麻豆社

Pascale Harter introduces insights and analysis from 麻豆社 correspondents and journalists around the world.

It鈥檚 a myth that the only people who die at the hands of drugs cartels are somehow mixed up in the business. In Mexico, they don鈥檛 just kill rival narcotraffickers - or the police and soldiers sent to fight them. All too often, their vendettas, gun battles and hitmen end the lives of people who had nothing at all to do with the drug trade. In Mexico, government statistics put the number of people currently missing across the country at more than 95,000. The true number could be far, far higher. So there are many families out there searching for clue to the fate of their relatives, often with little help from the state. Will Grant joined a group of relatives combing a remote part of the Sonora desert for clues.

On the sixteenth of January 2022, there was a suicide bombing in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Attacks like this are so frequent they aren鈥檛 always even reported in the local media, let alone by international news outlets. Somalia has been in a state of conflict for more than thirty years now. Yet although this bombing was 鈥渟mall鈥� by Somali standards, it did make the news - including reports on the 麻豆社 - because of who was involved. Our Africa Editor, Mary Harper, is a regular visitor to Somalia 鈥� and she鈥檚 often worked with the man who was targeted.

At the start of 2022, Kazakhstan was convulsed by unprecedented mass disorder and anti-government protests. The security forces cracked down hard 鈥� and even called in help from Moscow to reassert control on the streets. The violence has left at least 225 people dead. Thousands of protestors are still in detention. Abdujalil Abdurasulov lived in Kazakhstan for years, and returned to its capital Almaty in the middle of the protests. It was not the same city he remembered.

Germany currently has the largest Syrian refugee population of any country in the European Union, numbering more than 800,000. You might expect it to be a very tight-knit community, with people who鈥檝e survived similarly harsh experiences looking out for each other and helping each other to rebuild their lives. But when Michael Ertl talked to some Syrian refugees living in Berlin, he found things are not nearly so simple.

(Image: A relative searches for human remains in Sonora, Mexico. Credit: 麻豆社)