capacity, but confirmed Iktifaa still earned between $1.5 million and $2 million in profits from the region last year, 90% of it from absentee lands. This year, the firm will deploy additional staff across all producing regions to monitor the upcoming June mid-harvest, he said.

But for displaced Alawi landowners who have already been cleared of any ties to the Assad regime, the system still leaves them locked out of their livelihoods. Ammar al-Aassad, an Alawi farmer from the northern Hama village of Maraiwid, received official clearance for his 29 dunam pistachio and olive orchard last month, but has still been unable to access his land. After a Bedouin faction occupied his property and Iktifaa signed a cultivation contract with the group, Aassad lost his entire 2025 harvest, with estimated losses of $40,000. He has yet to receive any compensation, and fears to return to his village even with official clearance: three days after Assad’s ouster, one of his Alawi neighbors who tried to return was killed by unknown assailants, and no other displaced Alawi residents have dared come back since.

“There should be evidence – the previous regime was oppressive, we don’t want oppression again,” Ali says of the current system.

Syrian provincial authorities in Hama acknowledge the growing tensions and say they are working to resolve the crisis. Hama Deputy Governor Hassan al-Hassan says the national presidency has issued formal directives supporting the return of displaced Alawis to their lands, and that new appeal offices linked to the Illicit Gains Committee will open in every province within weeks to allow landowners to challenge seizures. To resolve the immediate housing crisis that has displaced Sunnis and Alawis alike, the provincial council is planning to build temporary caravan housing for displaced Sunni farmers who returned to destroyed homes and now occupy abandoned Alawi properties.

“Our goal is to restore civil peace, and our thinking is that of a state and its institutions, not that of an armed faction. The state’s vision is that people return to their regions,” Hassan said, adding that priority must first go to Sunni farmers who returned after years of displacement to find their homes destroyed and trees uprooted. He gave no clear timeline for when full property returns would be completed.

Local intercommunal reconciliation committees, made up of both Sunni and Alawi community leaders, are already working to resolve disputes at the village level. Alaa Ibrahim, an Alawi landowner from Maan village who serves on one such committee, says his 138 dunam family property remains under Iktifaa control because his brother worked at an army-owned shoe factory, placing him under suspicion. With the 2026 harvest approaching, the Illicit Gains Committee has not issued a ruling on his case, and Ibrahim warns that if Alawi landowners are locked out of another harvest, the economic impact will be catastrophic for already vulnerable families, pushing many to sell their land at rock-bottom prices.

Ibrahim and other committee members are negotiating direct sharecropping contracts between Alawi landowners and their Sunni neighbors, while working to resolve long-running intercommunal violent disputes. If successful, he says, the agreements could pave the way for the safe return of displaced Alawis and ease sectarian tensions. If not, he warns, growing resentment will undermine the entire project of building post-war civil peace in Syria’s once-prosperous pistachio heartland.

In the late evening of April 26, an Egyptian-registered merchant vessel, the Sward, was boarded and seized by armed assailants just a few nautical miles off the shoreline of Somalia. The hijackers diverted the captured ship toward a mooring point near the port of Garacad in Puntland, the semi-autonomous regional state in northeastern Somalia. In the days following the initial seizure, additional hijacking personnel arrived aboard the Sward, accompanied by a negotiator brought in to coordinate ransom demands with the vessel’s ownership. As of the time of this report, the Sward and its crew remain fully under pirate control. This incident is far from an isolated attack: two additional commercial vessels, the Palau-flagged oil tanker Honour 25 and the Togo-flagged tanker Eureka, were hijacked in the same window and also redirected to the Puntland coast.

In recent weeks, Somali pirate factions have also seized multiple traditional ocean-going sailing vessels called dhows to repurpose them as “motherships.” These converted vessels allow pirate crews to stay at sea for extended periods, putting them in position to launch strikes hundreds of miles from the Somali coastline. This string of coordinated attacks has reignited widespread international concern that Somali piracy, a threat largely suppressed for more than a decade, is making a dangerous comeback.

