Photos courtesy of the author

It’s all very numbing to be a part of an experience like the one that happened in Isla Vista on May 23. I would always hear about tragedies like this in other parts of the country and world, and while I feel empathetic to the atrocities that happen every day, it is different when you are in it.

I’m a student at Santa Barbara City College. I traded in living in the hot Arizona desert to move to an apartment a block from the beach in one of the most beautiful areas in Southern California. From my classes I could watch the waves of the ocean, and from my bedroom window I can always see people going out to surf. Now I see flowers on the ground and a community trying to piece together last week’s events.

But after all of this, all of the tragedy that struck so quickly, I find myself asking, “What more can I do?” I know I am not alone in this. I have never seen a more united and close-knit community join together for healing as I have after this awful night.

Last Friday was a pretty normal day. I’d recently finished my last day of classes and was preparing for a summer free from lengthy papers and discussion forums. I did some laundry, rewatched episodes of Game of Thrones, and cleaned some old pasta sauce out of a filthy pan. A typical day that ended around 9 PM, when I passed out on the sofa.

I woke up to a loud BLAM. At first I thought it was the manager of the 7/11 next door slamming the dumpster lid, but when I heard three more BLAMs, one after the other, I realized something much more serious was going on. This wasn’t a convenience store throwing out past-due donuts.

Like a dumbass, I ran outside to see what was going on. My roommate screamed at me to get back inside, and we took cover in my room, ducking low close to my desk. From my bedroom window I saw a girl crying with blood running down her leg.

I also saw a black car peeling down the street, a car I would later learn was being driven by a madman with about five minutes left to live before he offed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In about ten minutes, this crazed woman-hater ruined the lives of so many people. I couldn’t sleep that night. No one knew what had happened, and we couldn’t stop scanning the news reports for names of new victims, hoping the death count would stop rising.

The next morning I received a request to join a group called “The UCSB Week of Solidarity.” The community was coming together, creating a whole week of events to deal with the inexplicable tragedy.

There was a candlelight vigil Saturday evening, where 5,000 students joined together to march silently through the streets of Isla Vista. Name tags were given out at multiple booths before we began the walk, and within seconds it seemed like everyone around me was crying.

There are 26,000 people in Isla Vista. It’s hard to know everyone. But last week, there was a collective decision to face this tragedy in a peaceful way. Although much of the focus was on the crimes that took place, the residents of this town were focused on the bigger picture of restoration and unification.

The 7/11 I live behind used to be where I would get a Slurpee at odd hours of the night. Now it’s where I leave flowers and handwritten notes offering condolences to passersby and grieving friends. Hundreds of people have done the same. A container of colored chalk rests on the sidewalk next to all the flowers and is there for anyone to reach out and grab. As the week wears on, the chalk drawings continue to expand beyond the border of a few feet. Today, people prefer to walk in the street, avoiding stepping on the art created in memory of our fellow friends and neighbors.

The bullet holes in the windows of IV Deli Mart are now filled with flower stems. If you ignore the intrusive media crews' oversized news vans, the area is a beautiful, quaint memorial.

It’s been enlightening to see a small community come together to create something wonderful out of something so horrendous. From dog therapy to free massages to a paddle out to the ocean, there is an immense amount of love coming from the people in this beachside home away from home.

All of this was in my mind as I sat in the blue, fold-up chair listening to the girls next to me cry and hold up bunches of oversized sunflowers. I was squeezing the hand of my roommate who was supposed to help me stop crying, but she was already bawling herself. All UCSB classes were canceled this past Tuesday to mourn for the students that have left us. In a stadium that holds 17,000, people still had to sit on the grass due to a lack of space. 

As I sat in the blue, fold-up chairs alongside so many other people, the events seemed to continue to process in my mind. Blue ribbons were pinned to all of our shirts, and we waited in silence for the ceremony to begin.

The stadium was the most packed place I had ever seen. Anyone I think I have ever passed by was sitting besides me. The whole stadium was filled with people, so much so that over 100 people had to sit in the grass or stand off to the side. Blue ribbons were pinned to all of our shirts, and we waited in silence for the ceremony to begin.

Religious leaders from the Santa Barbara community came up to speak to us, and the tears were now flowing more readily. The repeated question of the week was Why? Why did this happen? and Why do these things happen? were still valid questions, but maybe not as important as how we deal with these things after they happen.

By no means was this event a celebration, but it was one of the most meaningful things I have ever been apart of. Being able to help the home I love and support innocent people who were so suddenly taken was something I was proud to be a part of.

Christopher Ross Michael-Martinez’s father spoke on the podium in front of more than 10,000 people, where his message about gun control and violence was passionately heard. He only asked for one thing: When he raised his arm in the air, he wanted everyone who agreed with him to scream, “Not one more!” as a response to no changes in the NRA's policy. My eardrums pretty much blew out, but I screamed loudly alongside thousands of people. “Not one more!” we all said. I kept thinking about how horrible it must be for any parent to bury a child. If there is any positivity to come out of this, it was the response that came from these victims’ friends, neighbors, and communities.

It’s been over a week since the events occurred, but it still feels like it was last night. The overwhelming amount of love coming from all directions in this town is inspiring. I can walk down the street and see the chalk flowers painted on the sidewalks, brightly colored flower arrangements piling near the lampposts, and encouraging messages of peace and unity throughout the blocks of Isla Vista. It feels like I can’t turn on my television without hearing about the atrocities of the weekend, the panel of forensic psychologists trying to uncover questions that we might never get the answers to. But if I walk out my front door, the media’s portrayal of this town seems like a bad joke compared to how we really are coping.

What matters is how we carry on and heal, and together as a unifying group, we have proven that there is calm after the storm and we can lean on each other in times of tragedy. 

Although the undying question is Why and how could this have happened?, maybe what is more important is the aftermath of it all and how it will shape our future experiences.

I refuse to watch any of the programs covering this event because its depiction of what happened seems to only focus on negativity. Not to say that this event wasn't a combination of deadly catalysts waiting to explode, which it was, but that it happens, and things like this happen all over the world, but what matters is how we respond.

In a book written by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, she takes the words out of my mouth about a possible utopia that can bloom from a world of darkness. Tragedy is embedded in life and from events like this one and many others. A unique humanistic trait shines through us all, and we desire to help the people around us, not only comforting them but also healing ourselves.

Out of tragedy comes so much more, and like Solnit says, “Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.”

Photo courtesy of USA George

This could be the last summer. Bees are dying, ice caps are melting, there’s a Dunkin Donuts in Williamsburg. Oh, and the US and Russia might start the second Cold War. Time for the global village to band together and pump the brakes? Not likely, considering we’re busy pumping our private parts at home.

In the face of inscrutable military-industrial agendas, porn offers some kind of logic. I’ll never understand troop movements in Crimea, but I definitely know what to do with my boner once I get online. According to a series of charts compiled by the eggheads (dickheads?) at Pornhub Insights, the smut peddlers’ data analysis department, Russians are (mostly) just like us. Cultural geography produces intriguing local fetishes, but at the end of the day, we’re all repressed perverts beating our meat like dogs in heat.

These charts will either prove we're better at busting nuts than Putin's cronies or help us set aside our differences and agree that Russia is too jam-packed with boobs, butts, and cock-hungry MILFs to reduce it to rubble. Let's find out! 

Graphs courtesy of Pornhub

Putin spent the last decade ramping up jingoism and openly icing opposition leaders while framing himself as a whale-hunting neo-Czar, a sculpted alternative to the West’s flabby Merkels and Cheneys—and it worked. His Crimean war games united the country against the finger-wagging West. As always, the political is personal, and Soviet pride extends below the belt. Who needs American resources when you have Russian mom anal? It’s masturbation as empire-building. Mother Russia, indeed.

America is less monolithic—the melting pot is full of cum. Our search terms read like an ethnography of a Disney show, with multiple races, four jobs, and wacky family dynamics. God bless the free market. In America you have the right—no, the responsibility—to imagine yourself landing a massive creampie in your 18-year-old step-sister’s anus while a hentai yoga teacher massages her squirting babysitter. In public. 

Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, start your engines—Americans last longer than Russians. Yup, it takes us over a minute more than the commies to crank off. Does this mean we’re better at sex? Yes. Or maybe we’re numb to sensation, eros dulled by an endless trough of media content. Our minds wander as we sweat and hunch over our iPads like monks with scripture. The likeliest scenario: Americans are so fat that we waste over a minute searching for our genitals. Whatever. A win’s a win.

“Ahhhhh!!! The Mondays!!! After another hedonistic weekend watchin’ ball and poundin’ local craft ale, do I really have to go back to the freakin’ office? Darrel’s gonna chew me out over the Simmons account. Might as well slip into the janitor's closet, fire up my Samsung Nexus, and bust one to Yoga Cum Sluts 4.”

“I am a Russian male. I work seven days of week. No day is the wrong day to watch Russian mom anal.”

Erm, awkward. Americans are nearly three times as likely to baste our turkeys to Russian porn as they are to bust a nut over our smut. It’s pervy espionage. The Spy Who Cums in from the Cold, if you will. Then again, what exactly is American porn? We’re everything and nothing. Searching “American porn” is like searching “dope Yeezy Red Octobers.” It's redundant.

This graph is a bit tricky—it lists the terms searched with the highest relative density in each country, a metric of our most unique kinks. The uncanny appeal of celebrity sex tapes is lost on Russians who are too busy offering their seeds to the motherland. We’re on some equally weird shit: Oedipal repression, colonial fetishism, and the arcane mysteries of yoga inflame our loins with the heat of a thousand suns. Oh. And college. We LOVE college.

You crazy for this one, Pornhub! Seriously, your stats team makes Nate Silver look like Hodor. This graph illustrates porn consumption during the US vs. Russia Olympic hockey match, a game fraught with socio-political significance—for the Russians, at least. About 10 percent of the country’s Pornhub watchers dropped their cocks long enough to grab foam fingers and vuvuzelas to cheer on their boys. Then they lost, and within 20 minutes traffic rose to about 10 percent higher than it is on an average day. Millions of Russians consoled themselves after a hockey loss with a collective wank. Sports are the world’s most obvious metaphor for war. Imagine that bell curve after we flatten Moscow. Go team!!!

