The strait of Hormuz remains among the main points of “serious disagreement” in talks between Iranian and US delegations in Islamabad, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Saturday. It added that consultations were continuing despite what it described as excessive US demands, while Iran insisted on preserving its military gains.
A malnourished nine-year-old boy was rescued after being locked in his father’s van since 2024 in eastern France, a prosecutor said. A neighbour alerted police to “sounds of a child” coming from a vehicle in the village of Hagenbach, near the borders of Switzerland and Germany. After forcing the van open on Monday, officers found a child “lying in a foetal position, naked, covered by a blanket on top of a mound of trash and near excrement”, the prosecutor, Nicolas Heitz, said. He added the child was malnourished and could no longer walk because he had been sitting down for so long. His 43-year-old father told police he had kept the boy in the utility vehicle since November 2024 to protect him from his 37-year-old partner who “wanted to put the child in psychiatric care”, the prosecutor said. The couple lived in a block of flats with the boy’s siblings, his 12-year-old sister and 10-year-old half-sister. The boy told police his father brought him food twice a day and left him bottles of water, according to Le Parisien newspaper. He said he had to urinate in plastic bottles and defecate in bin bags, adding the last time he had a shower was at the end of 2024. According to the father, his partner did not know the boy was in the van. The man has been charged with the “sequestration and arbitrary detention of a minor”, as well as depriving him of proper food and medical care, and has been remanded in custody. His partner has been charged with “non-assistance to a minor in danger” and “non-denunciation of mistreatment of a minor” and has been granted conditional bail. The three children have been placed in temporary care pending the decision of a children’s court judge. Neighbours told police that the boy seemed to have disappeared suddenly at the end of 2024, but they understood from the couple that he had been placed in care. Some local residents said they heard noises occasionally emanating from the van, but had been told it was a cat. One neighbour, named Danielle, described the situation as “truly devastating”, Sky News reported. She said: “We don’t understand it. It’s horrific, there are no words. “I never once noticed anything, never heard anything … It feels like we’re living in a movie or a dream, and we keep thinking, ‘Tomorrow I’ll wake up, and maybe it’s not real.’ We just can’t comprehend it.”
Peace talks between Iran and the US began in Islamabad this afternoon, with senior negotiators from both countries meeting face to face at the highest level for the first time since 1979, in the presence of mediators from Pakistan. Pakistani state TV said US and Iranian officials were “sitting directly at the same table” – which was later confirmed by the White House – and discussions were beginning in a positive atmosphere, despite fighting continuing in Lebanon. JD Vance, the US vice-president, is leading the American delegation, while Iran’s negotiators in Islamabad are headed by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, and Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister. Pakistani sources also said that Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, was present in the room. The field marshal, who was key in brokering the ceasefire earlier this week, is reported to have a good relationship with the US president, Donald Trump. The first round of discussions went on for about two hours, a political source said, and was followed by a second round of more technical discussions. These technical talks were divided into key topics, with a focus on security, finance and the strait of Hormuz, the source added. It was then planned that there would be a break for dinner, to be hosted by Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at his residence. Earlier, the Iranian negotiators demanded a ceasefire in Lebanon, reparations and commitment to unblock frozen assets as part of a peace deal in a preliminary meeting with Pakistani mediators, led by Sharif. However, the US warned it would not allow itself to be manipulated by a weakened Tehran. On his arrival, Vance said: “If they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive.” In previous negotiations, the US and Iranian teams have been based separately. During the nuclear negotiations held in Geneva in late February, diplomats from Oman shuttled between the two sides, though the talks collapsed when the US and Israel bombed Iran on 28 February, killing supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Israel is not present at the talks as its military said it had bombed 200 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours. Strikes on the towns of Kfar Sir, Zefta and Toul killed 10 people overnight, while Hezbollah fired rockets at cities in Israel’s north. Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters clashed in the city of Bint Jbeil. Trump said the US was “now starting the process of clearing out the strait of Hormuz” and that all of Iran’s mine-laying vessels had been sunk during the US and Israel’s 40-day bombing campaign. There were further reports that US navy warships had crossed west and returned east to establish freedom of navigation, but Iran denied this. Iranian state TV then said any US warship crossing Hormuz would be attacked within 30 minutes Other members of the US negotiating team in Islamabad include Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer who is Trump’s personal envoy, and Jared Kushner, who holds no formal White House position but is the president’s son-in-law. A senior Pakistani official expressed optimism as the discussions began: “Like us, the entire world is looking for a breakthrough and an end of the war. The talks are in a strong position because both delegations have come to Islamabad with complete authority from their capitals and have stepped back from extreme positions.” Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, a Qatari newspaper based in the UK, reported that China “may offer guarantees” to secure a deal, citing a Pakistani source. It also claimed that a delegation from the country had travelled for the talks. However, other Pakistani sources said later that, contrary to the newspaper report, a Chinese delegation had not flown in. “They did not need to come, as the Chinese ambassador is in constant contact and they are on board with the talks,” one said. Iranian media reported that the US had agreed to unblock $6bn of Iranian assets frozen in Qatar, though this was promptly denied by US officials. Direct talks between Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors are due to be held in Washington at the US state department. The two sides will discuss “declaring a ceasefire and the start date for negotiations between Lebanon and Israel under US auspices”, Lebanon’s presidency said. Israel has indicated it is willing to negotiate directly with the Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a part, but has said it is not prepared to agree a ceasefire with the pro-Iran proxy group. The two sides have been fighting since early March, when Hezbollah entered the war in support of Iran. Hezbollah supporters staged a rally against the negotiations in front of the prime ministers’ office on Saturday afternoon, with protesters waving Hezbollah flags and pictures of the organisation’s late chief Hassan Nasrallah. The Lebanese army deployed troops around the area and warned that it would not tolerate any attempts to destabilise the country at “this sensitive moment”. Internal tensions in Lebanon had been on the rise since Israeli bombing over the last month displaced more than 1.2 million people across the country. Disagreements over Lebanon’s engagement with Israel threatened to further fracture the divided country as they pitted Hezbollah against the government. The Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, announced he was cancelling a planned trip to Washington on Thursday, where he was supposed to meet with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to further negotiations with Israel. Mahmoud Qamati, the vice-head of Hezbollah’s deputy political council, warned in an interview on Saturday that the armed group viewed the government in an increasingly confrontational light.
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”. Simon McDonald, a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the government had “no other choice” than to halt the deal for the time being. “The UK had two objectives, one was to comply with international law, the second was to reinforce the relationship with the United States,” he said. “When the president of the United States is openly hostile, the government has to rethink, so this agreement, this treaty will go into the deep freeze for the time being.” The Chagos Islands are officially known as British Indian Ocean Terrority and have been controlled by the UK since the 19th century. In 2019, the international court of justice found that the UK unlawfully separated the islands from Mauritius before it granted independence to the country in 1968. Thousands of islanders were then forcibly deported to make way for the US-UK military base. However, many Chagossians and their descendants would prefer the UK to retain sovereignty over the islands, in the hope they can one day return. The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, said: “This is great news and long overdue. Now the government must right a terrible wrong and help the Chagossians to fully resettle their home.” The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, Calum Miller, said the handling of the Chagos deal had been “shambolic”. Miller said: “Any deal must provide clarity on the future military partnership with the US and address Chagossian rights and parliamentary scrutiny of the sums involved.” 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 launched two missiles at the joint military base after warning British lives were in danger because 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 process through parliament in relation to the treaty would be brought back at an appropriate time. Starmer has allowed US forces to use UK bases, such as Diego Garcia, only for defensive missions against Iran. This month, he faced increased 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”. • This article was amended on 11 April 2026. A previous version said that, last month, Iran "struck” the Diego Garcia base; in fact, though two missiles were launched, the base was not hit.
Collateral damage is a universally acknowledged hazard of war – more commonly known for its impact on truth and non-combatant civilians. Its consequences are much less frequently visited on military alliances. The United States’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) allies are fearful that may be about to change as a result of the fallout from Washington’s decision to team up with Israel in waging war against Iran. Donald Trump has attacked the pact with a vehemence rarely heard over what he regards as disloyalty and failure to help in re-opening the strait of Hormuz. Tehran closed the strategic waterway in response to the military onslaught it faced in the conflict, which is currently paused thanks to a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan. Trump’s criticisms of the 77-year-old alliance are nothing new; accusations of freeloading against allies for supposedly inadequate defence spending date back to his first term. But the stridency and threatening nature of Trump’s complaints have escalated, triggering fears that he could abandon the alliance – an act that would require approval from Congress. The air of panic drove Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, into a hurried trip to Washington, where he tried to soothe Trump’s resentments in a closed-door White House meeting on Wednesday. The two-and-a-half-hour session did not go smoothly, despite Rutte’s reputation as a “Trump whisperer”. “It went shit,” an unnamed European official told Politico, calling the encounter “nothing but a tirade of insults” in which Trump “apparently threatened to do just about anything”. Afterwards, Trump resorted to his familiar fusillade of abuse on his Truth Social platform, posting in capitals: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” Omitted – to widespread relief – was any definitive declaration that Trump intended to withdraw from an alliance that the US founded in 1949 with 11 other