GreyNoise researchers have observed exploit attempts targeting the remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2023-28771 in Zyxel devices.
On June 16, GreyNoise researchers detected exploit attempts targeting CVE-2023-28771 (CVSS score 9.8), a remote code execution flaw impacting Zyxel IKE decoders over UDP port 500.
“Exploitation attempts against CVE-2023-28771 were minimal throughout recent weeks. On June 16, GreyNoise observed a concentrated burst of exploit attempts within a short time window, with 244 unique IPs observed attempting exploitation.” reads the alert published by GreyNoise.
The main targets of the CVE-2023-28771 exploit were the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, and India. Interestingly, the attacking IPs showed no other suspicious activity in the two weeks before June 16, the attempts focused solely on this specific vulnerability.
All 244 IP addresses linked to the exploit attempts appear to come from Verizon Business in the U.S., but because the attack uses UDP (port 500), the researchers warn that the IP addresses could be spoofed and may not reveal the real source. GreyNoise linked the attempts to Mirai botnet variants, which VirusTotal later confirmed.
Below are mitigations provided by GreyNoise:
Block malicious IPs: While spoofing is possible, GreyNoise has classified all 244 IPs as malicious. Defenders should immediately block these IPs while monitoring for related activity.
Review Zyxel device exposure: Verify that any internet-exposed Zyxel devices are patched for CVE-2023-28771.
Monitor for post-exploitation activity: Exploit attempts may lead to botnet enlistment or additional compromise. Monitor affected devices for anomalies.
Limit unnecessary IKE/UDP port 500 exposure: Apply network filtering where possible to reduce unnecessary exposure.
In April 2023, Zyxel addressed the critical vulnerability CVE-2023-28771 in its firewall devices. The company promptly advised customers to install the provided patches in order to mitigate the vulnerability. At the time, the vendor reported that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit the command injection vulnerability CVE-2023-28771 impacting Zyxel firewalls. Their objective was to leverage this vulnerability to deploy and install malware on the affected systems. At the end of May 2025, US CISA added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog based on evidence of active exploitation.
Both Cambodia and Thailand have been rated among the friendliest nations in the world, and just five years ago, the Southeast Asian neighbors thought their friendship with each other could never be broken. “As we share a long border, we both know that we have to live and grow together,” Thailand’s then-Ambassador to Cambodia Panyarak Poolthup told Cambodia’s then-Prime Minister Hun Sen. “The political will is always there to resolve any issues that may arise.”
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But in recent weeks, bilateral relations have sunk to a dangerous new low, threatening to reignite a historic rivalry that had seemed to be a relic of the past.
Following weeks of standoff, including Cambodia invoking the language of “war,” since a Cambodian soldier was killed in a clash along the border last month, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra issued her strongest rebuke yet, signaling resolution likely remains distant.
“Thailand is united. We will not tolerate maltreatment, accusations or threats from any party. Our country also has dignity. Our country is also strong,” Paetongtarn said, in response to Cambodia retaliating with cross-border embargoes and taking the dispute to the International Court of Justice, which Thailand does not recognize the jurisdiction of.
Here’s what to know about the conflict—and its potential consequences.
What has happened in recent weeks?
The reescalation of conflict was sparked on May 28, when a Cambodian soldier was killed in an early morning clash between both nations’ troops, in an area called the Emerald Triangle—the shared border between Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. The area remains disputed as both Thailand and Cambodia lay claims to parts of the region.
Both sides argued that the other was the aggressor: Cambodia’s Ministry of Defense said the Thai army opened fire on a trench that had been a Cambodian army base, leading to the death of the soldier, while Thailand’s army claimed that its soldiers responded only after the Cambodian forces “started using weapons” during a misunderstanding in the disputed area.
Hun Sen, who relinquished the Cambodian premiership to his son in 2023 but became the Senate President and remains the effective country leader, reacted to the skirmish, saying that he supports the “decision to send troops and heavy weapons to the border to prepare for a counterattack in case of a further invasion.”
“We hate war, but we are compelled to wage it when facing foreign aggression,” Hun Sen said.
As members of the regional bloc Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Cambodia and Thailand are expected to resolve disputes peacefully, per the ASEAN charter. While both countries initially beefed up military presence on their respective sides of the border, on June 8, they appeared to attempt a deescalation by sending their troops back to military positions that were agreed upon last year. Paetongtarn, in a statement, said the countries agreed “to jointly adjust military forces at points of conflict to reduce the atmosphere of confrontation.”
But the dispute escalated through punitive tit-for-tat policies seemingly designed to appease fomenting nationalistic sentiment on their respective sides of the border.
The Thai army took control of border checkpoints and threatened to cut electricity and the internet to Cambodia. Cambodia responded by banning Thai media like TV and movies, and disconnecting cross-border internet links to Thailand. On June 17, Cambodia banned Thailand’s export of produce into the country. Thailand, meanwhile, barred Thais from crossing the border to work in casinos and other entertainment venues in Cambodia’s Poipet.
Further inflaming tensions, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet announced on Facebook on June 16 that Cambodia sent an official letter to the International Court of Justice to help find a solution to the border development issues. “Cambodia chooses international law and peace,” he said the day before.
Thailand’s foreign ministry has ruled out an intervention from the ICJ and made clear its preference for bilateral talks, arguing that “a third party may not always be conducive to the preservation of amicable relations among States, particularly in sensitive matters involving complex historical, territorial, or political dimensions.”
What is the historic context?
Cambodia and Thailand share an 817-km. land border, but that border was largely mapped by French colonizers while they occupied Cambodia from 1863 to 1953. A 1907 map was based on an agreement to follow a natural watershed line between Thailand and Cambodia. But Thailand later contested the map over the fact that it placed the 11th-century Preah Vihear Temple in the Dângrêk Mountains within Cambodian territory.
The dispute, as well as historical differences in cartographic methods, led to areas around the border that both countries lay claim to.
There have been attempts to clarify demarcations. Cambodia brought Thailand to the International Court of Justice in 1959 over the temple dispute, and in 1962 the court ruled in Phnom Penh’s favor, saying that Preah Vihear falls in Cambodian territory. Thailand recognized this at the time but argued that the surrounding frontiers were still disputed, which further complicated the borderlines.
Tensions flared in 2008 when Cambodia sought a UNESCO world-heritage status for the Preah Vihear Temple. After the temple received the recognition in July, military clashes between Cambodian and Thai troops erupted near the border area.
These clashes lasted for years, coming to a head in 2011, after displacing 36,000 at the height of the conflict in April that year. Around this time, Cambodia took to the ICJ again to interpret its earlier 1962 ruling, and the court affirmed its previous decision two years later.
Thailand has pushed for a more bilateral approach, with a Joint Boundary Commission (JBC) established in 2000 to help resolve border disputes. Cambodia has engaged with Thailand through the JBC, but these meetings—the latest of which was scheduled on June 14 in Phnom Penh—tend to produce no significant results.
What could come next?
Resolving the border dispute quickly seems unlikely.
Complicating matters is the relationship between the two countries’ current leaders—and their fathers. Paetongtarn’s father former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet’s father Hun Sen have a public friendship, with Hun Sen even providing refuge to Thaksin in Cambodia and naming him as an honorary economic adviser after Thaksin was ousted in a coup in 2006.
The relationship between the two has caused concern about how the border dispute will be resolved, particularly for Thailand.
When Paetongtarn was asked about whether she’s becoming “too soft” on Cambodia because of the relationship, she responded: “Even though our two families are friends, it doesn’t mean we would allow the country to lose its interests … if a friend asks for your house, no friend would just give it away.”
Paetongtarn’s comments come as the Royal Thai Army said it was ready for a “high-level operation” if necessary to address the situation at the border. Paetongtarn has reiterated calls for a peaceful resolution to the dispute, but being at odds with the Army has echoes of previous government downfalls: both her father Thaksin and aunt Yingluck Shinawatra, another former Prime Minister, were ousted following nationalists groups’ revival of border issues.
