It’s a tricky thing to classify tumultuous events as “good” or “bad” for global freedom. When protesters rise, do we count the courage or the crackdown? But with tyrants from Istanbul to Caracas rattled, this week’s Dispatches have my glass half full.

The Global Fight for Freedom

1. Turkish Opposition Roars Back to Life
2. Maduro's Brutality Betrays His Panic
3. Guyana Dodges the Petro-Curse
4. Syria Joins the War on Terror
5. Trump Counters China's Nuclear Ambitions

Country names are followed by their 2025 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking. Note: my domain reputation has finally recovered - source links have been restored.

In March, Turkish police surrounded Ekrem Imamoglu's house at dawn. From his walk-in closet, cameras rolling, the Istanbul mayor—who twice defeated President Erdogan's candidates to win—delivered his final message: "We are facing great oppression, but I will not give up. I entrust myself to my nation." Minutes later, he vanished into custody alongside 100 others, triggering Turkey's largest uprising in over a decade, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets.
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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response was swift and brutal. Nearly 2,000 were detained—subjected to mass trials devoid of due process. Since then, authorities have arrested over 100 members of the opposition CHP Party, including 14 mayors, systematically destroying the opposition.
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The protests fell silent.
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Six months later, the rebellion has roared back to life. On September 14th, at least 50,000 protesters packed Ankara's Tandogan Square as CHP leader Ozgur Ozel faced a court hearing that could strip him of party leadership—the latest attempt to decapitate the opposition. Live footage showed crowds waving Turkish flags and chanting for Erdogan's resignation. From prison, Imamoglu's letter electrified the crowd: "The era of 'I' in this country will end, and the era of 'we' will begin."
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Since a 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has weaponized emergency powers to purge over 100,000 civil servants, arrest over 50,000 people, and crush press freedom—transforming Turkey from democracy to bona fide dictatorship. He has also weaponized Islamic nationalism, abandoning the secular principles of founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to tighten his grip on power.
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Yet Erdogan's support is crumbling. Over two-thirds Turks now oppose another Erdogan presidential bid in 2028, signaling his twenty-year reign faces its gravest threat. In Turkey, the freedom fighters can now smell victory.

On January 7th, masked men came for Rafael Tudares as he drove his seven-year-old grandson and six-year-old granddaughter to school in Caracas. Hooded figures dressed in black intercepted his vehicle, violently dragged him from the car, and abandoned the traumatized children on the street. Eight months later, authorities have denied his family any information about whether he's alive or dead.
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This wasn't random—it was calculated political warfare. Tudares is the son-in-law of Edmundo González, the rightful winner of Venezuela's July 2024 presidential election. His disappearance represents an escalation in Nicolás Maduro's desperate campaign to crush the Venezuelan rebellion through terror.
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​A UN fact-finding mission report released this week exposes how Venezuela arrests opposition figures' family members in a "sustained and systematic pattern" to generate fear and social control. Maduro is criminalizing kinship itself, detaining relatives as reprisals against opposition politicians or weapons to exert psychological pressure.
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But Maduro's escalating desperation reveals weakness, not strength. The dictator faces unprecedented pressure as Trump doubled the bounty for Maduro's arrest to $50 million and deployed over 4,000 US military personnel to Caribbean waters with Tomahawk-armed ships and F-35 fighter jets. This coordinated squeeze—internal resistance plus external isolation—has pushed Maduro into panic mode, making tactics that once preserved his power now accelerate his regime's inevitable collapse.

Three miles beneath the ocean floor, ExxonMobil struck liquid gold. The 2015 discovery of oil deposits off the coast of Guyana came just months after its voters had punished the ruling party for corruption. The deposits could yield 11 billion barrels of oil—worth nearly $700 billion.
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Not bad for a nation of 830,000.
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But for Guyana, oil changed everything. The 2020 election became a battle for control of unprecedented wealth. When President David Granger refused to accept his defeat, a five-month standoff paralyzed the nation until U.S. sanctions and international pressure forced him from power.
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The standoff stoked fears ExxonMobil's discovery had unleashed the "resource curse," making Guyana's September 1st election perhaps the most consequential in its history.
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Incumbent President Irfaan Ali promised transformational development—investing revenues in infrastructure, education, and healthcare following Norway's model. His challenger, businessman Azruddin Mohamed—sanctioned by the US for alleged tax evasion, corruption and gold-smuggling—presented himself as a Robin Hood figure using personal wealth to help the needy.
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The stakes were enormous. The “resource curse” has historically empowered populists promising direct redistribution, especially across South America, only to concentrate power among elites while impoverishing citizens. Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, yet 76% of citizens live in extreme poverty. Nigeria's petroleum created billionaires while 40% survive on less than $2 daily.
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For now, Guyana has chosen wisely, decisively delivering Ali a second term.
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Yet Georgetown remains poor, with most living in ramshackle wooden houses plagued by power cuts. Ali won this battle against the resource curse, but unless he delivers results, the populist temptation will endure.

