Wrapped in plastic and white sheets, the ashen corpse of Mohammed Al-Shuhna, a Syrian mercenary allegedly killed in Azerbaijan, is shuttled back to north Syria just two weeks after he had first left. In the grainy mobile phone footage sent to The Independent  by Mohamed’s friends, a...

An Iranian dissident who fled his country fearing arrest has fallen foul of politics and COVID-19 restrictions in ethnically split Cyprus. Since mid-September, Omid Tootian has been living in a small tent in Cyprus’s buffer zone, a United Nations-controlled slice of territory carved out...

On 10 September 2020 Dr Adnan Al-Jasem became the first doctor in northern Syria to die from coronavirus. Al-Jasem had fled the bombings in Deir Ezzor in the east of the country and tended to the wounded throughout Syria’s nine-year long war. Yet it was the virus he died of whilst working...

Flooding has affected well over a million people across East Africa, another calamity threatening food security on top of a historic locust outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic. The Nile River has hit its highest levels in a half-century under heavy seasonal rainfall, and large parts of...