In an analysis for Asian current affairs magazine The Diplomat, Royal University of Phnom Penh’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies researcher Rath Pichanvorlak warned that the Thai military “could allow border tensions to escalate, inflaming nationalist sentiment,” to justify another coup.
North Korea has become one of Russia’s main allies during Moscow’s Ukraine offensive, sending thousands of troops to help the Kremlin oust Ukrainian forces from its Kursk border region.
Just four days into its ferocious air campaign, Israel appears to have gained a decisive edge in its escalating conflict with Iran: aerial supremacy over Iran.
The Israeli military said Monday that it can now fly over the country’s capital, Tehran, without facing major resistance after crippling Iran’s air defenses in recent strikes, enabling Israel to hit an expanding range of targets with relative ease.
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Such control over Iran’s skies, military analysts say, is not just a tactical advantage—it’s a strategic turning point. Air supremacy gives Israel the freedom to escalate its bombing campaign, look for additional targets, and possibly redraw the rules of deterrence in a region where missile salvos and proxy wars have long defined the limits of conflict.
Soon after declaring control of Tehran’s skies, Israel warned residents and workers in the capital to evacuate, and later appeared to strike the headquarters of Iran’s state television broadcaster while anchors were live on air. It was a symbolically potent moment: a demonstration not just of reach, but of psychological dominance.
Israel’s aerial ascendancy is not free of risks. Backed into a corner, the Iranian regime may consider its survival at stake and could take more extreme measures. Iran has limited tools given the setbacks it has suffered over the last two years, but it still has terrorist proxies around the world and has attempted assassinations of major figures in the past. It might also try to sprint for a nuclear weapon in one of its remaining underground facilities.
The Israeli offensive—codenamed Operation Rising Lion—was launched Friday after the IAEA concluded that Iran had moved closer to the threshold of producing a nuclear weapon. Since then, Israel has carried out one of the most intense and far-reaching air operations in its history, targeting nuclear sites, missile launchers, airports, and senior figures in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the strikes will continue until both Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile stockpiles are destroyed. U.S. President Donald Trump posted Monday night on Truth Social: “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON… Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
But while the air campaign has given Israel the upper hand militarily, it has also hardened diplomatic dead-ends. Richard Nephew, the former Deputy Special Envoy for Iran under the Biden Administration, says that reviving nuclear negotiations with Iran is now “infinitely harder than it used to be” because the U.S. has shown it can withdraw from an agreement at any time and is unable to control its ally in Israel. “The idea of finding a sustainable, permanent deal here has taken a big hit as a result of Israeli military action,” he says, adding that Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the original nuclear agreement was the catalyst for the current crisis. “We had a nuclear deal that was working. His own administration was saying it was working.”
Now, with Iran’s nuclear program damaged but not destroyed, and its retaliatory missile strikes continuing, military analysts say Israel may double down on the advantage its air superiority provides: more strikes, more decapitation efforts, and potentially even covert ground operations—backed by an air force that now roams Iranian skies largely unchallenged.
Here’s what to know about Israel’s air supremacy.
What does it mean to have air supremacy?
Air supremacy is the most complete form of aerial dominance a military can achieve. It means an air force can strike targets across a country at will, without major opposition from enemy aircraft or air defenses.
For Israel to claim this over Iran just days after the strikes began is an impressive military accomplishment, says Michael Knights, the Bernstein Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute who specializes in Middle Eastern security. “It’s exceptional to get this level of freedom. I’m quite surprised that they’ve managed it,” he says, noting that not even the U.S. had been able to establish air superiority over the Houthis despite spending around $1 billion on the effort, losing over 20 major drone systems in the process.
“Air superiority gives you a real edge when it comes to keeping the enemy stationary or watching whenever they try to move,” Knights says, suggesting that Israel may use it to track key targets like nuclear facilities or where certain Iranian leaders live. The air advantage also allows Israel to bomb “around the clock instead of just at night” without real fear of being shot down, he adds.
Israel began the war using its most advanced stealth aircraft, the F-35, enhanced with intelligence-gathering modifications to fly deep into Iranian territory and strike Iran’s air defense radar installations and surface-to-air missile batteries. After suppressing most of Iran’s air defenses, Israel sent older fighter jets, including F-15s and F-16s, to join the operation and began dropping JDAMs and SPICE bombs—relatively inexpensive compared to missiles—on an expanding list of military sites, some of them within the heart of Tehran.
Unlike Russia, which has failed to achieve similar air dominance in Ukraine after more than three years of war, Israel has accomplished it in a matter of days. Analysts credit superior training, tighter integration with intelligence and cyber operations, and the element of surprise.
“The two previous Israeli retaliatory operations in 2024 taught them that they could operate within Iranian airspace relatively freely,” Knights says. “First you take out its command and control, its communications, radar…and pretty soon you can operate drones in daylight over Tehran.”
How much damage can Israel do from the air?
With aerial supremacy, Israel’s destructive potential has increased exponentially. Without needing to rely on costly long-range missiles, Israeli jets can now fly directly over Iranian targets, drop cheaper precision bombs, and strike with greater frequency.
Knights says that the Israeli military will likely try to destroy the entire Iranian Navy and Iran’s weapon storage facilities, military and civilian fuel storage sites, and national security buildings. But he notes that Israel will not be able to strike some of Iran’s major uranium enrichment sites, like Fordow, a nuclear facility that is buried deep within a mountain and is considered nearly impervious to conventional airstrikes. “They don’t have bunker busters that are good enough,” he says.
Israeli officials have said its military has prepared at least two weeks of strikes, though that could change if the U.S. intervenes. The U.S. military has helped shoot down Iranian missiles fired at Israel.
“Iran has turned out to be much weaker than we had assumed, and yet it’s still standing,” says Alex Vatanka, a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute who specializes in Iranian security affairs. He adds that the Iranians know the U.S. is the only country that can stop Israel from attacking, and that Iran’s leaders are asking for talks to resume as long as the U.S. doesn’t join the attack. “Israel definitely cannot stay in this fight for the long haul without the U.S,” he says. “But Netanyahu is saying to Trump, please let me finish the job.”
“The Israelis were quite concerned about what kind of deal Donald Trump was going to make,” Nephew says. “That made them decide they needed to act now, as opposed to waiting to see what else would come from the negotiating process.”
Already, Israel has destroyed more than 120 surface-to-surface missile launchers—roughly a third of Iran’s total—along with two F-14 aircraft, dozens of command centers, and critical infrastructure supporting Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The strike on Mashhad airport, 1,400 miles from Israel, was the longest-range attack in the campaign.
Iran is depleting its stockpiles of missiles and drones in repeated attempts to retaliate. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, said that more than 220 civilians in Iran have been killed since the start of Israel’s offensive, including 20 children, while more than 1,000 people have been injured. The Israeli prime minister’s office says that at least 24 people have been killed by Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel, and nearly 600 injured.
The policy argument on the American political right these days between postliberals with (some) populists, on the one hand, and Reaganite and market-oriented fusionist conservatives, on the other hand, is, in essence, an argument over externalities. More particularly, the argument is over what’s included in our set of policy-relevant costs and benefits when we consider policy problems and solutions. The controversy circles around postliberals proposing the inclusion of a set of non-pecuniary costs when identifying policy problems and when considering policy change. Recognizing this means there is enough common ground for constructive debate over policy rather than each side arguing past the other.
To be sure, the philosophical divide between postliberals and market-oriented conservatives (and classical liberals) goes deeper than the policy divide. But Americans, and conservatives in particular, have long had experience with modus vivendi-type policy coalitions constructed out of groups with incompatible philosophical commitments.
