Search Results for: bahrain

Upon Sober Reflection, Bahrain Reconsiders the Wages of Sin

Longreads Pick

Island Reliant Upon Debauched Visits From Thirsty Saudis Looks to Clean Up

Published: Jun 9, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,202 words)

How Rival Gardens of Eden in Iraq Survived ISIS, Dwindling Tourists, And Each Other

A bird flies out of Lalish temple which features a stone black snake on its wall. Photo by: Erin Trieb

Jennifer Percy | Atlas Obscura | May 2016 | 17 minutes (4,132 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Jennifer Percy, author of the book Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Thirty-five miles north of Mosul, Iraq, about an hour’s drive from Islamic State territory, was the Garden of Eden. I stood with my interpreter, Salar, a local Iraqi journalist. “See that smoke between the mountains,” Salar said, pointing in the distance. “It’s an oil fire.” The thick plume of smoke marked the entrance to the site. Flames burst from a pipe stuck deep in the earth beneath which lay 25 billion barrels of crude oil worth more than $1 trillion. “These oil explorers think about holy places,” he said. “The more oil, the holier the land.”

But this isn’t the only Garden of Eden. It’s not even the only Garden of Eden in Iraq’s Nineveh plains, the war-torn province through which I was traveling. According to coordinates rather confusingly supplied by the Book of Genesis, the garden was at the spot where one river split into four. Here’s Genesis 2.8-2.14:

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed…A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The thinking was, if you can pinpoint the four rivers—Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates—you can pinpoint paradise. The Tigris and Euphrates run from northern Iraq the length of the country before meeting in the south. No one knows for sure the location of the Pishon or Gihon rivers, except that they are in Havilah, and no one knows where Havilah is either. These are the two unknown rivers of paradise. Genesis refers to the land of Cush, thought to be Ethiopia, but the known rivers are not near Ethiopia. Others believe the rivers are in Azerbaijan, or point out that Jerusalem is home to the ancient Gihon Spring. Read more…

How the uprising in Bahrain failed, and how the United States looked the other way:

What this silence conceals is the story of what really happened in the Gulf kingdom last year, and the full story of America’s halfhearted attempts to intervene, which ultimately went nowhere. What it also obscures is that last year’s events may mark an ominous turning point in the tiny country’s history. Bahrain’s uprising grew out of a long-running conflict between the country’s Sunni ruling class and its marginalized Shiite majority. But its aftermath has taken on the dimensions of something darker still—a vastly asymmetrical battle that, in the words of Marina Ottaway, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has assumed the “ugly overtones of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.”

“The Crackdown.” — Kelly McEvers, Washington Monthly

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The Crackdown

Longreads Pick

How the uprising in Bahrain failed, and how the United States looked the other way:

“What this silence conceals is the story of what really happened in the Gulf kingdom last year, and the full story of America’s halfhearted attempts to intervene, which ultimately went nowhere. What it also obscures is that last year’s events may mark an ominous turning point in the tiny country’s history. Bahrain’s uprising grew out of a long-running conflict between the country’s Sunni ruling class and its marginalized Shiite majority. But its aftermath has taken on the dimensions of something darker still—a vastly asymmetrical battle that, in the words of Marina Ottaway, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has assumed the ‘ugly overtones of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.'”

Published: Feb 15, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,183 words)

From Kid Celebrity to Consummate Con Artist

From Kid Celebrity to Consummate Con Artist

From Kid Celebrity to Consummate Con Artist

Longreads Pick

When immigration officials greeted him at Pan American Hospital, he said he was a 13-year-old orphan from Colombia who sneaked into the Arca Airline plane’s wheel well. Name? “Guillermo Rosales.” That was the first lie. Now he has matured into one of the world’s notorious jewelry thieves, who has escaped prison and dizzied detectives in at least five countries using a slew of stolen identities: A budding doctor studying in Ireland. A Colombian diplomat’s son. An English family man. A New York priest. A German prince. A wealthy Bahraini.

Source: Miami Herald
Published: Dec 11, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,359 words)