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Middle East crisis live: Iran peace talks under way as Trump claims US has begun clearing mines in strait of Hormuz

Al Jazeera, citing sources close to the mediation, has reported that the Iranian and US delegations are meeting face-to-face, with Pakistani mediators also present in the negotiating room. Reuters has also reported the same, citing a Pakistani source. The three-way talks are between US officials JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Iran’s Mohammad Ghalibaf and Abbas Araghchi and Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir. In previous US-Iran negotiations, including the indirect nuclear talks that took place in Oman in the days before the war began on 28 February, mediators would shuttle back and forth between the two disputing parties to relay proposals and other information.

‘He cares about Hungarians’: the small Ukrainian town divided over Orbán

Across much of Ukraine, Sunday’s parliamentary election in Hungary is being followed with a singular hope: that Viktor Orbán, the Kremlin-friendly leader who has made opposition to Kyiv a centrepiece of his campaign, will be voted out after 16 years in office. But in Berehove, the mood is more complicated. In this small town of about 30,000 in Ukraine’s hilly Zakarpattia region, ethnic Hungarians form a majority, and Hungarian is heard as often as Ukrainian. Daily life – from schooling to the television channels watched at home – remains closely tethered to neighbouring Hungary. Some residents admit, often quietly, that they are rooting for Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Orbán is not perfect, but he cares about Hungarians everywhere,” said László, speaking outside the Hungarian consulate on Friday morning as he collected documents to cast his vote on Sunday. Like others interviewed, he asked for his surname to be withheld, saying he did not feel comfortable speaking publicly about the subject. László said he was upset with the deteriorating relations between Hungary and Ukraine but praised Orbán for providing passports to ethnic Hungarians, financial assistance, and standing up for what he described as the community’s language rights. While it is technically illegal in Ukraine, many in Berehove have a second Hungarian passport, and Budapest has set up several voting stations at consulates in the region. Orbán has long portrayed himself as a defender of ethnic Hungarians abroad – about 60,000 of whom live in Zakarpattia – claiming they face widespread discrimination in Ukraine and are being forced to assimilate into Ukrainian society. His critics, both in Hungary and within Ukraine, say he has exaggerated – and at times distorted – those grievances to justify a hostile stance towards Kyiv and its western allies. “Hungarian voters are sensitive to the issue of ethnic Hungarians living beyond Hungary’s borders,” said András Rácz, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Orbán’s rhetoric made the situation seem much worse, and with that, he turned domestic Hungarians against Ukraine,” he added. Tensions between Budapest and Kyiv have reached a critical point in the run-up to the election, with Hungary continuing to block a €90bn EU financial package for Ukraine, delaying critical funding needed to sustain Kyiv’s war effort. Orbán’s government has also sought to use the plight of ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine to hinder Kyiv’s longstanding bid to join the EU. In a leaked phone call reported this week by the investigative outlet VSquare, Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, told his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, that the persecution of Hungarian rights in Ukraine had played a key role in Budapest’s continued opposition to Ukraine’s EU accession. Yet in Berehove, many residents insist the picture is more nuanced. Some voiced concerns over Ukraine’s language policies affecting Hungarians, most notably a law that would phase out minority languages in schools before it was suspended in 2023. But many said Orbán’s claims of discrimination were not reflected in everyday life. “We live alongside Ukrainians like brothers and sisters,” said Erika, who works at the Hungarian theatre in the centre of town, where clocks display both Hungarian and Ukrainian time. “There is no discrimination here at all.” She added that while she was following the election with interest, she had not voted. “I only have one president, and that is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” Outside a Catholic church flying a Hungarian flag, where services are held in Hungarian, Natália had just returned from morning mass. “Hungarians and Ukrainians live together and pray together,” she said. “We celebrate both Orthodox and Catholic Easter, and we like it this way.” She said she was frustrated by the way Ukraine had become a political talking point in Hungary. “Politics are heated, but here in Berehove we live together.” Others compared the mood in Berehove to the divisions seen inside Hungary itself. “Just like over there, you have people who want Orbán to win and people who want the opposition to replace him,” said Artúr, who said he wanted the Orbán government to lose, citing corruption issues and its stance towards Ukraine. Hungarian community leaders and analysts have sought to explain Orbán’s support in the towns and villages of Zakapattia in two ways. Known also by its Hungarian name, Beregszász, the town has long existed at the shifting edges of empires. It was part of Hungary for centuries before passing to Czechoslovakia after the first world war, then briefly returning to Hungarian control on the eve of the second. Incorporated into Soviet Ukraine in 1945, it became part of an independent Ukraine in 1991. But no matter who governed it, it has remained relatively poor and underdeveloped. “Orbán’s government has invested in schools, community centres and helped farmers,” said Boris Vashkeba, a lawyer and the head of a Hungarian community organisation based in the neighbouring town of Vynohradiv. Vashkeba said he initially supported Orbán but has been disappointed by his turn towards Moscow. “People see tangible results from him, and that’s why they tell me he has their vote,” he added. Timbur Tomba, who heads the Hungarian community in Kyiv and is a vocal critic of the current government in Budapest, blamed Orbán’s popularity on Hungarian state media “Most Hungarians in Ukraine still watch state propaganda. These people are just being fed lies from the television. They get a distorted picture of reality,” he said. Orbán has also played on the region’s sometimes complicated wartime sentiments. Tucked against the Hungarian border, Berehove can feel far removed from the war. The town has sent relatively few men to the front compared with other parts of Ukraine, and daily life has largely been undisturbed by air raid sirens or missile strikes. “The war feels distant in Zakarpattia, so people don’t always understand what the rest of Ukraine is going through,” Tomba said, adding he organised what he described as educational trips for Hungarians to the capital. Orbán has in the past accused Ukraine of sending ethnic Hungarians “to the slaughterhouse” and bloating their military casualties. But both Vashkeba and Tomba strongly pushed back against the notion that ethnic Hungarians were unwilling to serve or were “unpatriotic” towards Ukraine. Tomba said several thousand had fought in Ukraine’s armed forces since the full-scale invasion, with around a hundred killed in the fighting. Like in any other town, Berehove has a memorial to fallen Ukrainian soldiers in its central square. Kyiv, meanwhile, has sought to project cohesion. In a symbolic trip clearly tied to the Hungarian elections, this week Zelenskyy travelled to the region, where he met leaders from the Hungarian community and thanked them for their unity. For Vashkeba, the hope is that the election could offer a reset in ties between Kyiv and Budapest. “We need a restart in relations; it can’t go on like this,” he said. “When Ukraine and Hungary, two nations that have both suffered at the hands of Russia, are set against each other, it is Moscow that ultimately benefits.” Additional reporting by Artem Mazhulin and Flora Garamvolgyi