“Externalities” are costs or benefits imposed on (or received by) people not party to a market exchange or action. The action or exchange of one set of people imposes costs (or confers benefits) on others who are “external” to a transaction. A canonical example of a negative externality is an increased probability of lung disease as a result of breathing auto emissions from other people’s cars. An example of a positive externality is those spared from contracting an infectious disease because other people got vaccinated and, as a result, did not transmit the infection.
The above are textbook examples of externalities. While rightwing postliberals (and left-wing anti-neoliberals) generally eschew conventional economic jargon, many of their criticisms of markets or market outcomes really only argue for the recognition, and remediation, of un- or underrecognized negative externalities. Postliberal arguments can be accommodated by existing market theory, albeit by that part of market theory that considers market failure.
For example, while the market’s “creative destruction” can expand the economic pie, the process can also impose real costs on people in the form of disrupting lives and communities formed in reliance on settled, if imperfect, expectations of the future. (This is Karl Polanyi’s basic argument in The Great Transformation.) Another example is that increased globalization can attenuate supply chains. This can increase the fragility of domestic markets, thus making economic disruption more likely in response to otherwise remote events across the globe.
While these may seem like novel arguments, careful market theorists have long recognized that the idea of “cost” is broader than often conceived. For example, Harold Demsetz observed in his seminal 1967 article in the American Economic Review, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights,” that externalities can be both “pecuniary as well as nonpecuniary. No harmful or beneficial effect is external to the world.”
Similarly, F. A. Hayek rejected blanket ideological “appeals to the principle of non-interference” in the market economy. He endorsed empirical rather than rationalistic (or a priori) approaches to policy, arguing that government measures to address policy issues like negative externalities “must be examined in each instance” to judge in each case whether “costs will outweigh the advantages.”
That postliberal criticisms of the market can fit within a well-known category of “market failure” does not of course resolve the policy debate.
This does not mean giving a free pass to the mere assertion that the benefits of remediating a negative externality exceed the cost, but it does mean that evidence rather than ideology should be the guide on both sides of the policy argument.
This is not new. Adam Smith proleptically exemplified Hayek’s admonition when discussing a rationale that would justify national restrictions on free trade.
Adam Smith on National Defense and Free Trade
While generally favoring free trade in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith nonetheless famously argued that national defense can justify restricting trade with other nations in order to encourage domestic production or conservation of strategic materials needed for defense. Often styled as an argument Smith provided in favor of tariffs, Smith’s argument discussed the possibility that government subsidies (“bounties”) be provided for domestic production of goods critical to defense (rather than tariffs).
While Smith argued in application to a specific policy domain, the form of Smith’s argument is simply a specific example in which the benefit of the trade restriction is greater than the cost; he applies a simple cost/benefit calculus.
Smith provides an argument from an externality. That is, he argues that government intervention would provide a benefit beyond, or external to, the benefits to the parties immediately engaged in international trade of a particular good critically needed for national defense. The loss of the gains of trade to the nation, which occurs with certainty, would be compensated by a probabilistic increase in security.
The value of “increased security” would result from a lower probability of conflict breaking out in the first instance as a result of maintaining domestic production of the critical good, or from an increased probability of winning a conflict or minimizing the magnitude of loss should war actually break out.
The aura of mathematical calculation should not divert attention from the highly subjective elements involved in reasoning through the tradeoffs; the identification or calculation of the underlying parameters—the comparative probabilities that a conflict breaks out with and without the policy intervention, and the cost of a conflict if one does break out—is fraught with subjective judgment calls.
Yet while subjective, the necessity of making the judgment calls is inescapable. As a result, there would likely be policy debate over the magnitude of the foreign threat, the fragility of the international supply of the critical defense good, and over the actual dependence of the nation’s defense on the particular good in dispute. The accuracy of these judgment calls would be known, if ever, only in retrospect. As a result, the policy debate would be entirely appropriate and, again, inescapable.
While Smith limits his argument to national defense (although other externalities make an appearance later in The Wealth of Nations), the form of Smith’s argument is not similarly limited. The policy question is what external benefit or loss we seek to obtain or avoid with a policy intervention relative to the cost of that intervention. (And, to be sure, not all externalities require government intervention to solve. Nonetheless, externalities involving numerous actors unable to easily coordinate their behavior will typically require government intervention. That said, calibrating the appropriate type or level of government intervention in response to an externality can be fraught with practical difficulties.)
While goods like avoiding economic and social disruption of communities, or promoting national solidarity or national greatness, or increasing the availability of meaningful industrial jobs all require the making of highly subjective judgment calls on the nature of the benefit, they’re not really different animals than Smith’s argument justifying policy intervention in international trade to improve a nation’s defense capacity.
Importantly, that does not mean that the assertion of an amorphous, subjective “good” always wins the policy debate, but it does mean that the existence of an amorphous and subjective good does not rule out the need for authentic policy debate. Indeed, careful modern property rights analysis recognizes that identifying what externalities “count” for intervention changes with changing circumstances.
Externalities Change Over Time
Much of the debate today between postliberals and traditional market-oriented Reagan conservatives is, implicitly, an argument over what counts as an externality; that is, what interests we recognize as belonging to people and therefore what counts as a harm when taken away.
Postliberals and (some) populists, for example, advance interests of social solidarity and the dignity of manufacturing work as elements lost with the globalization of US trade. While these may be novel assertions in the context of the sorts of values policymakers (and academics) have typically considered in recent generations, their novelty does not really present a problem for bringing those values within the traditional theoretical structure of policy debates regarding externalities.
Phenomena like social solidarity and dignity doesn’t mean giving postliberals a pass on evidence and proof.
As noted earlier, in his 1967 AER article, Harold Demsetz pointed out that externalities can be “pecuniary as well as nonpecuniary.” While there are issues of identification and measurement, that interests such as solidarity and dignity are “nonpecuniary” does not rule out recognition of their loss as externalities.
Even more piquantly in Demsetz’s discussion is his observation that our concepts of what constitutes an “externality” naturally change over time with the advent of new economic and social circumstances. Demsetz’s argument in his 1967 AER article is dense but important:
Every cost and benefit associated with social interdependencies is a potential externality. …
Changes in knowledge result in changes in production functions, market values, and aspirations. New techniques, new ways of doing the same things, and doing new things-all invoke harmful and beneficial effects to which society has not been accustomed. … The emergence of new property rights takes place in response to the desires of the interacting persons for adjustment to new benefit-cost possibilities.
While interests such as social solidarity and the dignity of manufacturing work aren’t property interests in a narrow sense, the argument nonetheless is that in some identifiable way, these aspects of life and work “belong” to Americans and, as a result, their loss represents a real loss to many Americans. This loss, postliberals and populists argue, deserves to be taken into consideration when weighing policy costs and benefits.
Discussion of social reliance interests related to policy change is a matter of course in other areas. For example, US courts consider the significance of “reliance interests” in current law as one factor judges take into consideration when contemplating changing or overturning legal precedent. While the terminology is borrowed from contract law, no one suggests that overturning a judicial precedent constitutes an actionable breach of promise or an actionable deprivation of a property interest. Nonetheless, as a matter of legal policy, judges consider social reliance on previous decisions, and the cost of confounding settled reliance interests, as a relevant factor when considering whether to overturn precedent.
Identifying and Measuring External Costs
That postliberal criticisms of the market can fit within a well-known category of “market failure” does not, of course, resolve the policy debate. The question, as in all policy debates, is what’s the evidence that a problem exists and what’s the evidence that a proposed policy solution would actually address the problem?
On the one hand, simply asserting that “the pervasive logic of the market system has caused a decrease in social solidarity in the US” isn’t enough to warrant policies with real economic costs. (Nor is de rigueurcitation of Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation.) After all, even in a planned economy in which the means of production are wholly socially owned, changes in the technology of production or in consumer preferences would require planning boards to deploy labor and capital in new and different ways. These changes are no less socially disruptive simply because a planning board instigated them rather than the market. Further, social policies in market economies can cushion the impact of these changes without jettisoning the market in toto. Recall, after all, that Polanyi does not criticize economic change in itself, and he underscores that the system he advocates would make ample use of markets. Rather, Polanyi criticizes market “systems” (let the reader understand!) in which abstract market forces dictate an unduly rapid pace of economic change.
