‘Real and effective’ collaboration key to mitigating IS water threat
Not content with forcefully imposing its twisted version of Islam on local populations in Iraq and Syria, IS has also exerted control by other means. The group has captured a number of vital water resources in the region, wresting control of the people by holding their water supply hostage. IS water control has had other devastating effects in an already dry and arid region. Water shortages have destroyed agricultural land in the rural areas and caused electricity loss in the cities. Combined, this has meant severe setbacks for the region’s economy.
Source: Your Middle East
Kurdish Alevi music and migration: an interview with Ozan Aksoy
For Kurdish Alevis, music serves as a mode of articulating and transmitting ideas about collective history, identity, and connections to the geography of former homes in the countryside of Anatolia. Dr. Ozan Aksoy, has explored this crucial role of music within the Alevi community from a variety of angles throughout more than two decades as a musician and researcher.
Source: Jadaliyya
Remembering Assia Djebar: I write against erasure
Assia Djebar was the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, an Algerian novelist, poet, translator and filmmaker. She died a month ago, at the age of seventy-eight.
Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa’s pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie Française in 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. Djebar moved to France to study when she was eighteen. She became the first Algerian woman to be admitted to the country’s top literary university, the Ecole Normale Superieure. Her first book was published in 1957, when she was just twenty-one.
Source: Middle East Revised