Met police make arrests at London Palestine Action protest

Arrests have begun at the first mass demonstration opposing the proscription of Palestine Action since the group’s ban was ruled unlawful by the high court. Protesters in London’s Trafalgar Square unveiled signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Hundreds of demonstrators sat on camping chairs and on the ground as they held up their placards on Saturday afternoon. At the top of the square, near the National Gallery, large banners were displayed reading: “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth” and “Israel starves kids”. Several individuals, including a man and a woman with grey hair, were seen being carried off by officers away from the demonstration. One elderly woman using two walking sticks was escorted by an officer away from the protest in central London. Shabana Mahmood was given permission to appeal against the high court’s decision. Initially, the Metropolitan police said it would immediately stop arresting people for such offences under the Terrorism Act but would gather evidence for potential future prosecutions. But after the home secretary was given permission to appeal against the decision the force said it had “revised” its enforcement approach, describing the statement made immediately after the high court’s decision as an “interim position”. In February, the high court said the government’s proscription of the direct action group was “disproportionate and unlawful” and that most of their activities had not reached the level, scale and persistence to be defined as terrorism. Mahmood’s appeal to the high court is due to be heard on 28 and 29 April. Before the demonstration, Met commander Claire Smart, said: “Those attending should be aware that showing support for a proscribed organisation is an offence under the Terrorism Act, and we will not hesitate to act where the law is broken. “At previous events linked to this group we have seen coordinated attempts to disrupt police activity, including obstructing officers and, at times, verbal or physical abuse. Our officers are trained to deal with these situations proportionately and effectively, and we are confident we have the plans and resources in place to respond appropriately, including making arrests where necessary.” In response, Defend Our Juries, which organises the demonstrations, said on X: “More Met lies. There has not been a single instance of prosecution among our supporter base relating to ‘obstructing officers’ or ‘verbal or physical abuse’. “Our actions are peaceful, dignified (from our side, at least) and completely nonviolent.” More details soon …

‘Endless war’: inside an Israeli kibbutz near Lebanon’s volatile border

It is a day after Israel killed more than 300 in a ceasefire-defying attack in Lebanon, and five miles from the border, at kibbutz Cabri in northern Israel, the quiet of the early Thursday evening has been disrupted. Three times, as the Guardian tries to leave, air raid sirens sound, and twice Iron Dome interceptors are launched. The last of the rockets fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon is sufficiently close that the Moria family and their visitors head promptly to a reinforced safe room, shutting a heavy metal door behind them. The family dog is there too, knowing the drill. A couple of hours earlier, Yael Shavit, one of Cabri’s residents, said the official reaction time had been relaxed “to 30 seconds, up from zero seconds a few days ago”, in the light of the supposed ceasefire. But Orly Moria is less sure: “I don’t think it’s 30 seconds,” she says, cutting in. The reality is that in practical terms the time to respond to an attack from Lebanon remains almost nothing. It had been hoped Hezbollah rocket fire might stop after the Iran ceasefire was announced. “This is the first day it is relatively quiet but still everybody is waiting to see,” says another kibbutz resident Amir Yarchi, also speaking before the incoming warnings. Even then the situation appeared fragile. Is it more peaceful on the border now? “Ask us next week,” Yarchi says. By the time darkness falls a couple of hours later, it is clear that Israel’s continuation of hostilities has meant the Lebanon war has restarted broadly on both sides of the border, if it halted at all. Sirens across northern Israel are back. The danger in Cabri passes quickly this time. The close geography – the ridge line of hills that marks the border between Israel and Lebanon is visible in clear weather – means that air raid alerts do not last long. Within five minutes it is safe to leave the bunker and there are no reports of casualties or damage. Rocket fire and drone attacks by Hezbollah into Israel began on 2 March, when the Lebanese proxy group joined the war after the US and Israeli attack on Iran. A total of 1,164 rockets have been fired up to 40km into Israel, a rate of about 30 a day, according to the Alma Center thinktank. Across northern Israel, the number of civilian casualties caused by Hezbollah rocket and drone strikes has been small. Nuriel Dubin, 27, was killed in a rocket attack on 24 March, though there have also been attacks from Iran, sometimes in coordination. Four died in the city of Haifa this month after an Iranian ballistic missile smashed into an apartment building. The total number of those recorded killed in Lebanon since early March is more than 1,700. But as the dash to the shelter demonstrates, the war, for Israelis in the north, is constantly disruptive. Residents at Cabri say every decision to leave home, work in the fields, walk a dog, is a matter of “risk management” – in an open space, where there is no shelter, people are supposed to lie down until the danger has passed. Moshe Davidovich, the chief of the local Mate Asher Regional Council, argues starkly that he is happy for Israel’s war in Lebanon to continue, because it is not acceptable for Hezbollah, “a terrorist organisation for 40 years, to hit us when they want, or when a proxy of Iran wants”. Polling for media outlet Channel 12 reported that 79% of Israelis supported the continued strikes into Lebanon. It raises the question of how the cycle of violence can be stopped if the mood is to continue bombing. Davidovich calls for international engagement, with support for the Lebanese government from the US, the UK, and France to act as “a big brother in Lebanon, to make sure that Hezbollah will not grow again as a threat”. Israel, now under pressure from Donald Trump to scale back its offensive against Hezbollah after Wednesday’s mass strikes, has shown a willingness to talk to the Lebanese government directly. But it would take a major political commitment for other countries to become more deeply involved – and already Israel has rejected the idea of France acting as a mediator. In Cabri, Yarchi argues a military only solution is unrealistic. “We might find ourselves in an endless war in which soldiers are being hit on a daily basis,” he says. Yarchi hopes Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, lagging in the polls, will fall at the next election, due later in the autumn, having launched a series of wars since the Hamas attack on 7 October but failed to resolve Israel’s regional security. Gali Moria, who now runs the kibbutz’s business activities, was an Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that led to a traumatic and ultimately unsuccessful 18 year occupation of the south of the country. In the latest campaign, Israeli soldiers are operating several kilometres inside southern Lebanon, clearing border villages, as well as bombing Hezbollah forces and launch sites. The veteran argues there should be a winding down of military activity. Israeli soldiers should stay in Lebanon “for the shortest time possible”. A longer occupation would be “risky for the soldiers, bad for the Lebanese” though he also sees some ground for optimism, a view not widely shared among kibbutz members. “I hope that the weakening of Iran and its support for Hezbollah might have created some dynamics that will reduce the motivation of Hezbollah to attack Israel. I think it’s possible, the best case scenario we can wish for,” he says.

