Features

Johannesburg, South Africa – When the millionaire mining magnate-turned-president of South Africa landed in Washington to meet the billionaire real estate tycoon-turned-president of the United States, it was with a deal in mind.

Tensions have been escalating between the US and its African trade ally since Donald Trump took office this year, cut off aid to South Africa, repeated false accusations that a “white genocide” is taking place there and began welcoming Afrikaners as refugees.

At the meeting between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House on Wednesday, the South African president began by focusing heavily on trade and investments, highlighting the two countries’ years of cooperation, in keeping with statements made by South Africa’s presidency that Ramaphosa would present a trade deal to the US.

But Trump responded with a well-prepared redirect that South African media and analysts described as an “ambush” and a move that “blindsided” Ramaphosa.

Ready with printouts of news articles about alleged white victims of killings in South Africa and a video of firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing Kill the Boer, Trump insisted that white farmers were being targeted and murdered – an assertion Ramaphosa politely yet firmly denied, saying criminality was a problem for all South Africans regardless of race.

The team Ramaphosa assembled to join him on his working visit – which included four white South Africans: two golf legends, the wealthiest man in the country and the agriculture minister – all reaffirmed Ramaphosa’s facts that while violence was widespread, white people were not specifically being targeted.

“We have a real safety problem in South Africa, and I don’t think anyone wants to candy-coat that,” said John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister and a member of the Democratic Alliance party, which is part of South Africa’s governing coalition.

“Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work,” the minister, who is himself an Afrikaner, said. Trump claimed that “thousands” of white farmers were fleeing South Africa.

Steenhuisen added that the people in the video Trump showed were leaders of opposition minority parties and his party had joined forces with Ramaphosa “precisely to keep those people out of power”.

‘The lion’s den’

The meeting began cordially where Trump complimented South African golfers, including well-known Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were part of the delegation. They both implored Trump for enhanced trade to uplift South Africa’s economy.

Also in the delegation was South Africa’s richest man, Johann Rupert, a luxury-goods mogul and an Afrikaner. He countered claims of racial persecution against the white minority, saying that while criminality was rife, Black people were more often the victims.

“We have too many deaths, but it’s across the board. It is not only white farmers,” Rupert said to Trump.

Ramaphosa kept his cool, local media and observers said, noting that the South African president chose to remain calm, patient and light-hearted even in light of Trump’s attack.

He steered talks back to trade, saying South Africa needed economic investment from its allies, and mostly sat expressionless while the video was played, occasionally stretching his neck to look at it.

Ramaphosa went into “the lion’s den” and was met with an ambush but he remained calm, South African political analyst Sanusha Naidu said.

“Ramaphosa and the delegation did not allow themselves to be baited into an emotional response. That’s critical. They made Trump feel like he had the upper hand in the meeting,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that given the narrative from Trump before Ramaphosa’s arrival, it “could have gone worse”.

When asked by a reporter whether he wanted the impasse between the US and South Africa resolved, Trump said he was open to it.

“I hope it has to be resolved. It should be resolved,” he said, adding that if it were not resolved, it would be “the end of the country”.

‘Reset’ relations

Before the two leaders met on Wednesday, Ramaphosa’s office said the aim was to “reset” relations, especially as the US is South Africa’s second largest trading partner after China.

“Whether we like it or not, we are joined at the hip, and we need to be talking to them,” the South African president said before his trip.

Christopher Isike, a political scientist at the University of Pretoria, told Al Jazeera that direct engagement between the leaders was important, given the tense relations between their countries.

“This is an opportunity for South Africa to correct misinformation peddled by President Trump and try to reset trade relations between the two countries,” he said.

Isike noted that both presidents’ backgrounds as businesspeople could provide common ground for discussing mutually advantageous deals.

“Rich friends of Ramaphosa are also rich friends of Trump, and that may have helped facilitate the meeting,” Isike added.

Common ground and level heads would be useful as the leaders continued private talks away from the media on Wednesday, observers said.

Before the visit, Ramaphosa maintained that while Trump was a dealmaker, he too was adept at making deals and even joked about the possibility of playing a round of golf with his US counterpart.

Washington, however, has criticised Pretoria for a host of matters since Trump took office. This continued in the meeting on Wednesday.

Trump focused on the white farmers, particularly Afrikaners – the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who instituted apartheid. He alleged they are being killed because of their race despite evidence showing that attacks and killings are common across all groups in the country.

Trump also mentioned South Africa’s land reform law that allows land in the public interest to be taken without compensation in exceptional circumstances in an effort to redress apartheid injustices. Pretoria said no white land has been taken, but the US said the law unfairly targets minority white South Africans who are the majority landholders.

Despite Pretoria consistently seeking to rectify false assertions, the Trump administration has pushed ahead with a plan to take in Afrikaners as refugees. The first group arrived last week. He has also cut aid, including vital support for life-saving HIV programmes, to South Africa.

Additionally, there are worries that Trump may not attend the Group of 20 summit being held in South Africa in November and his government may not renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), key US trade legislation that assists economies in sub-Saharan Africa. It expires in September.

Trade and investments

Before Wednesday’s meetings, Ramaphosa said strengthening trade relations between the two countries was his primary motivation for travelling to Washington, DC.

“We want to come out of the United States with a really good trade deal, investment promotion. We invest in the United States, and they invest in us. We want to strengthen those relations. We want to consolidate relations between the two countries,” he said.

This week, South Africa’s ministers of trade and agriculture, Parks Tau and Steenhuisen, met with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to present the first draft of a trade deal.

In 2024, total goods trade between the US and South Africa amounted to $20.5bn. This included $5.8bn in US exports to South Africa and $14.7bn in South African exports to the US.

However, some observers said that at the heart of the potential trade deal is what South Africa could offer billionaire and close Trump ally, Elon Musk, given his ongoing claims about obstacles he allegedly faces in operating Starlink, his satellite internet company, in the country where he was born due to its transformation laws.

These laws seek to redress past injustices that kept Black people destitute and require businesses over a certain size to have a 30 percent equity stake held by members of previously disadvantaged groups.

Speaking at the Doha Economic Forum on Tuesday, Musk reiterated his assertions about laws he claimed were biased against white people despite experts explaining that most of those only seek to promote racial justice.

“All races must be on equal footing in South Africa. That is the right thing to do. Do not replace one set of racist laws with another set of racist laws, which is utterly wrong and improper,” Musk said.

“I am in an absurd situation where I was born in South Africa but cannot get a licence to operate Starlink because I am not Black,” he claimed.

Before Wednesday’s meeting, a White House official told the Reuters news agency Trump is likely to tell Ramaphosa that all US companies in South Africa should be exempt from “racial requirements”.

Opposition figure Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), threatened legal action after news that the government was considering offering regulatory assurances to Musk’s Starlink. The EFF said the move would be unconstitutional and shows Ramaphosa is willing to compromise the country’s sovereignty to “massage the inflated ego of Musk and Trump”.

Isike said that while trade concessions would be discussed, he doubted the South African government would give up its laws to appease Musk.

“I will be surprised if Starlink gets its way by refusing to follow South African transformation laws, which require 30 percent Black ownership of a foreign company,” he said.

‘Genocide’ claims

Meanwhile, in private talks, Ramaphosa and Trump were also expected to discuss foreign policy issues, including peace prospects between Russia and Ukraine and South Africa’s support for Palestine and its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Some political observers said Pretoria is in the US crosshairs partly because of its actions against the key Washington ally.

Patrick Bond, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg, predicted before the talks that the US might offer to retract claims of “white genocide” in exchange for South Africa dropping its case at the ICJ.

South Africa is seeking to hold Israel accountable for its assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The US is Israel’s strongest ally and arms supplier.

“We are very rational when it comes to discussing global and geopolitical matters. We will put South African positions first, and our foreign policy positions will be clarified,” Ramaphosa said before the meeting.

As the Gaza genocide case against Israel continues in The Hague, US allegations of a widely discredited “white genocide” in South Africa continue to follow the country’s leadership.

Before Trump and Ramaphosa retreated to private meetings on Wednesday, a reporter asked the US president if he had decided whether genocide was being committed in South Africa. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he replied.

The unfounded claim of white genocide has “taken on a life of its own”, analyst Paolo von Schirach, president of the Global Policy Institute in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

It will be difficult for Ramaphosa and Trump to rebound after the Oval Office “ambush”, he said.

“We know that Elon Musk certainly fanned this story [about a white genocide], and he’s probably not the only one,” von Schirach said. “It’s going to be hard for Trump to say, ‘Oh, so sorry. I was misinformed.’”

Israel’s military has launched an intense ground offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The offensive comes on the back of a more than two-month total blockade on Gaza after Israel decided to unilaterally end a ceasefire with Hamas in March.

Israel has come under increasing international pressure, including from its staunch allies in the United States government, to agree to a ceasefire and allow aid into Gaza.

Meanwhile, Hamas and Israeli negotiators are in Doha for new indirect talks.

Here’s everything you need to know about Israel’s latest ground assault:

What is Operation Gideon’s Chariots, and why did it begin now?

Operation Gideon’s Chariots is a major ground offensive launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip that comes after air attacks killed hundreds of Palestinians in recent days and further debilitated Gaza’s healthcare network. With the backing of Israel’s lethal air force, the operation is targeting both southern and northern Gaza.

The assault began as the second day of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas ended on Saturday in Doha. Israel tends to intensify operations and attacks during such negotiations. It said this latest offensive is exerting “tremendous pressure” on Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched this latest assault as US President Donald Trump concluded his Middle East tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates but did not stop in Israel.

What are Israel’s stated objectives for this assault?

The Israeli military said the offensive was launched to expand “operational control” in the Gaza Strip.

Israel says its campaign also aims to free the remaining captives held in Gaza and defeat Hamas.

However, Netanyahu has been repeatedly criticised by segments of Israeli society, including captives’ families, for failing to prioritise their return and has also rejected Hamas’s offers to end the war and free the captives.

A week before the start of the operation, quotes were leaked of Netanyahu speaking about the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza outside the Gaza Strip.

“We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to,” Netanyahu said in closed-door testimony made to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.”

What has happened in Gaza since the offensive began?

Since Sunday, the day Israel confirmed the operation, at least 144 people have been killed in a relentless wave of strikes. At least 42 people died in the heavily bombarded northern part of the Strip, according to medical sources. Five of those killed were journalists.

In southern Gaza, at least 36 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in Israeli air strikes on a tent encampment of displaced Palestinians in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis governorate, according to medical sources.

But the lead-up to the operation also included heavy attacks.

In the past week, Israel has attacked more than 670 places in Gaza and claimed all were “Hamas targets” located both above and beneath the ground. Israel has been accused of disproportionately targeting civilians in Gaza, including displaced families. At least 370 Palestinians were killed over five days.

Since the start of the war in October 2023, at least 53,339 Palestinians have been killed and 121,034 wounded, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

The severity of the recent attacks has many Palestinians expressing fears on social media that their latest posts may be their last.

On Monday, the Israeli military issued forced evacuation orders for Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, warning of an “unprecedented attack”.

What is Israel targeting?

Israel said it is targeting Hamas targets, a claim that has been increasingly challenged by human rights groups and experts as its more than 19-month war on Gaza continues.

Among the sites hit are hospitals, a recurring target for the Israeli military in Gaza. Muhammad Zaqout, the director general of hospitals in Gaza, described the tactic as part of “Israel’s systematic measures against hospitals”.

On Sunday, the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza was rendered nonoperational after it was besieged by Israeli forces. Medical professionals said it could lead to the deaths of thousands of sick and wounded people.

The situation was described as “catastrophic” by Marwan al-Sultan, the director of the facility, who also called on international organisations to push for the safety of medical teams.

Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza’s Jabalia and European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza have also been bombed.

In recent days, Israel said it has killed Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, Mohammad Sinwar, the brother and successor of the late Yahya Sinwar. It also reportedly killed another Sinwar brother, Zakaria Sinwar, a university lecturer, and three of his children in an air strike on central Gaza.

How has Hamas responded?

On Sunday, Hamas released a statement calling the attacks on displaced Palestinians in Khan Younis a “brutal crime” and a flagrant violation of international laws and norms.

The group also placed blame on the US for backing Israel.

“By granting the terrorist occupation government political and military cover, the United States administration bears direct responsibility for this insane escalation in the targeting of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip, including children, women, and the elderly,” Hamas said.

What is the current humanitarian situation inside Gaza?

The entire Strip is at risk of famine.

Basic humanitarian supplies, including food, fuel, medical aid and vaccines for children, have been blocked by Israel from entering the Strip. More than 90 percent of the population has been displaced since the war began on October 7, 2023. Many Palestinians have been displaced multiple times with some people being forced to relocate 10 times or more.

Israel has refused the entry of any aid since March 2. International actors and agencies have been pressing hard for Israel to resume the distribution of aid to Gaza to little effect.

“Two months into the latest blockade, two million people are starving, while 116,000 tonnes of food is blocked at the border just minutes away,” said World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaking at the opening of the annual World Health Assembly.

One in five Palestinians in Gaza is currently facing starvation, while 9,000 children, who are most vulnerable to Israel’s continued food blockade, have been hospitalised for acute malnutrition since the start of the year, according to the United Nations.

Late on Sunday, Netanyahu announced that some food would be allowed into the Gaza Strip in a much needed reprieve for the local population.

“Israel will allow a basic amount of food for the population to ensure that a hunger crisis does not develop in the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Netanyahu said on Monday that the move was motivated by pressure from Israel’s allies.