At the same time, the difficulty of empirically accounting for phenomena like social solidarity and dignity does not mean that the phenomena do not exist. In this, as in other policy debates, we must avoid repeating the error of Sir Arthur Eddington’s ichthyologist, who uses a net with a two-inch mesh to catch the fish he studies. When then asked about the study of fish that are less than two inches long, the ichthyologist nods, dismissively waves his hand and responds, “That’s no problem, ‘cuz what my net can’t catch ain’t fish.”
But this also doesn’t mean giving postliberals a pass on evidence and proof. For example, in their book The Politics of Virtue, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst criticize the materialism of modern market economies while also repeatedly (and implausibly) claiming that many of the policies they advocate won’t have any significant negative impact on current living standards. Yet if, in fact, renewed social solidarity and dignity (and other values postliberals identify) are valued by people, then they would be willing to trade away at least some material gain to obtain these greater goods. “Man does not live by bread alone,” after all.
The point, however, is that postliberals and traditional conservatives can have a policy debate on grounds that are recognizable in market theory. Postliberals press the outer boundaries of what we normally consider to be negative externalities. But that’s to be expected, if not actually predicted, as Demsetz observes, given the dramatically changing “social interdependencies” that result from globalization and from the extent that the market penetrates modern life.
To be sure, the possibility of shared areas of policy agreement neither entails nor necessitates philosophical convergence between postliberals and market-oriented conservatives (and classical liberals). Nonetheless, recognizing the possibility of a modus vivendi in some areas of policy would allow these philosophically divergent groups to move ahead together in substantive policy areas.
State supreme court justices often must resolve difficult issues in hard cases. No one expects them to get every hard case right. But judges who faithfully adhere to their oaths of office are unlikely to make obvious errors in easy cases whose issues are governed by clear rules and settled precedents. So, what is going on in Wisconsin?
Last week, in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a ruling of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. A unanimous US Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin’s high court had rationalized religious discrimination by Wisconsin officials in violation of the First Amendment. Writing for the Court, Justice Sotomayor observed that this was not a hard case.
A charitable explanation for the Wisconsin ruling is that a majority of Wisconsin’s justices suffer deep jurisprudential confusion. The court committed three major errors. All three errors are conceptual as well as legal and constitutional. And all three errors matter because they are incompatible with constitutional rule and ordered liberty.
The case arose under a Wisconsin law that requires employers to pay taxes into a scheme of unemployment insurance and exempts religious, nonprofit employers. The Catholic Charities Bureau claimed this tax exemption. But the Supreme Court of Wisconsin decided that Catholic Charities’ charitable ventures are not “operated primarily for religious purposes,” as state law requires. The court acknowledged that Catholic Charities and its subsidiaries are motivated by an explicit Christian mission and are governed by the bishop of a Roman Catholic diocese. But the court asserted that these religious institutions “offer services that would be the same regardless of the motivation of the provider.” The court concluded that Catholic Charities’ “activities are primarily charitable and secular.”
The Wisconsin court held that it did not violate the First Amendment to withhold the exemption from Catholic Charities. A dissenting justice charged that the court’s reasoning “excessively entangles the government in spiritual affairs, requiring courts to determine what religious practices are sufficiently religious under the majority’s unconstitutional test.” But the majority disagreed. “The review we endorse in this case is a neutral and secular inquiry based on objective criteria, examining the activities and motivations of a religious organization.”
The Wisconsin court also insisted that its holding would not infringe Catholic Charities’ free exercise rights. Catholic Charities can afford the tax. To require Catholic Charities to participate in the state’s unemployment compensation scheme, therefore, did not place a “constitutionally significant burden” upon its religious exercise, the court concluded.
Religious liberties are not contingent on sovereign will, Justice Thomas insisted.
In reversing, the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held that the Wisconsin ruling was not neutral between different religions, as long-established First Amendment doctrine requires. The Establishment Clause, as the US Supreme Court has interpreted it over several decades, prohibits governments from favoring any religion over any other. This rule of “denominational neutrality,” as the Court calls it, requires strict scrutiny of any law or application of a law that distinguishes between religions, treating one more favorably than another.
Wisconsin violated the neutrality rule. To affirm that violation was the Wisconsin court’s first error. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule,” Justice Sotomayor acknowledged, “but this is not one.” Wisconsin officials engaged in a “paradigmatic form of denominational discrimination.”
Wisconsin drew a line between religious charities based on “theological differences in their provision of services.” Wisconsin deemed Catholic Charities and its affiliates ineligible for the tax exemption “because they do not ‘attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith,’ ‘supply any religious materials to program participants or employees,’ or limit their charitable services to members of the Catholic Church.” On that reasoning, Catholic Charities “could qualify for the exemption while providing their current charitable services if they engaged in proselytization or limited their services to fellow Catholics.” But Catholic Charities and its affiliates argued that Catholic doctrine forbids them to use “works of charity for purposes of proselytism” and requires them to serve everyone. The burden on religious exercise is obvious.
The implications of this first error for ordered liberty are profound. The problem is not mere favoritism. A state supreme court that arrogates the power to draw the boundary between religious and non-religious activities by religious associations has seized the power in principle to nullify the religious freedom of those associations by defining their free exercise of religion out of legal and constitutional existence.
Writing a separate concurrence, Justice Thomas identified a second error of the Wisconsin court. Catholic Charities Bureau operates through a separate corporation from the Diocese that oversees it. For the Wisconsin majority, this meant that Catholic Charities is a separate “organization” from the Church, and the Church’s religious motivations, therefore, were irrelevant in ascertaining Catholic Charities’ primary purpose.
As Justice Thomas observed, that “holding contravened the church autonomy doctrine,” another well-established constitutional rule. It requires Wisconsin’s courts “to defer to the Bishop of Superior’s religious view that Catholic Charities and its subentities are an arm of the Diocese.” Religious institutions have a First Amendment right to structure their legal affairs in the manner best suited to their own ecclesial governments, theological doctrines, and practical, legal needs. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has no power to decide which corporate structure is sufficiently religious for a church’s ministries.
The Wisconsin court’s legal error, Thomas explained, was to identify the association of charitable Roman Catholic believers with the legal structures that the association uses to carry on its business. The Roman Catholic Church “is a single worldwide religious institution,” not a legal sub-entity incorporated in the state of Wisconsin. Though the Wisconsin justices acknowledged that the Bishop of the local Diocese directs Catholic Charities and controls its affairs, they nevertheless “viewed Catholic Charities and its subentities as distinct, nonreligious organizations merely because they are separately incorporated.”
The Wisconsin court’s conceptual error was, in Justice Thomas’s words, to think of “religious institutions as nothing more than the corporate entities they have formed.” Churches and other religious communities have an existence of their own, which is not reducible to their formal, legal structures and not contingent upon the laws of a state or judgments of secular officials. Whether its rights and obligations are secured by a corporation, a trust, or some other legal fiction, a religious group exists in reality, independent of its recognition in positive laws and legal and equitable judgments.
Justice Thomas pointed out the implications of this conceptual error for civil liberties and the rule of law. Quoting an 1835 decision of the Vermont Supreme Court, Justice Thomas explained, “To conclude that a religious institution has no existence outside its corporate form ‘would be in effect to decide that our religious liberties [are] dependent on the will of the legislature, and not guaranteed by the constitution.’” Religious liberties are not contingent on sovereign will, Justice Thomas insisted, because “religious institutions are a parallel authority to the State, not a creature of state law.”