From Isis recruit to influencer: ‘People think: you’re that evil girl who ran away’

If you met Tareena Shakil today, you would have no idea that the person in front of you had served time in prison for terrorism offences and holds the dubious distinction of being the first British woman convicted of joining Islamic State. Now 36, Shakil is glamorous, heavily made-up with long, tousled hair. When we meet at a plush hotel in Birmingham, she wears a sharply tailored dress, waist cinched in with a wide leather belt, and carries a Louis Vuitton handbag. She is bubbly and warm, with a disarmingly open demeanour. In short, this isn’t what springs to mind when you hear the words “terrorism conviction”. What Shakil actually looks like is an influencer – which is fitting, because that’s what she is trying to be. She has gained most traction on TikTok, where her profile has about 50,000 followers. She gives relationship advice, usually sitting in her car and talking straight to camera. Her content is a mix of humour (“Muslim men who go to the gym while fasting – brother, the world needs more people like you”) and advice about the dating game (“Men are natural born hunters … they love the chase” in one video; “When they block you, it’s a punishment because they know it’s going to hurt you” in another). In among this are videos that hint at something darker (“If your partner hits you, you must leave, it doesn’t matter how much they cry or say they’ll never do it again”). She never directly references her own complicated past but, she tells me: “There’s an element of my own experience in most of the videos I make.” This turn to content-creation is, she admits, a surprising segue for someone who first found prominence after running away to Syria in 2014 with her one-year-old son. Shakil was one of an estimated 900 people from the UK – including about 150 women – to make this journey during the five years that Islamic State held territory in Syria and Iraq. For years, these women, often referred to as “jihadi brides”, were a fixture in the press, the object of sometimes prurient fascination. Shakil was dubbed “the Towie jihadi” by the tabloids, after her parents described her as a normal girl who loved the reality show The Only Way is Essex. She quickly realised she had made a terrible mistake, and escaped from Syria after less than three months there. Those months have defined the course of her life. The people who travelled to Syria from Europe are often condemned as irredeemably evil, with any attempt to understand their motivation cast as justification. But Shakil’s story raises more complex questions: what makes a group like IS feel like an escape – and what does it look like, to try to live an ordinary life after tumultuous and infamous early experiences? For the past decade, she has been trying to do just that: prison, deradicalisation, rebuilding contact with her son, and now, improbably, reinvention online. “People don’t expect me to have the life I have now,” she says. “But I believe in second chances. When you’ve nearly died as many times as I have, you get a thirst for life.” * * * When Shakil was a little girl, growing up in the Staffordshire town of Burton upon Trent, she often dreamed of being rescued by a prince. Her own life was chaotic. Her dad was in and out of prison (he has more than 25 convictions, including for drug offences and assault) and, she was, she says carefully, “raised around violent relationships”. Shakil is close to her family, and says her parents “tried their very best to raise us the right way”, but it was an unstable environment. “That’s probably where my lack of insight for danger comes from,” she tells me. “I don’t have a regard for it, I don’t know what fear is.” As a kid, she frequently visited her dad in prison, and vowed that her own future would be different. She was a prefect at school and went on to university to study psychology – but when she was 20, she met a man and threw herself head-first into the relationship. Within a year, they were married and Shakil had dropped out of university. “I wanted to find my happy ever after,” she says. “I had pinned a lot on to the idea that the person I marry will save me.” This was not how it worked out. The relationship was turbulent and Shakil, who had always been bubbly and sociable, became isolated, finding herself with “literally zero friends”. At one point, she was not allowed to have a phone. She even pulled back from her parents, afraid to let them know what was going on. Shakil is mixed-race – her father is Pakistani and her mother white British – and her upbringing was not particularly religious. Her husband asked her to cover her head after marriage, which she was happy to do. But a few years later, when she got pregnant, she turned to religion. Prayer provided hope, comfort and a sense of being anchored to something as her life got more difficult. As the couple broke up and got back together, Shakil spent stints with her parents and, at one stage, in a homeless hostel. It was a tough period, “I was just like, ‘Where is my peace? Where do I go?’” In July 2014, Shakil’s husband left the country for a month, while she stayed in the UK. Lost and isolated, she reactivated her Facebook account in his absence. Soon, she was chatting to a young man fighting in Syria. A month earlier, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared an Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and called on all Muslims to travel to join the so-called caliphate. There was a deliberate push to recruit people to travel to IS territory. The man told her it was her duty to live under sharia law and that she would go to hell if she died in England. He referred her to hadiths, the words and actions attributed to the prophet Muhammad, which are heavily debated and subject to interpretation. Not having much religious expertise herself, Shakil took the man’s interpretations at face value. He encouraged her to go to Syria, and connected her to others already there, including women who said they’d escaped domestic violence. “It was constantly sold as a happy ever after,” says Shakil. She liked the idea of living a simple, spiritual life, in a place where everyone shared her faith. An escape hatch was opening up. When Shakil asked these people about the reported violence of IS, they dismissed it as yet more evidence of the western media hating Islam. “For me, it wasn’t about terrorism, violence, any of that,” she says. “It was about migrating for Islam, and escaping the life I had in England. That doesn’t mean I hate England, or anything to do with the government. It was my personal life I had come to hate. I never had my safe place. They offered a second chance, they offered safety, they offered a sense of belonging.” On top of this, she wanted to punish her husband, who had threatened to leave her. “I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got nothing to lose, you go off for another life and I’ll go off for another life, too,’” she tells me, her tone defiant almost 12 years later. In September 2014, just five weeks after her first interaction with the recruiter, she booked flights to Turkey for herself and her son for the following month. It is hard to reconcile the gravity of the decision to take a child to a war zone with the immaturity of, in her words “wanting to get one up on my ex”. She can see how it sounds. “I get it, it makes no sense now,” she says. “But at the time, I was very vulnerable, I was very weak, I was clearly being very selfish.” After landing in Turkey, Shakil messaged her parents to say she wasn’t coming home. They assumed it was a joke, only realising she was serious a few days later, when they went to collect her from the airport and she did not arrive. By then, Shakil and her son were in Syria. On the first day, she saw the huge black IS flag flying. It was like waking from a trance and realising: this is real life. A few days later, her brother sent her a picture of the front page of the Sun, with her photograph and the headline “The only way is Isis”. “I remember thinking, ‘Is what I have done worthy of front-page news? Is it that serious?’ That shocked me. I realised I was in a lot of trouble.” Single women could not live alone in IS-held territory, and Shakil and her son were placed in a house with about 60 other women and their children. Almost immediately, there was pressure on her to get married; women’s primary function there was to produce a new generation of fighters; she had arrived without a husband, so was considered to be single. Communication with the outside world was limited. There was hardly any electricity, and it was freezing. Life was claustrophobic, confined to the house and closely supervised, doing “absolutely nothing” all day, trying not to arouse suspicion by letting anyone see her get upset. Shakil realised she had made a terrible mistake, but did not know how to fix it. Soon, Shakil and her son were taken to another house for single women, this time in Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State and a war zone. Still mostly confined to the house, Shakil saw little of the cruelty of IS, but it was difficult to avoid the sound of airstrikes. “Death was very real,” she says. “I knew that if I had led my son to his death, I would never forgive myself for that, ever.” It is this aspect that she still struggles with most. Her eyes fill with tears and it is an effort to get the words out. “You don’t think your mother is going to take you somewhere dangerous, because that’s not what parents do. Children trust their parents to make the right decisions. But I didn’t. All I ever wanted, since he was born, was to keep him safe from violence and criminal activity like I’d seen. So how, in trying to keep him safe, did I take him so close to death?” She resolved to get him out. The same impulsivity that had got Shakil into Syria helped her to escape in January 2015, less than three months after she had arrived. First, she absconded from the house for single women, after bumping into a woman she’d met on the way into Syria who also had doubts. This woman was married, and let Shakil and her son stay at her house for a few days. Unaccompanied women and children were not permitted to travel around IS-held territory without written permission, but Shakil talked her way on to a bus going to a village near the Turkish border. When she got off the bus, she bribed a taxi driver with all the cash she had left – $100 – to take them closer. As the border came into sight, Shakil asked him to stop the car, threw the dollars on the back seat, picked up her son and ran. A small group of IS fighters, guns slung around their shoulders, stood nearby, but did not see her. The border was demarcated with barbed wire, and surrounded by thick mud after days of rain. She couldn’t get over it and screamed for help from some nearby Turkish soldiers, waving her British passport. They lifted her son over first, and then helped her. They were safe. * * * Shakil and her son were taken to a detention centre in Turkey, where they remained for six weeks before flying back to the UK. Police boarded the plane as soon as it landed, arresting Shakil on suspicion of terror offences and taking her son into care. Shakil, who thought he would be sent to relatives, was frantic. In her first interview, she lied to police, saying she had been forced to enter Syria by a man she met in Turkey. “I thought if I told them the truth, they’d never give me my son back,” she tells me. “I panicked.” This would later count against her in court. She was bailed to her parents’ house, and occasionally saw her child. “That was hands down the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alive, to be honest.” Her dad and brother took turns to sit by her bedside through the night in case she harmed herself. After five months, she was charged with two offences: joining IS, and encouraging acts of terror – relating to texts and social media posts sent while she was there. “I can leave, but I don’t want [to]. I want to die here as a martyr,” she said in one message to her dad; in others, she encouraged her family to visit her. Shakil was charged and taken into custody. She pleaded not guilty, claiming she had never joined IS or wanted to take part in terrorist acts. At trial, jurors saw photographs and messages from her phone – including an image of her son holding an AK-47. Shakil said she was simply going along with what others were doing, and that she was under intense scrutiny in Syria because her case was so high profile (in part because members of her own family were selling stories to the tabloids). Shakil maintains that to this day. But the judge did not accept her account, telling her: “You told lie after lie to the police and in court. Most alarming is the fact that you took your son and how he was used. The most abhorrent photographs were those taken of your son wearing a balaclava with an IS logo and specifically the photograph of your son, no more than a toddler, standing next to an AK-47 under a title which, translated from the Arabic, means ‘Father of the British jihad’. You were well aware that the future which you had subjected your son to was very likely to be indoctrination and thereafter life as a terrorist fighter.” Shakil was found guilty of both charges and sentenced to six years in prison. Soon after being sentenced, Shakil wrote down on a piece of paper: “This is the start of for ever.” It marked a decision to use her time while incarcerated to make sense of the decisions that had led her there. Shakil engaged with every rehabilitative service available: therapy, domestic violence courses, deradicalisation. Faith had helped her to survive the worst times in her life, and she believed, as she still does, that she was only able to escape Syria because of God’s mercy. She spent long hours reading and talking to the prison imam, who helped her to see how the brutality of IS ran counter to Islamic teaching about mercy, and to understand the distortions the recruiters had made. It was a slow, emotional process, redefining her personal relationship to God and to religion, and it’s the thing she is most grateful for. Today, she doesn’t wear a hijab, but prays five times a day. Faith has continued to be an anchor through hard times – and there would be more hard times to come. * * * In