It is unclear when the border will open to allow in aid.

What’s the status of the ceasefire talks?

The latest round of talks started on Saturday, and by the end of Sunday, there had been little progress.

Talks are set to continue this week.

Israel and Hamas both claimed the talks began without conditions.

“The Hamas delegation outlined the position of the group and the necessity to end the war, swap prisoners, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and allow humanitarian aid and all the needs of the people of Gaza back into the Strip,” Taher al-Nono, the media adviser for Hamas’s leadership, told the Reuters news agency.

The criticism of Israel is increasing.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “alarmed” by Israel’s expanded offensive in Gaza and called for an immediate ceasefire.

Germany, one of Israel’s foremost backers, expressed deep concern over the offensive.

Its Federal Foreign Office said in a statement: “A large-scale military offensive also entails the risk that the catastrophic humanitarian situation for the population in Gaza and the situation of the remaining hostages will continue to deteriorate and that the prospect of an urgently needed long-term ceasefire fades.”

After the offensive was confirmed, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot called for the “immediate, massive and unhampered” resumption of aid into Gaza.

Even before the offensive, international pressure on Israel was growing.

Seven European nations urged Israel on Friday to “reverse its current policy” on Gaza.

The leaders of Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, Spain and Norway released a joint statement on what they called a “man-made humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place before our eyes in Gaza”.

Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, has called for decisive action to prevent genocide in Gaza.

He criticised the US-Israeli joint plan to replace international aid mechanisms in Gaza as a “waste of time”. More than 160,000 pallets of aid are “ready to move” at the border, he said, but are being blocked by Israel.

Volker Turk, the UN’s human rights chief, said on Friday that Israel’s bombing campaign is intended to bring about a “permanent demographic shift in Gaza” and is in “defiance of international law”.

Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – In a quiet laser clinic in Indian-administered Kashmir’s biggest city, Srinagar, Sameer Wani sits with his arm stretched out, his eyes following the fading ink on his skin.

The word “Azadi” (freedom in Urdu), once a bold symbol of rebellion against India’s rule, slowly disappears under the sting of the laser. What was once a mark of defiance has become a burden he no longer wants to carry.

As Sameer, 28, watches the ink vanish, his mind drifts to a day he will never forget. He was riding his motorbike with a friend when Indian security forces stopped them at a checkpoint.

During the frisking, one of the officers pointed to the tattoo on his arm and asked, “What is this?”

Sameer’s heart raced. “I was lucky he couldn’t read Urdu,” he tells Al Jazeera, his voice tinged with the memory. “It was a close call. I knew right then that this tattoo could get me into serious trouble.”

When he was younger, he said, the tattoo was a “sign of strength, of standing up for something”.

“But now I see it was a mistake. It doesn’t represent who I am any more. It’s not worth carrying the risk, and it’s not worth holding on to something that could hurt my future.”

Sameer is one of many young Kashmiris choosing to erase tattoos that once reflected their political beliefs, emotional struggles or identity. Once worn with pride, the tattoos are now being removed in growing numbers across the region – quietly and without fanfare.

While a trend to remove tattoos was already under way, the urgency has deepened since India and Pakistan – who have fought three wars over Kashmir since emerging as independent nations in 1947 – came to the brink of yet another war following the killing of 26 people in the scenic resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir last month.

New Delhi accuses Islamabad of backing an armed rebellion that erupted on the Indian side in 1989. Pakistan rejects the allegation, saying it only provides moral diplomatic support to Kashmir’s separatist movement.

Two weeks after Pahalgam, India, on May 7, launched predawn drone and missile attacks on what it called “terror camps” inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – the most extensive cross-border missile strikes since their war in 1971. For the next three days, the world held its breath as the South Asian nuclear powers exchanged fire until United States President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between them on May 10.

However, peace remains fragile in Indian-administered Kashmir, where a crackdown by Indian forces has left the region gripped by fear. Homes of suspected rebels have been destroyed, others have been raided, and more than 1,500 people have been arrested since the Pahalgam attack, many under preventive detention laws.

‘We feel it on our skin’

In such a tense atmosphere, many Kashmiri youth say they feel exposed – and more vulnerable to scrutiny over even the most personal forms of expression.

“Every time something happens between India and Pakistan, we feel it on our skin – literally,” Rayees Wani, 26, a resident of Shopian district, tells Al Jazeera.

“I have a tattoo of Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s name on my arm, and after the Pahalgam attack, I started getting strange looks at checkpoints,” he said, referring to the separatist leader who passed away at the age of 91 in 2021. The Hurriyat is an alliance of pro-freedom groups in Indian-administered Kashmir.

“Even my friends ask me uncomfortable questions. The media, police, and even the neighbours start looking at you differently,” Rayees added.

“I just wish people understood that a tattoo doesn’t define someone’s loyalty or character. We are just trying to live, not explain ourselves every day. I want to erase this as soon as possible.”

Arsalan, 19, from Pulwama recently booked a tattoo removal session. He did not share his last name over fears of reprisal from the authorities.

“People with visible tattoos – especially those hinting at past political affiliations – are suddenly worried they could be profiled, questioned – or worse,” he said.

To be sure, tattoo culture itself isn’t fading in Kashmir. Tattoo studios are still busy, especially with clients aged between 22 and 40, many of whom wait for hours to get inked. But the trend has shifted; instead of political or religious tattoos, people now prefer minimalistic designs, nature-inspired patterns, names or meaningful quotes in stylish fonts.

Some Kashmiris trying to get rid of tattoos say that’s part of their personal evolution and growth.

“For me, it was about being brave,” Irfan Yaqoob from Baramulla district told Al Jazeera. Now 36, Yaqoob got a slain rebel’s name tattooed on his left arm when he was a teenager.

“Back then, it felt like a symbol of courage. But now, when I look at it, I realise how much I have changed. Life has moved on, and so have I. I have a family, a job, and different priorities. I don’t want my past to define me or create trouble in the present. That’s why I decided to get it removed. It’s not about shame. It’s about growth,” he said.

Many reasons to remove tattoos

It isn’t just the security forces that are driving this move among many Kashmiris to get rid of tattoos.

For some, tattoos became painful reminders of a turbulent past. For others, they turned into obstacles, especially when they tried to move ahead professionally or wanted to align the inscription on their bodies with their personal beliefs.

Anas Mir, who also lives in Srinagar, had a tattoo of a sword with “Azadi” written over it. He got it removed a few weeks ago.

“People don’t clearly say why they are removing tattoos. I removed mine only because of pressure from my family,” the 25-year-old said.

“It’s my choice what kind of tattoo I want. No one should judge me for it. If someone had an AK-47 or a political tattoo, that was their choice. The authorities or government shouldn’t interfere. And yes, tattoo trends also change with time,” he added, referring to the Russian-made Avtomat Kalashnikova assault rifles, arguably the most popular firearm in the world.

One of the key reasons behind people removing tattoos is religion. In a Muslim-majority region, tattoos, especially those carrying religious or political messages, could often conflict with the faith’s teachings.

Faheem, 24, had a Quranic verse tattooed on his back when he was 17.

“At that time, I thought it was an act of faith,” he told Al Jazeera, without revealing his last name over security fears. “But later, I realised that tattoos – especially with holy verses – are not encouraged [in Islam]. It started to bother me deeply. I felt guilty every time I offered namaz [prayers] or went to the mosque. That regret stayed with me. Getting it removed was my way of making peace with myself and with my faith.”

Many others said they shared the feeling. Some visit religious scholars to ask whether having tattoos affects their prayers or faith. While most are advised not to dwell on past actions, they are encouraged to take steps that bring them closer to their beliefs.

“It’s not about blaming anyone,” said Ali Mohammad, a religious scholar in Srinagar. “It’s about growth and understanding. When someone realises that something they did in the past doesn’t align with their beliefs any more, and they take steps to correct it, that’s a sign of maturity, not shame.”

Another key factor driving tattoo removals is job security. In Kashmir, government jobs are seen as stable and prestigious. But having a tattoo, especially one with political references, can create problems during recruitment or background checks.

Talib, who disclosed his first name only, had a tattoo of a Quranic verse shaped like an AK-47 rifle on his forearm. When he applied for a government position, a family friend in law enforcement hinted it might be an issue.

“He didn’t say it directly, but I could tell he was worried,” said the 25-year-old. “Since then, I have been avoiding half-sleeve shirts. I got many rejections and no one ever gave a clear reason, but deep down, I knew the tattoo was a problem. It felt like a wall between me and my future.”

As the demand for tattoo removal rises, clinics in Srinagar and other parts of Indian-administered Kashmir are seeing a steady increase in clients. Laser sessions, once rare, are now booked weeks in advance.

Mubashir Bashir, a well-known tattoo artist in Srinagar who also runs a tattoo removal service, said: “After a popular singer’s death in 2022, the trend of AK-47 tattoos exploded,” Bashir said. Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala, whose music often glorified guns, was killed in May 2022. Police blamed his death on an inter-gang rivalry.

“But now, especially after the Pahalgam attack, we are seeing more people coming in to erase those tattoos. The fear is real,” Mubashir said.

He estimated that tens of thousands of tattoos have been removed in the region over the past seven years, since 2019, when India abrogated Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and launched a major crackdown, arresting thousands of civilians. “Some say the tattoo no longer represents them. Others mention problems at work or while travelling,” Mubashir said.

Laser tattoo removal isn’t easy. It requires multiple sessions, costs thousands of rupees and can be painful. Even after successful removal, faint scars or marks often remain. But for many Kashmiris, the pain is worth it.

Sameer, whose “Azadi” tattoo is almost gone, remembers the emotional weight of the process. “I didn’t cry when I got the tattoo,” he says. “But I cried when I started removing it. It felt like I was letting go of a part of myself.”

Still, Sameer believes it was the right choice. “It’s not about shame,” he says. “I respect who I was. But I want to grow. I want to live without looking over my shoulder.”

As he finishes another laser session, a faint scar is all that is left of the word that is Kashmir’s war-cry for freedom.

“I will never forget what that tattoo meant to me when I was 18,” Sameer says as he rolls down his sleeve. “But now, I want to be someone new. I want a life where I don’t carry old shadows.”

In 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, as a record 1.3 million people, mostly Syrians fleeing civil war, sought asylum, Pau Aleikum Garcia was in Athens, helping those arriving in the Greek capital after a perilous sea journey.

The then 25-year-old Spanish volunteer arranged housing for refugees in abandoned facilities like schools and libraries, and set up community kitchens, language classes and art activities.

“It was kind of a massive cascade of people,” Garcia recalls.

“My own memory of that time is oddly patchy,” he admits. Though there was one encounter that stood out.

In one of those schools in Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood, where refugees painted the external wall to illustrate their memories of their journeys, Garcia met a Syrian woman in her late 70s.

“I’m not afraid of being a refugee. I have lived all my life. I’m happy with what I have lived,” he recalls her telling him. “I’m afraid that my grandkids will be refugees for all their life.”

When he tried to reassure her that they would find a place to start anew, she protested: “No, no, I’m worried, because when my grandkids grow [up] and they ask themselves, ‘Where do I come from?’ they won’t be able to answer that question.”

The woman told him how, during the family’s journey to Greece, all but one of their photo albums were lost.

Now, she said, all the memories of their lives in Syria existed only in her and her husband’s minds, unrecorded and unrecoverable for the next generation.

Connecting generations

The woman’s story stayed with Garcia after he returned to Barcelona and his work as cofounder of the design studio, Domestic Data Streamers (DDS).

Over the years, the studio has grown into a 30-person team of experts in varied disciplines such as psychology, architecture, cognitive science, journalism and design. The studio has collaborated with diverse institutions such as museums, prisons and churches, as well as the likes of the United Nations, and uses technology to bring “emotions and humanity” to data visualisation.

Then, in around 2019, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence – a model of machine learning that uses algorithms to create new content from data scraped from the internet – the team began to explore image-generating technology, following the release of ChatGPT.

As they did, Garcia thought of the grandmother from Syria and how this technology might help someone like her by constructing images based on memories.

He believes that memories – captured through records like photographs – play an integral role in connecting generations.

“Memories are the architects of who we are. … It’s a big part of how social identities are built,” he says.

He also likes to cite Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author, who wrote that the biggest act of love is to remember something.

But in the past, people had fewer opportunities to document their lives than their mobile phone-wielding contemporaries, he says. Many experiences have been omitted or erased from collective memory due to lack of access, persecution, censorship or marginalisation.

So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memories project to use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.

“I don’t think there was an eureka moment,” Garcia says of the evolution of the idea. “I’ve always been intrigued by how documentaries reconstruct the past … our goal and approach were more focused on the subjective and personal side, trying to capture the emotional layers of memory.”

For Garcia, the chance to recover such memories is an important act in reclaiming one’s past. “The fact that you have an image that tells this happened to me, this is my memory, and this is shown and other people can see it, is also a way to say to you, ‘Yes, this happened’. It’s a way of saying, of having more dignity about the part of your history that has not been depicted.”

Building memories

To create a synthetic memory, DDS uses open-source image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Flux, while the team is developing its own tool.

The process starts with an interviewer asking a subject to recall their earliest memory. They explore various narratives as people recount their life stories before picking the one they think can be best encapsulated in an image.

The interviewer works with a prompter – someone trained in the syntax that the AI uses to create visuals – who inputs specific words to build the image from the details described by the interviewee.

Nearly everything, such as hairstyles, clothing, and furniture, is recreated as accurately as possible. However, figures themselves are usually depicted from behind or, if faces are shown, with a degree of blurriness.