The majority of justices of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin are not equal to the powers that they arrogated. Secular courts have no legal or constitutional competence to adjudicate questions of canon law, religious or theological doctrine, or ecclesiology. And as the Wisconsin majority opinion illustrates, elite lawyers often lack professional competence to address such questions, as well. Most of the top law schools no longer require law students to learn jurisprudence and legal history, much less canon law. And increasing numbers of lawyers have no meaningful experience of religion.
A society comprised of charitable persons is immeasurably better off than a society whose members only do what they are obligated to do.
Thus, it is not surprising that most of the Wisconsin justices misunderstood religion. Not all religious people proselytize. Though the Christian religion involves evangelization, winning converts is neither the totality of the Christian religion nor its essence. The Christian life consists of acts of obedience. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus of Nazareth instructed his followers. Among those commandments are several injunctions to perform acts of charity. God will reward those who give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked. If anyone demands your shirt, give him your coat as well. Above all, love your neighbor as you love yourself.
The Wisconsin justices committed a third conceptual error, which the justices of the US Supreme Court did not correct—indeed, Justice Jackson compounded this error in a separate concurrence. They misunderstood charity. In the minds of the Wisconsin justices, the “religious motivation” for Catholic Charities’ charitable work was “not enough to receive the exemption” because non-religious organizations can provide the same services. The charitable services, therefore, “are secular in nature.”
In this line of reasoning, the justices identified charity according to its outward action and effect, without regard to its motivation. They identified the relevant “activities” as “job training, placement, and coaching, as well as services related to activities of daily living.” Whether these valuable ends are pursued for “religious or secular motivations,” the justices speculated, “the services provided would not differ in any sense.” Therefore, they concluded, the services are activities of a “wholly secular endeavor.”
That conception of charitable action, identifying charity with its effects and consequences, mistakes the character of charity. A charitable intention is what makes an act charitable. To be charitable is to intend to give what one has a right to retain, and to yield up one’s rights with no claim or expectation of reciprocity, for the sole reason that the recipient will benefit. Paying taxes and making payrolls of social services agencies are not acts of charity. Donating time and money that one has no duty to give, so that another may learn or eat, is charity.
Because it is the intention that makes an act charitable, the primary values of charity are moral and spiritual, not pragmatic. As Thomas Aquinas taught centuries ago, acts of charity, such as almsgiving, have an internal effect on the soul of the almsgiver, bearing the “spiritual fruit” of loving another person more than riches. And such acts can also generate gratitude and benevolence in the recipient.
Charity’s moral value is its central aspect. Charitable acts certainly can produce what Aquinas called “a corporal effect, inasmuch as they supply our neighbor’s corporal needs.” But what makes charitable action so valuable, and a chief reason why we extend to charitable actors so many special, legal privileges and immunities, is that charitable actions make charitable persons. And a society comprised of charitable persons is immeasurably better off than a society whose members only do what they are obligated to do.
Is charity religious? In theory, charity can be secular. Every human being has the capacity for charity. But in practice, charity is a religious phenomenon. Viewing the full sweep of human history reveals that charity is a distinctly religious virtue and almost exclusively a religious activity. While many societies throughout history have practiced hospitality and altruism, the Jewish and Christian religions invented charity. And it was Christian societies that placed charity in the mainstream of civic life and gave it a unique place in our fundamental law.
By redefining charitable action according to its material effects, rather than its intention and spiritual value, the Wisconsin majority attempted to make charity commensurable to non-charitable forms of poor relief. This false equivalence opens the door to threats to ordered liberty. If government welfare programs, social engineering projects, or other secular, non-charitable endeavors can produce equal or better results, and if it is the results that matter, then those in power may decide that we can do without charity. If we don’t need to preserve rights to perform charity, then officials may decide they don’t need to respect the autonomy of charitable associations. And we may end up with more rulings like that of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin.
In Yarmouk, to get from one house to another, you walk through bombed-out holes in demolished cement walls. Mountains of rubble and mounds of trash dot the landscape, which locals climb over to get from one street to the next. To walk through this ghost town is to be haunted by spirits of the dead, as well as by packs of hungry, and sometimes rabid, dogs.
There is no longer as much fighting in the streets in this refugee camp outside Damascus, but it doesn’t feel like a new Syria here, where a diaspora community of Palestinians displaced over decades struggles to survive.
On paper, the prospects for Syria have vastly improved over the last six months. The country seems poised for an economic recovery after years of war and a half-century of rule by the Assad dynasty. On December 8, 2024 — “Day Zero,” as many call it in Syria — Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, forces chased Bashar al-Assad out of the country, ending an era of brutal dictatorship. In February, the European Union began easing sanctions against Syria, then lifted them entirely. Last month, in a surprise move prior to meeting in Saudi Arabia with Syrian Interim President Ahmed al-Shara, President Donald Trump announced his plan to lift U.S. sanctions that have been leveled against Syria since Jimmy Carter was president. Trump praised al-Shara — who fought against the United States in Iraq and was once imprisoned in Abu Ghraib — as a “young, attractive guy,” and a “tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”
News of the end of Syrian sanctions have been welcomed across the aisle in Washington and from Brussels to Ankara to Damascus. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani thanked the EU for its decision. Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss said Trump’s decision was “the right move, which will aid desperately needed humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Syria.” The Economist’s article about the “euphoria” of the news is titled “One happy Damascus.”
People in Syria are certainly hopeful. A banker in Syria who spoke to Reuters described the lifting of sanctions as “too good to be true,” and a soap factory owner in Aleppo rushed to the square as soon as she heard the news. “These sanctions were imposed on Assad, but … now that Syria has been liberated, there will be a positive impact on industry, it’ll boost the economy and encourage people to return” she told AFP.
But what are the odds that what benefits investors will benefit the average person living in Syria?
After all, as United Nations Development recently warned, “nine out of 10 Syrians are living in poverty, and one in four is jobless.” The report ominously added that “40 to 50 per cent of children aged six to 15 are not attending school, and 5.4 million people have lost their jobs,” and $800 billion was lost during the war.
And then, there’s the issue of the people among Syria’s most marginalized residents: Palestinian refugees whose families have been impoverished for decades.
“No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk.”
To understand what this period of enormous transition means for them, The Intercept spent a week in the Yarmouk refugee camp and observed the lives of three residents who lived or hailed from there in a loose, informal family: Salwa, a single young woman, barely out of adolescence herself, who is responsible for a brood of children she didn’t birth; Bilal, a young man who wants to build houses but can only find work dealing hash inconsistently; and Abu Tarek, an HTS soldier positioned to thrive in post-Assad Syria. All of their names have been altered to protect them from retaliation.
Salwa, 22, has lived in Syria her entire life. Her family is originally from Haifa, where she declares, “I will return the moment it is possible.” But she’s actually never been to Palestine. Home, for now, is a bombed-out building in Yarmouk, where she is sit al beit, or “lady of the house.”
It is her house, she explains, because she is the person supporting her family financially. After her parents left their daughters, Salwa found herself responsible for two younger sisters, ages 13 and 18. She also cares for a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old whose mom dropped them off a few months ago when she could no longer take care of them. (Why did their mother leave them? Maybe it is drugs, trauma, a man, or all three, Salwa says.)
Salwa wears a hijab, but only outside of her home. The only male guests who come over are related to her anyways, and they always ask, “Is everyone decent?” before entering. This evening, Salwa has sparked up a heater meant to be powered by gas. But now it’s fueled by burning plastic, with coals burning precariously on top for shai (tea). She has also set up a perilous bank of power strips, so everyone can charge their devices during the few hours of nightly state-supplied electricity. She then winds down with a nargileh (hookah) to her lips, as visitors come over to pass the time. They include her 25-year-old “uncle” Bilal, more like her big brother, and two friends including Heba, who has Down syndrome.
