(Editorial) “Dilan’s stroll”, by Samuel Lieven
It is sometimes at the heart of tragedies that the reasons to still believe in them are revealed. This paradox crossed my mind when reading the testimony of Dilan Adamat, a young lawyer from France who made the decision to return to settle in Iraq and encourages his exiled compatriots to do the same. For what reasons? First, because he loves his country that his parents had to flee during the first Gulf War. Then, because he cannot bring himself to see Christian communities present in Iraq since the first centuries disappear from his native land. But also, he tells us, because “life in Iraq is a stroll”. And this, despite the drones and missiles that Iraqis have heard whistling above their heads since the start of the Israeli-American-Iranian war.
Denial, blindness or pure madness? You must never have walked the streets of an Iraqi, Lebanese or even Egyptian neighborhood or village to not immediately grasp the truth and poetry of Dilan Adamat’s words. You must never have met, in the Paris region or in Franche-Comté, these exiled fathers and mothers, driven out of Iraq by Daesh troops in 2014, to not feel the pain of uprooting, the shame of the downgrading that exile has engendered in an entire generation. I owe these two experiences to my job as a journalist in Pilgrimten or fifteen years ago. And while the situation in the Near and Middle East seems set to sink inexorably, the energy of a thirty-year-old in love with his country reopens a horizon of peace. Even fragile. Even distant.
Europeans have long fantasized about the Orient – a beautiful exhibition at the Louvre-Lens documents this at the right time. But the war raging there is too tangible a reality not to draw from the words of Dilan Adamat one of the reasons for our weekly in 2026: to help hold on, help to hope in a world which is hardening before our eyes, here and there. Without looking away from the violence that damages it. But without giving up, week after week, researching and highlighting what matters.