This is intentional. “We want to be very clear that this is a synthetic memory and this is not real photography,” says Garcia. This is partly because they want to ensure their generated images don’t add to the proliferation of fake photos on the internet.

The resulting images – usually two or three from each session, which can last up to an hour – can appear dreamlike and undefined.

“As we know, memory is very, very, very fragile and full of imperfections,” Garcia explains. “That was the other reason why we wanted a model that could be full of imperfections and also a bit fragile, so it’s a good demonstration of how our memory works.”

Garcia’s team found that people who took part in the project said they felt a stronger connection to less detailed images, their suggestive nature allowing for their imagination to fill in the blanks. The higher the resolution, the more someone focuses on the details, losing that emotional connection to the image, Airi Dordas, the project’s lead, explains.

The team first trialled this technology with their grandparents. The experience was moving, Garcia says, and one that grew into medical trials to determine whether synthetic memories can be used as an augmentation tool in reminiscence therapy for dementia sufferers.

From there, the team went on to work with Bolivian and Korean communities in Brazil to tell their stories of migration, before partnering with Barcelona’s city council to document local memories. The sessions were open to the public and held last summer at the Design Museum in Barcelona, generating more than 300 memories.

Some wanted to work through traumatic experiences, like one woman who was abused by a relative who avoided jail and wanted to recreate a memory of him in court to share with her family. Others recalled moments from their childhood, like 105-year-old Pepita, who recreated the day she saw a train for the first time. Couples came to relive shared experiences.

There was always a moment, Ainoa Pubill Unzeta, who carried out interviews in Barcelona, says, “when people actually saw a picture that they would relate to, you could feel it … you can see it”. For some, it was just a smile; others cried. For her, this was confirmation that the image was done well.

One of the first memories Garcia recorded during their pilot sessions was that of Carmen, now in her 90s. She remembers going up to a stranger’s balcony as a child, her mother having paid the owners to let them in, because it looked into the courtyard of the jail where her father, a doctor for the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War, was being held. This was the only way the family could see him from his cell window.

By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.

Clandestine assemblies

The team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.

One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.

Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression under General Francisco Franco, Vallejo came of age during one of Europe’s longest dictatorships, which lasted from 1939 to 1975. During the civil war of 1936-39, and following the defeat of the Republican forces by Franco’s Nationalists, enforced disappearances, forced labour, torture and extrajudicial killings claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.

Vallejo became involved in opposition to the fascist regime first at university, where he attempted to organise a democratic student union, and then as a young worker at Barcelona’s SEAT automobile factory.

He recalls an atmosphere of fear, with most people terrified of speaking out against the authoritarian government. “That fear sprang from the terrible defeat in the Spanish Civil War and from the many deaths that occurred during the war, but also from the harsh repression from the post-war period up to the end of the dictatorship,” he explains.

Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.

“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”

Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.

Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.

He learned about synthetic memories through Iridia, a human rights organisation that collaborated with DDS to help visualise memories of police abuse victims during the regime in a central Barcelona police station.

Vallejo was drawn to the project, curious about how the technology might be applied to capturing resistance activities too dangerous to record during Franco’s rule.

In 1970, SEAT workers organised clandestine breakfasts in the woods of Vallvidrera. On Sunday mornings, disguised as hikers, they would make their way through the dense forests surrounding the Catalan capital to discuss the struggle against the dictatorship.

“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.

Vallejo’s synthetic memory of these meetings is in black and white. The image is vague, almost like someone has taken an eraser to it to blur the details. But it is still possible to make out the scene: a crowd of people gathered in a forest. Some sit, others stand beneath a canopy of trees.

Looking at the image, Vallejo says he felt transported to the clandestine assemblies in the Barcelona woods, where as many as 50 or 60 people would gather in a tense atmosphere.

“I found myself truly immersed in the image,” he says.

“It was like entering a kind of time tunnel,” he adds.

Vallejo suffered memory loss around the ordeal of his arrests, imprisonment and torture.

The process of creating the image provided “a feeling – not exactly of relief – but rather of reconciling memory with the past and perhaps also of filling that void created by selective amnesia, which results from complicated, traumatic, and above all, distant experiences”. He found the reconstruction a “valuable experience” that helped him process some of these events.

‘We are not reconstructing the past’

Emphasising that memory is subjective, Garcia says, “One of the things that we are kind of drawing a very big red line about is historical reconstruction.”

This is partly due to the drawbacks of AI, which reinforces cultural and other biases in the data it draws from.

David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom centre for data science and AI, cautions that using data that was initially biased against marginalised groups could create revisionist histories or false memories for those communities. Nor can “simply generating something from AI” help to remedy or reclaim historical narratives, he insists.

For DDS, “It is never about the bigger story. We are not reconstructing the past,” Garcia explains.

“When we talk about history, we talk about one truth that somehow we are committed to,” he elaborates. But while synthetic memories can depict a part of the human experience that history books cannot, these memories come from the individual, not necessarily what transpired, he underlines.

The team believes synthetic memories could not only help communities whose memories are at risk but also create dialogue between cultures and generations.

They plan to set up “emergency” memory clinics in places where cultural heritage is in danger of being eroded by natural disasters, such as in southern Brazil, which was last year hit by floods. There are also hopes to make their finished tool freely available to nursing homes.

But Garcia wonders what place the project could have in a future where there is an “over-registration” of everything that happens. “I have 10 images of my father when he was a kid,” he says. “I have over 200 when I was a kid. But my friend, of her daughter, [has] 25,000, and she’s five years old!”

“I think the problem of memory image will be another one, which will be that we are … [overwhelmed] and we cannot find the right image to tell us the story,” he muses.

Yet in the present moment, Vallejo believes the project has a role to play in helping younger generations understand past injustices. Forgetting serves no purpose for activists like himself, he believes, while memory is like “a weapon for the future”.

Instead of trying to numb the past, “I think it is more therapeutic – both collectively and individually – to remember rather than to forget.”

Krakow, Poland – As Adrian Zandberg, leader of Poland’s left-wing Razem (Together) party, prepared to speak to the large crowd at his rally in one of Krakow’s central squares on Wednesday this week, he wasn’t just getting ready to contest Sunday’s presidential election.

Speaking with a revolutionary zeal to the cheering crowd, Zandberg put forward his ideals: Quality public services, affordable housing for all, investment in education and science and the end to a toxic right-wing duopoly in Polish politics.

Zandberg is one of two presidential hopefuls of Poland’s left – the other is Magdalena Biejat of the Lewica (The Left) party. Between the two of them, they represent a political force that has long remained on the margins of politics. Sunday’s contest is also a fight for the leadership of this movement which is popular with urban, generally younger people.

Opinion polls suggest that the final presidential battle – first-round voting takes place on Sunday – will be between the two favourites, Rafał Trzaskowski and Karol Nawrocki, representatives of right-wing parties Civic Platform and Law and Justice (PiS) which have dominated the country’s political scene for the past 20 years.

Nevertheless, Zandberg was confident and full of passion as he addressed his supporters.

“I believe that we can build a different, better Poland. I believe that we can afford for Poland to become a country with decent public services,” he declared. “That we can afford for people in the 20th economy in the world to stop dying in line to see a doctor. That we can afford for young, hard-working people to be able to rent a roof over their heads for a normal price, so that they can afford to start a family.”

Calling the current system “unconstitutional” and one which “explodes with inequalities”, he called for a change. The system, he said, “is a threat to the future of Poland”.

Like other left-wing politicians, he has been a staunch critic of the neoliberal views of the two main candidates, their lack of commitment to securing affordable housing for people (which is a constitutional right), attempts to privatise the healthcare system, and their seeming embrace of rising anti-migrant sentiment within the country.

Having a ‘real’ effect on Polish politics

The day before, in another square in central Krakow, Biejat, Zandberg’s main competitor for the hearts and minds of Poland’s left and deputy marshal of the Senate, stood before her own crowd of supporters. Unlike Zandberg’s Razem, her party, Lewica, is part of the ruling Civic Coalition along with the centre-right Civic Platform.

Lewica’s decision to enter the coalition government in late 2023 prompted criticism among some on the left, and has become the main bone of contention between the two leftist presidential candidates.

Speaking at her rally on Tuesday, Biejat defended the decision to join the coalition as the right one. According to her, it has allowed her party to have a real effect on politics in Poland.

She listed their achievements: “It is thanks to Lewica being in the government that we managed to introduce a pension supplement for widows. We managed to introduce a pilot programme which shortened working hours. We managed to increase the funeral allowance,” Biejat said.

“We have changed the definition of rape, so that women no longer have to explain to the judges that it was not their fault that someone had hurt them. Thanks to us, parents of premature babies have received additional leave days for each week spent in hospital with a small child.”

The Krakow crowd, albeit smaller than Zandberg’s, cheered Biejat’s declarations of support for the rights of women, LGBTQ people and those with disabilities and for affordable housing.

A fragile resurgence?

The two-term presidency of the left-wing Aleksander Kwasniewsk, an independent but also one of the founders of the Democratic Left Alliance, was highly successful. Under his presidency, which ended in 2005, Poland joined NATO and the European Union and introduced a new constitution. Since his departure, however, the left has been in crisis.

While the ideals of the left-wing candidates barely differ from those of left-wing candidates in other European countries, their appeal in Poland is limited these days as people have become disillusioned with immigration, and resentment towards the one million Ukrainian refugees taking shelter from the war with Russia has grown. According to Politico’s latest aggregate poll, the two leftist candidates are each expected to win 5 percent of the vote.

In the most recent European election in 2024, Lewica secured just 6.3 percent of the vote, the lowest score in its history. In the most recent parliamentary elections of 2023, the party secured just 5.3 percent of the vote. The question now is whether leftist parties can start to make a comeback.

Some observers see signs of a possible resurgence – but it is fragile.

“Any result above 5 percent for each of the candidates [in the upcoming presidential contest] would be a good score. And below 4 percent – a bad one,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.

He credits Zandberg with “restarting the Razem party project” by appealing to younger voters. “Recent studies show that he is competing with Slawomir Mentzen [the highly popular ultraconservative and free-market-enthusiast leader of the Confederation Party] to be number one among the youngest voters.

“Magdalena Biejat, on her part, represents women from the middle class, living in large cities. She is their mirror image. The election will show which one of them is more popular,” Rydlinski said.

Limited appeal

At the last presidential election five years ago, Robert Biedron of Lewica, who now serves as a Polish member of the European parliament (MEP), won just 2.2 percent of the vote. This time around, the left is expected to do better, but its appeal remains limited.

According to experts, the left has lost much of its traditional support base to the nationalist conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which attracted voters with generous welfare packages. In this presidential election, Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by PiS, is expected to take 25 percent of the vote in the first round, according to Politico’s aggregate poll.

This is despite the fact that Nawrocki has abandoned Law and Justice’s commitment to social welfare and has embraced free-market thinking with a focus on strengthening an alliance with the US while distancing Poland from the EU.

His main competitor,Rafał Trzaskowski of the centre-right Civic Platform, is polling at 31 percent.

“The left is continuously trying to win back pro-social Law and Justice voters, but so far it has failed,” Jakub Majmurek, a commentator at the left-wing Krytyka Polityczna media outlet, told Al Jazeera. “First of all, because these voters are often calculating and feel that the Law and Justice is a much more credible welfare provider than the weak left.

“Second, these voters are largely pro-church and much more conservative when it comes to social issues than the left.”

A good result for the left in the Sunday election could have the effect of bringing left-wing politics back to the agenda, analysts say, and make some inroads into reversing the long-term trend of far-right and centre-right politicians dominating government.

“If the combined result of Biejat and Zandberg is around 10 percent, in the second election round, Trzaskowski or even Nawrocki will have to try to claim this left-wing electorate somehow,” Majmurek explained.

“That would be the best scenario for the left. Especially if both candidates receive a similar percentage of the vote. That would show that none of them is a hegemon and cannot build the left without the other.”

Puchong, Malaysia – On a recent Sunday morning, about a dozen men with fishing nets skirted the rubbish-strewn banks of the Klang River just outside the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

Surveying the river, the men cast their nets into the polluted water. The nets billowed open and sunk quickly under the weight of metal chains.

From where they stood on the riverbank, they started to pull in their nets, already filled with dozens of squirming black-bodied catfish.

“You don’t see any other fish. Only these,” said Mohamad Haziq A Rahman, the leader of Malaysia’s “foreign fish hunter squad”, as they emptied their catch of wriggling suckermouth catfish into piles, away from the river.

None of the fish caught that morning were sold at nearby markets or food stalls. The sole purpose of the expedition was to cull suckermouth catfish, one among a growing number of invasive species that have in recent decades dominated freshwater habitats across Southeast Asia.

Once brought in for commercial or hobbyist reasons, invasive fish are not only threatening to edge native species out of the food chain in Malaysia and elsewhere, but they also spread diseases and cause great damage to local environments.

Invasive fish are a problem the world over, but experts say the issue is keenly felt in mega-biodiverse Malaysia.

“More than 80 percent of rivers in the Klang Valley have been invaded by foreign fish species, which can cause the extinction of the rivers’ indigenous aquatic life,” said Dr Kalithasan Kailasam, a river expert with the Malaysia-based Global Environment Centre.

“It’s growing in almost all other main rivers in Malaysia,” said Kailasam, explaining how species such as the suckermouth have the potential to quickly reproduce and survive in dirty water, leaving local fish on the losing side.

Aside from the suckermouth, Malaysia’s waterways are now threatened by species such as the aggressive peacock bass, Javanese carp and redtail catfish, he said.