March 2019, the last IS stronghold of Baghouz fell and the group was officially defeated. Around this time, one of the most high-profile foreign recruits resurfaced in a refugee camp. Shamima Begum was 15 when she left the UK with two schoolfriends from east London. Now she was 19 and heavily pregnant, dazed after the death of her two children. “I’m not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told the Times journalist Anthony Loyd. “I don’t regret coming here.” The outcry was swift and vicious. The UK government moved quickly, stripping Begum’s British citizenship, closing down the possibility of her returning home and rendering her stateless. The government argued this was justified as Begum was, through her parents, eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship – despite the fact that she had never held dual nationality or visited Bangladesh. Soon afterwards, Begum gave birth. The baby died. Begum had been legally a child when she left, and she had been groomed online. Her lawyers have argued, thus far unsuccessfully, that she was the victim of trafficking. Begum’s case has failed in the UK courts, and her lawyers are now taking it to the European Court of Human Rights. “What do you know about being evil at 15? Your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed at that age,” says Shakil, who had left Syria the month before Begum and her friends arrived. “I do think she was groomed and I believe in redemption.” But still, she bristles at the comparison between their cases. “We did the same thing, but we are not the same,” she says. “I escaped even though they could have killed me; Shamima stayed for a long time and only resurfaced when IS had been defeated. Living in such an environment for four-and-a-half years would affect anybody.” Yet it is hard not to see Shakil’s story as a counterfactual to Begum’s. Shakil, too, would theoretically be eligible for citizenship elsewhere – in her case, Pakistan, through her father. A few months before Begum’s citizenship was stripped, Shakil was released from prison, having served half of her six-year sentence, including time on remand. The terms of her probation were strict. She was not allowed to go to Burton upon Trent, where her family lived. She had spoken to her son regularly from prison, but now was barred from contact with him and with her younger siblings, who were under 18. She wore an ankle tag for almost three years, and was subject to an evening curfew. But despite the restrictions, she was at home, and she had a second chance. Shakil took this seriously. She rented a flat in Birmingham and found work as a cleaner, a waitress, an admin assistant – sometimes juggling all three jobs. You don’t legally have to disclose a criminal record unless you’re directly asked, so her conviction did not usually come up. Many people would have looked at the way Begum was monstered in the press and decided to keep a low profile, but Shakil did not. While the tabloids continued to intermittently run stories about “the Towie jihadi”, she decided she wanted to tell her own side of the story. The terms of her probation forbade media appearances, but once her licence period was over in 2021, Shakil made a documentary with ITV and did TV and radio appearances around it. Over time, she had come to understand what had happened to her as a process of grooming, and wanted to raise awareness of the issue. “There’s a lot of reluctance to see people who ran away to Syria as victims of grooming – it’s always, ‘You are a bad person, you are evil,’” she says. “But you’re only susceptible to grooming when you’re vulnerable.” Shakil frequently interrupts herself to say she knows how absurd it sounds, or how unbelievable it is that she could have thought that way. She’s used to being disbelieved. So when she received nasty messages from viewers, telling her she was making pathetic excuses for her crimes, it bounced off her. “I don’t really care what people think,” she tells me. “I get that not everyone is going to understand it.” She tried to set up a charity to run school workshops on online grooming and radicalisation, but it never got off the ground. She still wonders if people simply didn’t trust her to deliver the warning. Behind the scenes, Shakil was still engaged in the slow, painful process of rebuilding her own life. “Prison came and went, but the biggest punishment was my son,” she says. Shakil and her ex are both part of their son’s life, and are civil with each other. After a long period of enforced separation, contact resumed a few years ago and gradually, they got to know each other again. There was a moment in 2024 when Shakil thought: “I can exhale now.” Her relationship with her young son was good. She was surrounded by friends. She was in a steady admin job. “I got to a place I never thought I would get to,” she says. “This is the girl I always wanted to be.” * * * Growing in confidence, Shakil got tired of being asked repeatedly about Syria. Social media offered a way to control the narrative. On TikTok, she became an agony aunt teaching self-respect and no nonsense rules for the dating game. “People come to my page because they think, ‘You’re that evil girl who ran away,’” she says. “But what am I doing now?” Shakil doesn’t talk much about her past on social media, but the way she sees it, simply living a good life – travelling, having nice things – is a statement in itself. “I always want people to have hope, whether that’s someone who just got out of prison or someone who’s going through domestic violence, or who is going through heartbreak,” she says. “I’ve been through it and I’m proof you can make it out the other side.” She wants to talk about domestic violence, self-help and self-love, although she’s vague about what exactly that might look like. “Nothing will ever make Syria worth it, and I will always regret that till the day I die,” she says. “But if I can turn it into something else or actually help people, then maybe that’s why it was meant to happen.” In her bag, she carries a foldable tripod and a ring light. After an emotional three-hour interview during which she has talked at length about the worst moments in her life, she pops to the bathroom to refresh her makeup, adding dark lipstick and smoky eyes. When she returns, she sets up the tripod and camera inside the hotel lounge where we’ve been talking, and takes a few smouldering shots, posing with a lip gloss. Then she moves outside to the balcony. It is a drizzly, grey afternoon, so she stays under the awning. She sets the self-timer on the camera and immediately affects a sultry pose, propped against a tall stool, pouting. The shots are for her Instagram account, where she has a more modest following. “The more you get yourself out there, the more followers, the more opportunities,” she shrugs. Shakil’s sentence means that she will be monitored by police for 15 years after her release. She regularly checks in with the same set of police officers, and will do so until 2034. But in the meantime, she no longer dreams of being rescued. “I think I’m my own knight in shining armour,” she says. “I don’t need anyone to save me any more. I saved myself.”

