I had started working for the United Nations just two years earlier and was at a table with some Western diplomats and foreign aid workers. I watched as the young waiter carrying our food froze en route to our table and followed his eyes to a TV screen above our heads. It was showing news footage of a plane slamming into one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City.
The reaction to those attacks started a process that saw powerful states increasingly undermine international law, erode the norms of war, and instrumentalise humanitarian aid to serve their military and political interests. In retrospect, that reaction – which I witnessed from a front row seat during my career at the UN – also sowed the seeds for today’s genocidal Israeli campaign that has laid waste to Gaza and immiserated its inhabitants.
On the day it all started, our lunch was cancelled and we scattered back to our offices and satellite phones as Israel sealed the Strip. I was a spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme in Kabul and had been sent to the occupied Palestinian territories temporarily. When I reached out to the Israeli military to try to arrange an exit, I was sarcastically told I should stay in Gaza because it was much safer than Afghanistan.
When I was eventually able to leave, a couple of days later, I saw first-hand – from UN offices across the border in Islamabad – how the US war machine simply expanded its scope when it ran out of targets in Afghanistan. I also attended many meetings between October 2001 and April 2002 where US government officials met with UN field-level managers to influence how aid went into Afghanistan, especially into areas where the Taliban no longer controlled the territory.
Some of us aid workers justified the US influence on aid operations by arguing that we were at least helping feed and keep alive millions of Afghans who would otherwise have tremendously suffered. Politics, which lie at the root of what we call humanitarian disasters, is not our business, we reasoned. We just keep people alive as much as we can until a political solution is agreed.
I repeated such arguments to supporters and detractors even when I cringed at how our independence was undermined, and as aid shipments were ultimately directed according to geopolitical interests rather than need.
The Canal Hotel
Two years later, I went to Iraq after another US invasion. There, we would soon become a target of the political violence we always thought we were insulated from as “independent, neutral, and impartial” aid workers: The danger of allowing the perception to take root that international aid is an arm of Western political and military power became tragically apparent.
It was the middle of the afternoon on a very hot August day in 2003 when I started heading back to my office in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, half an hour later than scheduled. As we approached the grim building, I saw a column of smoke and a grey cloud forming on the horizon.
I left the car even before it came to a stop at the main entrance. Shouts and cries intersected in my ears, while particles of dust mixed with sweat and the scent of molten iron entered my nostrils and irritated my eyes. An armed American soldier stopped me. I yelled at him. “Let me through. This is my office. I work here. I'm a UN spokesperson. I work here!”
I was driven, possessed like any survivor of a tragedy to approach the centre of horror. How did this happen while I was away? Why wasn't I in my office? There was an irresistible urge to force my way through the soldiers, to enter the apocalyptic grounds. A colleague warned me not to enter the building, but that compulsion to witness what I had missed seized me and drove me on.
I slipped through a small back door and ran upstairs to the second floor where my office was. My laptop was there, but many keys had popped out of its keyboard due to the force of the explosion. Large, sharp glass fragments had lodged in the back of my chair. Any of them could have pierced my back had I been there.
I walked in darkness, relying on my hands to feel the corridor walls on one side. The faint light of my mobile phone revealed some obstacles in my path until a soldier stopped me at the office of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the head of the UN mission in Iraq. He had been sent there a few weeks earlier by the then UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, to help the invading Americans find a way out; to help them find a way to hand back power to the Iraqis after they had destroyed the military and political foundations of Saddam Hussein’s regime in an ill-conceived and illegal war that was not even sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
I tried to convince the American soldier to let me through. With a vacant look in his eyes, he said: “There is nothing there. That part of the building vaporised. If you stepped behind that door, you'd fall several stories onto rubble, iron rods, and concrete blocks.”
Aid as a target
I later learned that 23 people had been killed, including de Mello, and over 100 wounded. An Iraqi Islamist militant group claimed credit for the attack, accusing the UN of supporting the US occupation of the country.
For a few days, we worked throughout the day and into the night in an endless succession of meetings, calls, and emails, all fuelled by adrenaline, caffeine, and tobacco. There was no time to be angry about the UN’s failure to anticipate the attack or better protect its staff. There was no time to be angry at the mindless, murderous terrorists, or to contemplate the role of the US invasion and the disastrous de-Ba'athification policy.