While the full extent of the problem is not yet known, Malaysia’s fisheries department, after a four-year study until 2024, found invasive species in 39 areas across nearly every state in peninsular Malaysia and on the island of Labuan, including in dams, lakes and major rivers.

Alarmed by the threat, a small group of citizens banded together to fight the aquatic invaders.

Led by Haziq, they are working to reclaim Malaysia’s rivers one fin at a time.

Invasive fish invasion

The citizen fish hunters’ quest to fight invasive species started during the country’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when Haziq, a former healthcare consultant, turned to fishing as a pastime in a river near his house in central Selangor state. He found every fish he caught was of the suckermouth variety, also known as the “pleco” or “ikan bandaraya” – which translates as the “janitor fish” in Malay and is favoured by hobbyists to keep aquariums clean, as the suckermouth feeds on algae, leftover food and dead fish.

Native to South America, varieties of the suckermouth have also been introduced into waterways in the United States, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, often when owners dump them into rivers, canals, dams or free them after they grow too large for their aquarium tanks.

Because of their thick, scaly skin, suckermouths are usually avoided by even larger predators in Malaysia, and can grow to about half a metre (1.6ft) in length.

As bottom feeders, the catfish have been known to eat the eggs of other species and destroy their nesting sites. Catfish also burrow into riverbanks to nest, causing them to erode and collapse, which is a serious environmental issue in flood-prone Malaysia where year-end monsoon winds bring heavy rain.

Malaysia’s central bank said in 2024 that floods are the cause of 85 percent of the country’s natural disasters, with their frequency increasing since 2020.­

Though far from his favourite fish to catch, Haziq discovered that suckerfish roe could be used as bait for other bigger fish, and he earned some money selling their eggs to other fishing enthusiasts. He also gained a following by putting his exploits on social media. Further research then led him to learn about the threats posed by invasive species.

Harziq started to attract like-minded anglers, and, in 2022, they decided to form a group for hunting suckermouth, meeting nearly every week in a river to carry out a cull.

Their public profile and popularity are growing. The group’s membership has now grown to more than 1,000, and it has a strong fan following on social media.

“People kept asking how to join our group, because we were looking at the ecosystem,” Haziq said.

Focusing first on Malaysia’s Selangor state and rivers in the capital Kuala Lumpur, the fish hunter squad netted nearly 31 tonnes of suckermouths alone in 2024. They have also visited rivers in other states in Malaysia as their campaign expands.

Dispose, use for research, or cook and eat?

During a hunt in the Klang River earlier this year, Haziq and his comrades deployed to the river’s banks on a mission to see how many suckermouth they could catch during a single outing.

But hunting for invasive fish can be tricky. Without boats, the hunters have to wade into the fast-moving polluted waters from muddy banks, while navigating underwater debris such as rubbish on the riverbed.

Almost all the fish they caught were of the invasive kind, but once in a while, they do net a local.

“Haruan (snakehead)!” shouted ex-navy diver Syuhaily Hasibullah, 46, as he showed off a small fish half the size of his arm, taken from a net containing several suckermouths.

“This one is rare! There used to be a lot of them in the river,” he told Al Jazeera.

Haziq said if the hunters found many invasive species in their nets, they would organise another outing to the same location, bringing along more people to take part.

The day they set out to calculate how many invasive fish they could catch in a single outing turned out to yield half a tonne of suckermouth in just three hours – so many they had to stuff them into sacks.

Previously, the hunters buried their hauls in deep holes away from the river. Now, they have found more creative ways to dispose of what is, generally, an unwanted fish.

At the event earlier this year, sacks of suckermouths were handed over to a local entrepreneur looking to experiment with turning the fish into a form of charcoal known as biochar.

Some local universities have also started researching the possible use of the suckermouth. One university research article explored the potential of suckermouth collagen for pharmaceutical use, while another considered its use as fertiliser or even as a type of leather.

On some occasions, the hunters even eat the fish they catch, though that depends on which river they have been taken from.

While redtail or African catfish are considered delicacies by some, the suckermouth, also known in India as “devil fish”, is a less attractive snacking option – but not out of the question when it comes to a quick riverside grill.

“If the fish is from the Klang River, we don’t eat it,” Mohd Zulkifli Mokhtar told Al Jazeera, before dozens of hunters broke their fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

“But if it’s from the Langat River, it’s still OK,” Zulkifli said, as dozens of suckermouth caught in the less polluted Langat River, located in Bangi some 25km (16 miles) south of Kuala Lumpur, were gutted, marinated in satay and grilled on skewers.

Studies from Bangladesh and Indonesia have found varieties of catfish with high levels of heavy metals and contaminants. A 2024 article by Malaysia’s Universiti Teknologi Mara cited a study that showed the level of contaminants in the suckermouth was “heavily influenced by the level of pollution in the river”.

‘If we don’t act now, it would be worse’

While Malaysia’s fisheries department said there were no records of local species becoming endangered because of invasive ones, native fish nevertheless face threats.

Local fish either faced becoming prey or have had to fight to survive, with the department finding in a survey that 90 percent of the fish in six rivers in the Selangor and Kuala Lumpur region were now foreign arrivals.

The department’s Director-General Adnan Hussain said various measures had been put in place, including the release of some 33.6 million native fish and prawns into rivers nationwide from 2021 to 2025 to “balance the impact” of invasive fish.

Late last year, the state government of Selangor also came up with a scheme to pay anglers one Malaysian ringgit ($0.23) for every kilogramme (2.2lb) of the suckermouth fish removed from two rivers. The captured fish were to be turned into animal feed and organic fertiliser, an official said.

Restrictions on the import of certain foreign aquatic species – including entire species and groups – into Malaysia were also imposed last year, and he added that programmes and collaboration with the fish hunters had also helped to deal with the problem.

In one river in Selangor state, Adnan said the amount of invasive fish caught following one eradication programme had dropped from 600kg (1,300lb) in a May 2024 event to just more than 150kg (330lb) four or five months later.

However, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu fish researcher Professor Amirrudin Ahmad said it was “almost impossible” to fully exterminate the country’s invasive fish.

“So many species live in (native water bodies) and getting rid of invasive species by the means of poisoning the water is not feasible at all,” he said, adding there were close to 80 recorded fish species introduced in Malaysia so far.

He further warned that rising temperatures caused by climate change may even allow species like the predatory Mekong redtail catfish to proliferate in cooler upstream waters in Malaysia.

“They are here to stay,” Amirrudin said.

“It is simply,” he said, “that the environment is mostly similar to their native country, or these species are highly adaptable.”

That this is an ecological war that can never truly be won is a point that Haziq and his fellow fish hunters are fully aware of. Nearly every river they visited in recent times had almost nothing but invasive fish, he said.

But their mission will carry on, he added, along with the hunting and public awareness that has spurred thousands to follow his social media videos on the subject.

“Yes, this fish won’t be completely gone from our rivers,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But if we don’t act now, it would be worse,” he said.

“It’s better to take action than to just leave it alone,” he added.

“At least we can reduce the population, than allow it to completely take over our local fish.”

FORGET Game of Thrones, nobody understands the art of forming alliances better than Meghan Markle – but her latest friendship might just be her most fruitful yet. 

As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend… and having been blacklisted by David and Victoria Beckham, she and Harry have now made their allegiances very clear, while also bolstering their own “cool” social standing in the process. 

17

17

17

And it’s all thanks to their new friendship with Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz.

After all, it’s no secret that Meghan is making every concerted effort right now to re-establish herself as a lifestyle guru and online influencer. 

Since launching her lifestyle brand, As Ever, last month, she’s upped her output on social media in a bid to cement herself as the ultimate domestic goddess and yummy mummy.

Having the endorsement of the Beckham-Peltzes – who have a massive social media following between them and are hot property right now, thanks to all the whispers circulating about tensions with Brooklyn’s family – would only help her cause.

What’s more, having seen their friendships with the likes of George and Amal Clooney, Oprah Winfrey and Brooklyn’s parents, David and Victoria Beckham, fall flat, Meghan and Harry can use all the star power they can get right now. 

As the Sun exclusively revealed this week, the Sussexes and the Peltz-Beckhams came together last week at a dinner at the Sussexes’ mansion in Montecito, California.

The VIP event, which included 18 other guests, had been planned for weeks – but its timing, just days after Brooklyn and Nicola skipped his dad David’s 50th birthday celebrations amid a very public fall-out, was significant. 

According to insiders, the two couples “found a lot of common ground” – as Harry and Meghan lent an empathetic ear, and shared their own tales of battle with Harry’s family. 

As far as they are concerned, they’ve both been treated unfairly, prompting their estrangements. 

And in the aftermath, the two couples have potentially formed a powerful alliance.

This may be an unlikely quartet, but it might just be a friendship that pays dividends. 

17

17

17

Speaking exclusively to The Sun, brand and culture expert Nick Ede believes Meghan is well aware of the benefits that come from this new foursome. 

“Meghan is a very strategic player,” he tells us. “She knows how to maximise her influence by associating herself with those who have more than her.

“This move is positioning her away from old Hollywood stars who have already established themselves, like Oprah and the Clooneys, and it’s bringing new blood into the Montecito establishment.”

He adds: “No one saw this friendship coming, but Meghan really looks like she’s creating a new ‘Fab Four’ with Harry, Brooklyn and Nicola.”

Fab Four

Let’s not forget, this isn’t the first time the Sussexes have attempted to form a solid quartet. 

Back in 2018, months before they got married, Harry and Meghan teamed up with Prince William and Kate Middleton to launch a charity partnership. 

The two couples were dubbed “the Fab Four” – representing a new and exciting era for the royal family.

But, as we all know by now, alliances change and – having once been tied by brotherly bonds – the two couples fell out amid Harry and Meghan’s acrimonious departure from royal life.

Since then the Sussexes haven’t held back in airing their grievances against the Waleses, most notably in Harry’s memoir Spare. 

In it, the former senior royal alleged that his brother had physically attacked him amid their Megxit negotiations, and claimed that Kate had made Meghan cry before their wedding over a disagreement about Princess Charlotte’s flower girl dress. 

These days the warring couples have reportedly cut all communication, and that ‘Fab Four’ alliance is splintered beyond repair. 

‘Blacklisted’

Meanwhile, other A-list friendships have also fallen by the wayside.

Take George and Amal Clooney, who were proudly in attendance at Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding, and hosted them at their mansion in Lake Como soon after. 

The two couples don’t seem to have spoken for years, and the Clooneys have made their indifference to the Sussexes known by snubbing them from several high-profile events they’ve hosted. 

Likewise, fellow wedding attendees David and Victoria Beckham have also blacklisted their former friends. 

No one saw this friendship coming, but Meghan really looks like she’s creating a new ‘Fab Four’ with Harry, Brooklyn and Nicola

Nick EdeBrand and culture expert

As we’ve reported, the two couples were historically close, and Meghan even wore a Victoria Beckham dress in her first post-Megxit appearance as a mark of respect to her famous friend. 

But – after the couple accused Victoria of selling stories about them to the press – the lines of communication went dead. 

The Beckhams duly switched their own allegiances to the royals, and have since been getting closer than ever to Harry’s estranged father and brother. 

They’ve further demonstrated their antipathy by failing to invite the Sussexes to either one of their big 50th birthday celebrations – which, as we’ve seen, included a long list of A-list attendees including Tom Cruise, Eva Longoria and Gordon Ramsay.

So, having been declared personae non gratae by the Beckhams, it seems as if all bets are off.

17

17

17

Raft of opportunities

With relations between David and Victoria and their eldest son Brooklyn reportedly at an all-time low, this Montecito dinner has made a very public statement indeed. 

Yet this isn’t simply a case of trying to get back at the Beckhams.

For all intents and purposes, Brooklyn and Nicola’s friendship could hold the key to a raft of opportunities for Harry and Meghan at this critical juncture in their own lives.

As she strives to promote her brand As Ever – in tandem with her new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, and her recent Netflix series With Love, Meghan – Meghan’s been relying on her A-list connections. 

To that end, she’s been sending out her homemade jams, and other products including shortbread biscuits and herbal teas, to friends including Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen, in the hope that they might plug them on their Instagram pages. 

But so far, her connections haven’t quite paid off when it comes to promoting her business.

Indeed, one of the biggest complaints when it came to her Netflix series was that, while we know she’s enjoyed friendships with the likes of Priyanka Chopra, Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams in the past, she didn’t deliver on serving up A-list cameos on camera. 

Her biggest signing was Mindy Kaling, but even that interaction seemed awkward and not representative of a genuine friendship. 

17

17

17

So, having Brooklyn, 26, and Nicola , 30 – who both have a massive social media standing – on side could be highly advantageous to Meghan’s brand and online popularity. 

While Brooklyn, in particular, may be the butt of several jokes when it comes to his career as an online “chef”, there’s no denying that his fans love watching him cook up a storm on his social media. 

The nepo baby now has a whopping 16.3million followers on his Instagram account – which eclipses Meghan’s following of 2.9million.

With that kind of popularity, Brooklyn’s endorsement of Meghan’s jam, and her brand in general, would be a big win for As Ever. 

It’s time to build on her credibility and build an audience who are authentic and buy into her brand.

Nick Ede

What’s more, Brooklyn and Nicola bring a hip and fresh factor to this new dynamic. 

The Clooneys and the Beckhams may be established and dynastic couples, but the Peltz-Beckhams represent the next gen of showbiz influencers.

This potential leverage among younger followers will not have escaped Meghan’s attention. 

