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As a million Syrians fled their country’s devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.In Ismir, they met Isra’a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary “One In A Million,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.For the next ten years, they followed her and her family’s travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.There was “something about Isra’a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there,” MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.”The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.”She wasn’t sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there.”The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra’a’s changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe — something her father struggles to adjust to.Isra’a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was “beautiful.”And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.”I felt like this was something very special,” she told the audience after the screening. “My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster.”- Search -Family is also at the center of Michal Marczak’s beautifully-shot “Closure,” which landed at Sundance on Friday.The intensely cinematic documentary tells the story of a father’s search for his teenage son, who vanished from a bridge over the Vistula River, Poland’s longest water course.Over 12 months, Marczak follows Daniel as he searches the river, using boats, underwater drones and hand tools, torn between the dread that he might find Chris’ body and the desperate hope that he might be alive.The river, at times hauntingly beautiful and others murky and unknowable, offers a mirror to Daniel’s torment, and to the increasingly fragile hope of his wife, Agnieszka, that Chris will one day come home.Daniel’s quest expands from the river into the digital world, as he tries to understand how a generation that seems constantly connected can sometimes feel so cut off.His unrelenting river search lends him a degree of fame in Poland, and he is contacted by another father whose child is missing, eventually helping him to find her body.Marczak said he had begun the film almost by accident, when he and his wife were rafting down the river thinking about a fiction project when they ran into trouble.”We were trying to dock on this island, it got quite dangerous,” he said.”Then out of nowhere, this man appeared and he guided us to safety and that was Daniel. “We spent the night together by the campfire, and he told us about why he’s there. I saw the emotions and…I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.”At that moment, he decided to abandon the feature project and make a documentary instead.Sundance Film Festival runs until February 1.

Europeans were among 150 senior Islamic State group detainees transferred this week by the US military from Kurdish custody in Syria to neighbouring Iraq, whose premier urged EU countries to repatriate their nationals.They were among an estimated 7,000 jihadists due to be moved to Iraq as the Kurdish-led force that has held them for years relinquishes swathes of territory to the advancing Syrian army.In 2014, IS swept across Syria and Iraq, committing massacres and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery, but backed by a US-led coalition, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) ultimately defeated the jihadists in Syria five years later.This month, the United States said the purpose of its alliance with the Kurds had largely expired, as Syria’s new authorities pressed an offensive to take back territory long held by the SDF, which agreed to withdraw from areas in the north and east.An Iraqi security official said the 150 detainees, who the US military transferred to Iraq on Wednesday, were “all leaders of the Islamic State group, and some of the most notorious criminals”, and included “Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Iraqis”.Another Iraqi security source said the group included “85 Iraqis and 65 others of various nationalities, including Europeans, Sudanese, Somalis and people from the Caucasus region”.They “all participated in IS operations in Iraq”, including the major 2014 offensive that saw the jihadists seize large pieces of territory, he said, adding “are all at the level of emirs” within the group’s hierarchy.They are now held at a prison in Baghdad.- ‘Take responsibility’ -Amnesty International said in a statement Friday that the group of 7,000 slated for transfer “likely includes Syrians, Iraqis & other foreign nationals, and approximately 1,000 boys and young men”.The rights group urged the US to “urgently put in place safeguards before making any further transfers”, and called on Iraq to hold “fair trials, without recourse to the death penalty”.Iraq, where courts have handed down hundreds of sentences of death and life imprisonment to people convicted of terrorism, said it would launch legal proceedings against the transferred detainees. In a telephone call Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani stressed the importance of European countries “assuming their responsibilities” by taking back and prosecuting their nationals.The SDF jailed thousands of suspected jihadists and detained tens of thousands of their relatives in camps as it pushed out IS.In a previous report, Amnesty estimated that around 10,000 IS suspects were held in Kurdish-run prisons as of August 2023.Despite repeated Kurdish and US appeals, foreign governments have generally avoided repatriating their nationals, fearing security threats and political backlash.IS’s onslaught came during the peak of Syria’s civil war, which was sparked by longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests.After toppling Assad just over a year ago, President Ahmed al-Sharaa is now seeking to consolidate government control over all of Syria, with tensions between his authorities and the de facto autonomous Kurdish administration recently boiling over into clashes.The army has accused the SDF of releasing IS detainees from the Shadadi prison, while the Kurds said they lost control of the facility after an attack by Damascus.Syrian authorities later said they had arrested “81 of the fugitives”.The EU said Friday that alleged jailbreaks were of “paramount concern”, adding it was monitoring the transfer of prisoners to Iraq, “including foreign terrorist fighters”.In north Syria’s Raqa province, an AFP correspondent saw Kurdish forces who formerly controlled the Al-Aqtan prison for IS detainees being bussed out Friday under a deal with the government.