Dia Hadid
speaker
762 appearances
58 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Sep
Dia Hadid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 51 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
But Pakistan says the strikes mostly hit mosques and part of a hydropower dam. One prominent Pakistani militant says one of the strikes targeted his relatives and killed 14 people, including women and children. And that was in a small town in southern Pakistan. And it's really important to say here where these strikes took place. Some were deep in Pakistan.
One was near the country's second largest city. So here have a listen to Michael Kugelman. He writes the Foreign Policy's weekly South Asia brief, and he says this hasn't happened in decades.
An analyst I've spoken to said they were actually expecting India to hit hard.
Well, just because of the nature of the attack that triggered these renewed tensions, it happened on April 22 when gunmen attacked Indian tourists in a meadow. And it seems some of the gunmen targeted Hindu men. It was the deadliest attack against civilians in years. And the victims came from all over India. So it just really triggered widespread anger.
But after the strikes, the Indian military said its response was measured, focused and non-escalatory. Analysts say those words signal that India is not interested in escalating this further.
I guess the problem here is with strikes so deep in Pakistan and with this death toll, Pakistan may feel like it must respond to show people that its army isn't weak. So analyst Praveen Danti with the International Crisis Group says other countries have to step in.
For now, President Trump has said he hopes this ends quickly, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he's closely monitoring the situation.
You're welcome.
Aisha, as I was seeing what was happening in Damascus, I couldn't stop thinking about the children. I'd covered conflicts like this for so long and I knew there'd likely be a large number of kids in orphanages whose parents had been detained or even disappeared during the civil war. And I kept thinking, what was happening to them now? And let me tell you, this was hard for me.
I have two young kids, so stories about vulnerable children really hit home. And I try not to take too many long trips away from them. So for this assignment, I felt like I needed their permission. So I told them, I'm going to Syria so I can meet little ones who don't have a mama who So is that okay to give your mama to some other kids for a little while? And my girls agreed.
So I began calling groups that care for vulnerable children, like UNICEF, the Red Cross, other big organizations that run programs in Syria. And one group I reached was SOS Children's Villages. That's an international aid group headquartered in Austria. It has branches all around the world, including in war zones.
And a spokesperson for them told me they were coming to terms with a revelation that was shaking the organization. Their Damascus branch had secretly taken in children whose mothers had been detained by intelligence agents. And this revelation was triggering a lot of anger in Syrian society.
Well, after getting this tip, me and producer Mirna Rashid, we went to other orphanages across Damascus and we asked, did intelligence agents force you to secretly take in children? And what happened to those children?
While it was really hard to get answers at first, orphanages did not want to speak to us. The situation felt so uncertain. The Assad regime had just fallen at the time and people online were accusing them of collaborating with the former regime. But as we investigated, we finally met an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs who also wanted to know the answers.
You see, the ministry had been overtaken by rebels who formed an interim government, and Syrian families were asking them for help to find their children. So this official helped us by calling up orphanage directors and telling them that they had to talk to us. He requested anonymity through this process because he wasn't meant to be speaking to the media, let alone helping us.
Yeah, we spoke to one orphanage director who wanted us to hear from the detained women themselves. So she connected us to a couple of mothers. One of those women was Sukaina Shbawi. We reached her at her home in a village in the southern Syrian province of Daraa. That's where the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad first erupted. She was keen to chat.
So Ayesha, this is what Shabawi told me. She says that in the fall of 2018, Syrian security forces turned up one day and they dragged her and her daughter Hiba from their home. Hiba was just two. Shabawi believes they were taken hostage to pressure her husband's brothers to surrender to government forces.
That was a pretty common tactic at the time because the brothers had joined the uprising against the regime. Jibawi and Heba were driven to holding cells run by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. That was one of the most feared and violent arms of the Syrian regime. Guards pushed her and Heba into a cold, dark cell with about six other women and their children.
Nearly all the women's cells also held children, but the conditions there were not conducive to staying alive. Jibawi says they were only allowed to use the bathroom three times a day, not enough for little kids. So the mothers procured a bucket for the children to use as a toilet and they emptied it out whenever they could. There was never enough food.
An egg once a week, 15 olives twice a week, plain yogurt every four days. sometimes jam, boiled rice one day, boiled lentils the next, boiled potatoes after that. Shabawi says she gave Heba her share so she'd stay alive. But still, her daughter was losing weight. She became infested with lice.
Showing 681–700 of 762 · page 35 of 39
← Previous
Next →