Follow Ezra Marcus on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Tulsa City-County Library

Around this time of the year, I remember summer represented freedom to me when I was a kid. When school became arduous, I always reminded myself that summer would soon liberate me from all homework and responsibility. Eventually, I became old enough to work during the summer, and having a job cut my summer in half. Once I started working, I knew that summer would become shorter year after year until the season was exactly as busy as winter, fall, and spring—only hotter. I had slight reprieve from this decline when I couldn’t find a job my second summer in Philadelphia.

That summer, I was broke. I could only afford a couple of 40s and a three-for-ten nick bag from the neighborhood dealer. Many times, I went halves on the deal with my friend John. We started the day with a blunt and then rode our bikes all over town to fill out job applications. At the start of summer, we had hope, but six weeks into the season, we were still unemployed. We ended our days back at my house, where we consumed a day’s ration of weed and malt liquor. The daily job-hunting rides became a mere gesture, but right as we accepted our penniless destiny, a company called Environmental Action called both of us.

The nonprofit raised funds for environmental awareness and offered both of us job interviews. We went to their office, which looked like a campaign office. Lots of banners and charts showing how close employees were to their collective fundraising goal covered the walls. A perky blonde girl greeted us and explained how the job worked. We would go door to door in various Philly neighborhoods and ask residents to give a shit about the level of mercury in their drinking water. “Once you tell them our cause, you’ll ask if they can contribute,” she said. “Contribute to what?” I asked. “Aren’t we already spreading awareness by going to their house and telling them about the mercury?” She gave me a wide-eyed look. “The contributions help us spread even more awareness,” she said. “You want to make a difference, don’t you?” I nodded my head. She made the job sound shitty, but Environmental Action was the only employer that called us back, and we’d definitely be able to smoke weed on the job.

The blonde girl rounded us up, along with a few other applicants, and told us to stand in a circle. She stood in the center and taught us an exercise. “This is the script,” she said, gesturing toward her clipboard. “This is what you’ll say as soon as the resident opens their door, and you must stick to it. In order to make sure we all have it down, we’re going to go around the circle and each of us will read it to the person next to them.” Everyone in the circle smiled and nodded except for John. He looked at me with terror in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. He stammered, “I… I can’t… I can’t do this.”

I couldn’t figure out what bothered him. The first person started reading the script, and John muttered, “Fuck it,” and then fell silent. He sweated profusely even though the place was air-conditioned. Finally, someone passed me the script, and I read it to John. “Hello sir,” I began. “My name is T. Kid, and I’m with Environmental Action. Did you know that your drinking water could contain toxic amounts of mercury?” John stared at me as I gave him the spiel. He repeated my words in a whisper, throwing me off script. “Stop that,” I said, laughing. I got through the script and then handed it to John. He turned to the guy on the other side of him. “Hi, sir. I’m John and I’m with… with… um.” The name eluding him was, of course, Environmental Action, the company whose name was written on the page in his hand and adorned on giant banners around the room. An awkward vibe spread around the circle, and people tried not to chuckle. Finally, I whispered, “Environmental Action.” He smiled and said, “Ah, of course. Environment… um… Action.” He continued to bumble through the script. Though he glanced down at the clipboard, I could tell he recited the speech from memory. You see, John was illiterate.

As I listened to the next person read, I tried to think of another instance when John struggled to read. We regularly drank 40s, smoked blunts, watched TV, rode our bikes, and hung out in the park. None of these situations demanded reading skills, so there was no way I could have known that John lacked them. When we left the office, I asked him about his illiteracy. At first he acted a little cagey about his problem, but I promised him I wouldn’t change my opinion about him—John was a talented graffiti artist and generally a well-adjusted dude. He said that he had managed to get through high school in special classes and then only attended art school, so he never really needed to know how to read. He had some rudimentary skills, but a whole script scared him. I told him I’d help him with reading when we were on the job. He laughed and said, “Yeah, right, as if we’re getting this fucking job.”

Despite our poor showing during the circle exercise, the nonprofit hired us. On the first day, the blonde girl handed us each a clipboard, an ID badge on a lanyard, and a blue T-shirt with “Environmental Action” printed across the chest. Before she dropped us off in West Philly, she told us to stick together for the first few houses until we got the hang of it. John and I put on our T-shirts and hit the street—suddenly, I realized I’d have to confront people at their homes. The task scared me. As we approached the first house, I stopped and said, “Maybe we should duck out down that other street and smoke real quick before we do this. You know, calm the nerves.” After a quick smoke sesh, we hit the first house. An elderly woman with a buzz cut opened the door. John took the lead: “Hello, sir, my name is John and I’m with…” The name had escaped him again. (This was less a product of his illiteracy and more a side effect of being stoned on the job.) The woman adjusted her glasses and read the words on John’s chest. “Environmental Action?” she said in a meek, raspy voice. “Yes! That’s it. Environmental Action. Did you know that your water is poisoned?” I couldn’t hold in my laughter anymore. As soon as I started cracking up, the old lady shut the door on John. He turned around and then chastised me.

As we went from house to house, I realized John raised money better than me, despite his disregard for the script. For a laugh, he continued to purposely forget the name of our organization, making people relax. But we both hated the job. When the blonde girl picked us up, we shamefully handed her our lanyards. “That’s fine,” she said. “The first day usually weeds out half the people.” That made us feel better, but John still had one last question to ask her: “Do we get to keep the T-shirts?” 

Follow T. Kid on Twitter. 

This was life at the open market Feira de São Joaquim (link in Portuguese) in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. It was a chaotic market where people from the slums bought their groceries, but it no longer exists since it's now being "cleaned up" for the World Cup.

It was the largest open market in Brazil, or perhaps all of South America. Its history goes back hundreds of years, and it was originally one of the slaving capitals of the world. The vast majority of Salvador's people, who live in slums, are not allowed inside the city's new shopping malls. So this became the key place for the poorer 85 percent of the population to buy its food and other groceries. 

In 2011, I set out with another local photographer and photographed it over a period of six weeks. Two weeks after we finished, the police carried out a large raid in the market. They succeeded in capturing more than 60 drug dealers and other petty criminals, and in shutting the market down completely.

Today, the planned renovation is stalled (link in Portuguese), and the project's completion in time for the World Cup is in question. What was originally sold as a cleanup effort that would improve the quality of life for the people who do business there has instead scattered the workers and former vendors across the city.

Now, many of these people are unemployed, or struggling to scratch out a living. Those who held out hope for the reopening of the market are now faced with the stark reality that after almost three years, the "seven stage plan" for revitalization hasn't even left stage one. 

The vendors have staged protests, and was eventually permitted an audience with the local government. Officials blamed unions and planning difficulties. 

More of Lennart Maschmeyer's photos here.

When I got to Arnau and Marcel’s apartment in El Clot, Barcelona, I noticed something strange. There was an unusual silence that made me feel like I was no longer in a city. Turns out, their place is different because it has no electricity; There was a camping stove on the ceramic hob and no sign of a washing machine, refrigerator or a TV set. The only appliance in the flat was a big old radio, and that was disconnected. 

VICE: How come you don't have electricity?
Marcel: One morning, a couple of men from the electricity company came by to tell us they were going to cut it off because we hadn’t paid a year's worth of bills. We had just moved in, and had no idea about that debt – it belonged to the previous lodger. That was a hard time, we were left stranded. We tried everything we could think of to have our electrical supply restored but to no avail.

What was it that you did?
Marcel: We tried to contact the company every day, for two weeks. We wanted to complain, but were also prepared to pay whatever was necessary to get the electricity back. After getting no response, we began to think about alternative solutions to improve our day-to-day life. We started to experiment, talked to a few people and soon figured out that we could do it all by ourselves. We've really enjoyed it, too. We're definitely not engineers but we learned as we went along and by asking our grandfathers a lot of questions. It's been like this for six months.

What were the biggest changes you had to adapt to?
Arnau: Firstly, food. We can't preserve food for a long time, so we had to change our diets. For example, we hardly eat meat these days. We buy the food we are going to eat that same day. Sometimes we get free fruit at the market, if they have small imperfections.

Then it was the light. At first we used candles, but they're too expensive so we had to come up with a more ambitious system. We investigated the possibility of generating our own electricity with a solar panel but that was too expensive, too. So we built the bicycle, instead.

How did you do that?
Arnau: With the help of some YouTube tutorials, we managed to build a bike that helps us charge our mobile phones and computers. It also provides enough electricity for a lamp. Through the bike and an alternator, we transform mechanical energy into electricity, which is stored in a 12V car battery.

Marcel: We estimated that half an hour of pedaling charges the battery completely. Then we have to transform that energy from 12V to the 220 we need for lighting, charging appliances, etc. We use a power transformer.

Do you take turns pedaling?
Arnau: No, whoever feels like it, does it. And if one day there’s no battery, well, that’s it. We can always go to the library to charge our laptops. We've learned to adapt to not always having electricity and to manage consumption.

You have hot water for showers, right?
Marcel: Yes, we tried a few things that didn't work and eventually came up with a system, which consists of filling a deposit connected to the shower with hot water. Then we inject pressure with a pedal pump. It allows us to have short showers.

When I arrived, I found you melting candle residue.
Arnau: As I said before, candles are pretty expensive so we have to melt the ones that can no longer be lit, and make new ones. We have a stove we made with a beer can – it uses denatured alcohol. We melt the candle residue in a cup and make new candles using brand new wicks, which we braid so they last longer.

How do you wash your clothes?
Arnau: We go to a launderette in the neighborhood. It's nice cause that way we've met a lot of people we'd never have met otherwise.

Would you say your experience of living without electricity has been positive?
Arnau: We have decided to look at the whole thing positively. We could have just done nothing about it, but we’ve turned the tables and managed to self-manage our lives outside of society's norms. 

You never realize what certain things are worth, until you no longer have them. It’s like an awakening of consciousness; we've found that self-management is way more rewarding. Experience becomes more important. You might only own a few things, but sharing them with people helps enjoy them a lot more. This cutoff has been like a revelation to us. We definitely value the things we have more.

Marcel: It's also brought us closer to our roommates. When we had electricity, we'd spent most of the time in our rooms, minding our own business. These days when we get home, we meet at the hall and spend some time talking on the sofa. We’re more of a community now and we really like it this way.

Follow Juanjo Villalba on Twitter

Photo by Tim Freccia

By 1995 the Sudanese government could not guarantee the safety of the oil fields. Garang was going nuts, and Machar wasn’t much saner. Machar’s decision in 1991 to create his own weak Nuer faction, funded by Tiny Rowland and Khartoum, had plunged southern Sudan into chaos.