Salwa, her 13-year-old sister in the hat, and Heba eat the meal to celebrate Salwa’s cousin Abu Tarek, an HTS fighter, who didn’t show up because he was working late. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Heba immediately starts asking the men in the room questions about what what they like and dislike, sometimes teasing them. She flirts unabashedly. She enjoys listening to Shami Arabic music, and tonight she plays it loudly while showing off her dance moves. She says she loves to dance and makes everyone clap for her. The younger children jump up and down by her legs as she twirls with a sash around her waist.
A woman dancing in a room of men, related or not, wouldn’t have been appropriate during the more intense skirmishes in years past when groups of men in Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS might be too close to hear the music playing. The combat is done, but signs of those days of fighting are never far away. On one of the few walls still left standing of a partly destroyed building a few hundred feet away, graffiti reads la ilaha illAllah: “There is no God but God.” It’s a foundational Islamic declaration and common Arabic phrase said often in Syria. But these words are spray-painted in black and drawn inside a black circle —conveying that fighters and supporters of the Islamic State group are in the neighborhood. A few doors down is another ominous tag. It belongs to another Islamist militia, Jabhat al-Nusra, whose roots are from Al Qaeda. Over the last decade, Nusra rebranded to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel force that opposed and then pushed Assad’s regime out and took over the country.
The graffiti doesn’t faze Salwa. ISIS, she says, was an enemy to most people anywhere, but she “doesn’t mind an Islamist regime in theory.” That said, she thinks it is going to be tough to get Syrian women to stop wearing skirts.
It’s a welcome change from the Assad regime. “No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk,” Salwa says. “Life is hell.” Women especially were not safe under Assad. She says she knows many girls who were harassed, raped, and even murdered. “If a soldier wanted you, even if you were married or he was married, he could do whatever he wanted … but,” she adds pointedly, “I am a girl who screams and fights.”
Until Assad was gone, she was afraid to speak of that violence — and prohibited even from posting pictures of the dilapidation she lived in, for fear of being disappeared.
Now, she says, it is fine to take pictures in Yarmouk. “I don’t feel afraid like I did before, 3adi [it’s OK].”
On another night, Salwa and a friend are cooking dinner in her makeshift kitchen, the kind of chore they enjoy doing together, like going to the market to find deals on baby formula. Salwa says she worked at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East for two months straight recently, where she cleaned, made coffee, and helped with odd jobs. She made the equivalent of about $500 in total, which was good money: about 10 times the average wage. But she hasn’t been able to get more work there, and with UNRWA’s futurein doubt, she is trying to ration the money.
Sometimes her parents send her and her sisters some cash, but not much. And sometimes their cousins or aunties help them out, too. But day in and day out, it is Salwa who must feed at least six mouths, often more.
On this windy night in late January, when the cold air whips inside through the porous walls, Salwa decides to make waraq al anab, or stuffed grape leaves, and invite some family over. Her aunt is visiting from Lebanon with her cousin, and of course, her two sisters, two wards, and two friends from down the road are helping cook and enjoy the meal.
There is also supposed to be a guest of honor: Salwa’s cousin Abu Tarek, an HTS fighter — though he never showed up because he was working late.
Salwa uses a plastic UNRWA sign as a tablecloth on the floor of the living room and starts piling plates and pita bread on top of the spread. Electricity and water are unstable, but fresh food is usually available. Her situation, she acknowledges, is much better than what is happening in Gaza. “Blockades are hell, those were the worst times,” she explains, thinking back to her childhood when food was harder to get. When conversation turns to Gaza, a visiting cousin says, “Thank God for this food.”
Though she’s happy Assad is gone, Salwa said they are still struggling to survive. She’s not feeling the optimism that others feel for Syria.
“I don’t actually have hope this country will be free,” Salwa explains. She says she lost hope in any leaders doing right by them — certainly not Donald Trump — and that she and the girls will probably remain scraping by. “Palestinians are always forgotten,” she said.
Yarmouk was founded in 1957, about a decade after the Nakba first pushed Palestinians off their land. At just 2.1 kilometers, Yarmouk was once home to approximately 160,000 people in 2011, according to UNWRA, “making it the largest Palestine Refugee community in Syria and an important commercial hub.” Long before it became a central site of the Syrian civil war with its refugee population held hostage as a pawn in battles between Syrian and foreign adversaries, it was a thriving place, sometimes referred to as a suburb of Damascus.
Before it was rubble, the camp was teeming with buildings, business, and schools inhabited by Palestinian families in exile. Unlike in Egypt, Lebanon, and occupied Palestine, a Syrian law “passed in 1956 that granted Palestinian refugees almost the same rights as Syrian nationals, particularly in the areas of employment, trade and military service.”
In 1963, the Ba’ath Party grabbed power in a military coup. “Palestinians in Yarmouk launched organisations to ‘resist’ the Israeli occupation of their homeland,” the BBC reported. “Thousands of youths joined newly established groups like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Over the decades, young members of these groups died fighting, including when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.
In the 1980s, Yarmouk was the home of many Palestinian movements, including branches of the Yasser Arafat-led Fatah party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. “Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshaal” also lived in Yarmouk, the BBC reported, “until he refused to endorse President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of the uprising against his rule.”
From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Yarmouk was a hotly contested battle site within and beyond Syria. In July 2013, Yarmouk was cut off from United Nations aid, and its population dwindled to around 18,000 people. The blockade, The Guardian recounted in 2014, led to “acute shortages of food, medicines and other essentials.”
The Free Syrian Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have all fought in and around Yarmouk, thinning out its population, leveling most of its buildings, causing outbreaks of polio, and at times driving people to eat animal feed.
Meanwhile, the Assad regime and its proxy force, Hezbollah, also went to war against Yarmouk. In a 2014 report “Yarmouk under siege — a horror story of war crimes, starvation and death,” Amnesty International director of the Middle East and North Africa program Philip Luther wrote, “Civilians of Yarmouk are being treated like pawns in a deadly game in which they have no control.”
“Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk,” Luther wrote, with Amnesty accusing the Assad government of withholding food and electricity as war crimes.
A decade later, images of demolished Gaza are starting to look like Yarmouk — except Yarmouk has fewer people and life left in it. Even more of its structures are destroyed than in Gaza. In February 2025, the number of people in Yarmouk was approximately 15,300, with 80 percent being Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA.
“Brother, I am thinking of going back to the dark side and selling hashish,” Bilal says out loud to his cousin.
Bilal is a 25-year-old Palestinian Syrian. His teeth protrude when he smiles — and he smiles a lot. He is usually covered in dust and always wearing a baseball hat. His main line of work is repairing houses. Given the destruction of most of them in Yarmouk, there should be no shortage of work.
Bilal, a 25-year-old Palestinian Syrian, finds works difficult to come by. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Yet even when he does work on houses, money is hard to come by. Sometimes he works a job and doesn’t get paid at all.
And so Bilal sometimes sells hash. It doesn’t pay well, and it’s dangerous. But it’s easy work, and his friends had sources who could hook him up. The problem is that selling hashish is not lucrative or risk-free now that a theocratic group runs the government.
Bilal sleeps at his niece Salwa’s house as a means of protection for the girls. Just a few months before the fall of Assad, he explains, he and a Syrian friend, Oussama, had been imprisoned. It wasn’t for hash. “They accused us of killing Assef Shawkat,” Bilal says. At the time of his death, Shakwat was the Syrian intelligence chief and deputy defense minister; he also happened to be Assad’s brother-in-law. Shawkat was killed in July 2012 in a Damascus bomb attack allegedly organized by the Free Syrian Army coalition.
Incredibly, Bilal points out, he and Oussama were taken into custody and accused of having been 13-year-old assassins nearly 12 years later.
Then again, he notes, innocent boys and men from Sunni communities were routinely accused of terrorism under Assad on absurd charges. He and his friend say they were held in the notorious Mazzeh Jaweya prison, a military airport with Air Force intelligence barracks in Damascus. They remained in custody for several months before the revolution toppled the regime with shocking speed on December 8, 2024.
