Farrah Hassen

A year has now passed since the tumultuous US withdrawal from decades of war and occupation in Afghanistan. With the Taliban functionally in charge, the country faces a deteriorating humanitarian crisis and economic collapse. But instead of taking action to promote stability and reinvigorate the economy, the US has made it worse and penalized innocent, … Continue reading “End the Collective Punishment of Afghans”

The United Nations has called the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Yet even that designation hardly captures the full extent of misery endured by its people over seven years of violence and unrelenting war. It is also a crisis that the United States has not only enabled, but has been … Continue reading “President Biden Must Commit to Ending the War in Yemen”

The U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base reached its shameful 20th anniversary of operations on January 11 — with a legacy marked by the detention of nearly 800 Muslim men and boys, the majority of them held without charge or trial for years and many subjected to torture and other cruel and inhumane … Continue reading “Gitmo’s Shameful Twentieth Anniversary”

I was a college student on 9/11. The ensuing “War on Terror,” anchored by the bombing and U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, has been with us ever since – virtually my entire adult life. President Biden was right to end the war in Afghanistan and follow through on a deal that his predecessor Donald Trump had … Continue reading “Now Close Gitmo, Too”

While filming a documentary in Syria in the summer of 2003, I visited the Jaramana refugee camp near Damascus. Run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Jaramana at the time housed around 5,000 registered Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 and their descendants. At Jaramana, rows of decaying … Continue reading “Refugee Crisis: The Stunning Collapse of Syria’s Safe Spaces”

With one deadly strike, the Bush administration has offered a fitting epitaph to its "might makes right" policy towards Syria – and the rest of the Middle East. On October 26, nine days before the election, American Special Operations forces, allegedly pursuing a "top operative" of al-Qaeda in Iraq, carried out a helicopter attack on … Continue reading “Strange Strike”