By Daniel Neep

Daniel Neep is a senior fellow and the director of publications at the Arab Center Washington DC. His most recent book is Syria: A Modern History, from which this essay is adapted.

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I was 18, sitting in a cubicle in a drab office at the northern tip of Manhattan, transcribing interviews with people who had evacuated the World Trade Center on 9/11. It was 2003, late summer September in the city—a day like today, bathed in sun, not yet fall, still far away from the grey and early dark of winter.

I listened carefully to a middle-aged man who described in quiet, precise detail how he evacuated down a dark stairwell from his office in one of the towers because the elevator shafts were on fire, engulfed in burning jet fuel. I typed slowly, making sure I got the transcription right. I listened to the tape again. And again.

I’d never heard anything like it—and still haven’t. Another evacuee described a fireball exploding out of a bank of elevators in the World Trade Center lobby. I remember thinking that this kind of awful detail was missing from the instant, mass memorialization of 9/11 t…

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By Raed Shomar

Raed Shomar is a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza. He describes his work as “looking beyond war as an event to examine its quiet, lasting impact on everyday life.” His poetry has been published in Arabic online, including on the website Palestinian Stories. This is his first poem to appear in English.

“When the City Falls Asleep”

When the city falls asleep,
The dead awaken from their graves,
Wondering:
Who planted roses in the cemeteries?
And the night screams:
Where did you bring all these coffins from?
When the city falls asleep,
I listen to the voices of those returning from the road,
As their murmurs reach me:
What on earth happened to the city?
Which face of death visited our home?
Where are we headed on a road with no doors?
When the city falls asleep,
Death casts its shadows over the rooftops,
Laughin…

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Alex Simon is a researcher, writer, and co-founder of Synaps, a Beirut-based research and training center that conducts intensive fieldwork on socioeconomic trends in the Middle East. From 2017 to 2024, he coordinated Synaps’ team of Syrian researchers working across Syria and neighboring countries. He is the editor of Syrians in the Shadow of War: Everyday Struggles and Survival, recently published by AUC Press and from which this essay is adapted.

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Casey Michel is an author, journalist, and non-resident senior fellow on corruption at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of American Kleptocracy, Foreign Agents, and United States of Oligarchy, out now from St. Martin’s Press and from which this essay is adapted. He writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and other outlets on the intersection of corruption and democracy.

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By Samar Yazbek

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. Her novels Planet of Clay and Where the Wind Calls Home were both finalists for the National Book Award for translated literature, in 2021 and 2024. She is also the author of two acclaimed nonfiction accounts of Syria’s war: A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the author of the new book Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, from which this essay is adapted.

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By Aaron Magid

Aaron Magid is a former Amman-based journalist who has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Al-Monitor. He is the author of The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan, from which this essay is adapted.

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By Mohammed Abu Lebda

Mohammed Abu Lebda is a Palestinian poet and translator from Rafah, Gaza. His poetry has been published in Democracy in Exile, the journal of DAWN, and he has spoken about life under siege in interviews with NPR’s Here & Now and Democracy Now!. He continues to write from Gaza.

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Ben Soodavar

Ben Soodavar is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

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By Robin Yassin-Kassab

Robin Yassin-Kassab is a British Syrian writer and journalist and the author of The Blood Between Us: Syria After the Fall of Assad, recently published by Saqi Books.

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The following is an excerpt from my new piece in World Politics Review, published earlier this week. Read the full piece via this gift link.

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For days, the drones had been flying low over Beirut. On our calls, their buzzing was constant, a sound that never left the conversation.

My friend Ghida and I spoke through all of it. Every few hours, I would check on her, trying to measure the danger outside in small increments. Are the drones closer today? Did you get to sleep? What is the news saying now?

Then, a little after two in the afternoon on April 8, the strikes began. We switched to video. From Ghida’s balcony, I watched plumes of smoke rise in almost every direction. The time between explosions was about the length of a breath. A hundred strikes in ten minutes, they said. Black Wednesday.

Her mother called, and we hung up. When Ghida rang back, she told me she would be staying home. She had been planning to go to her parents’ that day, a twenty-minute walk from her apartment. We talked a little longer.

Eventually exhaustion of the day’s terror pulled me under. I woke late…

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In April, Dalia Ghanem, a scholar based at a think tank in Qatar, published an article with the German Marshall Fund on how the Iran war had abruptly ended what she called the Gulf’s “gilded age.” Barrages of Iranian missiles and drones, fired in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombardment, had shattered the Gulf’s image as a luxurious—and well-protected—island of stability in a region wracked by war. “For years, residents of the Gulf’s gleaming metropolises—Doha, Dubai, Riyadh—existed in a state of geopolitical disbelief,” she wrote.

A senior fellow and program director at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Ghanem had moved to Qatar, like so many expatriates in the Gulf, seeking the regional “exception,” that “rare corner of the Middle East where continuous conflict was a data point for a policy brief, not a vibration in one’s windows.”

So much f…

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Editor’s note: Adam Makary is an Egyptian-American writer based in Cairo. An Izzy Award nominee, he has reported across the Middle East as a journalist for Reuters, Al Jazeera, CNN, and other outlets. In an essay last year for The Markaz Review, he reflected on his years at Al Jazeera, where he covered every stage of Egypt’s revolution as few others have, and the shift that came with working for Western news desks. “Each edit taught me what kind of suffering was legible, what kind of death was allowed to matter,” he wrote. “The language of power had its own syntax and I was learning to write it. Objectivity was a disguise, a costume that power wore to be impartial.”

His poem “Style Guide,” published here in Hidden Cities for the first time, was shortlisted by the literary magazine A Public Space in its 2025 Open Call.

I first met Adam in Cairo in…

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Counterrevolutions are often assumed to restore the ancien régime, but Egypt’s trajectory under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power in a coup in 2013, challenges this notion. While the counterrevolution triumphed, its leader set out to construct an entirely new order—what he called a “New Republic” or “Second Republic.” Figures from the era of Hosni Mubarak may still linger, but their influence has steadily waned as they adapt to new rules in an unfamiliar political landscape. Sisi—for the first time since 1952, when the Free Officers movement toppled King Farouk and ended Egypt’s monarchy—succeeded in unifying Egypt’s coercive apparatus and empowering it to dominate the state. The result is a republic without a social contract, devoid of hegemony, locked in an existential war against its own people, and operating more like a col…

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By Vaheed Ramazani

Vaheed Ramazani is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at Tulane University, where he held the Katherine B. Gore Chair in French Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2021).

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By Dilek Çelebi

Dilek Çelebi is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.

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On a recent visit to Europe, Syria’s former rebel leader-turned-president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had a pitch that would have been hard to imagine just a year and half ago. He told a packed audience at Chatham House in March that his government was trying to “transform Syria into an economic destination” for the entire Middle East. By investing in Syria’s reconstruction, Europe could tap into what Sharaa called the country’s “strategic geopolitical location in the region” while allowing millions of Syrian refugees to finally return home.

Sharaa has been busy making a version of this pitch ever since he toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. Whether hosting foreign officials in Assad’s old presidential palace, or traveling abroad to meet heads of state such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and …

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By Hagai El-Ad

Hagai El-Ad is an Israeli human rights activist and the former executive director of the human rights organization B’Tselem. He lives in Jerusalem.

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