Explosives found near pipeline in Serbia probably ‘Russian provocation’, says expert

The amount of explosives discovered in Serbia last week would not have been enough to destroy the Balkan Stream gas pipeline, prompting an expert to conclude it was probably a Russian intelligence plot aimed at influencing Hungary’s impending election. A former Ukrainian major general and a munitions specialist told the Guardian calculations made by his company showed the 4kg of explosives recovered by Serbia’s military security agency in Kanjiža could not have seriously ruptured the pipe. Experts from his firm, Andromeda, analysed the steel and polypropylene connection, which carries Russian gas to Hungary, passing through Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia, and calculated the amount of explosive they believed to cause serious damage. To succeed, a significantly greater amount would have been required, Mykola Zentsev said, supplying an estimate in private. “Four kilograms is not sufficient to put the gas pipeline to a standstill,” said Zentsev. Even if optimally placed, 4kg of plastic explosive “would likely result only in localised damage or limited penetration, which could be repaired within a few days without causing long-term disruption of supply,” he added. “This does not align with the objective of a classical act of sabotage, which aims to disable infrastructure for weeks or months,” Zentsev concluded, supporting “the conclusion that the incident was likely a provocation”. On Sunday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said he had been informed by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, about the discovery of the explosives. Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, hinted that Ukraine could be responsible in what he described as “an attack on our sovereignty”. The incident was picked up widely in the media before Hungary’s election on Sunday in which the pro-Russian Orbán is lagging in the polls and fighting for his political survival. Péter Magyar, the leader of Hungary’s opposition, accused Orbán of “attempting to instil fear in his own people through false-flag operations” and following “the advice of Russian agents”. Ukraine denied being involved, a conclusion endorsed by the chief of Serbia’s military security agency, responsible for the investigation. Zentsev argued that, in his opinion, “the primary beneficiaries are likely the current Hungarian government, which gains an additional political advantage ahead of elections, and Russia, which seeks to use such incidents to discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the civilised world”. Under Orbán, Hungary is one of the few EU countries that has chosen to remain close to Russia, buying its gas and oil. Budapest also blocked the approval of a €90bn loan to Ukraine in March after a dispute with Kyiv over repairs to the separate Druzhba oil pipeline, a section of which runs through Ukraine into eastern Europe. Serbia’s Vučić said last Sunday that the explosives could have “endangered many lives” and caused significant damage to the Balkan Stream pipeline. They were found in two backpacks in Kanjiža, “a few hundred metres from the gas pipeline”. However, Zentsev said from the public evidence it did not appear any effort had been made to place the explosives on the pipeline itself – and the Ukrainian, close to the country’s security services, said he believed that the incident was probably a false-flag operation conducted by Russia’s GRU military intelligence. “This meets the standards of the GRU,” said Zentsev, reflecting the incident’s military dimension. Last month, Magyar accused Orbán of inviting GRU agents to help him with his attempted re-election. The Russian embassy in Budapest denied this, describing suggestions of GRU involvement as “openly false information”.

UK forced to shelve Chagos Islands legislation after US dropped support

The UK government has been forced to shelve its legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after the US dropped its support for the agreement. On Friday, UK government officials acknowledged that they had run out of time to pass legislation within the current parliamentary session, which ends in the coming weeks. The latest setback in the UK’s push to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which hosts a joint US-UK Diego Garcia military base, is a sign of the worsening US-UK relations after Donald Trump’s heavy criticism of Keir Starmer over his handling of the Iran war. A government spokesperson said: “Diego Garcia is a key strategic military asset for both the UK and the US. Ensuring its long-term operational security is, and will continue to be, our priority – it is the entire reason for the deal. “We continue to believe the agreement is the best way to protect the long-term future of the base, but we have always said we would only proceed with the deal if it has US support.” The US president has previously criticised the plan, which is backed by the US state department, telling Starmer he was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for the UK and US being allowed to continue using their airbase. However, earlier in February Trump had described it as the “best” deal the prime minister could make in the circumstances. The US president also endorsed the handover when Starmer visited the White House last year. Under the deal, the UK would cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and lease the largest island of the archipelago, Diego Garcia, for 99 years to continue operating the joint military base there. The US had not formally exchanged letters to amend a 1966 British-American treaty on the islands that is understood to have forced the UK to drop its bill. Now, a new Chagos bill is not expected to feature in the king’s speech in May, where the government’s agenda for the coming parliament is revealed. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said on X that the time the Labour government took to drop the bill is “another damning indictment of a prime minister, who fought to hand over British sovereign territory and pay £35bn to use a crucial military base which was already ours”. In February, the Guardian reported Trump changed his mind on supporting the deal because the UK would not permit its airbases to be used for a pre-emptive US strike on Iran. Last month, Iran struck the joint military base after warning British lives were in danger, after Starmer authorised the US to carry out further strikes from British bases. At the time, Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, had told MPs that discussions with American counterparts were paused and that the ongoing process through parliament in relation to the treaty would be brought back at an appropriate time. Starmer has allowed US forced to use UK bases, such as Diego Garcia, only for defensive missions against Iran. This month, he faced increase pressure to limit access after Trump threatened “a whole civilisation” would die if Iran ignored his demands, before a ceasefire was later agreed. In an effort to contain the confusion surrounding Falconer’s comments, the Foreign Office said there was no pause or set deadline, and timings would be announced “in the usual way”. The group of islands were designated as British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965 and detached from Mauritius, which became independent in 1968. However, it forcibly evicted thousands of Chagos islanders who have since mounted a series of legal claims for compensation in British courts. The government has been approached for comment.

