Mese: Novembre 2015

Are you an Homeland fan?

Do you impatiently wait Sunday to watch the latest episode?

If the answer is yes, than you should really watch Hatufim, the title in English is Prisoners of War. The Israeli TV show, by Gideon Raff, was adapted into Homeland for the US and believe me, Prisoners of War is ten times better. The plot overlaps and certain things are very similar, though Hatufim is more realistic, and has a better script. (I am sorry guys but some parts of Homeland are really ridiculous)

I’ll try not to spoil too much in this post, but if you don’t want to know anything about it because you want to watch it, please stop reading now. So far two seasons have been screened. The first one war aired in 2010 and then two years later. A third one is planned, but it’s unclear when it will come out. I watched 24 episodes last week and it was great.

Yanar Mohammed is a tiny woman with very delicate manners. I met her about a month ago, days before her hearing at the UN Security Council on October 13. She came to New York to talk about the current status of Iraqi women. She wanted the world leaders to know what the Iraqi government was not doing to help them. She hoped her speech would raise awareness for a political push to create new laws for women.

“Since 2003 Iraq made a step backward in terms of women’s freedom and rights,” she said. Yanar  blamed the US invasion for what happened to her country. She explained the aftermath politics  of the invasion excluded most of the secular parties. “I remember this long list of new political figures that wanted to participate in the creation of a new Iraq. They were banned from any form of political participation.”

John Gallagher, 32 year-old Canadian, lost his life in Syria. Gallagher joined the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish militia, to fight the Islamic State.

According to several sources, Gallagher got killed by an ISIS suicide bomber east of Hasakah, where the YPG is trying to push East. With Gallagher another soldier lost his life, though his identity has not yet been revealed.

The YPG is the only force actually taking back ISIS territory, and many analysts believe the will try to attack Raqqa, the de-facto capital of the Islamic State.

Gallagher is the seventh western fighter to get killed in Syria. He was recently interviewed and this is the article.