After 30 years in Iran, Noorullah found himself on a bus in the Afghan city of Herat. He clutched all the documents that made up the life of his 21-year-old son, Rohullah, who was the reason his family was headed back to Kabul for the first time in decades. Rohullah was killed instantly when a missile struck the Tehran apartment complex he had been staying in: “My son was martyred,” Noorullah said.

The brutal reality of wars unfolding in our world, such as the current war in Ukraine, the Iran-Israel-US conflict, or the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, reveals that war is never just fought on battlefields. It is fought on every road, in every schoolyard, and in every home.

“In most of these markets people also say they pay more attention to creators and influencers than to mainstream news brands (or their journalists) when using social media.” — Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report

Jumping from the top of a truck, Gazan journalist Anas Al‑Sharif landed in the arms of his best friend, Saleh Al‑Ja’farawi, with a joy that felt almost borrowed from another world, brief, bright, and impossibly alive amid a landscape cratered by warplanes.