To understand the gravity of the current resurgence, it is necessary to revisit the history of piracy in the region. Between 2005 and 2012, Somali pirate groups carried out more than 1,000 attacks on international commercial shipping, successfully hijacking 218 vessels and taking more than 3,700 sailors hostage. Over that period, shipowners paid an average of $50 million in annual ransom payments, while the cumulative economic cost of disrupted trade, increased insurance premiums, and expanded security measures reached as high as $18 billion per year for the global economy.

For more than a decade after that peak, Somali piracy was kept under control through a combination of armed private security on commercial vessels, coordinated international naval patrols, and targeted land-based development programs. However, the underlying structure of piracy was never fully dismantled: very few top pirate leaders were ever brought to trial, and the extensive onshore support and logistics networks that sustained the trade were never rooted out. Experts have long warned these networks were merely dormant, and the recent spate of hijackings suggests that warning was well-founded.

So is the old hijack-for-ransom business model poised for a full resurrection? Analysts point to three key factors that create fertile ground for a widespread return of piracy. First, piracy in Somalia has always been deeply tied to political instability. Academic research on the local dynamics of 2000s-era Somali piracy found that peaks in pirate activity consistently aligned with periods of constitutional crisis, political upheaval, and military conflict across the country. Today, Somalia is mired in just such a crisis: in March 2026, the federal federal government indefinitely postponed the scheduled 2026 general election without following legal protocol, and recently ordered the dissolution of the newly elected parliament of Somalia’s South West state, forcibly replacing its regional leadership. Additionally, Israel’s December 2025 recognition of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland has reshuffled regional alliances, pitting Arab states led by Saudi Arabia — which views Somali territorial integrity as critical to Red Sea and Gulf of Aden security — against the breakaway region. This pattern of political fragmentation mirrors the conditions that allowed piracy to flourish between 2005 and 2012, when regional elites in Puntland and south-central Somalia turned to pirate revenue to fund political and military campaigns. There is growing concern these elites could be tempted to revive the practice.

The second key driver is widespread economic desperation. Skyrocketing prices for food, fuel, and agricultural fertilizer, compounded by the Trump administration’s sudden elimination of U.S.-funded development and humanitarian programs, have created widespread hardship across Somalia. U.S. humanitarian aid to the country plummeted from $467 million in 2024 to just $70 million in 2025, with only $3 million in federal assistance disbursed in the first three months of 2026 alone. For many coastal communities, piracy is remembered as a reliable source of income: during the 2005-2012 peak, pirate groups distributed ransom revenue broadly across local communities to build onshore support, earning a reputation as generous employers for young people with few other economic options. With widespread poverty leaving many Somalis desperate for alternative income, pirate groups are finding a ready pool of new recruits.

Third, the strategic conditions for piracy are more favorable today than they have been in more than a decade. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid ongoing conflict with Iran, paired with Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, has forced thousands of merchant vessels bound for Europe to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope — a path that runs directly along the length of the Somali coast, bringing a flood of new targets within pirate reach. At the same time, the risk to pirates has dropped sharply: most of the international naval vessels that previously patrolled the Somali basin have been redeployed to the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz to address other security threats. This leaves pirates free to operate from hijacked motherships for weeks without detection or intervention. Compounding this, rising operational costs have led many smaller shipping lines to cut back on expensive counter-piracy measures, such as traveling at the high speeds needed to outrun pirate skiffs or hiring armed private security teams. While armed security has proven an effective deterrent, vessels that cannot afford these protections are extremely vulnerable to hijacking.

Looking ahead, the near-term trajectory of Somali piracy will depend heavily on the outcome of the current round of hijackings. Pirates depend on ransom payments to reinvest in their operations and attract new recruits to their performance-based, no-win no-fee contracts. If shipowners meet the hijackers’ demands — including the $10 million ransom the group has demanded for the Eureka — the quick payoff will incentivize more attacks and raise risk for all shipping in the region. Marine insurers could respond by reclassifying the Somali Basin as a high-risk area, as they did in 2008, which would drive shipping away from the coast and push up consumer costs across global supply chains. Unlike the 2010s, no major global power or international alliance currently has the political will or capacity to deploy a large-scale counter-piracy naval mission on the scale seen in 2011 and 2012, when the international community spent more than $1 billion annually on patrols off Somalia.