In December 1995 Machar had run out of money, supporters, and options. Khartoum had appointed Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony as the governor of Jonglei, and starvation, malaria, and violence ruled southern Sudan. NGOs called it the “Death Triangle.” So Machar fled to Ethiopia, but instead of being welcomed as a comrade, he was told to leave immediately. When he refused, he was thrown in jail.

In April 1996, spurred on by promises of support from China and desperate to increase production, Sudan signed a vaguely worded agreement called the Political Charter with Machar to end his rebels’ attacks on the oil fields. This was an historic act of conciliation, as Garang and the rebel groups had been telling the oil companies to leave for years. Their logic was simple: Money from oil bypassed the south and went directly to Khartoum, funding the capital’s war on the south.

This temporary peace deal allowed Arakis—the oil company that had taken over explorations after Chevron bailed—to solicit the investment of outside oil companies, which agreed to fund a pipeline going north to Port Sudan. They created the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, with Arakis claiming a 25 percent stake, China National Petroleum Corporation landing a 40 percent share, Malaysia’s Petronas taking 30 percent, and Sudan’s Sudapet left with only 5 percent.

After this deal, Sudan began trading cotton to China, its new oil partner, for $400 million in weapons, including Scud missiles. Eventually China flew laborers, troops, and advisers into the country to work with northern Sudanese in the southern oil areas. No southern Sudanese were employed. Human rights groups estimated that China had exported 7,000 prisoners to augment the 20,000 it had already sent there. Meanwhile, Khartoum’s funding of various splinter factions, including Machar’s, to fight one another had destroyed any sense of unity in the oil-rich Unity state.

Sudan’s strategy of “aqtul abid bil abid,” or “kill a slave with a slave,” was working. As Machar and Garang battled each other, their strength ebbed and their political aspirations devolved into intertribal murder. To intensify the chaos, Khartoum employed armies of Arab raiders called the Baggāra, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, and a long list of independent Nuer and Dinka warlords whose sole mission was to wreak havoc and push civilians out of the oil fields and into oblivion.

It wasn’t coincidental that in December 1996, amid Khartoum’s campaign of destruction and ethnic cleansing, Arakis announced that it had discovered more oil and would spend some $1 billion to exploit this find and build a pipeline to move the oil away from the south to the north’s Port Sudan.

Baggāra mercenaries in Darfur and Kordofan were then dispatched to attack, murder, and disperse the Dinka, and the remnants of Bin Laden’s largely unsuccessful mujahedeen initiative were moved into Bentiu to guard the oil fields.

Khartoum’s policy of sheltering dubious characters such as Bin Laden, Carlos the Jackal, and other international fugitives had resulted in strict sanctions from the US. On November 3, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13067, finding that “the policies and actions of the Government of Sudan, including continued support for international terrorism, ongoing efforts to destabilize neighboring governments, and the prevalence of human rights violations, including slavery and the denial of religious freedom, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

While this wouldn’t save the people of southern Sudan—who had endured another decade of starvation, displacement, and unmeasured suffering—the rebels were about to experience a change of fortune. In 1995, as the Sudanese government focused its military efforts on the oil fields, some elements of the SPLA began to capture garrisons staffed with poorly trained conscripts. By 1997 the southern insurgents had captured almost all of Bahr al Ghazal, the western part of what is now South Sudan.

These rebel factions did not include Garang and his Dinka army, however. Nor did Machar command much military power at the time. But Hasan al Turabi argued that Machar should be the rebels’ lead negotiator with the government, which instantly led to further arguments and defections from the peace process.

Many in the south viewed 1997’s Khartoum Peace Agreement as a thinly veiled surrender with no teeth and no clear path to implementation. Yet whatever its weaknesses, the accord did lay the groundwork for an independence referendum, something Khartoum had assumed would never happen.

The only major rebel leader who held out from siding with Khartoum was Garang. Despite boasting that he would take Juba, he was unable to hold any strategic towns, positions, or borders whatsoever.

Since the government had signed the accord to assure the continued production of oil, it installed Machar and the men currently under his control—the anti-SPLA South Sudan Defense Force—to provide security for the Sudanese Armed Forces in the oil fields. The flawed peace agreement also allowed the government and the Chinese to begin building the pipeline, which would syphon the south’s oil through a 957-mile conduit to Port Sudan.

John Garang celebrates the signing of the 2005 peace agreement that ended 22 years of civil war in Sudan. Photo by SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

By 1999 the pipeline began loading the oil onto tankers, generating much-needed income for Khartoum. Over the next year, the government spent more than $250 million, nearly half of its oil revenue, just to cover the costs of its army and hired militias in the field.

It was in 2000 that Machar, frustrated by the lack of any real implementation of the now three-year-old agreement, decided to abandon the support of Khartoum and create yet another rebel movement. And in an odd sense of déjà vu, he took another wife: American Becky Lynn Hagmann from Minnesota. They were married in 2000. Although not much has been reported about her, Hagmann, now in her late 50s, was like Machar’s other wives—his personal adviser.

Hagmann is a devout Christian who was formerly married to the pastor of a local church and has three children from that marriage. As Becky Machar-Teny she ran the Center for Africa, and following that she became involved in state building in Juba. Her Christian efforts included trying to set up boarding schools and other projects. After South Sudan gained its independence, she lived in a small guesthouse in Juba and helped Machar with various political projects.

His decision to split from the government also seemed to mirror his time with Emma McCune. Machar’s goal was to get a stronger grip at the never-ending peace talks, but his strategy ended up destroying southern unity and playing into the hands of Khartoum’s divide-and-conquer game. Khartoum was now able to send northern troops into the south on newly built roads leading to the oil fields. This stage of the war included attacking naked pastoralists using Arabs on horseback and bombing them using aircraft. Looting, murder, burning, rape, and kidnapping were the tools of terror.

Even though Machar had thelargest number of soldiers and was the best-known rebel leader, he was losing because the south couldn’t marshal its divided and meager resources. He fled with his commanders to Nairobi in March 2000, after a disastrous dry season in the country, and tried to persuade the US embassy to support him against Khartoum. The US turned him down, insisting that he and the government work out their differences. Although there were efforts in the US to position Garang as the next Yoweri Museveni of Uganda or Paul Kagame of Rwanda, US-imposed sanctions prevented the delivery of overt aid or support. Tiny Rowland had died in 1998, and Khartoum was essentially bankrupt; oil was pretty much the only potential source of revenue.

By 2004 more than 90 percent of Sudan’s oil was being extracted by non-Sudanese enterprises. Greater Sudan was producing 304,000 barrels a day in 2004, and 80,000 barrels of refined product. A second pipeline was built to meet increased refining capacity in Khartoum. Big oil money was predicted for Sudan.

By the early 2000s, the potential of shared oil wealth began to sink in, overshadowing the long-standing ethnic grievances. It was clear to the north and the south that this endless war would never allow Sudan or even the ethnic groups in the south to experience peace or prosperity. Human rights groups and the media also began to make it clear that something very dark and evil was happening in the oil areas of Sudan.

In January 2002 Machar and Garang put their personal vendettas aside and reconciled, merging their long-warring factions. Other rebel groups also began to see the benefit of peace rather than war.

In January 2005 Garang and Ali Osman Taha signed the Comprehensive Peace Accord. The Second Sudanese Civil War had officially ended, the terms of ceasefire agreed on after three years of negotiations. After years of failed attempts, backstabbing and infighting, and outright disaster, it seemed as though this US-backed, Bush-endorsed peace deal would stick. The treaty integrated many of the carefully crafted points made by Machar and others in the 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement, and that toothless accord suddenly had teeth. There would be a vote, and the people would decide if they would be independent or stay with Khartoum.

Garang would never live to see an independent South Sudan. On July 30, 2005, he died in a helicopter crash on a visit to meet with Museveni in Uganda. Salva Kiir, the military man and his second-in-command, would take over the role of leading the country’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka.

After Garang’s death, the ethnic dominance of the Dinka ensured that Kiir would be elected president. The Nuer, the second-largest ethnic group, were represented by Machar, who became vice president of the Government of Southern Sudan and SPLM co-chair of the Joint Executive Political Committee. The men’s public appearances may have looked pleasant and refined, but the years’ worth of bad blood between them never disappeared.

Despite Garang’s death, the peace held. The world rejoiced as a framework to create the country of South Sudan was born. The future oil revenue was carved up to compensate Khartoum and to generate funds to build the new country. A good slice of it was pledged directly to Machar’s home region.

This coming together of former ethnic opponents, not to mention the north and the south, served as proof that good intentions, money, and some diplomatic arm-twisting could bring positive change and peace to Africa. It seemed the world had finally saved South Sudan.

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Photo courtesy of SeaOrbiter/Jacques Rougerie

Since the advent of the Cold War, humanity has been turning its dream of space exploration into reality. We’ve walked on the moon, habitable space stations have been set into orbit, ambitions for Mars colonies are percolating. All this while vast, vast swaths of our own planet remain a mystery, as an estimated 95 percent of the Earth’s oceans are unexplored.

Jacques Rougerie wants to change that. The French oceanographic architect has been designing underwater habitats and nautical museums for the past three decades, but his latest project is his most ambitious yet. He’s building a massive, 550-ton semi-submersible vessel called that SeaOrbiter that by late 2017 will hopefully be roaming the waters in search of unknown species and submerged relics of lost civilizations with a crew of around 20, including Rougerie, who will live on the vessel for up to six months at a time. It’s an ambition straight out of science fiction, but so were all those space stations before they became reality. I recently went aboard Jacque’s boat in Paris, where he lives and works with his team of scientists, to discuss his project and the future of mankind.

VICE: How did the SeaOrbiter project come about?
Jacques Rougerie: For ten years, I wanted to make an underwater habitat capable of crossing oceans. It was therefore necessary to take the constraints of the aquatic world into account. In order to achieve this, I based my research on bionics, [I observed] how animals have adapted to nature. From these lifeforms, I had the basic direction lines to build an architectural object that could adapt to the underwater world. My idea was to make something similar to a seahorse, a sentinel of the oceans—which is actually SeaOrbiter’s vocation.