It’s worth noting that the Duchess of Sussex has already made attempts to broaden her showbiz squad. 

Earlier this year, she gave an online shoutout to Billie Eilish, the ultimate Gen Z cool girl, after the latter helped her with a charitable endeavour.

17

17

She and Harry also recently stepped out at Beyonce’s LA concert – packing on the PDA and later thanking the singer online for a very fun “date night”.

This new Meghan is one who wants to be perceived as laid back, personable and fun – countering claims made in the past year that she’s a “bully” and difficult to work with. 

Having the endorsement of a young, cool couple like Brooklyn and Nicola at this time could be beneficial – and Meghan knows it.

Meanwhile for Harry, having Brooklyn on side, who – as a Brit abroad – represents a piece of home at a time when he remains largely estranged from his family, might just be the source of comfort he needs. 

Building a business should be Meghan’s priority

Nick Ede

But, as Nick tells us, she shouldn’t rely on her A-list friendships to guarantee her brand’s future.

She may be hoping to garner attention, but – ultimately – consumers want high quality products, regardless of who’s endorsing them.

“Whether this is a good move for Meghan is something we will have to wait and see,” Nick says. “The As Ever brand is still in its early days, and so is her TV career as a lifestyle expert.

“It’s time to build on her credibility and build an audience who are authentic and buy into her brand. 

“Building a business should be her priority – this relationship may just serve as a distraction, rather than a positive step for both parties.”

17

17

17

L.A. has long been a beacon for the arts. So it’s only fitting that “Forever,” the Netflix series that showrunner Mara Brock Akil envisioned as “a love story within a love letter to Los Angeles,” celebrates local artists.

The Midcentury Modern home of Justin Edwards, one half of the couple whose love story informs the show — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel — is flooded with work from Black Angelenos.

“Local Los Angeles artists were important for me to put into the sets, and the Edwards family home, specifically, being collectors of Los Angeles art,” Akil, an L.A. native, told The Times.

Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev and set decorator Ron Franco are also Angelenos, which they said contributed to the cultural competency of their work on “Forever.” Although the writers’ strike made elements of their jobs difficult, both agreed that their experience on “Forever” was uniquely positive, in large part because of their curation of the art in the Edwards’ home.

“Sometimes art can really make a space and it makes a statement and it tells you who the character is,” said Ingerslev. “In this case, you really knew who the Edwards were — they curated art and they cared about where they live — and I thought that really made a big difference through the art and through the furnishings as well.”

Franco agreed, saying he had fun sourcing artwork from Black artists that matched Ingerslev’s color palette and also contained themes pertinent to the show.

“A lot of times the shows that you see now are just headshots and everything that we put up becomes a background piece that’s kind of blurred,” he said. “We are very lucky in that this camera really opened up, and you follow everybody through both of the [permanent] sets and you really feel a lot.”

Audiences noticed their effort, said Ingerslev, who’s been bombarded with questions about the artworks in “Forever,” which was just renewed for a second season.

Here are five local Black artists whose work are featured in the show.

Noah Humes, 31

Humes cites a book about artist and writer Romare Bearden that he received from Akil when he was 6 years old as the foundation for his worldview as an artist. (Humes’ mother was a casting director on “Girlfriends,” the 2000s TV series created by Akil, whom Humes calls “Auntie Mara.”)

“I look back [and] that’s what helped form and shape my energy with how I approach the canvas, wanting to tell the story of my community and different things that I see — social moments, political moments, historical remnants,” said the figurative painter.

Humes is drawn to bright colors that capture the vibrancy of his hometown of L.A. “Her” and “Mid City,” which feature prominently in the Edwards family’s media room in “Forever,” depict solitary figures against yellow backgrounds. The foliage in “Her” grows in Humes’ mother’s frontyard. “Mid City,” the neighborhood where Humes was raised, features the red-crowned parrots that wake him up every morning.

1

2

1. “Her” (Noah Humes) 2. “Mid City” (Noah Humes)

“I felt inclined to represent and show a certain subtlety of ‘We’re here, we’re centered, we’re always a focal point of unfortunate times, but also we can overcome things and become stronger than we have been,’” Humes said of the twin paintings, which he completed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the national racial reckoning that followed.

Humes also credits his neighbors in L.A., a “system of Black excellence,” for positively influencing his artistry. Animator Lyndon Barrois (“Happy Feet,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks”) is his mentor, and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, including siblings Syd and Travis “Taco” Bennett, as well as Thebe Kgositsile — who uses the stage name Earl Sweatshirt — are his childhood friends.

Francis ‘Tommy’ Mitchell, 41

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

Mitchell has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but it was a high school classmate pointing out the permanent nature of a ballpoint pen that led to his aha moment.

“You can erase graphite, you can paint over acrylic and oil,” said the Baltimore- and L.A.-based artist. “Ink is one of those things that I just think of, no pun intended here, it’s forever.”

Mitchell’s portraits feature individuals shaded with ink set against monochromatic acyrlic background. Because it is extremely time-consuming, most artists working in ink compose smaller, more intimate images, said Mitchell. In contrast, his portraits are huge. If the work were hung on the walls of a museum, the viewer may never notice the figure’s skin was drawn in ink and not paint.

“Going to museums or galleries as a kid, I would see these amazing European paintings, and I’m like, ‘Wow, these are amazing,’ but there’s no one that looks like me,” he said, of his desire to focus on portraiture.

“Francis R. of City College”

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

The subject of “Francis R. of City College,” Mitchell’s painting featured in the Edwards’ dining room in “Forever,” is modeled after his father. For Mitchell, the work represents a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Making the painting in his Baltimore studio less than a mile away from City College, where his father attended high school, felt like a full-circle moment.

Seeing the work on television only adds to the significance.

“One of my goals is to always promote those who work in ink because it’s not a traditional medium,” he said, pointing to tattoo artists Jun Cha and Mister Cartoon as inspirations. “So for it to be seen on television, it lends credence to, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special as well.’”

Edwin Marcelin, 50

Marcelin’s first job as a teenager was at Stüssy, a Laguna Beach streetwear brand founded in the early 1980s. Minimalist graphic design, a trademark of Stüssy as well as brands Supreme and Undefeated, has always informed his art.

“Everything usually is about engagement, confrontation or affection,” said Marcelin. “Those are things that I tend to generate towards by using very minimal strokes.”

During his time at the California College of the Arts — then called the California College of Arts and Crafts — Marcelin was drawn to Bauhaus, a German school of art that melds functionality and design. Marcelin applies those abstract Bauhaus fundamentals and adds the element of movement.

“If it ain’t moving, it ain’t me,” said the L.A.-born-and-raised artist.

Marcelin said his emphasis on motion lends itself well to the screen — his piece “Clarity,” a dynamic painting of Michael Jordan taking flight, hangs in basketball-loving Justin’s bedroom in “Forever.”

“I think Black folks in Los Angeles are dynamic, so I try to keep dynamic images, people doing things, not standing there, and I think that translates to film very well,” said Marcelin.

“Clarity” is part of a 23-painting series titled “Black Jesus.” Each image in the series, which took Marcelin about five months to complete in its entirety, references Jordan, who Marcelin said is disappearing visually from pop culture. Case in point: He said his 19- and 16-year-old sons may recognize the Jumpman logo, but they wouldn’t instantly recognize an image of Jordan himself.

“There’ll be more basketball players, but I wanted to do something that was completely abstract representing him because he has so many moments that are fantastically beautiful,” said Marcelin.

Corey Pemberton, 34

With a background in collage, glassblowing and painting, Pemberton’s large mixed-media works — of a man singing into his toothbrush in the bathroom, a naked woman smoking marijuana in bed, a man devouring a plate of his mother’s food — are both intimate and mundane.

“At a certain point, I turned an interest to those who had been marginalized by society in some way, whether it was because of the color of their skin or their gender expression or their socioeconomic status, and developed an interest in depicting those people in a way that both celebrated them but also gave them some space to just exist,” he said.

Such themes of ownership and viewership are etched into Pemberton’s work. For example, he depicts the space and objects around his figures in vivid detail. Objects are important, he said, because they carry memories of “the people who created them or gave them to us or lived with them before us.”

Similarly, his painting “The Collector” celebrates “a young black person who’s making a concerted effort to own and conserve our culture, which is so often falling into the hands of people who don’t care about us on a deeper level.” And in many of Pemberton’s pieces, miniature renderings of his previous works can be found on the walls of his subjects’ homes.

“I think when you see a work presented that way, it sort of brings a heightened level of importance,” said Pemberton.

“I Used to Cook More”

(Corey Pemberton)

So it’s doubly significant that Pemberton’s work is on display in the wealthy Edwards’ home in “Forever.” The art in question, “I Used to Cook More,” can be found in the family’s kitchen and depicts Pemberton’s friend and fellow collector Jared Culp eating out of a white takeout container.

“We were talking about all of the takeout that we now consume as busy young Black creatives in L.A. trying to claw our way to the top of something,” said Pemberton.

But success in the art world has been easier to come by in L.A., where he relocated to after six years in rural North Carolina, said Pemberton.

“When I moved to Los Angeles, not only was I selling work but I was selling work to people with shared experience,” he said. “I was getting feedback that not only were these works that people wanted to live with, but they were works that people saw themselves reflected in, and that I was doing something important or meaningful to more people than just myself.”

Charles A. Bibbs, 77

Bibbs worked in corporate America for 25 years before becoming an artist full time. For Bibbs, art — in a crosshatching style, in his case — is all about communicating universal ideas.

“I mix that crosshatching with different colors and paint, and it’s just one layer on top of another until you get your desired effect,” Bibbs said of his “spontaneous” way of creating that’s “almost like magic sometimes.”

Like many Black artists, Bibbs chose his subject matter out of necessity. As a young man, he encountered few Black artists, yet innately understood the power of positive images of the Black experience, especially in the home.

“It’s a very honorable occupation because you’re giving people a part of you that is changing their lives in an aesthetic way,” he said. “All of those things play into people proud to be who they are.”

“Daddy’s Love”

(Charles A. Bibbs)

In “Forever,” viewers may catch a glimpse of “Daddy’s Love,” a drawing of Bibbs’ father and Bibbs and his sister as children, on the wall outside Justin’s bedroom. But this isn’t the first time his work has made it to the screen. Bibbs is credited with the Black Madonna artwork on the honey jar central to the plot of the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” He said the experience underscored the importance of art, which he said touches the “subconscious mind.”

“[My work] was part of the presentation of the movie and in some way or another may have helped them understand what that movie was really all about.”

Lisbon, Portugal — Portugal is summoning its citizens to vote in their third general elections in three years on May 18, amid rapid shifts to the country’s political landscape that have left the country facing the prospect of yet another fractured mandate after decades of relative stability.

This year’s snap election comes at a moment when rising living costs, a housing crisis, the future of the national health service and perceptions of immigration are all significant issues on the public agenda – as is a corruption scandal that precipitated the upcoming vote.

The government of Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), fell in March, when parliament voted against a motion of confidence, triggering elections. It’s the second Portuguese government in a row that had left office under a cloud of corruption allegations.

Now, the country’s 10 million voters will need to choose the makeup of their next parliament, where 230 seats are up for grabs – and a divided mandate appears likely.

‘A very serious case’

Montenegro led a right-wing minority government for less than a year before accusations of corruption emerged over a consultancy firm that he set up, called “Spinumviva”.

A string of media investigations into potential conflicts of interest revealed the firm had received thousands of euros a month in consultancy fees from previously undisclosed clients, including companies with government contracts.

When a defiant Montenegro appeared on national television back in March to issue his response, he insisted that he had not broken the law because he had transferred his shares in the company to his wife and sons before he became prime minister in 2024.

But his defence is controversial, say experts.

“Under Portuguese civil law, even if it was possible to sell shares to someone you’re married to, you’d still be a joint owner of them, and, therefore, still able to profit from them,” said Portuguese lawyer and political commentator Carmo Afonso. “Spinumviva is a very serious case – and revelations are still emerging.”

Just hours before a live debate a few weeks later with his main rival, the Socialist Party’s Pedro Nuno Santos, Montenegro submitted an updated declaration of his business interests to the national online transparency portal.

According to an investigation by the Portuguese newspaper Expresso, some of Spinumviva’s clients earned at least 100 million euros ($112m) a year in government contracts during Montenegro’s mandate alone. Montenegro, meanwhile, says that he has not been involved with Spinumviva since becoming prime minister in March 2024.

How the race is shaping up

Still, the attention on Spinumviva may not have damaged Montenegro’s chances of re-election. According to Portuguese political scientist Vicente Valentim, “perceptions of corruption in Portugal are traditionally high, but it may not to be a significant factor in how people vote”.

Despite the ongoing scandal, the conservative Democratic Alliance (AD) coalition, in which Montenegro’s Social Democratic Party (PSD) is the majority party, leads the race, and is polling at 34 percent.

And according to a poll by Lisbon’s Catholic University, a third of voters think the Spinumviva case and its potential legal ramifications are irrelevant to the elections.

Montenegro’s brief period in government has seen him enjoy the support of the professional class, riding on a budget surplus attained by the previous government of the centrist Socialist Party (PS) of Antonio Costa, who was prime minister from 2015-2024.

Meanwhile, “the loss of the charismatic Antonio Costa has affected the PS’s popularity,” says Afonso. “Costa is a hard act to follow.”