Experts emphasize that while piracy appears as a maritime security problem, a permanent solution will require addressing its root causes on land. Rather than relying exclusively on naval enforcement, investing in infrastructure to boost regional trade and inclusive local economic development offers a more sustainable long-term path to suppressing piracy. The cumulative economic damage of higher trade costs and large-scale naval operations far outweighs the limited benefits pirate activity brings to local Somali communities, making targeted onshore investment a far more cost-effective solution for the international community.

On a midday Sunday in Shan State, northeastern Myanmar, just kilometers from the Chinese border, a catastrophic detonation of improperly stored mining explosives ripped through Kaungtup village in Namhkam Township, leaving dozens dead and scores injured. By Monday, more than 14 rescue and charitable organizations had deployed heavy excavation equipment to comb through the blast site, recovering fragmented remains as teams worked to finalize an accurate casualty count.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the ethnic rebel organization that controls the Namhkam region, released an official statement Monday evening updating the death toll to 43, including seven young children. Earlier preliminary estimates from first responders had fluctuated between 38 and 45 fatalities, with the extreme force of the explosion turning many bodies to fragments making exact accounting a grueling, complicated process. The group added that 112 people were hurt in the incident, 25 of whom are children, and 37 remain in critical condition—leaving emergency responders bracing for the death toll to climb in the coming days. Rescue operations and casualty data compilation are still ongoing, the statement confirmed.

The incident has thrown a harsh spotlight on Myanmar’s sprawling, largely unregulated mining sector, which operates across resource-rich territories mostly controlled by armed ethnic groups locked in long-running sporadic conflict with the national military government. Unregulated extraction operations have seen frequent deadly accidents, including repeated catastrophic landslides at mining sites across the country in recent years.

According to the TNLA, the blast originated from stockpiles of gelignite, a common explosive used for small-scale mining and stone quarrying operations in the region. While gelignite is standard for industrial extraction, it becomes dangerously unstable over time when it is not stored following correct safety protocols. Shockingly, none of the roughly 200 households that call Kaungtup village home were ever notified that large quantities of explosive materials were being stored in their community. An official investigation into the exact root causes of the detonation remains ongoing.

Local residents told the Associated Press that silicon ore mines, which supply raw material for semiconductor manufacturing, solar panel production, and aluminum alloys, operate in the mountainous terrain roughly 10 miles southwest of Namhkam town. Speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for their personal safety, the residents claimed these mines are jointly run by the TNLA and Chinese business partners, and are closed off to most local residents. The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify this claim.

Myanmar’s extractive industry is one of the world’s largest suppliers of rare earth elements, copper, tin, and high-value precious gems including jade and rubies, with nearly all extracted materials sent to China for processing and refining. China maintains a complex diplomatic and economic position in Myanmar: it is a key strategic ally of the military-led government that seized power in the 2021 coup, while also maintaining open ties to the country’s ethnic minority armed groups.

Following the blast, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian issued a statement of deep condolences, confirming that one Chinese national was injured in the incident and is currently receiving medical care. Beijing has also offered to provide assistance to help manage the aftermath of the explosion.

The TNLA, a core member of the Three Brotherhood Alliance anti-military coalition, seized full control of the Namhkam region in late 2023 during a large-scale offensive against the military government. This offensive is part of the wider nationwide unrest that followed the February 2021 military coup, which ousted the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and sparked widespread armed resistance across the country. Though the TNLA signed a China-brokered ceasefire with the military government at the end of 2023, peace in the border region remains fragile. Control of mineral and gem extraction operations is a critical source of revenue for both the national military government and the ethnic armed groups opposing it, fueling continued low-level conflict and unsafe operating conditions for workers and nearby communities.