Live Breaking News & Updates on Merchant Boy|Page 1

The New Arab and others.
This is how one story goes. It was the early 20th century, maybe 1915, amid Lebanon’s vicious famine. Ottoman authorities were enforcing
safar barlik, mandatory conscription of Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Kurdish men to fight for them during the Great War. They say these were some of the worst years for Bilad el-Sham, that Beirut and its surrounding mountains were like shriveled fruit, wrinkled and helpless. Locusts had destroyed everything the olive trees, the fruits, the vegetables, the maize. People were starving, dying on the streets from deadly diseases, their stomachs empty and bloated, lice powdered over their bare bodies.  ....

Liban Nord , Mont Liban , Ha Afon , Ar Raqqah , Jamal Pasha , Sandra Samaan Tamari , Javier Mar , Amal Murkus , Nawal Muradwij , Rashideh Atayeh , Nadia Ben Youssef , Sobhi Sayed , Al Rozana , Bertolt Brecht , Lena Chamamyan , Charbel Rouhana , Sabah Fakhri , Rabih Alameddine , Shahla Ujayli , Battle Think , Mount Lebanon , Sanaa Moussa , Hawa Dafi , Marcia Lynx Qualey , Orwa Al Mokdad , Merchant Boy ,