In his living room in Casablanca, Mellul, 66, sat in his striped “djellaba” (long robe) and black hat, taking long sips from a small glass of sweet mint tea. From a nearby speaker, the warm voice of Mbarek Oulaarbi, a renowned Amazigh singer, cut through the sound of the old man’s slurps, before he lowered his cup from his lips and joined in, singing, “They want to cut us from the Palestinian cause” in Tamazight, one of the indigenous languages of Morocco. Mellul, who asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons, belongs to a unique community in Morocco. He is Amazigh, par ..read more

The villages around Asni, a beautiful market town built into a hillside in Morocco’s High Atlas mountain range, are hard to access at the best of times. Narrow tracks snake up rocky ridges and plunge into picturesque valleys; small groupings of traditional mud-built homes, villages of just a few hundred people, dot the mountainsides. The powerful earthquake that shook the region, which is about an hour’s drive south of Marrakech, on Friday evening, leveled most of those homes, trapping their inhabitants under the rubble. Thousands have died and the official toll of 2,122 is sure to rise. In M ..read more

On a cold morning last January, dozens of men dressed in layers of thick wool robes and coats to keep out the biting cold crowded into the village hall in Bab Berred, a town nestled high in Morocco’s Rif Mountains. The humidity had infiltrated the wall where a framed portrait of King Mohammed VI hung; the peeling paint was hastily covered over with a Moroccan flag in anticipation of the visitors from the capital who were filing into the hall and mounting the dais. There was an uneasy tension in the air as Mohamed El-Guerrouj, polished in a tailored suit and dark-rimmed glasses, took to the po ..read more

It is common for women in the Arab world who speak out against male sexual predators to face vicious shaming while the perpetrator escapes unscathed, a trend that has long deterred Arab women from speaking out publicly against abusers. But what happens when the predator is a pop star with a fervent fan base? Saad Lamjarred is a Moroccan musician whose songs have amassed millions of views and who has enjoyed sweeping popularity across the Arab world. That is until a series of violence and rape allegations surfaced against him, with several women publicly stepping forward to speak out. From the ..read more

In the summer of 2000, I settled in with my dad to watch a soccer match between England and Portugal in the group stage of the Euro Cup. I knew many of the English soccer players because I was obsessed with the Premier League – legends like Alan Shearer, Paul Scholes, David Beckham and others took to the pitch and were up 2-0 in the first 20 minutes of the match. But the Portuguese team was stacked with legends as well – Luis Figo, Rui Costa, Nuno Gomes, Sergio Conceicao and others who turned out to be a golden generation that played some of the most beautiful soccer I had seen. They won 3-2 ..read more

There were once lions in North Africa’s woodlands — beautiful, big and strong. Local people reported seeing the animal in the wild for the last time in the 1950s and 1960s, in Algeria’s Aures Mountains, a place of resistance during the Algerian war for independence. Since then, the lion has been declared extinct in the wild, with zoos leading uncertain conservation efforts. Though the lion’s disappearance from its historical natural habitat already represents a loss of wildlife, biodiversity and cultural heritage, the emblematic animals are now at risk of disappearing even in captivity. For g ..read more

One summer morning in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in North Africa, I climbed the steep path into the old fort and up to the battlements. The sea was still, and the heat was yet to settle. There was a sleeping migrant, a child, in a grubby orange armchair outside the city’s general archive, where I had come to meet the historian Vicente Moga. One hundred years ago, Moga told me, the scene here was very different. In the days following the Battle of Annual on July 22, 1921, what remained of Spain’s colonial army staggered back into Melilla. Vultures flew in the opposite direction. “Imagine,” s ..read more

In 2003, a young and ambitious Moroccan woman, Ouahiba Khourchech, became a police officer in El Jadida, where she steadily rose through the ranks to lead the region’s division in charge of violence against women in 2009. On any given day, Khourchech would be handling cases spanning from women enduring domestic abuse to sex workers who had survived physical assault. But in 2014, Khourchech’s new boss, regional security chief Aziz Boumehdi, began singling her out in the workplace, slowly escalating his behavior toward her, including stalking. By 2016, Khourchech was left with no other choice b ..read more