Is Iran Trump’s Suez crisis, or just a passing thunderstorm?

Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”. But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown. Trump likes to portray Europe as being under civilisational threat from migration, but this week he threatened that a 7,000-year-old civilisation would “die … never to be brought back” if it did not comply with his demands. He swiftly discovered it was not a threat on which he could follow through, and had to be extricated from it in a rescue mission led by Pakistan and, ignominiously for him, China. He pulled back in a social media post issued just 88 minutes before the implied destruction of Iran. Not for the first time, Trump had disregarded Iran’s history of resilience. As the late Iranian essayist Bastani Parizi once wrote: “Sometimes the fate of this kingdom hangs by a hair, but that hair does not break.” Faced by Iran’s refusal to back down, symbolised by millions of Iranians volunteering to stand on the bridges of their homeland, a late-night White House scramble ensued to find a justification to bring his latest piece of brinkmanship to a semi-dignified end before his ghoulish deadline. Tuesday night’s chaos, entirely self-induced, led to Wednesday’s mess – including the US administration’s claim that “a legitimate misunderstanding” had led Iran to believe the ceasefire covered Lebanon, as the mediators Pakistan insisted. Similarly, the White House asserted that Trump’s explicit acceptance in a social media post that the 10-point plan would form “the framework of the talks”, was in fact a reference to a milder, different plan that is yet to be revealed. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted that the published Iranian plan – written in Farsi and containing full sanctions relief and an Iranian right to enrich uranium – had been merely a Tehran wishlist that Trump had immediately thrown in the garbage. By Thursday, there was zero agreement on what was agreed to secure the two-week ceasefire. Iranian diplomats say the explanation is simple. Trump, once he realised coercive diplomacy had failed and the strait of Hormuz would not be reopened, promised the Pakistani mediators more than he intended to deliver. His only interest, the Iranians say, was to get himself off the hook. Not for the first time in his decade-long dealings with Iran, Trump has proved, from Tehran’s perspective, to be entirely untrustworthy. Faced by a hail of criticism from the right, yet knowing his whole presidency is imperilled by a project he had vowed on the campaign trail to abjure, Trump is reluctant to accept the consequences of his own errors. These include the original sin of being gullible enough to believe the Israeli prime minister, Benjamim Netanyahu, when he said that a war was winnable in days. It is a measure of the extent to which the fate of the two leaders is intertwined that Trump, in the face of worldwide criticism, is reluctant to order a halt to Israeli’s assault on Lebanon. Yet the White House knows Iran cannot desert Hezbollah after it suffered so much by answering Tehran’s call to intervene. With few allies left in the Middle East, and so much hostility created, Iran cannot be seen to abandon its most important Shia ally. As a result, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said the US must choose between ceasefire and continued war via Israel. “It cannot have both. The ball is in the US’s court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” he said. So Trump is trapped, just like the oil tankers awaiting clearance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to chug through the strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump had fruitlessly demanded. Instead it is Trump who is living in hell, as he watches his poll ratings slide in a year of midterm elections. A worldwide mess If one seeks Trump’s current monument, one need only look around. The mess across the world is astonishing. Americans face $4-a-gallon petrol at the pumps. The world economy is unhinged by the worst disruption in the history of the oil market, with the International Monetary Fund predicting lower growth and higher inflation worldwide. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is likely to see Russian coffers swell by anything from $45bn to $151bn over the next year, according to the Kiel Institute thinktank. Across the Gulf region, the crafted aura of stability and modernity looks suddenly fragile. It will take many years for Qatar to repurpose its liquid gas industry. In a sign of the times, British Airways is ending flights to Jeddah from May, in the expectation that tourism will shrivel. A complex debate awaits a divided Gulf Cooperation Council on the security provided by allowing the US to site so many military bases in the region. Inside Iran, schools, universities and medical research centres have been bombed. The US-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran estimates that a total of 3,636 Iranians have been killed, including 1,701 civilians. The trauma is captured in this vignette from the citizen journalism website IranWire: “My husband counted 13 explosions in a row. Women in the neighbourhood were screaming, some on the verge of a nervous breakdown, There was dust – endless dust – that seemed to cling to one’s throat.” Iran started 2026 mired in an economic crisis. This led to one of the biggest outbreaks of popular protest in years, which was brutally suppressed by the regime. Now, the only street demonstrations are regime-backed shows of patriotic solidarity, and the Iranian government looks stronger. The prospect of regime change or at least ideological rethink has receded. One infirm Khamenei has been replaced as supreme leader by another. The Revolutionary Guards may have lost many buildings and missile launchers, but not the ability to wreak havoc across the Gulf, control the strait of Hormuz and “manage” civil society – the true metrics of its authority. The internet remains shut to most after a record six weeks, and since 19 March, six members of the dissident People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran and seven young protesters have been hanged on charges of “moharebeh”, or enmity against God. No one can know whether – once the internet blackout ends and the economy’s travails return to the fore – a call for a different Iran will emerge from the darkness and rubble, framed by the memory of the bloody protests of January. For now, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remains in place, and the US’s negotiators are starting to hint of concessions as talks in Islamabad approach. JD Vance, the US vice-president, said on Wednesday: “The president said that we don’t want Iran to enrich uranium with a view to developing a nuclear weapon, and we want Iran to give up its nuclear fuel.” He did not formally deny Iran the right to domestic enrichment – the central point of dispute in previous talks brokered by Oman. Iran has already agreed not to build up its nuclear stockpiles. Yet there is a risk that Iran’s leadership, heady at its survival, may now overplay its hand. The country’s former foreign minister Javad Zarif proposed in Foreign Affairs magazine this week that in return for sanctions relief, Tehran should cap domestic uranium enrichment, blend down existing stockpiles of nuclear materials, transfer enriched uranium to a new multilateral consortium, and reopen the strait of Hormuz. The plan was supported by the former president