- Al-Hol camp -UN refugee agency (UNHCR) spokesperson Celine Schmitt said Friday that the agency, accompanied by Syrian government officials, had entered Al-Hol camp — the biggest facility housing relatives of suspected IS members — after “a three-day interruption caused by the volatile security situation”.Kurdish forces withdrew from Al-Hol on Tuesday and the following day Syria’s army entered the camp, where thousands of men, women and children have lived in squalid conditions for years.”The delivery of essential supplies has resumed,” Schmitt said, adding that “trucks carrying bread entered the camp today”.The camp houses some 23,000 people — mostly Syrians but also around 2,200 Iraqis and 6,200 other foreign women and children, according to its former administration.Two former employees of organisations working at the site said an unspecified number of residents fled during an hours-long security vacuum between the SDF withdrawal and the army takeover.After recent clashes, Sharaa announced a deal Sunday with SDF chief Mazloum Abdi on the integration of the Kurds’ administration into the state, which will take responsibility for IS prisoners.A four-day ceasefire agreed on Tuesday after tensions reignited is set to expire on Saturday evening.burs-lg-rh/smw

Donald Trump is shaping a new world order of empires and coercion, from Venezuela to Greenland and through his newly created “Board of Peace, shattering the post-war global consensus.As the old order crumbles, AFP sought the views of ministers, advisers, lawmakers and military from across the globe.Celso Amorim, chief adviser to Brazil’s President Lula Inacio Lula da Silva, described the situation as “a very difficult moment of transition to a new order”.”But these periods of transition sometimes lead to terrible consequences,” he added.One Filipino diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no one felt able to speak out that “the emperor has no clothes”.Weng Hsiao-ling, a Taiwanese lawmaker from the main opposition Kuomintang party, said there had been a belief in “international rules”.”But Trump’s approach has broken those norms,” she said.- Geography -How the future could play out looks different from the Americas, Europe, Eurasia and South Asia.Brazil, for example, is an emerging power and member of the BRICS group of developing nations, but also located within Trump’s purported sphere of influence.Amorim said Brazil needed “to maintain and build on what’s being done”, pointing to the recent trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.It also needed to stay onside with the United States, as well as China, India and other BRICS countries, he added.”We are very much interested in maintaining good relations with the United States, let that be clear,” said Amorim. But he added: “Those relations must be based on mutual respect; they must be conducted through dialogue.”Many countries on the continent may find it difficult to find a balance and distance from American hegemony. Trump, for example, regularly threatens neighbouring Mexico.But Ricardo Monreal, parliamentary leader for the ruling Morena party, rejected the idea that Washington could make Mexico a “subordinate”.”The United States believes that Mexico’s alignment with the American empire is automatic. I don’t think it’s that simple,” he said.”The margin we have is very limited because our dependence is strong. Our proximity is unavoidable.”But I maintain that Mexico, with 110 or 120 million inhabitants, is a country that can shape the economic bloc — and that the way the United States treats Mexico is not as a partner, but as a subordinate. And I don’t think they’re going to pull that off.”- Protection -China and Russia may feel emboldened by US action under Trump but the countries threatened by their territorial ambitions still want to believe they are protected.In Taiwan, whose survival in its current political form depends largely on US support, lawmaker Wang Ting-yu, of the ruling DPP party, hopes the show of force to capture Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro will force authoritarian regimes to think twice about acts of aggression.That will be “a good thing” for Taiwan. But he added: “We need to be careful because China will learn from this kind of operation.”The Filipino diplomat said the Indo-Pacific, including the Philippines and the ASEAN bloc, was vital for the United States’ economic security, whatever happened in Greenland.”I’m not saying (Trump’s actions) don’t keep people awake at night. But there’s a level of comfort there, and we hope we’re proven right,” they added.On the South China Sea, where Beijing has designs, Filipino Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad also said he was reassured by “the surge and upscale of not only US but even allied forces in this part of the globe”.- ‘Darwinian’ -Europe enjoyed US protection from the Soviets for decades and according to some remains indispensable to Washington because of its geographical location as the gateway to Eurasia.Yet one high-ranking officer said the continent was “completely paralysed” and bogged down in debate rather than action.”The world has become very Darwinian again,” he warned. “It’s not intelligence that matters most, it’s the speed of adaptation” to the new reality.The chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Armin Laschet, said the US-Europe alliance needed to be maintained “for as long as possible” — even if that means calling Trump “daddy”, like NATO chief Mark Rutte.The current state of affairs has raised questions about the effectiveness of the traditional tools of multilateralism.Colombia’s deputy foreign minister, Mauricio Jaramillo, said he was “surprised” at the lack of weighty UN reaction after Maduro’s capture.But despite criticism about its limitations, Laschet said there was “no alternative” to the world body, which emerged from the failings of the post-World War I League of Nations, and the ashes of World War II in 1945.”But today the big difference is that countries have atomic weapons that can destroy everything. So, we need to act beforehand.”