Both before and after the attack, I remember long discussions among senior UN officials and mid-career employees (like I was at the time) about how humanitarian aid had become too politicised and how this had turned us – aid workers – into a soft target for attacks, which were increasingly being aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, US financial support – amounting to billions of dollars – paid for most of the food that my organisation brought in, flooding the markets according to plans USAID officers influenced.
What was crystal clear in the meetings at the time with US officials was that hunger or lack of basic supplies would not be allowed to overshadow the more important narratives about “liberating” Afghanistan and Iraq that the US was promoting.
More than a bed for the night
Even before 11 September 2001, many people, especially in societies that receive aid or are affected by the UN resolutions and interventions, viewed the UN as a part of a scheme to maintain a Western-dominated neoliberal international order. During my time at the UN, I challenged this view, while acknowledging the power asymmetry between the West and the rest when it comes to running the humanitarian industry.
It was the role I saw the UN play in Syria, starting in 2011, that made me start to rethink that position, and it was the ongoing carnage in Gaza that sealed the deal. What I previously rationalised as an acceptable and unavoidable degree of politicisation has become irredeemable co-option, especially in the case of large UN aid agencies.
The humanitarian system has always been dependent on Western capitals for political and financial support. When it lost most of both in Gaza under the weight of a US-led, anti-UN, and pro-Israel campaign, the system started to come apart and show its structural weaknesses.
The shared humanity that is supposed to underpin the system has shown itself in massive demonstrations in Western capitals against the Israeli war in Gaza, but this energy is blocked somewhere in the ruling political systems. Thus, all these protests have not succeeded in pressuring influential governments to do what they can to stop the bloodletting.
Over the last two years, this whole rickety humanitarian structure and its shaky underpinnings have come unglued. The International Criminal Court has come under US sanctions for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials; UNRWA – the main aid organisation helping Palestinians in Gaza – has been defunded and effectively besieged; the principles of necessity and proportionality and the laws on war have been simply shredded.
The case of Gaza is the most flagrant due to the interplay of global politics, regional complicity, and gruesome acts of killing brought live to any screen near you, but the Sudan war provides good examples too.
In 2003, a total of 117 national relief workers were killed, injured, or abducted around the world. By 2024, the number of casualties had risen to 816. The majority of those killed and injured over the past two years were in Gaza due to Israeli attacks.
Atrophy or renewal
Humanitarian relief and peacekeeping have always been politicised, but there have also been valiant efforts – by many states, organisations, and individuals – to uphold principles and norms. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s fatally eroded those efforts, while the ongoing genocide in Gaza shows their current state of paralysis. It may ultimately turn out to be the end of an era for humanitarianism.
With loads of unexpected good luck and unforeseen changes in global politics, the current miasma and decay could lead to genuine and needed reform of our faltering post World War II order. More likely, we are witnessing one of the last nails being driven into the coffin of this system, sweeping away many international arrangements – including possibly the UN itself – without any clear alternatives, except the survival of the fittest.
Another likely scenario is for the system to meander for a few more years and atrophy in a slow torturous manner, even turning into part of the global military and surveillance enterprise, as illustrated by the operations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whereby Palestinians are surveilled and frequently killed as they queue for aid.
Every year, in August, I receive an invitation to attend the celebrations of World Humanitarian Day in Geneva or in New York. The event originated to commemorate the 2003 Baghdad bombing at the Canal Hotel that I narrowly escaped and that killed my colleagues. I am invited because I am a survivor of that attack.
I no longer attend the celebrations. This is because I no longer believe in the humanitarian system – or, more precisely, in what it has metamorphosed into over the past few years. Nor do I find such gatherings meaningful enough to seriously celebrate the lives and the ultimate sacrifices of my fallen colleagues and the hundreds that followed them, especially in Gaza. One cannot celebrate humanity and the organisations that work on aid when both are largely paralysed in the face of a genocide that has been unfolding for almost two years.
The Israeli revenge war has become a watershed, but it is by no means some sudden new trend. It simply reveals how far the world has travelled in a direction paved by the US and other aggressive states over the past 24 years: launching preemptive wars of revenge in violation of international law; killing large numbers of people collaterally to get to an “enemy”; shirking due process for civilians and alleged enemy combatants detained during conflicts; weaponising humanitarian aid; and systematically eroding the norm-based global system, together with its moral underpinnings.
Nothing in all of this calls for celebration, but for deep thinking and a lot of hard work – not to salvage our humanity and the humanitarian system, but to construct them anew.
Source: The New Humanitarian