“Ironically, the more Spinumviva gets talked about, the better it is for Montenegro, is what some commentators are saying,” says Afonso, who believes Montenegro was well aware of this when the government collapsed. “Montenegro chose to bring a vote of confidence in parliament knowing full well that he would lose it, because there really couldn’t be a better time to hold elections – better for him, that is.”

The PS, by contrast, is polling several points below the AD at about 26 percent.

Currently, it looks highly improbable that any of the parties or alliances running will win an outright majority of 116 seats or more. That leaves two likely possibilities: either a post-electoral coalition of parties that forms a majority in alliance; or a minority government, which needs the tacit support of other parties in parliament to push through essential legislation, including budgets.

About half a dozen parties are serious contenders for the rest of the 230 seats in parliament. These include the traditional players such as the Communist Party-Greens alliance (CDU), the Left Bloc, and the People-Animals-Nature party, as well as new parties including the Europeanist-Socialist party Livre (“Free”), the radical right-wing Iniciativa Liberal (“Liberal Initiative”), and the extreme right Chega (“Enough”).

The rise of the far right

Chega, which opposes immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, and has targeted minorities like Portugal’s substantial Romani population, won a surprising 50 parliamentary seats in the 2024 elections, with Andre Ventura as leader. It won 18 percent of the national vote.

The party is currently in third position in the polls and is predicted to win close to what it did in the last elections.

Valentim, the political scientist, warns against interpreting Chega’s support base as representing a protest vote.

“A lot of people who vote for them already held the ideas they espoused, long before the party actually appeared; generally, the rapid growth of radical right-wing parties is not down to them changing people’s ideas,” he said. “So, Chega going from 1 percent of votes, to 7 percent, to 18 percent over the course of the last three elections doesn’t mean that the number of people with right-wing ideas has grown in those proportions.”

What it means, he said, is that “more and more people who already had those ideas, but used to feel that they were not socially acceptable, and that they would be judged, or made social pariahs or disadvantaged professionally because of them, no longer feel that”.

With the campaign period now well under way, Chega has been appealing to potential voters who might normally abstain. While polls suggest the party might not make major gains compared with the 2024 election, Valentim said he believes it’s here to stay.

“Portugal was previously the exception in the European landscape, because no far-right party had had any notable success there; that’s no longer the case,” he said. “We can be fairly certain in saying that Chega is not going to just disappear, as suddenly as it appeared. The political landscape has changed, definitively.”

And that has a range of consequences, he said.

“Citizens and politicians feeling at greater ease to express extreme right-wing ideas in public,” he said. There’s “greater polarisation around specific issues such as immigration and minority rights, and, of course, the dilemma of how the more traditional centre right deals with the far right”.

Under Montenegro, the PSD has maintained it will not cut a deal with Chega. However, its options for forming a government are limited. According to Valentim, centre-right parties often try to overcome the popularity of new radical right parties by shifting further right themselves – including, at times, by forming partnerships with them.

That rarely actually works for the centre right, he said. “Power-sharing agreements with the extreme right legitimise those parties, without actually bring any long-term gains for the centre right,” he said. “Studies have shown that the rapprochement of the centre right to the far right neither takes votes away from the far right, nor does it bring more votes back to the centre right. But it does result in a normalising of extreme right discourse, turning extreme right-wing ideas like xenophobia more acceptable.”

This effect was visible even before election campaigning began on the issue of immigration, which Portugal has actively encouraged in recent years. Almost a quarter of Portuguese companies now employ foreign workers, according to the Bank of Portugal. According to a study by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation in December, the number of immigrants in Portugal tripled between 2015 and 2023.

However, right-wing parties have also stirred a backlash against immigration, and in particular the presence of agricultural and shop workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The FMS Foundation report showed that negative perceptions of migrants outweighed positive ones considerably – with 67 percent of the people they polled responding that they thought the presence of foreigners was associated with an increase in crime. Last year, Chega brought a motion to parliament for a national referendum on immigration but was voted down.

Earlier this month, Montenegro’s government notified 4,500 migrants that they would have to leave the country within 20 days. Following the permanent closure of the border agency SEF in 2024, the government cancelled a scheme that allowed migrants originating from outside the European Union to apply for residency once already working in the country. Some of those facing deportation have been waiting several years for a reply on their applications, and thousands more such notices are expected in the coming months.

These policies sit in contrast with Portugal’s demographic situation, with a falling birthrate, an ageing population and a declining fertility rate. In addition, it suffers from an ongoing trend of youth emigration – about 30 percent of the population between 15 and 39 is living abroad, one of the highest rates in the world.  A study from Porto University in December 2024 said that Portugal would need to ensure 138,000 immigrants arriving per year to guarantee economic growth over the next decade.

Housing and costs

Meanwhile, a housing crisis is the biggest ongoing issue in Portugal in the run-up to the elections. House prices rose by 106 percent between 2015 and 2023, according to the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, compared with 48 percent in Spain and 8 percent in Italy. The increase in property value has been caused by deregulation, large influxes of foreign investment in properties, speculation on real estate and a tourism boom.

As a result, young people and professionals are increasingly unable to afford housing in cities like Lisbon and Porto, where soaring rents have also prompted the closures of small businesses, and left low-income tenants stretched to pay rents or facing eviction.

Rising housing prices have also contributed to a general increase in the cost of living, with energy and food prices rising. Factors such as the war in Ukraine – because of its effect on the global supply chain – have amplified this crisis.

What’s next?

As of Thursday night, almost 20 percent of voters were undecided, meaning a range of outcomes is possible after the Sunday vote: An AD-led minority government, a less likely PS-led minority government, or a coalition between a variety of political players.

If that happens, it would be the second time a row that Portugal will not have a majority government: The AD won 80 seats in 2024 out of 230, just ahead of the PS, which won 78.

To Valentin, this is no longer an anomaly – he expects this scenario to be repeated in future elections, too.

“Portuguese democracy went through a very long period of relative stability,” he said, reflecting on the fact that Portugal this year celebrated 50 years since its first fully free elections, following the overthrow of the Estado Novo dictatorship. “For decades it had a multiparty system that barely changed, with governments alternating between the centre left PS and centre right PSD, and some interventions by a small number of other parties.”

“But now there’s been a lot of changes in a short period of time, with more and more new parties having made it into parliament,” he added.

That has meant fewer votes for the mainstream centrist parties, the PS and the PSD, as newer parties like Chega eat into their traditional base.

“We’re now entering a new paradigm,” said Valentin. “And it remains to be seen how these different political forces will balance out.”

In Syria, optimism abounds. The unexpected decision by United States President Donald Trump to lift sanctions on the country, announced in Riyadh on Tuesday, is a relief for Syrians. They hope that the move will reintegrate Syria into the global economy, and bring much-needed investment into a country trying to recover from more than 50 years of dynastic family rule, as well as a nearly 14-year-long war.

The impact of Trump’s statement, which he said would give Syria “a chance at greatness” after the December overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, had an almost immediate effect, as the Syrian pound strengthened against the US dollar by about 25 percent, in a boost to a country suffering through economic hardship.

“Lifting sanctions on Syria represents a fundamental turning point,” Ibrahim Nafi Qushji, an economist and banking expert, told Al Jazeera. “The Syrian economy will transition from interacting with developing economies to integrating with more developed ones, potentially significantly reshaping trade and investment relations.”

Complex sanctions

While the announcement will likely lead to some imminent progress, there are still some stumbling blocks to the sanctions removal, analysts and experts told Al Jazeera.

US sanctions on Syria date back to 1979, when the country was under the iron grip of President Hafez al-Assad – Bashar’s father – and designated a “state sponsor of terrorism”. In the intervening years, additional sanctions were placed on the state and individuals associated with both the regime and the opposition, including current President Ahmed al-Sharaa – a result of his former association with al-Qaeda.

“There’s an entire building of a complex gamut of sanctions,” Vittorio Maresca di Serracapriola, sanctions lead analyst for Karam Shaar Advisory Limited, a consulting company with a focus on the political economy of the Middle East, told Al Jazeera.

Analysts said that Trump could remove certain sanctions through executive order, while some “foreign terrorist organisation” (FTO) designations could be removed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But other sanctions may be more complicated to end.

According to Maresca di Serracapriola, there are also a series of export controls, executive orders that target the banking sector, and acts that were passed by the US Congress.

“It is a huge moment for the country,” Maresca di Serracapriola said. “Of course, sanctions are very technical and complicated tools, so it’s still unclear how the US government will be able to implement what it promised.”

There are also questions about the timeline. The economic situation for many Syrians is dire, with 90 percent of the population living in poverty and approximately 25 percent jobless, according to the United Nations. The new Syrian authority is under extreme economic pressure, while at times struggling to exert its authority and provide security around the country.

Trump’s decision will come as a welcome reprieve, but Syrians may have to wait for sanctions relief to take effect. Analysts said the changes would come gradually and could take up to a year before “tangible results” are seen.

Sanctions relief alone will also not be enough. Analysts noted that Syria still needs banking reforms to comply and get off international monitoring lists. There will also need to be incentives from the US and other international actors to build trust among private investors looking to invest in Syria’s future.

“Achieving long-term growth requires implementing internal economic reforms, including improving the business environment, enhancing financial transparency, and developing productive sectors to ensure the Syrian economy effectively benefits from global opportunities,” Qushji said. “Lifting economic sanctions on Syria is a first step toward restructuring the economy, but it requires reform policies focused on sustainable development and global economic integration to ensure a real and productive recovery.”

Trump meets al-Sharaa

For months, everyone from Syria’s new leadership, analysts, and international actors has said there is a dire need for sanctions relief. But the US has previously taken an inflexible stance against al-Sharaa’s government, due to perceived ties to violence and armed groups.

Regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkiye, however, have built strong relations with the new government in Damascus. Before Trump’s pronouncement on Tuesday, multiple analysts told Al Jazeera they did not expect Syria’s sanctions relief to be high up on the agenda for the US or the Gulf states Trump visited during his three-country tour.

The US has taken a cautious, and at times conflicting, approach to Syria’s new authority since the fall of the Assad regime on December 8.

On March 9, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned Syria’s new government for their failure to prevent sectarian violence and massacres in the country’s coastal region. But then, three days later, Rubio praised the agreement between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian central government in Damascus that ostensibly would see the SDF integrate into state institutions.

Previously, the US provided Syria a list of demands that included destroying the remaining chemical weapons, cooperation on “counterterrorism”, and the removal of foreign fighters from senior roles in the new government or military. There have also been suggestions that Syria might throw in a Trump Tower deal in Damascus and that Trump wanted ties between Syria and Israel before any sanctions relief.

But by Tuesday evening, everything had changed. Trump announced he would remove sanctions on Syria without conditions.

“The key emphasis here is it’s a Saudi-US deal rather than something between the US and Syria,” Rob Geist Pinfold, a lecturer in defence studies at King’s College in London.

Then, on Wednesday morning, Trump and al-Sharaa met for a little more than half an hour in the presence of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and with Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan phoning in. The meeting appeared to please Trump.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on his way to Doha, Trump called al-Sharaa a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”

After the talks, the White House released a list of issues Trump discussed with al-Sharaa. They included some of the US’s prior demands on Syria, such as dealing with foreign fighters and “counterterrorism” cooperation. But Trump also brought up Syria recognising Israel, as well as taking over ISIL detention centres in northern Syria.

“These don’t appear to be preconditions, but they could slowroll the lifting [of sanctions],” Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Al Jazeera.

The Nakba. It’s a concept that accompanied me from birth until I lived through it myself these past two years.

I was born a refugee in the Khan Younis camp, known by the city’s residents as the largest gathering of refugees expelled from their lands during the Nakba, when Israel was founded in 1948.

Whenever someone asked me my name, it was always followed by: “Are you a refugee or a citizen?”

‘What is a refugee?’

As a child, I would ask: “What is a refugee?”

I attended a school run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and my documents always had to include proof that I was a refugee.

I received treatment at UNRWA clinics, always needing to bring that refugee card.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand what being a refugee meant. How did my grandparents flee their land in Beit Daras, a village north of the Gaza Strip that no longer exists? How did my grandfather end up in this camp, and why did he choose this place?

Before Israel’s war on Gaza, May 15, or Nakba Day, the day Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, was a unique occasion. Everyone paid attention to it, seeking out people who had lived through it to hear their stories.

When I began working as a journalist in 2015, Nakba Day was one of the events I looked forward to covering. That year, I went along with colleagues to the Shati camp, west of Gaza City.

It would be my first time writing about the Nakba, and my first visit to a refugee camp in 13 years, since we had moved from camp life to village life in al-Fukhari, south of Khan Younis.

When I entered the camp, memories of my childhood in Khan Younis came flooding back: the small, crowded houses, some newly built, others still original structures.

It was nice that the commemoration falls in May, with good weather.

Elderly men and women sat by their doors, just as my grandmother did when I was a child. I used to love sitting with her; she seemed used to open spaces, like her pre-1948 home in Beit Daras.

We sat with elderly women, all over 70. They talked about their homeland, the stability they had in their lands, their simple lives, the food they grew and ate, and the heartbreak of not being able to return.

We met many – from Majdal, Hamama, and al-Jura, all depopulated villages and towns taken over by Israel in 1948. Whenever I met someone from Beit Daras, we’d share memories, and laugh a lot, talking about the maftoul (Palestinian couscous) the town was famous for.

The visit was light-hearted, filled with laughter and nostalgia, despite these people having been forced into camp life after the occupation drove them from their towns in horrific ways.

Displacement

I began to understand those Nakba stories more deeply when my grandfather began to tell me his own story. He became the central character in my Nakba reports every year, until his death in 2021.