Do you know what sort of missions you’ll undertake once the vessel is built?
We’ve planned about ten years of expeditions. We will be based in Monaco, where we’ll launch our missions with Prince Albert II of Monaco, then we will sail on the Mediterranean Sea for a year. After that, we’re scheduled to sail on the Atlantic Ocean for eight years—one will be dedicated to a mission in the Sargasso Sea alongside marine biologist Sylvia Earle. Before SeaOrbiter, there was no machine that could allow humans to live under the sea for such long periods. But with this vessel, we will be able to explore abyssal plains [on the ocean floor], to discover underwater mountains, and study unknown animal species—in the Gulf Stream, for example. This project is pretty similar to the Radeau des Cimes project [a “canopy raft” that is attached to a hot air balloon to hover over the trees] that was designed in 1986 to explore the rainforest canopy of the Amazon. That’s exactly what we’re planning to do: Observe the canopy of underwater worlds. I had to imagine a next-generation machine that could allow us to live under the sea without danger.

I read that you were part of an underwater-living experiement that lasted 69 days.
Yes, this was in Florida, in June 1992. I was with aquanauts Rick Presley and Bill Todd from NASA, who are both underwater habitats specialists. Since theApollo lunar program, astronauts have been training under the sea. There are many similarities between these two worlds, where one has to live in extreme conditions. On our planet, nothing is closer to the weightlessness feeling than diving in a marine environment.

Why do you think underwater exploration gets less attention than space travel?
The underwater world has fascinated men for centuries, but they are distressed by the sea, which has engulfed sailors, captains, and entire cities. During the space race, [Jacques] Cousteau was conceiving his first houses underwater, because current technology was finally allowing him to do so. At that time, we realized that the ocean wasn’t as gruesome and bleak as we thought it would be. It’s a place of wonder made of coral galaxies and treasures that could benefit mankind—renewable energies, bacteria, and viruses that could be used to produce drug molecules or the food of the future. It’s pretty tricky to ask ourselves why it took us so much time. In 50 years, we’ve seen more technological advances that there has been since the dawn of man, and I can only be hopeful about the decades to come.

Screenshot via YouTube.
A new type of conditional permanent residency is making it easier for abusive spouses to get away with what they do. At the end of 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada introduced a new requirement for immigrants who are sponsored to come to Canada by a spouse who’s already here—they must live with their sponsor for two years or lose their permanent residency.

“Since this legislation has come to pass, and it seems to be a progressive trend, the abuse of immigrant women appears to be more flagrant… I’m having women whose abusers are photographing them or taking videos and distributing these sexual images of them. They’re getting more open about their abuse, because they know they can get away with it,” said Claire Tremblay, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Ottawa.

Tremblay alone sees about two women a week who choose to stay in an abusive relationship because they’re scared they’ll be deported if they leave. And that’s just one lawyer in one office in one city. The threat of deportation has become a very helpful tool for men who beat, rape, or neglect their partners. This law is now part of an “arsenal of abuse” men use to control their wives, Tremblay said. “A certain percentage of sick individuals know that they can get away with it. And they are getting away with it.”

The two-year condition appears to have made a terrible situation worse. The wait period added yet another layer of imbalance to the already imbalanced dynamic of sponsored immigration. Women often feel they owe something to their sponsors in return for the chance to come to Canada. And thanks to this law, they now legally do.

“It needs to be remembered just how vulnerable these women are,” Tremblay said. “They often don’t speak the language, they may or may not have family here or an independent source of income, they don’t know what their legal rights are. That means their abuser is culturally, linguistically, their only link to Canada often.”

Last month, Kamal Dhillon asked a House of Commons committee to repeal the condition. She’s the author of Black and Blue Sari, a memoir of her 12 torturous years married to a brutally abusive husband. He started planning her funeral and told their children he’d get them a new mother. Dhillon came to Canada in the mid-1970s before she was even married, but that doesn’t mean her husband didn’t use her status in Canada as a threat. 



Kamal Dhillon has an "artificial jaw" following years of abuse. Screencap via Black and Blue Sari.
“Even though he didn’t sponsor me, he would ask me how I got into the country so he could figure out how to send me back,” she said. “When you are so traumatized by him, you start to think Can he? It’s a fear that they instill in you.”

“I really believe that it should be lifted,” Dhillon said of the two-year requirement. “Even before they get here there’s almost a fence of fear, you’re going into a contract really. And if you don’t live by the rules and regulations—you’re out.”

Women’s groups warned Jason Kenney, then the minister of immigration, that this would happen when the law was first proposed. So he added an exception clause—partners being abused don’t need to fulfill the two-year period. All they have to do is call the government hotline, which is only available in English and French. Then they have 30 days to provide an immigration officer with third-party evidence proving that they lived with their spouse, that he became abusive, and that they left him after the abuse began. If they can’t, they get deported. Citizenship and Immigration Canada did not respond to a request for comment.

"Women have to put a lot of time and effort into collecting evidence and structuring it in a way an immigration officer will understand," said Deepa Mattoo, the acting executive director of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario. “The burden of proof should be on abusers to prove that they didn’t do anything, but that doesn’t happen."

The pressure of dealing with police, immigration officers, judges, and lawyers is often too much for women who just came to Canada and may not speak the language.

“The consequences of remaining in the relationship, while damaging, of course, are less damaging than the consequences of not remaining in the abusive relationship, which can be homelessness and deportation,” Tremblay said. Even if a woman finds the courage to speak up, she may not be able to provide the proof in time. Tremblay, Mattoo, and Dhillon all said abusers in this situation have a habit of hiding their wife’s passport and visa, or destroying both when she threatens to talk.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada paired this new law with new funding cuts to the settlement agencies that help women navigate the system. Every year since 2010, settlement agencies have seen funding cuts, said Mattoo. And the same year the two-year regulation was put in place, 15 immigration agencies were defunded completely.

This makes it even harder for victims of abuse to get the support they need. Even when women do call the police, they’re not guaranteed any help. Tremblay said she has clients who’ve called the police, but couldn’t speak English well enough to explain exactly what happened. So their husbands just talked the cops out of laying any charges.

“When a victim comes and tells somebody that he beat or he slapped [them], we think, Oh, OK. It happened today, you’ll live. People don’t realize the consequences of that action,” said Dhillon. “My husband used to slap me on my face repeatedly, and because of his slaps I’m going through surgery after surgery. I have an artificial jaw. I will never be pain free or stop having surgeries. These are the consequences of one man’s actions.”

“And I am not just an isolated case,” she added. “There are many, many women like me who have lost their voice.”

@waitwhichemma

To get your university art project featured on Time, the Huffington Post, the Independent, the Mirror, the Telegraph, and Die Welt in the same week isn't an easy feat. It takes talent, dedication, good connections, and, occasionally, boiling and eating a chunk of your own body.

That's the path taken by 25-year-old Norwegian Alexander Selvik Wengshoel. Wengshoel was born with a deformed hip and has spent most of his life in pain, enduring years in a wheelchair, hours of morphine treatment, and countless surgeries. Four years ago he was offered a metal hip replacement, which he accepted on the grounds that his doctors let him film the operation and keep the old hip. When he got home he cooked the flesh and ate it with some potato gratin and a glass of wine, all in the name of art.

I met up with him to find out why.

VICE: Your piece The Body Project has garnered a lot of media attention. When did you decide to turn your body into art?
Alexander Wengshoel: Back in 2010, I was studying animation. My tutor showed me the bloody art of Hermann Nitsch, and I was truly mesmerized and very inspired. Plus, I find blood fascinating. Then suddenly I got word that my final hip operation was going to take place—the surgery promised to make my life pain-free and livable. My tutor said that the story was too strong not to be documented and used. So I got the idea of filming it and taking the replaced hip bone home with me.

Alexander's new metal hip

How did you convince the hospital to let you film the surgery and take the hip home?
I called the hospital, and they immediately said no to filming. I kept on calling, though, several times a day, until they put me through to my main surgeon. He also turned me down at first, but after I told him my nightmare story and presented my project, he said, “Hell yes.” Luckily he is very interested in art and loved the idea.

Then there was the question of the hip bone. Usually they crush it to powder and use it for medical molding materials. Keeping my hip was also totally out of the question. But I gave them an ultimatum: Either I keep it, or I go to another hospital. We argued until the surgeon finally was sick of the bitching nurses and let me have it my way.

Tell me about the big day.
It was March 18, 2010. I lay on a hospital bed, and people pushed me through long corridors toward a life with my new pain-free hip. I clenched my tripod and video camera between my legs. When we arrived at the operating theater, the medical staff started asking questions, but my surgeon told them to do exactly as I said. In the end, the anesthesiologist offered to hold the camera. Then he injected me with the greatest drug of all time. I was in paradise and started laughing my ass off, but then they injected me with something else and started dismantling my hip.

What happened when you woke up?
I tried to strangle my doctor. Five staff members jumped me, and I got another dose of something strong. The next time I opened my eyes, I saw my then girlfriend. I turned around in bed and rested my eyes on a bloody hip bone. It was vacuum-packed in a plastic bag, and a good-luck note from my surgeon was attached to it.

Taking a piece of yourself home in a plastic bag is one thing. But how did you end up eating your own tissue?
Originally my meat wasn’t part of the project. I was just going to scrape it off and throw it away. As I gave the bone its first boil, in a little kettle, the flesh came off and I poured it into the wash sink. Then the shock hit me—I thought, Oh my god, this is my flesh.

I quickly concluded that it was too personal to photograph and picked up a piece. I stared at it for a long time and then said, "Fuck it." I put it into my mouth, tasted, chewed, swallowed, and got to crying uncontrollably. It was happiness, anger, and frustration combined.

Alexander never wants to throw away his old hip bone. Here it sits among medical paraphernalia that he's collected over the years.

Did you throw up?
No, after a couple of minutes of crying, it suddenly felt very natural, and I didn’t think of it as human flesh anymore. So I continued boiling and scraping, then pulled out some chili and garlic and fried it in a pan. Salt and pepper were mandatory, and so was a good bottle of wine. Then I lit some candles and also whipped up some potato gratin. I sat down and ate it all—it became a ceremony, a ritual.

How was it defecating yourself?
Haha, I just went. There was nothing special about it, and it looked the same as always. I could have made a clone I guess, but nope.

What are your views on cannibalism?
I don’t see it that way. Cannibalism is mostly based on the idea of killing another person and eating them—often raw. I like to compare my act to eating your placenta after giving birth. It's part of your body. You can call it cannibalism if you want, but I won’t.

This year you exhibited your final project at your graduation show. The installation is made of three parts: the surgery video, a table of your long medical history, and a suspension rig. Can you tell me about that other stuff?
Most of the things and medicine you see on the table is from when I died in Thailand.

