New York Times Magazine - FRACTURED LANDS: HOW THE ARAB WORLD CAME APART
Scott Anderson
Paolo Pellegrin
Paolo Pellegrin
The product of some 18 months of reporting,
it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since
the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global
refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are
many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are
familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of
how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria,
Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the
photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region
over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that
embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake
Falluja.
History never flows in a predictable way. It is always a
result of seemingly random currents and incidents, the significance of which
can be determined — or, more often, disputed — only in hindsight. But even
accounting for history’s capricious nature, the event credited with setting off
the Arab Spring could hardly have been more improbable: the suicide by
immolation of a poor Tunisian fruit-and-vegetable seller in protest over
government harassment. By the time Mohamed Bouazizi succumbed to his injuries
on Jan. 4, 2011, the protesters who initially took to Tunisia’s streets calling
for economic reform were demanding the resignation of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali,
the nation’s strongman president for 23 years.
In subsequent days, those
demonstrations grew in size and intensity — and then they jumped Tunisia’s
border. By the end of January, anti-government protests had erupted in Algeria,
Egypt, Oman and Jordan. That was only the beginning. By November, just 10
months after Bouazizi’s death, four longstanding Middle Eastern dictatorships
had been toppled, a half-dozen other suddenly embattled governments had
undergone shake-ups or had promised reforms, and anti-government demonstrations
— some peaceful, others violent — had spread in an arc across the Arab world
from Mauritania to Bahrain.
As a writer with long
experience in the Middle East, I initially welcomed the convulsions of the Arab
Spring — indeed, I believed they were long overdue. In the early 1970s, I
traveled through the region as a young boy with my father, a journey that
sparked both my fascination with Islam and my love of the desert. The Middle
East was also the site of my first foray into journalism when, in the summer of
1983, I hopped on a plane to the embattled city Beirut in hopes of finding work
as a stringer. Over the subsequent years, I embedded with a platoon of Israeli
commandos conducting raids in the West Bank; dined with Janjaweed raiders in
Darfur; interviewed the families of suicide bombers. Ultimately, I took a
five-year hiatus from magazine journalism to write a book on the historical
origins of the modern Middle East... read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/11/magazine/isis-middle-east-arab-spring-fractured-lands.html?_r=0