He estimated he was about 15 years old at the time. He was already married to my grandmother, and they had a child.

He would describe the scenes as I sat in awe, asking myself: How could the world have stood by silently?

My grandfather told me they had a good life, working their farm, eating from their crops. Each town had a specialty, and they exchanged produce.

Theirs was a simple cuisine, with lots of lentils and bread made from wheat they ground in stone mills. Until that dreadful displacement.

He said the Zionist militias forced them to leave, ordering them to go to nearby Gaza.

My grandfather said he shut the door to his home, took my grandmother and their son – just a few months old – and started walking. Israeli planes hovered overhead, firing at people as if to drive them to move faster.

The baby – my uncle – didn’t survive the journey. My grandfather never wanted to go into the details, he would only say that their son died from the conditions as they fled.

After hours of walking, they reached Khan Younis and, with nowhere else to go, he pitched a tent. Eventually, UNRWA was set up and gave him a home, the one I remember from my childhood. It was so old; I spent years visiting them in that asbestos-roofed house with its aged walls.

That memory of being forced into exile became their wound. Yet, the idea of return, the right to go home, was passed down through generations.

Memories made flesh, blood, and anguish

The Nakba was a memory passed down from the elderly to the young.

But in the war that Israel began waging on Gaza on October 7, 2023, we lived the Nakba.

We were forcibly displaced under threat of weapons and air strikes. We saw our loved ones arrested before our eyes and tortured in prisons. We lived in tents and searched everywhere for basic provisions to save our children.

My grandfather told me they fled under threat of weapons and planes – so did we.

He said they searched for flour, food, and water while trying to protect their children – so are we, right now in the 21st century.

Perhaps in 1948, the media was more primitive. But now, the world watches what’s happening in Gaza in many formats – written, visual, and audio – and yet, nothing has changed.

Never did I imagine I’d live through an existential war – a war that threatens my very presence on my land, just as my grandparents lived through.

The repeated scenes of displacement are so painful. They’re a cycle, one that we have been cursed to live through as Palestinians again and again.

Will history record this as Nakba 2023?

Years from now, will we speak of this Nakba just as we’ve spoken about the original one for 77 years? Will we tell stories, hold commemorations, and hold close memories of the dream of return that has stayed with us since childhood?

Since I realised what it meant to be called a refugee and learned I had a homeland, I’ve been dreaming of returning.

This pain, we can never forget it. I still remember the camp and my life there.

I’ll never forget the moment Israel destroyed my house and made us homeless for two years, 24 years ago.

Now we live our painful days searching for safety, fighting to survive.

We will tell future generations about this war, the war of existence.

We resist hunger, fear, thirst, and pain so we can remain on this land.

The Nakba hasn’t ended. The 1948 Nakba continues in 2025.

Johannesburg, South Africa – On a chilly Sunday evening in Johannesburg, OR Tambo International Airport was filled with tourists and travellers entering and exiting South Africa’s busiest airport.

On one side of the international departures hall, a few dozen people queued – their trollies piled with luggage, travel pillows and children’s blankets – as they waited to board a charter flight to Washington Dulles International Airport in the United States.

Dressed casually and comfortably for the 13-hour journey that would follow, the group – most young, all white – talked among themselves while avoiding onlookers. Although they blended into the bustling terminal around them, these weren’t ordinary travellers. They were Afrikaners leaving South Africa to be refugees in Donald Trump’s America.

When Charl Kleinhaus first applied for refugee resettlement in the US earlier this year, he told officials he had been threatened and that people attempted to claim his property.

The 46-year-old, who claimed to own a farm in Limpopo, South Africa’s northernmost province, was not required to present proof of these threats or provide details regarding when the alleged incidents occurred.

On Sunday, he joined dozens of others accepted by the Trump administration as part of a pilot programme granting asylum to people from the Afrikaner community – descendants of mainly Dutch colonisers that led the brutal apartheid regime for nearly five decades.

The Trump administration claims white people face discrimination in South Africa – a country where they make up some 7 percent of the population but own more than 70 percent of the land and occupy the majority of top management positions.

“I want you all to know that you are really welcome here and that we respect what you have had to deal with these last few years,” US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told Kleinhaus and the others when they landed at the Dulles International in Virginia.

“We respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years,” he said on Monday.

Speaking to a journalist at the airport, Kleinhaus said he never expected “this land expropriation thing to go so far” in South Africa.

He was referring to the recently passed Expropriation Act, which allows the South African government to, in exceptional circumstances, take land for public use without compensation. Pretoria says the measure is aimed at redressing apartheid injustices, as Black South Africans who make up more than 80 percent of the population still own just 4 percent of the land.

South African officials say the law has not resulted in any land grabs. There is also no record of Kleinhaus’s property being expropriated.

Kleinhaus was unaffected by any threats and the government was unaware of anyone who might have threatened his property, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told Al Jazeera.

“The people of South Africa have not been affected by the expropriation of land. There’s no evidence. None of them are affected by any farm murders either,” the minister emphasised.

Discredited ‘genocide’ claims

In February, when Trump signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners, he cited widely discredited claims that their land was being seized and that they were being brutally killed in South Africa.

On Monday, Trump again claimed that Afrikaners were victims of a “genocide” – an accusation South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other experts maintain is based on lies.

“Farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters. “White farmers are being brutally killed, and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

Ramaphosa has also debunked claims that the group who left this week faced any persecution at home.

“They are leaving because they do not wish to embrace the democratic transformation unfolding in South Africa,” he said.

For 60-year-old Sam Busa, watching Kleinhaus and the 48 other South Africans leave to be resettled in the US was a hopeful moment.

Busa, who has also applied for asylum, is waiting in anticipation for an interview that would qualify her for resettlement. She has begun selling excess household items in anticipation of her new life in the US.

The semi-retired businesswoman has been at the forefront of efforts – through a website called Amerikaners – encouraging Afrikaners to take an interest in the US offer to grant refugee status on the grounds that they face racial persecution in South Africa.

When asked how she has experienced persecution because of her race, Busa recounted an incident where she was held at gunpoint at her home in Johannesburg – the commercial capital of South Africa and one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

She later moved to KwaZulu-Natal on the country’s east coast, where she ran a business that provided services to the government.

When asked whether she believed she was targeted because of her race or if she was simply a victim of common crime, Busa asserted it did not matter.

She didn’t feel safe, she said. “I am not overly sensitive. When I watch Julius Malema singing about killing the Boer, it is extremely terrifying.”

Malema, the far-left leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party, often sings a famous anti-apartheid song, Kill the Boer (Boer meaning farmer in Afrikaans), which the courts have ruled is not hate speech or an incitement to violence.

‘Persecution’

For Busa, much like Kleinhaus, new legislation passed to bolster racial transformation, which includes having specific hiring targets for employment equity, has been “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

“Expropriation without compensation is a huge issue, along with the amendment to employment equity,” she said, restating her belief that white people don’t have a future in South Africa.

“It’s coming hard and fast, and it’s becoming clear to [white] South Africans that we struggle with fears of home invasion. I don’t live on a farm, but there are massive fears because of the constant threat of crime. It has become clear to white South Africans; it’s not disguised,” she claimed.

The narrative of fear is prevalent among those engaged in the refugee programme despite the fact that several experts have debunked the assertion that they were victims of racially motivated attacks and not common crime.

South Africa sees about 19,000 murders a year. According to data from the police, most victims of rural crime are Black, with evidence showing that white farmers are not disproportionately being killed.

Meanwhile, many participants in the US’s Afrikaner refugee resettlement programme do not even live on farms; many are urban dwellers, according to Minister Ntshavheni.

Katia Beedan, who lives in Cape Town, is also anticipating resettlement in the US. She told Al Jazeera that refugee hopefuls do not have to prove racial persecution but simply articulate it.

“For me, it’s racial persecution and political persecution,” she said about her reasons for wanting to leave South Africa.

The copywriter-turned-life coach pointed to racial transformation laws targeting employment equity and land expropriation, which she believes the government is “overwhelming us with”, as a key reason for her desire to flee.

However, many other South Africans see sections of the Afrikaner community – including their right-wing lobby groups like AfriForum that first pushed the false narrative of a “white genocide” – as struggling to exist equally in a country where they were once considered superior because of their race.

“I think AfriForum is struggling with the reality of being ordinary,” social justice activist and South Africa’s former public protector, Thuli Madonsela, told local TV channel, Newzroom Afrika, in March.

“The new South Africa requires all of us to be ordinary, whereas colonialism and apartheid made white people special people.

“I think some white people … [are] seeking to reverse the wheel and find reason to be special again. They seem to have found an ally in the American president,” she said.

‘Absurd and ridiculous’

In February, as Trump expedited efforts to resettle Afrikaners in the US, he was closing off his country’s refugee programme to other asylum seekers from war-torn and famine-stricken parts of the world.

For Loren Landau from the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Afrikaner refugee relocation is “absurd and ridiculous”.

“They have not been welcomed as tourists or work permit holders, but as refugees. The idea of a refugee system is to protect those who cannot be safeguarded by their own states and who fear persecution or violence because of who they are or their membership in a social group. Can Afrikaners make that case?” he asked.

Although “there are people in South Africa who discriminate against them,” and Afrikaners now “have less privilege and protection than during the apartheid era”, it cannot be said that this is indicative of state policy, he said, adding that many different people are robbed, killed, and face discrimination in South Africa.

“Are they [Afrikaners] specially victimised because of who they are? Absolutely not!” Landau added.

He said all statistics on land ownership, income, and education levels indicate that South Africa’s white population far outstrips others: “They are still by far in the top strata of South African society. No one is taking their land. No one is taking their cars.”

Even fringe groups that may have called for land grabs have done little to enact their threats, observers note.

However, for Busa, that doesn’t matter. “I fear for my children. You never know when the EFF decides they want you dead. It’s not a country I want to live in,” she said. The EFF has said those who decide to leave South Africa should have their citizenship revoked.

Confronted with the implications of this situation, the government is considering whether those who exit as refugees could easily return to the country. Ramaphosa is expected to discuss the ongoing matter with Trump at a meeting in the US next week.

Meanwhile, for the Afrikaners now in the US, most will settle in Texas, with others in New York, Idaho, Iowa and North Carolina, while the government helps them find work and accommodation.

They will hold refugee status for one year, after which they can apply for a US green card to make them permanent residents. At the same time, the Afrikaner resettlement programme remains open to others who want to apply.

When Kleinhaus and his group arrived in the US on Monday, they had smiles on their faces as they met officials and waved US flags.

Yet, for South Africa’s president, their resettlement in the US marks “a sad moment for them” – and something he believes may not last.

“As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from our problems,” he said at an agricultural exhibition in Free State province on Monday.

“If you look at all national groups in our country, Black and white, they’ve stayed in this country because it’s our country.

“I can bet you that they [the Afrikaners who left] will be back soon because there is no country like South Africa.”

When Abdullah Ocalan said his Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, should lay down its arms and disband after more than four decades of conflict with the Turkish state and tens of thousands of deaths, there was an instant look across the border to Syria.

Syria’s northeast is largely controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led military force Turkiye has repeatedly fought against over the past decade.

The SDF is led by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkiye views as a “terrorist” group and the Syrian branch of the PKK. The United States, however, has backed the YPG in Syria to fight against ISIL (ISIS).

Since the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December, the SDF has been negotiating with the new Turkish-allied government in Damascus over what its future role in a newly unified Syria and as a military force will be and what kind of governance will extend to the northeast of the country.

No laying down of arms

The removal of the PKK from the equation will likely facilitate the SDF’s integration with Damascus, analysts told Al Jazeera.

“For the SDF, it makes it much easier to talk with the government in Damascus and also to de-escalate their relations with Turkey,” said Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst of Kurdish politics based in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

While the SDF rejects Turkiye’s assertions that it is the Syrian arm of the PKK, analysts said the groups have strong links.

While the PKK’s announcement that it would heed Ocalan’s call and disarm was welcomed by SDF leader Mazloum Abdi, he said his group would not disarm and Ocalan’s decision did not extend to Syria.

But this could give the group further incentives to bring its fighting force and governing structure – called the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) – under the umbrella of the new government in Damascus.

When reached for comment on Monday, an AANES spokesperson told Al Jazeera: “The autonomous administration is not concerned with the internal affairs of other countries.”

The SDF has clashed with Turkish-backed Syrian factions, including in the immediate days after the fall of al-Assad’s regime, and sustained attacks from Turkiye’s air force.

In December, the US negotiated a ceasefire between the SDF and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which has since been incorporated into Syria’s new armed forces.

Abdi has been in discussions with the new Syrian government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, over how best to integrate the SDF into the post-Baathist Party security forces and govern Syria’s northeast.

Increased pressure to negotiate

The SDF has engaged in the talks with the pressure of an impending US troop withdrawal from northeast Syria.

Without a US presence and support, the SDF has feared it might be vulnerable to attacks from Turkiye or Turkish-backed factions in Syria.

But should the PKK’s decision to disarm bring a feeling of security to Turkiye along its border with Syria, analysts said the relations between the SDF and Turkiye would also likely improve.

“We know that Turkey’s hardline stance towards the SDF was very much linked to concerns over the PKK and not so much about the SDF being Kurdish-dominated,” Thomas Pierret, a Syria specialist and senior researcher at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds, told Al Jazeera.

This is evident by Turkiye’s relations with Masoud Barzani and his Kurdish Democratic Party in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, Pierret said.