You died?
Last year I was riding a motorcycle in Koh Phangan without a helmet, very drunk and high. I hit a huge SUV and got pretty destroyed. Glass fragments penetrated my neck three millimeters away from my main artery. My head cracked open, but my cranium was intact. My shoulder was dislocated, my elbow and my fingers crushed. I was gone. I woke up five days later with metal plates and screws everywhere. Luckily, I had good insurance and ended up at a private hospital.

Alexander has been doing suspension for two years and has joined a community of Berlin-based body artists. This is part of his graduation show.

How do people react to your eating yourself?  
The support I'm getting from all over the world has been incredible. People are curious, and many are disgusted. But I feel they misunderstand my project. I did not do it for attention. This is my story, and I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. My life is great.

My goal is to get the audience reflecting. Life is short and people have the habit of running away from pain. One paper cut, and they pop pills. Pain is not physical—it's an idea, which you can learn how to handle. It doesn’t need to be a negative thing. All I want is for the audience to think about what life is, and what your body means to you.

Has anyone else done something like this before?
No, and I want to change the art scene. Literally inject new blood into it. At the moment everything is so highbrow, theoretical, and philosophical. I want people to feel.

What's your next project?
I'll continue this project but contextualize it more through words. Next year, I'm planning on moving to Italy to set up a body-art gallery. After that, I don't know. My tattoos are also a part of The Body Project. I'm covering my whole body with ink, and when I die I won't be cremated—I want my skin to be flayed, salted, and stretched out like a canvas. My flesh is going to be pumped with a special silicone, which will turn me into a sort of sculpture. The hipbone in one hand and my trousers opened up so that the hip is exposed. It will be my last piece.

Who would do that for you?
I'm in talks with some people in Germany and Poland. It's extremely expensive, but, fuck it—I'm going to sacrifice my whole life to art. All I got is my body and my stories.

Our Italian office went for a stroll around Rome's Wax Museum recently and sent me back a bunch of snaps. I thought I'd pay it forward by translating their post for you guys, but quickly realized I had no idea who the weird waxy figurines in the pictures were supposed to represent.

I figured the best way to identify the wax statues was to run the images through one of those celebrity lookalike websites, but unfortunately the technology isn’t quite as advanced as I’d expected.

Can you guess which celebrity these shitty wax statues look like?

What celebrity does Cleopatra look like? 

a) Alicia Keys

b) Molly Sims

c) Newton Faulkner

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Michael Jackson look like?

a) Liza Minnelli

b) Lorde

c) Nick Cannon

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Nelson Mandela look like? 

a) Mary J. Blige

b) Freddie Prinze Jr.

c) Morgan Freeman

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does the Prince from Sleeping Beauty look like?

a) Rob Lowe

b) Gary Barlow

c) Chingy

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Brad Pitt look like?

a) Jennifer Aniston

b) Snoop Dog

c) Matthew Perry

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Barrack Obama look like?

a) Kramer

b) Whoopi Goldberg

c) Andrew Keegan

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Pope Benedict XVI look like? 

a) Steve Martin

b) Tom Hanks

c) Some other Pope.

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Vladimir Putin look like?

a) Christian Bale

b) Ed Harris

c) Vladimir Putin

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Albert Einstein look like?

a) Courtney Love

b) Alanis Morissette

c) Russell Brand

And the correct answer is:

What celebrity does Hitler look like?

a) Charlie Chaplin

b) Kenneth Branagh

c) Hugh Jackman

And the correct answer is:

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Qusai on the streets of Moadamiya, which has been attacked nearly daily by the regime by shelling and aircraft bombings

Twenty seven-year-old Qusai Zakarya woke up at about 4:30 AM on Aug. 21, 2013. He rolled out his prayer rug inside his family’s two-bedroom apartment in the small town of Moadamiya, Syria, and started his morning prayers.

Alarms coming from nearby Damascus interrupted his daily ritual. Two years into the revolution, Qusai was used to the near constant shelling and bombings, but something was different this summer morning. The alarms were the kind “you usually hear in movies about World War II when there is a big air raid,” he told me.

“Within seconds, I started hearing rockets flying into the ground,” Qusai recounted. They hit the rebel-held town about 500 feet away from him.

“Before I realized what was going on, I lost my ability to breathe. I felt like my chest was set on fire. My eyes were burning like hell and I wasn’t even able to scream to alert my friends,” he said. “So I started beating my chest over and over until I managed to get my first breath.”

As Qusai recovered inside his home, he heard people screaming on the streets. A neighbor pounded on his door and asked for help. Her two kids were suffocating and vomiting “weird white stuff,” Qusai said.

They rushed onto the street to seek help and found a “terrifying” scene. Men, women, children, elderly people were “running and falling on the ground, suffocating, without seeing a single drop of blood or knowing what was really going on,” Qusai told me.

Qusai spotted a 13-year-old boy left all alone, suffocating and vomiting. Qusai ran to him and gave him CPR. “He had big wide blue eyes and he was almost staring into another dimension. He was suffocating and he seemed to me very innocent to die this way or any other way,” Qusai said.

A friend in the Free Syrian Army brought his car to transport wounded to the local field hospital—a poorly equipped center with eight doctors for the town’s nearly 14,000 people. They packed the car with six children and three women. Qusai and the wide-eyed 13-year-old boy sat in the trunk together on the way to the hospital.

Hundreds of people, all exposed to the chemicals, had already arrived seeking help. More than 550 people in Moadamiya were exposed that day, according to Qusai.

Courtesy of the White House

Placed Amongst the Dead

As Qusai started to get out of the vehicle, he felt himself fading away. He fell to the ground and lost consciousness. Then, his heart stopped.

Qusai later learned that his friends took his body inside the hospital. Doctors gave him CPR but couldn’t bring him back to life. They put his body in a pile of other Syrians killed by the attack.

That could have been the end for Qusai. Fortunately, 45 minutes later, a friend saw his body. Crying, the friend came over and started shaking his limp corpse. Qusai made slight movements. So doctors worked to revive Qusai, giving him extra shots of atropine. They washed his body with cold water repeatedly, trying to cleanse him of the chemicals. Half an hour later, Qusai woke up.

“I was standing in the street near the field hospital wearing nothing but my underwear. I was almost freezing because my body was covered with water. I was trying to understand what was going on, because everything was going in slow motion for me,” Qusai said.

Syrian President Bashir al Assad’s military forces were taking advantage of the panic. They attacked the town on the ground with special forces, all wearing full chemical protective gear. Artillery units fired on the town. In the air, regime jets dropped bombs onto the town. “The earth was literally shaking under my feet when I woke up,” Qusai said. “They used unbelievable amount of power.”

The chemical weapons attack was part of a concerted effort to take the town back from the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Located less than 10 miles from downtown Damascus, rebel-held Moadamiya is a key strategic gateway on the southwest of the capital. It’s also positioned near important military assets—the barracks for the Presidential Guard, the al Mazzeh Military Airport, the Air Force Intelligence Directorate headquarters, and the main base for the 4th Armored Division, headed by Bashar al Assad’s brother Maher.

Despite their best efforts, the regime failed to take back the town from rebel control that day.

Eighty five people in Moadamiya died after being exposed to the Sarin gas. Another 50 people were killed by the subsequent artillery shelling, bombardment, and ground offensive, according to Qusai. 

“There are no words to describe the horror of that day,” Qusai said. 

Photo courtesy of Qusai Zakarya.

The World Turns Its Attention to Syria

The regime’s Sarin gas-filled bombs infected thousands and killed an estimated 1,400 Syrians throughout Damascus that day.

Graphic images of piles of Syria children killed by the chemical weapons quickly dominated the news. This wasn’t the first chemical weapons attack but the visuals and massive numbers set off international demands for retribution.   

In Washington, President Barack Obama threatened Syria with a military strike. A few months prior, the White House had concluded that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons to kill 100-150 Syrians in multiple previous attacks.

“The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons—or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups—is a red line for the United States, as there has long been an established norm within the international community against the use of chemical weapons,” the White House announced on June 13, 2013.

Syrians celebrated, thinking that even with the horrors of the chemical attacks, the West would finally take down Assad.

I was in Turkey when the chemical weapons fell on Moadamiya. Via Skype, I talked to Syrians in Damascus who survived the chemical weapons attack. The following day, I walked the short distance across the border into Syria and met refugees fleeing the country. They feared future chemical weapons attacks and demanded American action.

Meanwhile, United Nations weapons inspectors came to Moadamiya to examine the patients and gather evidence. Qusai escorted them to the hospital, translating and explaining what happened. Assad’s soldiers shot at the UN vehicles and bombed the town yet they still examined the survivors, took blood and tissue samples, and looked at the remnants of the rockets.

The evidence was clear. But polls showed that 75 percent of Americans opposed a military attack against Syria. Obama changed course. “I’m ready to act in the face of this outrage,” he announced on Aug. 31, 2013, just ten days after the attack. Obama acted by deferring to Congress to make the decision.

With the British parliament rejecting a motion to join the United States in a military strike against Syria, Congress looked ready to vote against American action. They weren’t interested in getting involved in another faraway conflict—even though more than 100,000 Syrians had been killed at that point. (Since then, the death toll has risen to 150,000.)

Obama asked Congress to delay a vote. Instead, Syria’s ally Russia brokered a deal for international monitors to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and production sites.

I could feel the anger and disappointment building in Syrians. They had believed in Obama and felt betrayed. The “red line” had been crossed back in June. Just another broken American promise.   

“It was absolutely disgusting for me,” Qusai said. “I was feeling angry and disappointed, as well, from the entire world because we were asking everybody to help, and no one stepped in. Nobody did anything, after the chemical attack.”

“Kneel or Starve,” written on a wall in Moadamiya by regime soldiers

Kneel or Starve

The regime had another tactic in its arsenal: starvation.

Because of the rebel resistance, the regime shut off Moadamiya from the world, besieging it since early November 2012. The military forces shut off all the basic supplies of life: power, water, gas, and food. “Everything was forbidden,” Qusai said, in an effort to displace people and disrupt the rebellion. 

No one is permitted to leave or enter the city, not even humanitarian aid workers. People attempting to leave get shot at by regime snipers. Qusai said he helped bury “a lot” of civilians who tried to flee.