The night before Assad fled the country, Bilal says, he and his friend were among a group of prisoners moved to an execution room.
Military officers, he recalls, seemed panicked and were rushing to get rid of them that night for some reason. At the time, he didn’t know why. “I remember they moved us around 10 p.m. into the new room and we waited and waited,” he tells The Intercept.
Oussama, who stands around 6 feet tall with a heavy build, explains that as they were led to the chamber, he was “just preparing myself to die, really.” But by 4 a.m., both men were free. The Assad regime had fallen.
As frightening as their experiences were at Mazzeh Jaweya, Bilal and Oussama say that there was a kind of incarceration which Syrians feared even more: the secret prisons hidden everywhere.
Even by the standards of their abduction, these black-site prisons made the young men feel like the regime and its army would justify a man’s abduction for any reason they drummed up — and no one would ever know where they had been disappeared.
One of those secret prisons, Bilal and Oussama believe, was in the basement of a house that a friend bought after the regime fell. Bilal has been helping on the repairs just a few kilometers from Yarmouk. The new owner said that the house’s basement had been used to detain people who passed through a military checkpoint up the road. He’d heard stories that it was cramped and that people could be held without charge — sometimes for months.
The Intercept accompanied Bilal and Oussama to the multi-level house, then down the stairs into the basement.
The heavy metal door, orange with rust, screeches when opened. At eye level, a small, rectangular slot with a sliding cover could allow a guard on the outside to peer in and bark orders.
Behind it, a corridor leads to several square rooms. The fetid air is thick with the smells of burned plastic, trash, and human waste. The floors are stained from an unknown liquid but had recently been cleaned. In one corner, a hole in the floor had served as a toilet. In three of the rooms, the walls are high; near the ceiling, ground-level windows are covered with wavy bars, preventing anyone from getting in or out. One dark room in the middle has no windows at all.
Bilal and Oussama leave the basement prison in silence and lock the door behind them.
“Yes, thank God the bastard fell,” Bilal exclaims, clearly shaken.
Inside a home, just a few kilometers from Yarmouk, above what is believed to have been a secret prison. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Still, he admits, he is also afraid of HTS. Shortly after he and Oussama exit the house, a hash dealer meets up with them to show them some product. The three boys roll up a few joints, sipped tea, and talk through the afternoon about money and how they could earn some. “This is harder than it used to be,” Bilal explains, pointing to the hashish. It wasn’t legal to be a dealer under Assad, but it is quite a different thing to be a dealer under a new Islamist regime. Despite any rosy outlooks from Western economists, Bilal says that “now the economy is worse than it used to be, and there is no work, no nothing. It is so frustrating.”
“It will be more dangerous to sell or even smoke hash now than it was before,” one of his friends agrees.
“The new regime is very strict, even though you can smoke with many of the guys who claim to be religious,” the other chimes in, laughing. “It isn’t forbidden in Islam, just looked down upon,” he clarifies.
A night later, a group of Alawites — a minority group of Syrians from which the Assads hailed — were raided in a neighborhood not too far away from where they’d been smoking. They were allegedly dealing hash.
Several were killed as HTS soldiers ambushed them; others were allegedly arrested.
In Yarmouk, the graffiti announcing the presence of groups like ISIS or Nusra were expressions of violent resistance to the Assad regime. But it’s a different piece of graffiti Syrians cite as the beginning of the revolution-turned-civil war. It’s known as the “Dara’a graffiti” incident.
Dara’a is a small, largely agricultural community in southwestern Syria, near the borders of Jordan and Israel. In 2011, as Ahmed Masri, a Syrian man now living in the United States, told CNN, graffiti appeared in the town while he was a teenager: “At a school in town, someone had written on the wall: ‘It’s your turn now Doctor,’ referring to Assad, the ophthalmologist,” Masri said.
“They needed to arrest someone,” Masri told CNN. “So they started to gather the names written on the walls, names students wrote years ago, and arrested those who were under 20 years old.” The boys were “held, beaten, had fingernails removed” and were “tortured for weeks.” Although eventually released, community support for them increased resistance — which in turn increased Assad’s punishment of Dara’a.
Eventually, some of the boys joined the Free Syrian Army, which fought the Assadists.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported last year that there were “617,910 people whose death has been verified” over the 13 years since the Dara’a graffiti incident, an event often considered to have triggered the Syrian civil war.
“Here is where it started” graffiti in Daraa Photo: Afeef Nessouli / The Intercept
The report was able to verify 507,567 of those “people since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution” by name and included more than “55,000 civilians who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”
During this same time, as Assad monopolized industry (and cut off aid and commerce to places like Yarmouk), dissidents were purged from official employment and pushed into the informal economy. This especially affected Palestinians, perceived to be at the margins of society anyway and aligned with resistance movements Assad found threatening. For people who had relied upon steady jobs in government or industry, the only available work was often only selling drugs, making crude weapons, or peddling to source black-market necessities, like food.
Climate change-fueled drought, which resulted in 80 or 90 percent reductions in water supply in different regions of Syria, led to more chaos and desperation — and allowed another weapon at Assad’s disposal in controlling the scarce water resources available to a thirsty, war-torn population.
By “Day Zero” last December, the relief from the House of Assad falling was palpable across Syria, after so many years of torture. And yet, for so many who lost so much, apart from the freedom from being tortured or disappeared, there has been little material change.
“When we would go out, it would be with hunting rifles, seizing weapons from Assad’s soldiers,” Abu Tarek recalls, between alternate sips from a cigarette and a cup of mint tea.
Abu Tarek is a 35-year-old Palestinian HTS fighter who grew up in Yarmouk. He wears HTS fatigues and a HTS cap backward; he has a thick beard and only one tooth. He smiles often, inserts the appreciation for God into nearly every sentence he speaks, and is never without a cigarette. He is both Bilal’s and Salwa’s cousin, and is visiting from Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria where he has been a rebel for years. Now he’s working with the new government.
The dinner Salwa was cooking in Yarmouk was supposed to be because Abu Tarek was in town and in his honor. But instead of coming over to eat with everyone, he was stuck at work planning the logistics of a forthcoming military camp.
“The operation” of taking down the Assad regime, he explains, “was planned by HTS for a long time but we were waiting for Day Zero to move.”
Abu Tarek had finished his mandatory service in Assad’s military around 13 years ago when the civil war began. “Seeing what happened in Dara’a, particularly the torture of children” led him to take up arms against the regime, he says. He and some of his Palestinian-Syrian friends in Yarmouk joined rebel groups that eventually fed into the Free Syrian Army. They would take the rifles and weapons they already had at home from their conscription to secretly ambush and kill Assad’s men, then steal their weapons to beef up their arsenal.
“Bashar al-Assad’s regime drained the country of its wealth. Restoring it will not be a small task.”
Eventually, Abu Tarek explains, the fighters he was working alongside with agreed that the Islamist militia called Jabhat al-Nusra seemed “cleaner and more organized” than the FSA. It has been important to Abu Tarek, a devout Muslim, that he fight for a Syria that would be governed by Sharia law because he believes that system would guarantee justice.
“It is the most important thing,” he says, “that Syria is guided by the law of God.”
When Abu Tarek’s son was just 18 days old, he took him to get vaccinated when a shell hit the clinic. His baby was pulled out of rubble but remained unresponsive. Abu Tarek was distraught and sure that his son had been killed. In grief, he found a shoebox that fit his tiny body, then read aloud prayers. He remembered looking down when his son miraculously took a breath. Abu Tarek bowed his head and immediately recited scriptures from the Quran to give thanks to the almighty who, to him, had just saved his baby’s life.
He lives with his wife and three children in a small apartment in Idlib, in Killi, a refugee camp built from the donations of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The buildings in his neighborhood sit atop a hill overlooking the city center and are a striking turquoise — as colorful as Yarmouk is gray.