Of course, this new reality “doesn’t mean it will be easy”, according to Pierret. Under the agreement between Turkiye and the PKK, some fighters could be relocated to third countries – essentially sent into exile. There’s also the possibility some fighters may decide to make their way to northeast Syria, in which case, Pierret said, Turkiye could see the SDF as a haven for PKK fighters.

So Turkiye will keep a close eye on the SDF in Syria and the SDF’s negotiations with Damascus.

In the past, the Turkish military has launched drones, fired artillery and carried out air strikes against Kurdish fighters, including the SDF.  And analysts said military options may still be on the table going forward.

“For now, they seem to be letting negotiations take their course,” Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International with a focus on Syria, told Al Jazeera. “And that’s probably related both to events in Syria but also to the PKK process.”

Beyond Syria

The PKK’s affiliates and allies are spread across regions of the Middle East where Kurds live.

Historically, the PKK has operated in Turkiye as well as northern Iraq. And their allies have operated in places where Kurds live in Syria and Iran. Their struggles have often opposed the national authorities in those places or sought self-determination or federalism.

One example is the Kurdistan Free Life Party, or PJAK, in Iran, which says its goal is to declare an autonomous Kurdish region in Iran.

“It’s unclear what will happen with the … PJAK because they also have a number of Iranian Kurdish fighters inside the PKK,” van Wildenburg said.

“It’s possible that they will continue as a political party and not as an armed group because they are already not doing much fighting against the Iranian state anyway.”

Analysts agree it is unclear whether the PKK’s allies will follow Ocalan’s lead and lay down their arms or, as is the case with the SDF in Syria, if they will view their own struggles as independent and make decisions on their own.

Lilongwe, Malawi – Since he was young, Enock Dayton has made a living from bananas. The 30-year-old was born and raised in Molele, in the southern Malawian district of Thyolo, which was at the heart of local banana production until a plant virus devastated crops more than a decade ago.

At his stall at Mchesi market, in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, Dayton serves customers from the bunches of green bananas that he has. “I started this business when I was young, and we had farms where we were growing bananas and we would take trucks and bring them here and sell them to individuals,” he told Al Jazeera.

But in 2013, the deadly banana bunchy top disease wiped out almost all the crops in the country. Farmers were asked to uproot their banana plants to avoid the spread of the virus; hundreds of thousands of people were affected.

Bananas are Malawi’s fourth biggest staple crop, after maize, rice and cassava, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The United Nations body – which is working with other organisations to help revive banana farming in the country – said in 2023 that with “the right investments and strategic support, the banana sector has the potential to provide greater benefits in food and nutrition security and commercial value for growers, transporters, consumers and food processors”.

But in the meantime, to maintain their businesses in the absence of sufficient local produce, farmers and fruit-sellers like Dayton turned to neighbouring Tanzania to import the crop and complement their own meagre local supplies. In 2023 alone, for instance, Malawi imported more than $491,000 worth of bananas, with the majority of that – 5,564,180kg (12,266,920lb) – coming primarily from Tanzania. The remainder came from South Africa and Mozambique.

But this year, that arrangement came to a sudden halt. In March, Malawi said it was temporarily banning the import of some farm produce, including bananas, from Tanzania and other countries. The government said this was to help support local industries and stabilise the country’s foreign exchange shortage, which has led to challenges that include the inability to import some necessities, like pharmaceuticals.

But Malawi might have underestimated the effect of its bold move, observers say.

In retaliation, in April, Tanzania banned the entry of all agricultural imports from Malawi, responding to what it described as restrictions on some of its exports. That ban also extended to South Africa, which for years prohibited the entry of bananas from Tanzania.

This was bad news for Malawi, observers say, as it is more on the receiving end of trade between the neighbours. According to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), Malawi exports less than $50m worth of products to Tanzania, including soybean meal, soybeans and dried legumes, while it imports hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of mineral fuels, oil, distilled products, soaps, lubricants, cement and glassware, among other products.

In its response, Dar es Salaam went a step further, extending its trade ban to the export of fertiliser from Tanzania to landlocked Malawi. It also threatened to stop goods en route to Malawi from passing through Tanzania.

By land, Malawi depends on Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique for the import of goods. As it lacks direct access to the sea, Malawi utilises seaports in Tanzania and Mozambique. But the instability of the Mozambique route – due to insecurity caused by conflict, recent post-election violence and truck drivers facing harassment – made the deadlock with Tanzania a bigger challenge for industry. Businesses that rely on the import of farm produce started crying foul as their trucks of groundnuts and other produce stood in line at the Songwe border.

Malawi also found itself in a tricky situation as it depends on Tanzania for its harbours to import fuel.

Soon, even Kenya found itself entangled in the conflict as cargo from Malawi, which has to travel through Tanzania, was also stopped en route.

The ensuing row shone a light on Malawi’s precarious geographical location, as well as regional agreements aimed at facilitating trade, the efforts by individual nations to follow the rules, and the macroeconomic imbalances in a nation designated as one of the poorest in the world.

After weeks of tensions, this month, a high-level meeting between Malawi and Tanzania appeared to have brokered the differences, paving the way for the lifting of the bans between the two countries, according to a spokesperson for Malawi’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

‘Symptom of a huge challenge’

For Ernest Thindwa, a political commentator based at the University of Malawi, the recent trade dispute does not exist in isolation – and should also be viewed from a political lens.

Both countries are heading for polls this year, first Malawi in September and then Tanzania in November. Within an election environment, the dispute says something about the attempts by both countries’ leaders to display patriotism and a sense of empowerment to their citizens, the analyst said.

“The current administration [in Malawi] wants to be seen to be delivering and they want to be seen to be responding to people’s concerns,” Thindwa told Al Jazeera. “And certainly they need to make sure that local producers are protected, which has become more urgent as we go towards elections.”

Thindwa said that both Malawi and Tanzania are signatories to regional and international trade agreements, the frameworks of which entitle them to take measures to protect their trade interests when they deem necessary.

However, he questioned the timing of these moves, asking why the initiatives by Malawi were not implemented earlier if they were indeed to protect local industries.

Answering his own question, he said, “Because then it might have not been an agent in terms of attracting votes.”

“What you would call subsistence or smallholder producers … would be significant for the government in terms of trying to win votes from such social groups,” he observed.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, something similar was at play in its decision to retaliate, Thindwa said.

“The incumbent administration in Tanzania wants to be seen to be responding to the needs and interests of its citizens. So the administration in that country, in Tanzania, also wanted to project an image that it cares for its people. That’s why it responded rather quickly.”

Broadly speaking, Thindwa noted that the trade dispute points to overall challenges African countries face – in terms of promoting internal trade, and trading more within Africa than with other continents.

Citing the example of Angola, he said that despite it having oil, countries within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) bloc continue to import oil from the Middle East.

“There is Angola there,” he said. “Why can’t they put together a regional project, for instance, and invest in the capabilities to make sure that the end product is being produced in Angola and Angola serves the region, to be much cheaper for the region? And it will make sure that the resources of the region remain within the region.”

Such examples show that “in spite of these trade protocols, Africa still struggles to encourage trade between member states”, he said.

“So the case of Tanzania and Malawi is just a symptom of a huge challenge Africa faces in terms of promoting internal trade.”

Tensions eased

In a statement on May 9, Malawi’s Ministry of Trade said Malawi and Tanzania had held bilateral discussions in Tanzania regarding the implementation and resolution of its prohibition order.

After that, a letter from the ministry, addressed to Malawi’s Revenue Authority, read: “In this regard, I wish to advise that you facilitate the clearance of exports and imports of goods between the Republic of Malawi and the Republic of Tanzania. This, however, does not exempt importers from complying with legal and regulatory requirements, including obtaining the relevant licences and certifications from regulatory bodies.”

After the talks, Charles Nkhalamba, Malawi’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, told Al Jazeera the neighbours had signed “a joint communique” to resolve the dispute between them.

The “high-level discussions” were a result of “robust diplomatic efforts” by the foreign ministries of both countries, he said in a message on WhatsApp, adding that Tanzania also “acknowledg[ed] the economic circumstances that necessitated the import restrictions”.

During the meeting, both parties agreed in principle on the importance of continuous engagement and communication on all matters impacting their bilateral trade relations, Nkhalamba added.

Weeks earlier, Tanzania’s Ministry of Agriculture also released a statement acknowledging that Lilongwe had reached out to Dar es Salaam to resolve the problem and stating that “Tanzania is lifting a ban on export and import of agricultural produce to and from Malawi”.

In principle, the trade war between the neighbours appears to have stalled for now.

But experts told Al Jazeera that practically speaking, it will take time for the logistics to be sorted out and for things to return to normal for sellers left in limbo when their supplies dried up.

At the market in Lilongwe, Dayton is eagerly awaiting the trucks of sweet bananas from across the border, so he has enough to sell to his customers.

He is grateful for the cross-border trade, and the arrangement that has over the years helped business people like him make money selling the crop from their neighbours.

But he also had mixed feelings as he reminisced about their lost opportunity to grow their own crops.

“The amount of money we used to have when we grew our own bananas is different from what we’re earning now,” Dayton said. “While we were growing and buying them at a cheap price … we were making a lot of money, apart from the transport [costs]. The ones from Tanzania are quite expensive.

“We need our bananas back.”

A decade ago, Dayton was a casualty of a natural disaster that made his garden back in the village dormant. Now, he feels that he is a casualty of the decisions made by authorities in offices far away.

“What we want is a stable supply of bananas in this market,” he said. “It’s good because it provides for our families and the customers as well.”

On May 4, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched a barrage of suicide drones at Port Sudan, the army’s de facto wartime capital on the Red Sea.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) accused foreign actors of supporting the RSF’s attacks and even threatened to sever ties with one of its biggest trading partners.

The RSF surprised many with the strikes. It had used drones before, but never hit targets as far away as Port Sudan, which used to be a haven, until last week.

“The strikes … led to a huge displacement from the city. Many people left Port Sudan,” Aza Aera, a local relief worker, told Al Jazeera. “If the aggression continues … I think I’ll leave like everyone else.”

A drone war

When a civil war erupted between the SAF and RSF in April 2023, the army had aerial supremacy due to its fleet of warplanes and drones.

Yet the RSF is closing the gap with an arsenal of suicide drones, which it used on Port Sudan for six consecutive days, hitting an army base, a civilian airport, several hotels, and a fuel depot, which caused a massive blast.

“Sudan had already entered the phase of drone warfare over the last … few months at least,” said Suliman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker think tank.

The army largely relies on the relatively affordable Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, reportedly receiving $120m worth of them since late 2023.

Bayraktars can travel long distances with a large payload, and the army says they helped it regain swaths of territory from the RSF in eastern and central Sudan between September 2024 and March 2025, including the capital Khartoum.

Despite losing significant ground, the RSF then stepped up its aggression against the SAF with Chinese-made drones, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.

The human rights group, Sudan’s de facto military government and other monitors all accuse the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of purchasing these drones – and other weapons – and supplying them to the RSF.

The UAE has denied the accusations as “baseless”.

“The UAE strongly rejects the suggestion that it is supplying weapons to any party involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” said Salem Aljaberi, a spokesperson for the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement on X.

Regardless, the increasing use of drones by both sides marks an escalation and risks exacerbating an already catastrophic situation for civilians, according to experts and human rights monitors.

Bold announcement

On May 6, the army-backed authorities in Port Sudan announced the severing of all ties with the UAE after accusing it of being behind the attacks.

That announcement was not well thought-out, according to Baldo.

Sudan’s army could lose tens of millions of dollars in gold revenue, as well as access to vital banking operations, he told Al Jazeera.

A UAE-backed company, Emiral Resources, owns a majority of shares in Sudan’s largest gold mine, the Kush mine.

Kush is administered by Sudan’s army, which likely sells tens of millions of dollars worth of gold to the UAE.

According to the Central Bank of Sudan, about 97 percent of gold exports from army-controlled areas went to the UAE in 2023.

Kush exported at least one tonne of gold in 2024, although it is unclear how much higher the number is for production.

Furthermore, UAE banks own a majority share in the Bank of Khartoum, whose digital platform, Bankak, facilitates money transfers for millions of displaced Sudanese and public institutions.

The UAE state also owns El Nilein Bank, which manages and approves international transactions on behalf of Port Sudan, according to a report that Baldo co-authored in March for the Chatham House think tank.

“This was a rushed decision [to cut ties with the UAE] that will have serious consequences … due to the UAE’s control over [Sudan’s] national economy,” Baldo told Al Jazeera.

Major escalation?

Sudan’s army has not clarified how and when it will sever ties with the UAE.

On May 6, SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan vowed in a video to “defeat the militia (RSF) and those who help them”.

Al Jazeera sent written questions to army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah, asking if Port Sudan will implement the announced suspension.

No reply was received by time of publication.

For its part, the UAE’s Foreign Ministry told Al Jazeera in an email that it will not retaliate against Port Sudan.

“The statement issued by the so-called ‘Security and Defence Council’ will not affect the deep-rooted and enduring ties between the UAE and the Republic of the Sudan, and their peoples,” the emailed statement said.

Meanwhile, experts and observers believe the war in Sudan is trending towards a major escalation.

The army’s regional backers could respond to the RSF’s increased use of drones by doubling down on their support for the army, warned Alan Boswell, a Sudan expert for the International Crisis Group.

“The obvious risk [from the attacks on Port Sudan] is that it brings other [regional powers] into deeper involvement on the army’s side,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We could see an escalating war with greater and greater firepower, and nothing would be left of Sudan’s infrastructure by the end of it.”