Abdul Hamah, 42, tried to sneak out of Moadamiya in January 2013 to get medicine for his 7-year-old daughter. The regime caught him, tortured him to death and dumped his body on a nearby road, according to Qusai. The soldiers attached a note to his body that stated: “This is what's going to happen to anybody who's going to try to come in or out from Moadamiya. It's either Assad or we're going to burn the country.”

Previous food stockpiles of rice, sugar and noodles started to run out after about seven months, just before the chemical weapons attacks. “We had nothing to survive on,” he said. During the siege, Qusai lost 30 pounds. (He has since recovered mostly, weighing in at about 165 pounds now.)

People in Moadamiya turned to their olive trees, which are hundreds of years old. They subsisted on these olives and tree leaves to make “something like a salad or a soup – anything that can keep us going,” according to Qusai. It was clearly not enough.

“People were literally becoming like ghosts,” Qusai said. “Their faces are pale, their voices have become weaker. You can look at people’s eyes and see how tired they are and how desperate they are as well.”

The town’s doctors gave vitamins to malnourished patients but their supply was limited and insufficient to treat the widespread problem. Within a few months, a total of 12 people died from starvation—seven children, three women and two elderly people.

Regime forces had written “Kneel or Starve” on building walls in Moadamiya. “It’s an organized policy. It’s a weapon of war, starving people to death,” Qusai said. 

A child in Moadamiya who didn’t survive the regime's starvation campaign

Life under Siege 

All public services in Moadamiya were halted, including schools, but doctors ran a field hospital out of a 900-square feet basement with 10 beds for 30,000 people.The town’s three previous hospitals were destroyed by regime military attacks. (Mosques and schools were also destroyed.)After the siege began, only five doctors and three medical school students remained.

More than 400 people in Moadamiya died due to lack of medical care, according to Qusai. “The doctors were almost helpless,” Qusai said, while crediting them for doing the best they could, like “performing heart operations with flashlight or sometimes with candles.”

Regime jets bombed the town on a nearly daily basis. Helicopters indiscriminately dropped barrel bombs (filled with explosives, nails, and other materials), falling wherever the wind took them. Syrian military troops on the ground fired artillery shells at Moadamiya every day. When I talked to Qusai and other activists in the town over Skype, I could hear shelling in the background.

Qusai claims more than 600 people were killed and 900 were injured in these attacks. Most of the victims were women and children.

Locals, including Qusai, formed a relief committee to supply people with food and help with other needs. The committee gathered food stocks and kept it in a storage area, distributing it those who need it most (mostly families with women and children).

At the same time, Qusai and others besieged the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organizations for humanitarian aid. “But nobody was able to do anything or nobody did anything, because I know if there’s a will there’s a way, but nobody had a will to help us,” Qusai told me.

The UN tried to bring in food but the Assad forces stopped them from entering the town.

Life under the siege was “unbearable,” Qusai said. He tried to explain it to me: “Imagine yourself waking up one day and knowing that you don’t have any food in your house and when you want to go and get some food, you’ll just see soldiers shooting at you, you’ll see bombs and aircrafts falling on your neighborhood and on your street.”

“When you come back home, you’ll see your family, your children, your sister and wife starving, they’re literally starving to death, they’re hungry and you cannot do anything to help them. Imagine how frustrating and heartbreaking that will be,” he said. “I really hope that nobody [has to] live in a similar situation.”

Qusai points out that millions of Syrians across the country are also without education, medical care, and safety. 

Syrians flee Moadamiya once the regime temporarily breaks the siege and allows people to leave the town.

Civilians Permitted to Leave Moadamiya

With his excellent English skills and internet access, Qusai became a spokesman for the town, speaking regularly to international media hoping for an intervention. I first spoke with Qusai in October 2013 and wrote one of the first pieces about the blockade on Moadamiya for VICE. Three days later, the State Department took notice and called on the regime to allow for humanitarian access.

The regime finally agreed to allow civilians to leave the town. About 4,500 people—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were taken outside Moadamiya by bus to the nearby al Mazzeh Military Airport. 

As they arrived, however, most of them were arrested or executed, according to Qusai. Women were raped. Families were robbed. “Even some small kids died under torture,” he said. Hundreds are still missing.

On a wall in Moadamiya: “Where is the [regime] security service to challange us? This is Moadamiya and God is with us.”

Trading People for Food

The remaining thousands of people in Moadamiya still had no food or access to humanitarian aid. The regime offered to provide food only if the rebels surrendered. That wasn’t an option for the people of Moadamiya.

Though he was already starving, Qusai started a hunger strike on Nov. 26, 2013. The peace activist blogged about the non-violent action daily and called on people outside Syria to join him.

Activists, human rights defenders, congressmen, academics, and thousands of Americans supported his effort by joining together in an International Solidarity Hunger Strike started Dec. 20, 2013. More than 30 towns in Syria faced similar blockades, affecting more than a million people. They continued until Jan. 22, 2014, when the peace talks between the Syrian government and the rebels began in Geneva.

Qusai didn’t eat for 33 days, stopping his hunger strike on Dec. 28, 2013, due to “health issues.”

Two days prior, the Moadamiya local council, run by the opposition, had signed a truce with the Syrian government.

Looing back, Qusai told me wasn’t happy with the results of his hunger strike because the international pressure didn’t force the regime to end the siege.

Instead, the town accepted piecemeal deals from the regime in exchange for food.

When the locals raised the Syrian government flag on the highest landmark in town, the military sent the first shipment of food in 15 months. “It was less than a meal per person—400 grams [less than a pound], maximum. Rice and sugar. One and a half pieces of bread,” Qusai told reporter Michael Weiss.

Then the rebels traded a captured armored truck. More food came.

The Fourth Division soldiers then asked to interrogate specific rebel soldiers in Moadamiya. They said they “just wanted to have a talk with these people,” according to Qusai. About 100 young men in low-level roles surrendered themselves. Some volunteered to turn themselves over. More food arrived. 

Heavy and light weapons were also swapped out for more food shipments. “We gave them 20 AK-47s, most of them not even functioning well. Another shipment came,” Qusai explained.

Now, the town council raises money from its residents to pay the regime exorbitant amounts for minimal food to keep everyone alive. The siege continues.

A Great Escape

After the truce was signed, more than 7,000 people had returned to the town, including government spies. “I stopped feeling secure after the truce, the town was open and I felt they could get me any second,” he explained.

His fear was justified. The regime had noticed Qusai. “If you want the truce to go smoothly, shut up Qusai—for good,” said Ghassan Bilal, the chief of staff of the 4^th Armored Division in January 2014. Bilal supposedly to co-opt Qusai.

Two weeks later, the mukhabarat got in touch with Qusai. Guaranteeing his safety, they offered to escort him to the nearby 4th Armored Division headquarters in Damascus to meet with Bilal.

The regime had “demanded that certain activists in Moadamiya leave as a condition of the truce,” according to a Feb. 3, 2014, post on his Facebook page. Qusai initially opposed the truce and still advocated for a complete end to the siege. In part, he eventually agreed to meet with Bilal “due to increasing pressure from residents who want the food shipments.”

Under pressure from the locals, Qusai agreed to talk. Soldiers took him to the Dama Rose Hotel in Damascus, where he stayed for four days. It was his first time leaving Moadamiya since the siege began 15 months prior.   

Over the course of several days, Bilal tried to convince Qusai to work with the regime by telling international media that conditions had improved in Moadamiya and throughout Syria. Qusai told the military commander he needed time to think about it.

While Bilal leveled with Qusai, the secret police came to Qusai’s hotel to arrest him. While they were kicking and punching him, Bilal’s soldiers appeared just in time to stop them.. Qusai thinks it was an elaborate ruse—an attempt to make Qusai trust Bilal.

Really, Qusai had no choice. Refusing would likely have meant being indefinitely imprisoned, tortured, or killed. So Qusai lied and told Bilal he would tell international media that all was well in Syria. 

Qusai convinced Bilal that reporters wouldn’t believe him while on regime territory, and that he needed to go to Lebanon.

Bilal “was stupid enough to believe me,” Qusaid said. He was escorted to the border and used a fake passport with a photo that didn’t even look like him to get into Lebanon.

Sure, he was free but still feared attacks from Syrian agents. Qusai spent every moment with foreign reporters. “Even in Lebanon, I knew that there was somebody watching some way or somehow,” he told me.

Both the Syrian regime and the Russian government tapped his cellphone. “Sometimes I heard people opening the lines and talking in Russian and other times I heard the answering machine of Syria Tel network,” he said.

Working with American activists, Qusai secured a tourist visa to the United States

To get out of Lebanon, he first had to get past agents of the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah in the Beirut airport. “I really felt like Ben Affleck in [the movie] Argo,” he said. Only once the plane was airborne did Qusai feel truly safe. 

He arrived in Washington, D.C., on March 10 on a tourist visa and is applying for asylum.

Qusai speaks out once outside of the Middle East. He’s been on a speaking tour ever since.

The Consequences of Obama’s Betrayal

Ultimately, Qusai blames President Barack Obama.

Since he arrived in the United States, Qusai has been on a speaking tour across the country, mostly at universities. He meets with American policymakers in D.C., including senators and representatives. He talks to journalists and uses social media to explain the situation in Syria. He’s writing his autobiography. “I am doing my very best to raise awareness,” he said. His goal is to get people to support the Syrian revolution.

I met Qusai in New Haven, Connecticut. He’d come to speak to a group of law students at Yale University. We’d talked by phone for hours already but I wanted to meet him in person. As I listened to him tell his story in a classroom, I realized his description of what happened to him was nearly identical to what he told me. He used the same powerful phrases and expressions to explain it. It was like a politician’s stump speech.

“How do you feel telling the same story again and again?” I asked him after his presentation.

“I feel noxious sometimes,” he told me, “because I’m telling the story over and over, almost every day with media or during the events and it’s just so disgusting and pathetic that all of that happened and it wasn’t enough to have the international community and the United States, President Obama doing anything against the Assad regime, to show any kind of consequences for the chemical massacre at least.”

Among others, Qusai has met with the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, the U.S. National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, and other directors at the National Security Council at the White House. Additionally, Qusai conducted a briefing for 20 officers and officials from the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense. Qusai has also met with senior aides on the Republican and Democratic staffs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Everywhere he goes, American officials say they want to do more for Syria but say they’re stopped by the White House.

“There’s a lot of pissed government and high government officials” about Obama’s inaction, Qusai said.   