Back when he lived in Yarmouk, the camp had been nearly destroyed by skirmishes between various rebel groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, as well by huge battles against the Assad regime. By 2017, an agreement was reached between rebels and Assad’s regime to evacuate fighters like him from Yarmouk to the rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest of Syria.
“We had to surrender and take buses up to the north,” he recalls. At the time, HTS controlled Idlib with around 30,000 fighters. He was drawn to the group because “HTS never treated Syrian-Palestinians differently.” HTS controlled border crossings with Turkey, along with swaths of land rich in petroleum, providing the group with significant income.
Since 2018, Abu Tarek and his family have stayed in Idlib, which is ruled as an Islamic caliphate. The roads are barely paved, and there are HTS soldiers everywhere. He has been lucky to rise the ranks, he says, because it has lifted him out of extremely dire conditions.
Areas within the Idlib province are still being developed, Abu Tarek explains, and, unlike under the Assad regime, it’s happening under a Sharia society. A new mall he frequents in Al-Dana has separate entrances for women and men, and restaurants with private areas where women in niqabs can eat without covering their face.
After Assad fled to Russia, Abu Tarek and other internally displaced people suddenly had new freedom to move about the country. He had been restricted to an area of about 50 kilometers during the latter part of the civil war, and it had been eight years since he had seen his parents.
Abu Tarek believes, even as a Palestinian Syrian, that the most important thing right now to deal with is Syria. “One day God will open a path to liberate Palestine just like he did for us in Syria,” he said. Even as Israel illegally occupies large parts of Syria, Abu Tarek believes the new Syrian army could not engage Israel in a fresh war after coming out of a 13-year revolution. “It would be pure foolishness.” Al-Shara, the interim Syrian president who was also the leader of HTS, has “previously said that he does not want conflict with Israel.”
Now, Abu Tarek says, the biggest focus is building a country from scratch: “Bashar al-Assad’s regime drained the country of its wealth. Restoring it will not be a small task.
Having taken up arms on the winning side might work out well financially for Abu Tarek; so far, it has certainly worked out better for him than for Salwa or Bilal. Recently, he and his family have moved to an apartment in Damascus subsidized by the new government. He is being paid around $200 a month for directing logistics at a military training camp in the capital — about 10 times the average wage.
“The hope is for one united Syria,” he says, “governed by Islamic law, no more, no less, whatever Islam prescribes should apply to all of us on the same level. As for the economy,” he explains, “I know that our new leaders, God bless them, are working hard to solve the problems everyday people have right now.”
Is post-Assad Syria ascendant? Even as war spreads in the region — with Israeli and Iranian missiles crossing its skies — the consensus amongst western leaders seems to be that Syria’s future is prosperous and bright. But what about for its 25 million residents?
Things are certainly not very bright right now for the 2 million Alawites, the religious minority from which the Assads hailed. An ongoing series of mass killings of Alawites has occurred in Syria since December at the hands of the new government’s fighters. More than 1,300 people were killed in a spate of massacres in March alone. Many Alawites have fled to neighboring Lebanon.
One Alawite man told The Intercept that al-Shara and “his terrorists want us dead, and they have now completely destroyed access to the economy for Alawites.” He believed there was no work for his people, and was sheltering in a mosque on the Lebanese border town of Massoudiyeh. Alawites need help so badly, he said, “We would take it from Israel even.”
For the more than 400,000 thousand Palestinians in Syria, the forecast is mixed. For those who joined HTS to take up arms against Assad, like Abu Tarek, they may stand a chance of enjoying the spoils of war and key roles in forging the nation’s new government. For those like Bilal and Oussama, who have few work prospects except for dealing hash and day laboring, their odds seem dim. For many of the 160,000 Palestinians of Yarmouk, now scattered across Syria, who depended on UNRWA as an economic engine, prospects seem precarious at best, especially as U.S. funding for UNRWA has been frozen since the Biden administration.
In Yarmouk, life goes on much as it has. People pass between bombed-out walls to share what little they have. Salwa cooks for her ragtag brood.
Reporter Afeef Nessouli shares a meal honoring Abu Tarek with Salwa’s family. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
“Lifting the sanctions on Syria is a very good thing of course,” Salwa says in a voice memo. “But for Syria to raise Trump’s voice and so on, I do not like this at all,” she adds, because Trump had “imposed sanctions on us during his term, he is the one who imposed the wars on us, and to raise his picture in Arab countries as if this didn’t happen, I do not like this at all.”
“Even if they rebuild all of Syria,” she says, “Yarmouk will remain destroyed.”
Editor’s Note: This story contains discussions of rape or sexual assault that may be disturbing. Reader discretion is advised. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can find help and discreet resources on the National Sexual Assault Hotline website or by calling 1-800-656-4673.
(NewsNation) — A federal agent who has testified to evidence, including hotel receipts and text messages detailing “Freak Offs” conducted by Sean “Diddy” Combs, will resume testimony Tuesday in the sixth week of his criminal trial.
U.S. Attorney’s Office Special Agent DeLeassa Penland will be called back to the stand as a summary witness, or someone who testifies to condense voluminous amounts of evidence.
Diddy not likely to testify in federal sex crimes trial
Combs defense team attorney Marc Agnifilo told the judge that their side may rest in roughly two days. Jurors could then begin deliberations potentially starting as early as next week.
Should the hip-hop mogul testify, it would most likely take five days.
The prosecution said they would rest sometime this week.
Penland has presented evidence about sexual events allegedly set up by Combs that included escorts and his ex-partner Casandra “Cassie” Ventura.
This week started off with a bang Monday as Judge Arun Subramanian dismissed a juror for what he called “inconsistencies” and lack of candor.
Questions arose over whether juror No. 6, a Black man, primarily resided in New York or New Jersey after he informed a court staff member that he had moved in with his girlfriend, who lives in the neighboring state.
Subramanian said allowing the juror to remain could threaten the integrity of the judicial process and could lead to “another set of shifting answers.”
“In other words, there’s nothing that the juror can say at this point that would put the genie back in the bottle and restore his credibility,” the judge said.
That juror was replaced by one of the alternates, a white man from Westchester.
Combs’ defense team opposed the juror’s dismissal, arguing he was one of only two Black men on the jury, which would likely harm Combs. They also requested a mistrial over the matter.
“There has been no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct brought to the court’s attention. Zero,” the judge said, rejecting the defense’s third request for a mistrial.
The state presented two summary witnesses who testified to the numerous text messages, emails and other correspondences between Combs, his staff and the accusers.
Prosecutors called paralegal Ananya Sankar, who works for the prosecutors office, to read aloud texts from Combs’ former girlfriend, who testified under the pseudonym “Jane,” to his chief of staff, Kristina Khorram.
In the texts, Jane wrote, [Combs] “just threatened me about my sex tapes that he has on two phones. He said he would send them to my baby daddy.”
Jane noted she didn’t typically involve Khorram in such matters but said she needed help because Combs was having one of his “evil-ass psychotic bipolar” episodes and, along with threatening her, was saying he’d call the police on her.
Jane also told Khorram she was heavily drugged in the tapes.
Texts showed that Jane previously told Combs she felt he exploited her with their “dark and humiliating lifestyle.” She wrote that for the three years they were together, she felt confused by their relationship.
Jane testified for nearly a week during the trial, telling jurors that she felt compelled to participate in a dayslong “hotel night” in which she engaged in sexual events with others.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
President Donald Trump has left the G7 summit early, saying he needs to focus on the Middle East. Meanwhile, further strikes between Israel and Iran have people concerned the conflict will escalate. GOP senators have unveiled the changes they want to see in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” The children of the Minnesota lawmaker who was shot and killed have a message for the public. Plus, we’ll bring you an update in the case surrounding the death of actor Matthew Perry.
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