Amelia Smith

Amelia Smith is a writer and journalist based in London who has reported from across the Middle East and North Africa. In 2016 Amelia was a finalist at the Write Stuff writing competition at the London Book Fair. Her first book, “The Arab Spring Five Years On”, was published in 2016 and brings together a collection of authors who analyse the protests and their aftermath half a decade after they flared in the region.

Items by Amelia Smith

- August 17, 2018 Amelia Smith
Mystery shrouds extradition of Egypt imam from Spain

On 1 June Spanish police injected Dr. Alaa Mohamed Said with anesthetic, beat him and bundled him onto a plane bound for Egypt. For two days his wife Iman, who was then two months pregnant with their sixth child, had no contact with her husband: “I kept calling when he...
- August 14, 2018 Amelia Smith
Five years on from Rabaa Sisi’s massacre continues in North Sinai

Rabaa represents the failed hope of Egyptian democracy and it set a precedent for the despicable brutality of a regime towards its own citizens....
- July 31, 2018 Amelia Smith
Haifa film festival reclaims city’s status as cultural capital

The festival is an attempt to connect with the Arab World...
- July 6, 2018 Amelia Smith
Refusing to open borders, separating parents and children. We have truly lost our humanity

For politicians across the world, refugees are not human beings any more, they are rubbish to be disposed. ...
- June 25, 2018 Amelia Smith
At the World Cup 2018, regional rivalries play out on the pitch

Last week, not even Egypt’s fourth pyramid Mohammad Salah could save the Pharaoh’s from their 3-1 defeat against Russia. A further loss against Uruguay secured the Egyptian team seats on a one-way flight back to Cairo after a dismal two matches at the 2018 World Cup. Salah was embroiled in...
- June 22, 2018 Amelia Smith
In London, theatre is helping four young refugees process trauma

The first time Talal Hasan met Omar Almahel they slept side by side on a piece of cardboard at a train station in Brussels. Not long after this the pair climbed a bridge, jumped onto a fence below and manoeuvred themselves between carriages on a London bound Eurostar, hiding...
- June 1, 2018 Amelia Smith
Palestine has a wealth of talented filmmakers, but no cinema industry to showcase them

Haifa Independent Film Festival prides itself on being independent from the Israeli government and is not supported by any organisation or institute...
- May 18, 2018 Amelia Smith
It took 116 dead Palestinians for Egypt to ease its siege on Gaza for a month

Yesterday Egyptian military strongman Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced on Twitter that the Rafah border crossing to Gaza would remain open throughout the entire month of Ramadan. Al-Sisi’s tweet came at the end of a long and bloody week for Palestinians. On Monday, as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner inaugurated the...
- May 10, 2018 Amelia Smith
Welcome to Sinai, where soldiers shoot children then boast on Facebook

Even by the standards of Egypt’s dirty war the video circulating this week of a young boy pleading for his mother moments before he was shot in central Sinai was heartbreaking. When it comes to Egypt we hear a lot of figures – 60,000 political prisoners, 1,000 protesters massacred in...
- May 3, 2018 Amelia Smith
Yusuf Qaradawi’s granddaughter: ‘It never crossed our mind they would detain my mother because of my grandfather’

Amelia Smith interviews Aayah Khalaf, the daughter of Ola Al-Qaradawi and Hosam Khalaf who have been detained for nearly a year in Egypt. Ola is the daughter of the exiled Egyptian scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi....
- April 25, 2018 Amelia Smith
The UK government steals billions from the poor to fund illegal wars in the Middle East

You don’t have to look far to find evidence of the abject failures of the current Tory government, they are plastered over every media outlet – the Windrush scandal, Brexit and intervention in Syria are just three misguided policies that have cost the UK dearly, both in terms of integrity...
- April 21, 2018 Amelia Smith
‘Syrians are not cockroaches to be exterminated’

Amelia Smith interviews Hammam Yousef, a Syrian activist who co-founded the Syrian Non-Violence Movement during the 2011 uprising. ...
- April 11, 2018 Amelia Smith
World leaders shed a tear for Syrian children, but for Gaza it’s business as usual

In the aftermath of the chemical weapons assault that suffocated to death over 80 men, women and children in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta, this weekend British Prime Minister Theresa May issued a stern warning to the highest levels of the Syrian government: “The regime and its backers, including...
- March 23, 2018 Amelia Smith
In Egypt the British trade millions of dollars for human rights

In 2016 UK investments in Egypt topped $30 billion. Instead of using their influence to force Egypt to behave, the UK has awarded Sisi with $500,000 of investment for every Egyptian locked up for pro-democracy protests....
- March 8, 2018 Amelia Smith
Here come the next generation of female, Middle East activists

On the 15 December 2017 Israeli soldiers raided Ahed Tamimi’s home and shot her cousin in the head at close range shattering his skull. Ahed and her cousin ran outside to confront the military, who were loitering in her front yard. A video of Ahed slapping one of them...
- February 23, 2018 Amelia Smith
‘The regime is killing people and the whole world is watching’

Mohamed Adel has been inside his office, a basement below a building in Douma in Eastern Ghouta, for four days now. Yesterday at midnight he decided to risk the seven-metre journey and ran to his house to check on his family. “It was terrifying,” he says, pausing as a...
- February 6, 2018 Amelia Smith
Doria Shafiq won the vote for Egyptian women, and kicked the Brits out

“To know, to be able, to want and to dare,” Doria Shafiq Britain today is celebrating the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, passed on 6 February 1918, which gave women over the age of 30 who owned property the right to vote. The outcome was a huge...
- January 15, 2018 Amelia Smith
‘As a Palestinian on the stage I feel I’m fighting, I’m resisting’

Palestinian actor and director Momin Swaitat looks at life under occupation and the contemporary refugee experience in his latest work 'Alien Land'...
- December 20, 2017 Amelia Smith
1,000 days of Saudi war on Yemen, backed by the UK

This week marks 1,000 days since the Saudi-led coalition launched a bombing campaign in Yemen. What followed was the world’s worst cholera epidemic and horrific human rights abuses on the ground yet Yemen has been dubbed the forgotten war because much of the world has ignored it. Data gathered by...
- December 7, 2017 Amelia Smith
The UK supported Saleh and every other Middle East tragedy

Shortly after photos of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, wrapped in a red blanket bearing a fatal head wound, were circulated on Twitter, a shot of him flanked by Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak also did the rounds. It was a reminder of life...
- November 25, 2017 Amelia Smith
‘The Syrian conflict is a very big money machine’

Manaf Halbouni tells me that the price of tomatoes in Syria has increased 80 fold since the start of the conflict: “When I left Syria you used to pay five Syrian pounds for one kilo of tomatoes and at the moment it’s around 400… if you want to buy...
- November 15, 2017 Amelia Smith
Code Name: Butterfly

Butterfly is not your average schoolgirl; at least not if you went to school in the UK. One of her best friends calls herself Dalal Mughrabi after the female Fatah fighter who played a central role in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre. Another classmate, Fida, is nicknamed Al-Khansa after...
- November 13, 2017 Amelia Smith
The million-dollar boat ride across the Mediterranean

By the end of August 2017, 112,450 Eritreans were registered as refugees and asylum seekers in Sudan...
- November 10, 2017 Amelia Smith
Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine

Ibtisam Barakat’s house in Ramallah is made of memories, not stone, she tells us. It is made of birds migrating in the sky, of her mother and father, of the skateboards her brother made from wooden vegetable boxes and of musical instruments shaped from rubber bands. It is these...

Amelia Smith

Items by Amelia Smith

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