Hassan Rouhani, but pilloried by hardliners in the conservative media and at demonstrations. The test in the Islamabad negotiations, apart from the terms for opening the strait, will be whether the US team can secure something on nuclear they were not already on course to achieve in the Geneva talks that took place immediately before the start of the war. The US still lacks a theory of evolutionary change inside Iran, preferring rupture and revolution, rather than the reform most Iranians appear to favour. Sanctions relief is still the prerequisite for a more modern Iran. If there is anyone that speaks Farsi in the US administration, they have surely not been invited anywhere near the situation room. The European angle Faced by such incompetence and recklessness, Europe now faces a choice about how hard it tries to maintain the US alliance. Europe in the short term deserves to fume, as the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has started to do. Europe was excluded from the nuclear talks, declined to support a war over which it was not consulted and did not believe necessary, and has repeatedly been blamed by Trump for refusing to “be there” for the US. But the internal rifts that divided Europe over the 2003 Iraq war have not been replicated – either over the war’s necessity or Lebanon’s inclusion in the truce. Instead, Britain and Spain, the two European countries most supportive of George W Bush, have been clear opponents of the war – albeit deploying very differing timbres. For all that Trump has belittled Starmer as no Winston Churchill, the UK prime minister has refused to join the White House in pretending war is a Call of Duty video game in which you can die and get to play again. In 2003, the Downing Street comms team tried to persuade President Bush not to deploy cowboy vocabulary, warning him it alienated potential support in the UK. This time there is no constraining advice. Iran does not hold back on the polemics, but the language used by the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has been crude, cruel, and sometimes to the European ear, little short of repulsive. It serves only to widen the Atlantic. A Politico poll this week found that only 12% of those polled in March in Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy saw the US as a close ally, while 36% saw it as a threat. By contrast, China was seen as a threat by 29% of those polled across the six countries. The transatlantic alliance, institutionalised through Nato, presupposes consent not only within the White House, but also among the people of Europe. Washington can pretend it does not care if it loses allies, even as it dispatches the vice-president to Hungary to try to prop up the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. But what it cannot countenance is no longer being feared. Might is right is, after all, what Trump offers the modern world. American military and technological power is of course unmatched. US defence spending is equal to the defence budgets of its next eight largest allies combined. But despite the massive destruction and the billions spent, force has failed to win the day in Iran. Decapitation plus air power may destroy a state, but it cannot occupy it. Historical parallels Whether this is the US’s Suez crisis, a perfect failure, or “essentially a passing thunderstorm” – as some in 1956 insisted Suez represented – is now the question. But wars, especially badly misjudged wars, tend to accelerate pre-existing change, and the parallels with Suez are too numerous to ignore. Faced by the nationalisation of the Suez canal – an artificial waterway of similar commercial strategic importance to nature’s strait of Hormuz – the then British prime minister, Anthony Eden, announced that Gamal Abdel Nasser, then president of Egypt, could not “be allowed to have his thumb on our windpipe”. Nasser retorted that if the British and French did not like what he had done, they could “choke to death on their fury”. Britain and France applied sanctions, with London holding a 15-nation conference to assert the legal rights of a Suez Canal Users Association. With diplomacy floundering, Eden even contemplated the assassination of Nasser. When France, the UK and Israel cooked up a plan to re-occupy the canal and remove Nasser, the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, intervened to stop it. Eisenhower disapproved of Britain’s actions for many reasons, including regarding Suez as an unnecessary distraction from a more important conflict in Europe’s East – the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of an uprising in Hungary. Only Australia backed Britain, while Pakistan threatened to leave the Commonwealth. Anti-war protests sprung up across the UK and senior civil servants resigned in protest, saying experts had been systematically sidelined. Evelyn Shuckburgh, the Foreign Office official for Middle Eastern policy, was not alone in deciding “Eden had gone off his head”. What Britain had hoped to prevent by its actions in November 1956, it actually succeeded in guaranteeing. Egypt maintained control of the canal with the support of the UN and the US. The canal was closed to traffic for five months as a result of ships sunk by the Egyptians. British access to fuel and oil became limited and resulted in shortages. Nasser emerged from the crisis much strengthened, with Britain’s decline in the Middle East exposed. Harold Beeley, a British diplomat in the Foreign Office at the time who later served as ambassador to Egypt, believed Suez was a “disastrous adventure” that showed Britain could no longer enforce its will through major military action. Stories of the end of the American empire have long been in circulation, of course. Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said in a seminar last month: “If the American era is over, nobody told the Americans, and they certainly did not tell Trump. But we may be in a paradoxical situation where the US is still the dominant player in the world, but not promoting a liberal order, and that seems to me to be the heart of the problem.” Asked who would be the architect of a new order, in the absence of the US, Cox answered China. But in the same seminar, Prof John Ikenberry, one of the world’s leading liberal international theorists, answered that the liberal order could come back. The Princeton professor insisted the virtues of the liberal order – open trade, institutions that enforce rules, democracy, interdependence – remain robust and more attractive than the alternatives, including “fractured zones of micro-imperial oppression”. But the future role the US will play in any new order is unclear. Judging by the recent Mansion House speech given by Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, Britain’s security still requires relations with the US to endure at least until Europe shows it can be responsible for its own defence. At another LSE seminar, the political scientist Nathalie Tocci argued that defence work needs speeding up, and to be made genuinely European. Something fundamental has changed in the liberal leviathan America, she said. It was now “neither liberal nor a leviathan”. As a personality, Trump may be Levin’s once in a century aberration, but he is also the tip of an iceberg, Tocci argued, in which structural irreversible forces will diminish US hegemony. If that is indeed the case, it will be the greatest of ironies, as Iran – nominally a backward-looking country – will be the midwife of a new era.