Qusai speaks to a group of law students at Yale Law School in Connecticut. Photo by Zack Baddorf.

UN Ambassador Samantha Power Wants to Do More

In an hour-long, one-on-one talk at the United Nations, U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power compared the situation in Syria with what she witnessed in Bosnia as a war correspondent. In her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Power argues the U.S. could have saved tens of thousands of lives in Bosnia and Rwanda. During her conversation with Qusai, Power hinted at how more lives could be saved if the United States did more in Syria, too.

“In her writing and thinking, Ms Power often divides US officials into those who pressed for action [on past wars] and those who found reasons not to get involved. As a member of the president's cabinet and America's representative to the United Nations, she may well have to decide into which category she falls,” journalist Raf Sanchez wrote in The Telegraph last year. 

Power can’t speak out directly or publicly against America’s foreign policy but some Syrian activists told me she should take a moral stand by resigning in protest of American inaction and work outside of the government to save Syrian lives. Career diplomat Fred Hof, for example, resigned from his role as the lead diplomat tasked with leading negotiations to end the Syrian conflict and has since been a strong advocate of engagement in Syria.

A few weeks after they spoke privately, Power invited Qusai to attend a May 22 meeting of the UN Security Council. The council voted on a resolution to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court. After China and Russia predictably vetoed the resolution, Power asked Qusai to stand in the audience as she told his story. “The Syrian people will not see justice today. They will see crime, not punishment,” she said.

“Am​bassador​ ​Power was the first person who had the ​courage to open and read one of ​those messages from the Syrian people,” Qusai wrote on his blog.

Qusai said Obama has made “a big mistake” in not responding and should “stop trying to reason a lunatic”—Bashar al Assad. “This is a very bad message that he’s giving right now to all the lunatics for power, like North Korea, or Iran,” he said, comparing Obama to a child closing his eyes and hoping bad things will go away.

This inaction has “terrified a lot of people even inside of US government,” Qusai said. He didn’t want to name “high profile people” who criticized Obama’s foreign policy because they spoke to him in confidence.

Qusai advocates for a no-fly zone to stop the Assad regime from bombing civilians. This would negate the need for providing anti-aircraft missiles that could fall into Islamist hands. Qusai also wants more anti-tank weapons for the rebel, saying that could change the course of the war. Many of the American officials he met want these things, too.

“Unfortunately, dictators only understand the language of power,” Qusai told me.

Qusai believes it could also make the regime take negotiations seriously and start handing over power. During the Geneva talks, the regime tripled the number of barrel bomb attacks on Aleppo. People on the ground referred to them as “Geneva Barrels.” The continued killing of civilians “showed the world once again that the regime is not interested in having any political settlement in Syria,” Qusai said.

With limited weapons and funds coming in from the United States, Syrians are turning to unwelcome terrorist groups like the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. These Islamists “are getting stronger on a daily basis,” according to Qusai, by gaining sanctuaries and invaluable battlefield experience in their attacks against moderate rebel groups and regime forces. “You can’t buy experience,” Qusai said.

Getting Iran or Russia to stop supplying weapons to Assad’s military could also change the balance of power, he said. 

Qusai predicts a bleak future for Syria if Assad remains in power. “We will only see more suffering and more misery coming to the Syrian people,” he said. But with new political leadership, Qusai said “it will be the first and true chance of peace in the Middle East.”

A child in Moadamiya

Support for Syria

Kenan Rahmani, the director of operations at Syrian American Council, has been traveling with Qusai across the U.S. since March and sees Qusai as an inspiration for activists like him. “He seems to be very, very hopeful,” the law student told me.

“He is always believing strongly that Syria is going to be free, going to be the Syria we dream of, even if it takes 20 years, but eventually we’ll all go back to Syria and live in a democratic Syria that we dream of,” said Rahmani, a Syrian-American whose grandfather was jailed and tortured in Syria by Hafez al Assad.

Qusai is always thinking of new ideas to get people thinking about Syria, according to Rahmani. For example, Qusai is working on a letter writing campaign directed at the White House to ask for President Obama to “stop the genocide in Syria and help the Syrian people to win their freedom.”

Qusai will be speaking on June 5 at a United Nations panel on the Syrian regime’s use of starvation as a weapon. Today, across the street from the UN headquarters in New York, he and other supporters will read out the names of 100,000 Syrians killed since the revolution began. People in Syria, Turkey, and Paris will also read the same names.

Qusai is also participating in the Blood Elections campaign. Activists reject the presidential elections scheduled for Tuesday while the regime continues its “shelling and killing [of] civilians.”

When people ask Qusai what they can do to help, he tells them to raise awareness of what’s actually happening in Syria, especially through social media. He tells people to talk to their Congressional representatives. He also asks that they donate to non-profit organizations supporting people in Syria.

Moadamiya Siege Continues  

The checkpoints, the troops, the snipers, the tanks, still surround Moadamiya. Now some people in Moadamiya are providing aid to civilians in Darayya, a neighboring town also under siege. The bombs continue to fall from the sky, tumbling from the backs of helicopters, in an effort to deter support for other Syrians in need.                                 

More than 150,000 people have died since the conflict began in March 2011. “It’s just like you’re sitting there and waiting the next day and who’s going to die next,” Qusai told me. “I lost most of my childhood friends, friends from high school, from junior school.”

Nearly three million Syrians have fled the country. Another 6.5 million are displaced within Syria. Thousands have been tortured. The regime has used chemical and conventional weapons against civilian populations. While chemical weapons are being dismantled, regime aircraft are dropping chlorine-filled barrel bombs on rebel-held areas.

To get some perspective on these numbers, I stopped by Arlington National Cemetery on a recent trip to DC. More than 300,000 Americans are buried in those fields. I walked through the gravestones for about 15 minutes and found a spot in the shade to work on this piece. It’s hard to imagine all the careless loss of life that’s taken place on the other side of the world and the loss that continues today.

Looking at the “normal lives” of people here in the United States, Qusai said, “it just doesn’t seem right to me to see all of going on in the world and people are just moving on with their lives, like nothing is going on somewhere else.”

People in the United States are “blessed” to have power, food, and safety, Qusai said. “They take it for granted. They don’t hug their family and friends tight like we do, because they don’t feel that this might be the last time they might see them,” he continued. “They don’t understand. They just don’t.”

“But this is going to change. I will speak, scream, and write, until they start listening, until they understand,” Qusai said.

Follow Zack Baddorf on Twitter.

Illustration by Molly Crabapple

Donald Trump's hair should not be.

It sits on his head like a soufflé, both airy and solid, as improbable as any building to which he’s given his name. In Dubai, I get to inspect Trump from all angles. His hair is otherworldly, but his face is more easily dissected. It’s tangerine, save two pale circles around his eyes.

Ivanka looks perfect, however. Even when her mouth is a moue of hate.

I am sitting two scant yards from Trump père et fille at a media briefing for the Trump International Golf Course, which is being built by the Emirati firm DAMAC Properties in conjunction with Donald Trump Townhouses and Villas. Trump has promised it will be the greatest golf course in the world.

Ivanka is angry because I asked a real question. In Dubai, this can land you in jail.

***

This May, I researched labor issues in the United Arab Emirates with a local journalist. To avoid being deported, he goes by the pseudonym Tom Blake. We interviewed construction workers building museums on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island. In the richest city in the world, the workers we spoke to were little more than indentured servants. For between $150 and $300 a month, they worked 13 hours a day, six days a week. Their bosses kept their passports. They landed in the UAE owing more than a year's salary to recruiters back home. They could be deported for striking.

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, they had families dependent on their wages. However brutal it was, the Gulf dream was their one shot out of poverty. They could not fuck this up.

The UAE is not uniquely guilty. Migrants throughout the world, in the US as well as the UAE, do the worst work and suffer the worst state violence. While my research focused on Abu Dhabi, poor conditions are typical throughout the Gulf. Thousands of workers could die building the World Cup stadia in Qatar. Figurative blood stains the gleaming steel of Earth's tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa.

The day before Trump's press conference, Tom interviewed workers building the luxury villas bearing Trump's name. They told him they made less than $200 a month.

***

These workers would never bask in the air conditioning with me in the AKOYA by DAMAC Sales Center. Like so many of Dubai's interiors, the sales center is as cold and shining as top-shelf gin. TVs play ads for Trump's villas. On screen, white women plunge into swimming pools. Their hair billows in vast bedrooms. These villas are dreams for the world's winners. Like the construction workers who built them, they are placeless. They could be anywhere. Capital is context free.

“Who are you here for?” one of the publicists asks me.

“VICE.”

 The publicist asks how I know about the event. I say I heard about it from a friend.

“Behave yourself,” he smiles. “Don't embarrass them.”

The waitresses here are gorgeous Eastern Europeans. They smile hard. So happy. I used to work as a promo model. I remember the faux joy I'd put on for clients who delighted in being difficult to please.

Feeling out of place, I stare at scale models of Trump's development, complete with miniature Ferraris and blue resin lagoons.

Westerners misrepresent Dubai as tacky. This is wounded pride. Dubai is Versailles, not Vegas. It is frozen money. At night, when even the palms twinkle, the city has a heart-soaring grandeur. It looks like the sound of Daisy Buchanan’s voice.

Dubai's skyscrapers are our era's pyramids. Slaves built the original pyramids, but tourists visit just the same.

At this type of party, I always tell myself I won't eat the food. Journalists are either shills or situational sociopaths. When you cover the powerful, they serve great canapés. The powerful can seem so nice. Your lizard brain tells you to be nice back. But to be nice is to sell out those workers sweating it out for $200 a month.

I swipe a flute of orange juice.

Trump enters with Ivanka and DAMAC CEO Hussain Sajwani. Cameramen bash into one another to film them. Trump is little more than a moving statue to be sucked into their devices. He gives a practiced thumbs up.

On stage, Trump praises his Dubai. He is effusive—and sincere. Trump is one sort of Westerner who loves the UAE. They find here a throwback to colonialism's heyday. No matter how much you've shat the bed at home, here your whiteness will get you a job, money, servants from the Global South. Help is so affordable when migrant workers make $200 a month. In police states, there is little crime.

“The world has so many problems and so many failures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful,” Trump says. “Why can't we have that in New York?”

Trump does not mention that, like Dubai, New York is morphing into the no-place of multi-national capitalism. He does not mention that this is partially his fault.

The floor opens to questions.  

I stand up.

