A thread on the most extraordinary week in Syria. 🧵

An enormous privilege to be here and see all this. A lot of sadness. But a lot of hope too

1/ Meeting Youssef on the border. He’d fled at 17. Now 29, he was going back for the first time. Couldn’t stop smiling 2/ At the morgue, surrounded by the dead, where we met a father identifying his 20 year old son. He’d been taken just 2 months ago

Leaving Ukraine after a long stretch, thinking about all the people we met.

THREAD Mykola in Bucha. Three of his neighbours were murdered in front of him. One of them blown up with a grenade. He had to pick up the body parts, put them in a bag, and bury them. He showed us the three graves outside his building. He shook with the trauma of it

Just spoke with Ukraine’s deputy PM Iryna Vereshchuk who says the US visit today from Blinken and Lloyd will discuss the logistics of getting more military assistance in. “When you talk on the phone the emotional part of the conversation cannot be conveyed,” She’s in charge of prisoner exchanges and says about 200 Russian soldiers have been exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers so far. Highest rank captured: lieutenant colonel. But won’t exchange those responsible for war crimes. Exchanges part of conversation in Mariupol.

THREAD from Bucha.

We met Mykola. He and his wife spent a month living in the cellar of his apartment building. When the Russians arrived, they killed all the men below 50. He’s 53. He told us this shaking with the trauma of it. They gave him 20 minutes to bury his friends. Three graves sit just opposite his apartment block. Each marked with a wooden plank and a religious icon attached. He wanted to give them whatever dignity he could. ‘But it’s too shallow,’ he says, almost apologetically. ‘I just wanted to protect them from the dogs.’

I just spoke with Ekaterina, who escaped Mariupol with her husband, daughter and mother.

As they went to get her father who’d been in the hospital, Russian troops shot at their car. He’s still there. This is them moments after getting clear of the city, crying with relief “I would never wish anybody feel this. You are leaving, and your family is staying and you dont know if they’re alive for that moment even… but you know you have to save the life of the youngest…”

Seems to me fundamental question of this crisis: is Ukraine enough of a prize for Russia to pivot away from the west, and completely into China’s orbit? Is now the time Putin has chosen to say: ‘that’s it. We’re done. We are fully into a new world order with Beijing.’ 🧵 China can fill the gap western companies leave behind. No more Mercedes? That’s ok we’ll have the Chinese equivalent. And we’ll set up businesses that buy the parts we need for stuff we can’t get. No more Apple Pay? Fine, China has Union Pay. We’ll use that. The list goes on.

A thread on all the stuff that’s not going very well so far at the Olympics:

1/ Positive cases and contact tracing are taking down athletes. Coco Gauff out of the tennis, two South African footballers also positive as well as the SA sevens rugby coach 2/ Russian men’s quadruple sculls have pulled out because they don’t have good enough reserves. A group of British gymnasts are isolating after a case on their flight

Two foreign athletes in the Olympic Village have tested positive for COVID. Anyone they’ve come into contact with will now be contact traced. 14 day quarantine may beckon.

Restrictions and testing are so severe here that they risk derailing the entire event. The IOC keeps a running tally of positive cases. Between locals and foreigners, it’s now at over 40 people associated with the games.

They say that proves their system works, and that there are many thousands of athletes and officials here who are being kept safe

How do you restore a national treasure during a pandemic?

Updating this thread today as we go INSIDE Notre Dame during the renovation The big danger at Notre Dame is lead poisoning - requiring a pretty involved decontamination process. You have to change out of your clothes, and into this lovely getup, over which you wear another layer and a helmet. Showers separate clean zones and dirty zones.

Thread about happiness

When I was young, my father sadly ended his life. I’ve never known really anything about his early years. He had schizophrenia, and that - along with a few patchy stories - is all that defined him. This is us at around the same age Fast forward to 2016. A lady gets in touch out of the blue to tell me she was his girlfriend at art school. She’d heard me on the radio, and guessed I must be his son. She’d seen a doc I’d done on mental health and him, and thought I’d like to know more about him.

THREAD London - Athens

Usually a simple trip. Not now.
If you’re planning a summer trip, this could be what it looks like

Long lines at a busier Heathrow than last week. Lots of questions.

From London we have to overnight in Zurich as direct flights to Greece hard to come by Zurich airport the following morning: entirely deserted

A thread from Sweden:

Much of what has been reported in the foreign press seems to misrepresent or over simplify the situation. It is not ‘business as usual,’ here. The government has simply put more responsibility on the individual There is a voluntary lockdown in place. People are advised to work from home where possible. Not assemble in large crowds and maintain social distancing. The economy has still suffered.

One year after the 'defeat' of ISIS, what of the men & women who joined?

In Syria, I spent time with British woman Shamima Begum & US/Canadian Kimberly Polman. In a tent next-door Hoda Mothana & her son Adam, from the US

Part of an @ABCNewsLive special report to air soon

1/23 You might argue that those who joined ISIS sealed their own fate, and should be left in Syria.

But there are thousands of ISIS fighters, women and children, sitting in camps and prisons in NE Syria. Western countries are doing very little to sort the problem.

2/23

1/14 We’ve been in Syria with US troops. They’re trying to pick up the pieces after Donald Trump’s October announcement that they’d leave the country. It started a Turkish invasion that cost many in northern Syria their lives and their homes. The Kurds felt particularly betrayed 2/14 About half the number that were here originally, remain - their work complicated by the chaos of October’s decision. This election year you may hear a lot of talk about ‘bringing our people home.’ This is the reality of north east Syria now, for US troops and the Kurds:

Tonight on @ABCWorldNews, Hoda Mothana, the American young woman who went to join ISIS, gives her first TV interview since fleeing the so called Islamic State a month ago

She’s alone with her 18 month old son in a Syrian refugee camp. Full of regret, she’s begging to come home “I was born and raised in America and I wanted to do American things. My family didn’t get any of that. Those restrictions - the only way out for me was to become more religious.”

She says she became part of a secret Twitter group of ISIS youth numbering over 2,000

THREAD

I’ve just had possibly the most extraordinary meeting of my life. A year ago, I posted this story about how my grandparents met - a New Zealand officer who married a Lebanese woman in Egypt at the end of WW2 About a month ago, a man in New Zealand commented on that post, with this photo of my grandparents, asking if they were my family. He told me my grandfather’s personal photo collection was at NZ national library