PodcastHers

01/06/2026

In 2011, a Saudi woman pressed record, got behind the wheel and drove. She was arrested nine days later.

Manal al-Sharif filmed herself driving in Khobar, uploaded the video to YouTube and watched it reach hundreds of thousands of views before authorities pulled it down. Driving was not explicitly illegal for women in Saudi Arabia at the time. There was simply no mechanism to grant them a license. The distinction did not protect her. She was jailed, held for nine days and released only after signing a pledge to never drive again.

The video did not disappear with her arrest. It became the spark for Women2Drive, a coordinated campaign she co-founded that organised women across Saudi Arabia to get in their cars on the same day and document it. The campaign ran for years, gathering global attention and domestic momentum. In September 2017, the Saudi government announced it would lift the ban. The first licenses were issued to women in June 2018.

She did not ask permission to start the conversation. She started it from the driver's seat.

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27/05/2026

In December 2015, a 22-year-old Iraqi woman stood before the United Nations Security Council and described, in full detail, what ISIS had done to her people. The room went silent. No one had ever done this before.

The Yazidi genocide began in August 2014 when ISIS swept through Sinjar in northern Iraq. More than 5,000 Yazidi men were executed. At least 7,000 women and girls were captured and sold into sexual slavery. Nadia Murad was one of them. She escaped after three months. Her mother and six brothers did not.

She chose not to stay silent. She testified before the UN, met with world leaders and founded Nadia's Initiative in 2018 to rebuild Yazidi communities in Iraq and push for accountability on sexual violence as a weapon of war. That same year, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize, making her one of the youngest recipients in the award's history. The Yazidi genocide has still not been legally recognised by Iraq.

She did not survive to become a symbol. She became an institution while the war was still happening.

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24/05/2026

IRANIAN DIRECTOR WINS TOP CANNES DOCUMENTARY PRIZE

Iranian filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani has won the prestigious L’Oeil d’or award for Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival for her film Rehearsals for a Revolution.

➡️ The documentary explores more than four decades of political repression, protest movements, and resistance inside Iran through archival footage and personal narratives.

➡️ Accepting the award at Cannes, Ahangarani dedicated the honor to the people of Iran, calling attention to the country’s long struggle for freedom and expression.

➡️ The film has drawn international attention for its deeply personal portrayal of Iranian society and its reflection on generations shaped by upheaval and crackdowns.

➡️ The Cannes recognition marks a major global achievement for Iranian independent cinema amid continued political tensions and restrictions on artistic expression.

21/05/2026

In 1991, Christiane Amanpour broadcast live from Baghdad for six weeks as coalition bombs fell on the city. Every major network took note of what she was doing and how she was doing it.

She was reporting from inside a war zone with no guarantee of safe passage, no certainty that the Iraqi government would not detain her and no script that had been written before. CNN was not yet the global force it would become. She was, in large part, the reason it got there.

Over those six weeks she filed dispatches that reached audiences across the world in real time, redefining what war correspondence could look like when a journalist refused to step back from the front. She did not report around the war. She reported from inside it. The standards she set during that Gulf War coverage became the baseline expectation for a generation of foreign correspondents who came after her.

She did not get famous and then go to war. She went to war and that is what made her famous.

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17/05/2026