“Mr. Trump,” I ask, “the workers who build your villas make less than $200 a month. Are you satisfied?"

The room gasps, then goes silent. The security tenses towards me. In two hours I am scheduled to interview Ahmed Mansoor, who spent eight months in jail for signing a pro-democracy petition. I think about Nick McGeehan, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deported a few months ago for investigating the same migrant issues I am.

I think about the web of professional coercion that keeps journalists in the US from asking real questions at press conferences. I wonder if the rules in Dubai are the same.

Trump says nothing.

“That's not an appropriate question,” the publicist barks.

When the next journalist says, “Dubai is synonymous with the big, bold, and beautiful,” the room un-tenses.  “Is that where your affinity comes from?” the journalist asks.

“I think Dubai has a tremendous future,” Trump replies.

***

The security guards are still staring a hole into me when we file out. “Nice question,” says one reporter from the National. A state-owned newspaper, the National was Abu Dhabi's attempt to bring the best of British-style journalism over to the Gulf. In many ways they were successful, especially in luring talented reporters and editors to Abu Dhabi. But laws against insulting the government are too strict. With honesty off the table, no Pulitzers will be forthcoming.

“Why didn't you ask him something like that?” I asked.

“It’s just not done here. You don't do it because you know you won't get an answer.”

Implied: I live here. I might suffer consequences. You're leaving in a few days. It thrills the soul to confront powerful bastards, but does that alone change anything? The whole Gulf is built on exploitation. Local journalists must be canny and patient, applauding small improvements as they come.

A waitress offers macaroons. You shouldn't eat these treats any more than you should eat fairy food. If you eat them, you might get your loyalties so mixed up that one day you're sitting at a press conference asking Donald Trump about “the highest levels of luxury” like you believe it.

If you get too comfy in rich-people land, in New York or Dubai, you might stay here and belong to them.

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

A series of bloody attacks has rocked Kenya since the September 2013 Westgate mall massacre in Nairobi, which left 67 people dead. Curiously, some recent victims in these murders have been Muslim sheiks that were associated with al Shabaab, the jihadist group that took credit for the deadly Westgate attack. Even more curiously, all of the high-profile sheik murders have taken place in the same area in Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city.

VICE News headed to Mombasa to speak with Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, the highest-profile radical sheik in Kenya, before he was assassinated in April, and to get an up-close view of those living and dying in the cross hairs of a holy war being fought on Kenya's streets.

This year's 36th annual International Mr. Leather conference drew a diverse contingency of leathermen and leatherwomen to the city of Chicago. An estimated 20,000 visitors participated in the annual gathering’s events, and while it's generally considered a conference for  leather, latex, and kink, the weekend’s festivities culminate in two contests: International Mr. Leather, and the International Bootblack Competition.

Over the weekend, I wandered throughout the Marriott in downtown Chicago with my camera, meeting and photographing a wide gamut of fetishists and visitors. I observed men bound and tied, whipped, and stimulated with ropes and toys. I celebrated the notion of being “body-positive” and witnessed men of all sizes squeezed into latex onesies. I sniffed boots, befriended a group of leather-uniform fetishist who later made fun of my Birkenstocks, and witnessed mothers covering the eyes of their children as they walked passed the hotel. I practiced my bandanna decoding, was reminded that all properly made leather chaps are assless, and learned that someone who enjoys “CBT” might not be talking about cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Since the State of Illinois legalized same-sex marriage yesterday, there is no question that the gay community has become more and more accepted by the larger society. But when it comes to subcultures like leather and kink, there still seems to be less tolerance, and many argue that the community is waning. No doubt the majority of revelers and hedonists last weekend were men in their 40s and 50s, but a scrappy group of young pups, young masters, and leather fashionistas were still present, strong, and eager to get their asses into gear.

Christophe Tedjasukmana is a New York–based photographer.

Al Masri poses with Saad and the technician who made his leg outside the clinic. It's supported by four organizations: Every Syrian, Syrian Relief, Syrian-British Medical Society, and the Syrian Expatriates Medical Assocation. All photos via the author.
Muhammad Hamidu was 15 years old when a bomb dropped through his roof near Idlib, a city in Northwestern Syria, 59 km west of Aleppo. His right leg was severed on impact. Thirty-six people died, and it took three hours for his friend Muhammed Albush to dig him out.

It took another few hours before the crushed left leg was amputated in a desperate bid to save his life. Fortunately, it worked. Muhammad is 18 now and today he is getting fitted for double prosthetics that will allow him to stand again, if only on crutches.

Muhammad is one of thousands of Syrian children who have been, literally, torn apart by the civil war that has raged in the country for three years. The city of Reyhanli, a Turkish town that lies on the border with Syria, has become one of the safe havens for what is being referred to as the lost generation of Syrians.

There are 100,000 Syrian refugees in Reyhanli alone, nearly twice the city’s Turkish population of 60,000. Everywhere you look here there is war etched into the town— from eight-year-olds in tattered rags selling bags of tissues out of their pockets to old women’s faces crumpling under the weight of worry lines. There is no doubt that living in the shadow of one of the most brutal humanitarian crises is not an easy burden to bear.

There are pockets of hope, however. On a new road at the edge of town, past a makeshift military hospital made of shipping containers and a garbage-strewn sidewalk, a grassroots prosthetics clinic is a hive of activity in the heat of a Saturday morning. Crammed with patients and technicians, there is a steady hum of Arabic, a gentle clicking of metal joints, and even the occasional peel of laughter.



Omar Saad removes his prosthetic, revealing the scars left behind by his amputation. His leg was removed a week after it was shredded by a high-calibre bullet.
In one room, plaster dust chokes the air as molds are made. In another, plastic shavings litter the floor as whirring machines and handheld scissor blades smooth rough edges into beveled corners. Finally, in the largest room, walkways with railings on either side creak a little as tentative first steps are taken on new limbs.

“There is an important need for this [clinic] because of the many patients who undergo amputations,” says Raed al Masri the director for the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs.

Al Masri’s team of 12 students from Antakya University has made 800 new lower limbs since the clinic opened a year and a half ago.

As the violence in Syria exploded around him, al Masri—once a math teacher in the now-decimated city of Homs—saw the sons and daughters of his friends and neighbours butchered either by sniper attacks or air strikes. He recognized that one of the first priorities of humanitarian aid would be to “make the patient more effective by giving them a limb back.” In Syria taking or losing a limb is all too common.

Vascular surgery to save a limb can cost $10,000, money that few of the refugees here have. Amputations, however, are free. A new leg from the NSPPL clinic costs $550. In North America, a similar prosthetics can cost in the thousands.



Each prosthetic is custom fit to the patient. It takes a week to make a single prosthetic leg. The joints have to be carefully tuned; al Masri says making a prosthetic to fit above the knee is the hardest..
Despite the Turkish locale, al Masri is Syrian. His staff are Syrian. His patients are Syrian. They come from different parts of the country and speak with different accents, but they share one commonality: They arrived in Reyhanli after fleeing the deadly sniper attacks, and the endless barrage of barrel bombs and rocket assaults that pummeled their homes to dust.

As one Syrian source described in a text message from inside Aleppo this week, “It is raining barrel bombs.”

The staff arrived (mostly) physically unharmed from throughout the conflict zone; the patients were not so lucky. Every body bears the scars of war, from the 23-year-old former fighter whose left arm was paralyzed by an exploding bullet, to the father and son who now have matching double amputations halfway up their thighs.

These are sad stories relative to the tragedies. The worst cases never made it to the prosthetic clinic. They were the babies cut in half by screaming hot shrapnel tearing though the air. They were the old men and women who were too weak to walk to safety and starved to death in the shelled-out streets, where UN food aid is being sold for profit.

The clinic has produced 800 lower limbs in a year and a half.
Today, though, is about marking small successes and that is what we see every few minutes in this chaotic clinic.

The day before visiting the prosthetic clinic we toured some of the rehab centres in Reyhanli. It’s not immediately clear how many there are in town. As need grows and wanes based on the frequency and proximity of the attacks in Syria, clinics in Reyhanli are added or packed up and moved elsewhere. We visited a centre now taking over several floors of an old hotel, one in a basement apartment and another in a rented out house.

It was in these clinics that we met the two Muhammads, now inseparable friends, and a group of other young Syrians, no older than 25, who represent the lost generation. Today they have come to the clinic for a day of fitting, training and adjusting to their new life with a prosthetic.

As patients wait for their turn to be measured or to take a walk on the practice stairway, the ones who have had their prosthetics longer coach the new users while the staff set up obstacle courses and demonstrate exercises.

Omar Saad seems to have taken to his new leg without missing a step. Where some of the other patients have concealed their limbs, he proudly displays his, rolling up the right leg of his jeans, standing with his arms crossed, studying the movements of the staff and then mimicking them almost perfectly.



Omar is ready to go back to Syria just four days after getting his new prosthetic.
Seven months ago Omar had his right leg shot to pieces by a .50 calibre bullet—a round that can penetrate concrete and 1-inch plate steel. He’s a handsome 19-year-old whose gait is now so strong and purposeful that it’s nearly impossible to tell he’s lived through hell.

Omar has been studying computer science, but he plans to return to the front lines of the war in just a few days.

“I will be a sniper,” he says.

It’s hard to understand what would compel a maimed teenager to put his life on the line after such a near miss. But Syrians aren’t stupid—they know the world is ignoring them and, if they don’t go back, no one else is coming to help.

“I will defend the families and the religion against Bashar al-Assad,” he says with conviction.

We ask al Masri whether it’s normal for his patients to return to the war. He says he doesn’t ask about politics, but that only just over half of his patients are men. The rest are women and children. There are enough badly-injured women that there is an all-female rehabilitation centre in Reyhanli as well.

We stopped by the women’s centre and met one of the young female casualties: Noor. She looks every bit the grown-up Syrian woman, but she is just 14. She has already outgrown her first prosthetic, and has returned to be fitted for a new one.

Noor has been off school for a year due to her injuries, but she dreams of returning and studying to be a doctor.

“I have two emotions: sad and angry at the Syrian regime," says al Masri. “These limbs don’t return. These [prosthetics] just help with life.”

With the war still in a deadlock, and the regime’s continuing campaign of indiscriminate mass bombings, more patients will undoubtedly find their way to al Masri. But thanks to al Masri and his team, some modicum of normal life seems to be once again possible for the resilient young people lumbering awkwardly around this makeshift prosthetics clinic.

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