countries, in what was then seen as a vital bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism. Since the end of the cold war, it has expanded to include 32 countries. In a speech to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute a day after the White House showdown, Rutte – a former Dutch prime minister – fluctuated between self-flagellation and self-abasement in his condemnation of his fellow Europeans for previously failing to meet their own defence costs, while voicing understanding for Trump’s viewpoint over Iran. Nato members had been “a bit slow, to say the least”, he conceded, to provide support for the US’s war against Iran – a campaign about which none of its members had been consulted and few supported. But praising Trump for his “bold leadership and vision”, Rutte argued that Nato would survive not in spite of the US president’s splenetic outbursts, but because of them. “President Trump’s commitment to progress reversed more than a generation of stagnation and atrophy by reminding Europe that values must be backed by hard power – hard power provided not only by the United States,” he said, referring to an allied commitment agreed last year for members to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. “Why, then, does everyone in this room have a knot in their stomach about the future of the transatlantic alliance? Why, when we turn on our televisions or scroll on our phones, do we see eager early drafts of Nato’s obituary? Let me be clear, this alliance is not whistling past the graveyard.” Yet its physical survival may conceal a multitude of moral wounds inflicted by Trump’s rhetorical assaults, which have included belittling Nato as a “paper tiger” and demanding that one of its founders, Denmark, cede Greenland to the US – putting Washington on a potential military collision course with other members. Additionally, there has been profound shock over the macabre nature of Trump’s bellicose threats against Iran – among them a warning that Iranian civilization would be eliminated “never to return” if the country’s leaders did not open the strait of Hormuz. Analysts say Trump’s demands and accusations, coupled with threats to commit what many saw as tantamount to genocide and that ran contrary to Nato’s values, corrode the trust that has sustained the alliance. “It is hard to imagine that the current war with Iran and the crisis over the strait of Hormuz does not represent a fundamental rupture in the North Atlantic security structure,” wrote Francis Fukuyama, a historian at Stanford University. “Nato is an alliance built on trust: its deterrent value rests on the belief that NATO members will come to one another’s aid if a member is attacked. Trump is accusing alliance members of betraying the United States by not collaborating with it to re-open the strait–but no one ever signed up to wage offensive war.” Charles Kupchan, director of European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said that while Nato’s European members were trying to keep Nato afloat until the end of Trump’s presidency, they have long-term fears about the alliance’s future, amid suspicions that the US no longer shares their values. “The United States has always tried, in some ways, to be an idealist power that’s navigating a realist world, and [it] wanted to change the world,” he said. “[But] you could argue that the world has changed the United States, and now it is just another great power playing by the rules of realpolitik, like Russia or China. I think that mystifies allies and confounds allies.” Kupchan predicted a domestic backlash against Trump’s hostility towards Nato – which retains significant support among the US public – that would produce a more traditional posture towards the alliance from a successor administration. But allied suspicions would persist, he warned: “If you are an American ally, you now have to wonder whether the United States is passing through a prolonged period of political dysfunction and unpredictability that forces you to call into question its reliability? My answer is yes. “That’s because this is not just about Trump. This is about the hollowing out of America’s political center [and] a foreign policy that has been swinging quite wildly from one extreme to the other. The world has whiplash.” Still, Trump’s withdrawal from Nato is thought unlikely given the presence of 80,000 US troops and numerous military bases in Europe, which are vital components in the projection of American global power that has become a hallmark of his second presidency. Kristine Berzina, a Nato specialist at the German Marshall Fund, said Trump’s attacks risked weakening the alliance at a time military cooperation within it is at an all-time high. “The magic of Nato is not only the real military power, and that is actually still as strong as ever, but what is the deterrence effect, and how aligned are all of the allies within the alliance?” she said. “When there are such open attacks on it from its strongest member, at the very least, it’s dispiriting. It calls into question the military power in a way that is not reflective of the actual reality and the very close coordination between the militaries in the alliance.” More damaging still, she warned, is the danger of western European nations widening the breach with Trump by waging a war of words that could provoke the White House into turning its back on the alliance, leaving eastern European members exposed to Russian aggression. “What I’m getting increasingly concerned about is a sense from western Europeans in particular that speaking out against Trump is going to be in their interest,” Berzina said. “The reality is that Europeans cannot do without the United States, when facing down the possibility that a revanchist Russia could try to cross Nato’s borders. The countries that are loudest in efforts to push back against Trump and his rhetoric right now are the countries least likely to have to face any consequences of such rhetoric on their own soil. “Europe is stuck with the United States, and it has to make the best of it. Yes, it’s bad right now. It’s unpleasant and unfortunate and regrettable and stressful, but [the US] is indispensable.”
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
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.
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.”