Documents from an internal Ericsson investigation show how the Swedish telecom giant used layers upon layers of subcontracting companies in order to evade taxes including social security fees.
Despite the ISIS invasion of Iraq, Ericsson put pressure on employees and contractors to get the Peroza Project done. Affan got kidnapped and threatened but lived to tell the tale. The Swedish telecom giant went on to pay Iraqi firms to circumvent federal taxes – money that is highly likely to have ended up in ISIS pockets.
The absolute star in the Ericsson documents is former Alfa Chairman and CEO Marwan Hayek, who created a triangle of interests: Alfa, Quality Telecom Services (QTS), owned by his wife, and Ericsson, where his brother-in-law worked in a good position.
Since the liberation of Raqqa in 2017, the city’s residents are still on a journey to search for the bodies of their relatives after they buried them under suspicious circumstances.They had to transport the remains in primitive ways from mass graves and parks out of the city. During the transfers, many of the bodies were lost and the remains were scattered, and they may have disappeared forever.
There has been much talk about ISIS’s expropriation of the lands and properties of religious minorities in Mosul and in some Iraqi provinces; however, the violations that started in 2003 are ongoing today and are not perpetrated by just one entity, as this investigation reveals.
It is a little known chapter of the Syrian war: the thousands of Syrians who were treated in Israeli hospitals. Some never returned. Omran is one of them.
Commemorating the 2014 ISIS invasion, a statue of Yazidi hero Coli was erected in the town of Sinuni on August 3. Seven years ago, she killed Isis emir Salim Al-Jazrawi.
Sold twice as a slave by ISIS, young Iman learnt the Quran by heart in order to be released. Today she is 20 and studying hard to become a lawyer to defend the Yazidi cause.
The Egyptian army does not allow people in North Sinai to carry weapons to protect themselves against ISIS. Yet, it also hardly intervenes to protect or negotiate the return of the kidnapped. Copts are particularly hard hit.
The Yazidi Women Survivors Law is a victory, yet many question marks remain. Will the law be implemented or remain ink on paper? How will the land be distributed? And what to do with the children born as a result of rape?
