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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.

When I was in Erbil, less than a month ago, I sat down in a cafe and started chatting with an old friend. She has been an aid worker for years — for obvious security reasons I will not use her name, so let’s call her Alex — and she recently moved to Iraqi Kurdistan. Alex filled me in with details about her life and work.

Then she started telling me a story and at first I thought she must have been mistaken.

“The other day I was in a meeting with other NGOs and they started talking about a refugee camp in Anbar which is still running under ISIS,” she said realizing she triggered my reporter interest.

“What do you mean?” I asked her innocently since I was convinced refugees and IDPs — internally displaced people — were able to flee the area before ISIS seized it.

“I would say everybody who operates in the area knows about Al Qaim, but they try not to publicize it too much. There are many risks involved, especially for the people who work on the ground.”

But the reality, I discovered while reporting for Reuters Foundation on this topic, is that International organizations also do not want to be liable under counter-terrorism laws. As experts explained to me the lines are blurry and there is a great tension with international humanitarian laws. So they rather not speak about what they do and especially how in certain areas. It is true for Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and all the places where there is a non-state actor on the scene.