In a scene that would have been inconceivable a year ago, Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, shook hands with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the jihadist who once fought U.S. forces.
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The man who once accused the U.S. of being “responsible for all Muslim suffering” now coordinates with it against their mutual enemy.
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For over a decade, America led an 89-nation Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, supporting Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in a grinding war that delivered ISIS's territorial defeat in 2019. The coalition's success was staggering—ISIS shrank from 100,000 fighters controlling a third of Syria to fewer than 2,500 operating from shadows.
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But annual ISIS attacks have more than doubled recently—to 294 last year. The group now exploits Syria's sectarian fractures to attack al-Sharaa’s legitimacy, bombing a Greek Orthodox church in Damascus and ambushing checkpoints across the northeast.
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Yet Al-Sharaa—formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—now pursues the ultimate gamble: peace with Israel. ISIS propaganda calls him "Jewlani," claiming he's a Mossad agent—underscoring the risk he is taking to pursue peace with a nation that has bombed Damascus and occupied southern territory since Assad's fall.
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I'll admit: al-Sharaa baffles me. He's battled fellow Sunni Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran's efforts to exert Shia control. Yet he seeks peace with Israel and leaves doors open to future Iranian relations—positions that defy easy categorization. Does this dealmaking represent genuine tolerance, mere authoritarian pragmatism, or strategic jihad focused on eliminating competing Islamic factions first?
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Regardless, his cooperation against ISIS serves global freedom by preventing the resurgence of Islam's most evil expression.

In 2021, as Joe Biden's pitiful withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded, Russian State TV triumphantly declared the "end of American hegemony.” Iranian hardliners celebrated what they called "the humiliating U.S. flight." Beijing's public response was more restrained, but accounts revealed quiet jubilation as state propaganda outlets reveled in the collapse of American credibility.
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China's contentment revealed the strategic windfall Biden had delivered America's authoritarian enemies when he yielded a key strategic position—and $7 billion in military equipment—to the Taliban.
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Now Trump is seeking to reclaim what Biden surrendered: Bagram Airfield, the Soviet-built fortress that became America's premier intelligence outpost.
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​Satellite intelligence reveals Beijing has constructed over 250 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos across Western China—the largest nuclear buildup since the Cold War. These silos house missiles capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads to American cities. Bagram enabled critical monitoring of this threat, along with Russian and Iranian regional activities.
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China now warns the U.S. reclaiming Bagram could "inflame regional instability", showing their desperation to shield their nuclear ambitions. Beijing also fears Uyghur resistance could organize in Afghanistan, seeking revenge for the imprisonment of over one million Uyghurs in nearby Xinjiang. No wonder China rushed to embrace the Taliban after the American collapse.
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Trump's determination to retake Bagram signals America's refusal to accept permanent retreat from a strategic position vital for confronting tyranny—and that's good news for global freedom.

Freedom Fighter of the Week: Sudan Gurung

"A child died in my arms. I'll never forget that moment." Sudan Gurung's words carry the weight of Nepal's 2015 earthquake—the disaster that transformed a nightclub DJ into a revolutionary. The owner of OMG nightclub posted an SOS on social media after the quake killed nearly 9,000 people. Nearly 200 volunteers responded.
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That relief network became Hami Nepal, the organization that would eventually bring down a Prime Minister. Gurung's organization delivered oxygen tanks to hospitals during COVID, provided pregnant women and children food after floods, and sent millions in aid to Turkey when earthquake struck.
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But as he helped society's most vulnerable, Gurung watched Nepal's politicians steal from disaster victims while flaunting wealth. As political elite children—"nepo kids"—posted TikTok videos of designer shopping and foreign vacations, young Nepalis struggled to find work, with youth unemployment topping 20%.
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Gurung transformed his relief effort into a political machine. Operating under "For the People, By the People," it channeled Gen Z's frustration, growing to over 1,600 members.
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When Prime Minister Oli banned 26 social media platforms on September 4—silencing the generation exposing "nepo kids"—Gurung struck back. His team flooded Discord and Instagram with protest instructions, telling students to carry books and wear uniforms as symbols of defiance.
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September 8 turned Kathmandu into a battlefield. Students charged Parliament barricades. Police opened fire with live rounds. Nineteen young protesters fell dead. Enraged crowds torched the parliament building, president's office, and politicians' homes. Oli fled to army barracks and resigned within hours.
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The DJ who once spun records suddenly held Nepal's fate. Over 100,000 followers joined Gurung's Discord channel to select corruption-fighting Chief Justice Sushila Karki as interim prime minister through online polls—digital democracy overthrowing the old guard.
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But revolution breeds enemies. Last week, motorcycles stalked Gurung from his office while red cars joined chase. Only government security saved him.
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The former DJ now shapes Nepal's political future, proving you don't need elite credentials to change the world.

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