Paris attacks: a few long reads for context

I’m heartbroken for my friends and family in France. One thing that makes me feel like I have a millimetre of control on my feelings is to read and try to understand things.

For geopolitical, historical and religious context context, here’s a list of articles I found to be essential reading, shedding some light on what is currently unfolding in Europe.

Skyping with the enemy (The Guardian)

When a French journalist posed online as a young woman interested in ISIS, she was soon contacted by a fighter in Syria. He proposed marriage — but could she maintain a double life?

The other France (New Yorker)

Although the alienated, impoverished immigrant communities outside Paris are increasingly prone to anti-Semitism, the profiles of French jihadists don’t track closely with class. Many of them have come from bourgeois families.

ISIS enshrines a theology of rape (NYT)

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.

On Colonial Borders and the Middle East’s Problems (Atlantic)

“Our collective fixation with the Middle East’s borders has, however, drawn attention away from the truly pernicious policy of divide-and-rule that the French and British used to sustain their power. In Syria, the French cultivated the previously disenfranchised Alawite minority as an ally against the Sunni majority. This involved recruiting and promoting Alawite soldiers in the territory’s colonial army, thereby fostering their sense of identity as Alawites and bringing them into conflict with local residents of other ethnicities. The French pursued the same policy with Maronite Christians in Lebanon, just as the Belgians did with Tutsis in Rwanda and the British did with Muslims in India”.

‘Nothing’s changed’: 10 years after French riots, banlieues remain in crisis (The Guardian)

Despite years of emergency assistance, residents of the suburbs that erupted into violence in 2005 are still waiting for things to improve

Fattemah’s choice: stay in a warzone or risk losing her baby on journey to Europe (The Guardian)

Syrian refugee endured pain, nausea and fear of robbery as she walked towards Europe — and for much of the time she thought her unborn child was dead