Foreign Policy September/October 2017

AN FP SPECIAL REPORT: In May, Foreign Policy’s Africa editor, Ty McCormick, traveled with photojournalist Nichole Sobecki to Agadez, Niger, an age-old trading post and a gateway to the Sahara that has become the epicenter of the modern humansmuggling trade. Their story, “Highway Through Hell,” shows how European efforts to halt migration through Niger have only made the journey more perilous for those who attempt it. “It’s clear from our conversations with smugglers that the EU-funded crackdown hasn’t stopped the flow of people,” McCormick says. “It’s just pushed it into remote parts of the desert where there is no water and no margin for error. If you break down out there, you die. And so will all of your passengers.” Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay…

Kasim Muhammed Tahir, 58 Kasim fled Mosul with his family in the middle of November 2016 after an airstrike destroyed their house. The only thing he saved was his pet bird, Abboud, which he has had for more than five years. “I’d rather die than lose this bird,” he says. Kasim is unhappy living in the camp, because it’s hot and dusty, but believes the bird has it worse, especially now that he’s no longer able to find proper seeds to feed it. “I have six sons, and I love this bird just like one of my sons,” he says with a playful smile on his lips. “If you asked me to sell one of my boys, maybe there would be a chance—but not my bird.” STANDING BY THE ROWS OF TENTS…

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN—As the sun sets over the city’s snowcapped mountains, Yerbolat and May Ospanov settle into the gray sofa. May slides her hands over Yerbolat’s, which lie clasped on his knee. Then, with a precision honed through countless recitations, they take turns listing the dozens of places they’ve lived together around the world before settling in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. Happily married for nearly 20 years, the couple never expected to serve as a bridge for a cultural chasm. Their two homelands— China and Kazakhstan—share some 1,100 miles of border and an increasingly vital political relationship. Yet on the ground in Kazakhstan, distrust of Beijing’s designs on its Central Asian neighbor is rising. Today, a small but growing number of Kazakh-Chinese couples may be helping to counter that tension: Their intimate understanding…

BALTIMORE—On June 29, 1987, Jermin Laviera attended her first English-language lesson still wearing her wedding dress. Though she had just arrived in Baltimore from Venezuela eight days earlier, acquiring the ability to communicate in her new home was so important that she went straight from her nuptials to class. Laviera still has a photograph of her 28-year-old self in the white patterned gown, a look of exhilaration in her brown eyes as she proudly holds her most valued treasure from that day. “Not a ring,” she says with a smile. “It was a book.” Thirty years later, Laviera manages a desk in the lobby of the Esperanza Center in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore—the place where she took her first English class. She has long since retired her student status…

FORT WORTH, TEXAS—Jaime Carrillo emerges from his faded pink house wearing blue jeans and a black cowboy hat. After a long day at work laying cement for city streets, he is ready for a second shift—this time as a volunteer for the Fort Worth Police Department. He straps a walkie-talkie to his collar, slaps a “Citizens on Patrol” sticker on the side of his blue Nissan Sentra, and settles in the driver’s seat. “Tigre, Tigre,” Carrillo calls into the radio, addressing his partner. His own code name is “Meneaito,” the title of a popular salsa song. “I like to dance,” he explains in Spanish, shimmying his shoulders. As he weaves his way around the roughly four miles of his regular patrol route through Polytechnic Heights—a low-income, largely immigrant neighborhood of Fort Worth…

AMMAN, JORDAN—Tagreed Daftar’s thick black hair falls past her shoulders, stark against her bright floral blouse. She is fidgety in the crisply lit conference room at the CARE relief agency’s east Amman center, where refugees come for counseling, therapy workshops, and financial assistance. It’s a controlled setting, in which journalists on trips organized by CARE are taken on tours and given the chance to interview some of the refugees they assist with a provided translator, central air to ward off the searing heat, and bottled water. In many ways, Daftar’s story departs from the refugee narrative that has become so familiar—women fleeing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bombs with toddlers in tow or being forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State. Originally from Baghdad, she is not Muslim and has never been…