Category World News

Fifteen years have passed since Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor whose cart was confiscated by the police, set himself on fire to protest against police harassment and the authorities’ neglect.

His act of desperation triggered nationwide protests by millions facing a crushing reality of increased unemployment, corruption, and a decades-old political system with little room for expression or change.

In 28 days, demonstrators brought down President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for 23 years.

Inspired by Tunisia’s uprising, millions of people from Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria took to the streets in 2011.

This movement, which became known as the Arab Spring, led to the toppling of five longtime leaders. Al Jazeera looks back at what happened to those leaders.

Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

• 1936-2019
• In power: 1987-2011 (23 years)
• Status: Died in exile

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali came to power in 1987 when, as prime minister, he declared President-for-life Habib Bourguiba medically unfit to rule.

In office, the former security chief worked to repress any challenges to his rule and installed a rigid system anchored in security services and a loyal governing party.

He opened up the economy, leading to economic growth, but the country was mired in deepening corruption, inequality, and media censorship, sparking public outrage and anger.

Grievances, including over police abuse, youth joblessness, and entrenched corruption, erupted after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010.

After nearly a month of nonstop demonstrations, on January 14, Ben Ali dissolved the government, declared a state of emergency and fled to Saudi Arabia.

A Tunisian court later sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment, which he did not serve. Eight years later, on September 19, 2019, Ben Ali died in exile in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the age of 83.

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak

• 1928-2020
• In power: 1981-2011 (30 years)
• Status: Died in Egypt (after release)

Hosni Mubarak became Egypt’s president in 1981 after Anwar Sadat’s assassination.

The former air force commander consolidated power through a mix of military dominance and emergency laws, maintaining tight-fisted rule marked by crackdowns on dissent, limited political freedoms, and widespread corruption.

On January 25, 2011, set to coincide with the annual celebration of the Egyptian police, protesters from across the Arab world’s most populous country, driven by high unemployment, poverty, and political repression, marched through the streets, demanding Mubarak’s departure.

On February 11, 2011, after 18 days of protests, Mubarak was forced to resign, ending a three-decade presidency.

Mubarak was ordered to stand trial and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in killing peaceful protesters during the revolution.

However, this sentence was overturned by the country’s high court, and a retrial was ordered. While that retrial was pending, he was convicted on corruption charges and spent six years in detention, though due to his health and the shifting political landscape, very little of that time in a prison cell.

In 2017, he was acquitted and released. On February 25, 2020, Mubarak died in Cairo at the age of 91.

Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh

• 1947-2017
• In power: 1978-2012 (33 years)
• Status: Killed by Houthis

Ali Abdullah Saleh was Yemen’s longtime strongman who ruled for 33 years, first as president of North Yemen from 1978, then of a unified Yemen from 1990.

Saleh was known to be a mastermind of tribal and military politics, once describing governing Yemen as “dancing on the heads of snakes”, where he leveraged shifting alliances in the region.

Following the Arab Spring protests in 2011, Saleh was forced to step down under a power-transfer agreement in 2012.

However, he soon forged a surprising alliance with his former enemies, the Houthis, helping them seize the capital, Sanaa, in 2014.

The pact collapsed in 2017, when he broke with the Houthis to seek a deal with the Saudi-led coalition fighting them. He was killed at the age of 75 by Houthi forces.

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi

• 1942-2011
• In power: 1969-2011 (42 years)
• Status: Killed by rebels

Muammar Gaddafi was an army officer who seized power in a 1969 coup, dismantling Libya’s monarchy and later promoting himself to the rank of colonel, which he held for the rest of his life.

Gaddafi built a highly personalised, restrictive system, governing through revolutionary committees rather than formal institutions, and maintaining control via the strategic use of Libya’s vast oil wealth.

Though he was internationally isolated for decades, he later re-engaged with Western states in the early 2000s after renouncing his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programme.

On February 15, 2011, protests erupted in Benghazi after a human rights lawyer was arrested. Like other Arab Spring countries, the incident was a catalyst; however, Gaddafi’s violent crackdown escalated the peaceful demonstrations into a full-scale armed uprising and civil war.

By August 2011, armed opposition forces captured Tripoli, marking the beginning of the end for the regime. A NATO air campaign and high-level internal defections proved decisive, tipping the balance against Gaddafi.

After retreating to his hometown of Sirte, Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, ending his 42 years in power.

Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad

• 1965-present
• In power: 2000-2024 (24 years)
• Status: Ousted, in exile

Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000 at age 34, following a special constitutional amendment that lowered the presidential minimum age just hours after his father’s death.

His father, Hafez al-Assad, was a military officer who seized power in a 1970 coup and ruled Syria for 29 years, establishing a centralised, tightly controlled government that Bashar would go on to lead for 24 years.

The Syrian revolution was sparked by a few teens who wrote anti-government graffiti on the walls of their school in Deraa. This act of dissent led to protests that spread across the nation, which drew a brutal crackdown from government forces and ultimately ignited a civil war.

The war drew in global powers including Russia, Iran, Turkiye, and the United States, and lasted for nearly 14 years, making it one of the longest in the region. It displaced more than half of the country’s population and created a significant refugee crisis.

On December 8, 2024, the Assad family’s 53-year rule came to an end.

Following a lightning offensive spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and supported by several other rebel factions, the Syrian military collapsed in a matter of days.

Lucknow, India – Harshit Verma believes his 50-year-old father, Vijay Kumar Verma, died because he was handling an “inhuman task”.

Vijay, a contractual government teacher in Lucknow, the capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, was hired as a booth-level officer (BLO) to conduct a revision of the voter list in his constituency, as part of an enormous electoral exercise involving millions of BLOs across the world’s most populous country.

The exercise, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on November 4, across 12 states and federally governed territories, to update the electoral rolls by adding eligible voters through house-to-house enumeration and removing ineligible people. The exercise will be repeated in the remaining states in phases.

According to a handbook for BLOs on the ECI’s website, their responsibilities range from doing house visits to identifying existing and dead voters, collecting their photos and other relevant documents, and uploading them on a designated portal. The BLOs, who are mostly government teachers or junior officials, have complained of their immense work pressure. A single mistake means the entire process of filling out the forms and uploading them has to be done again.

A report last week by the Spect Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, said at least 33 BLOs have died across India since November 4, at least nine of whom took their own lives and left desperate accounts of their work pressure in their suicide notes.

Vijay did not die by suicide. He collapsed on November 14 while completing SIR work late at night at his home in Lucknow’s Sarava village, and was rushed to hospital. He died of a brain haemorrhage 10 days later.

“Since he had joined the BLO duty, his phone continuously rang. We saw him working from morning till late night,” Vijay’s sister-in-law, Shashi Verma, told Al Jazeera.

Harshit, 20, said he had read text messages sent by district officials to his father, repeatedly telling him to do more work or “face consequences”.

“Quickly complete 200 forms. If it’s less than that, you will be charged,” he recalled one of the messages as saying.

“We have received no support from the government,” Harshit told Al Jazeera, as he stood with his mother, Sangeeta Rawat, outside the Lucknow offices of the Samajwadi Party, an opposition party supporting their protest.

“The senior district magistrate visited us after my father’s death, but only paid condolences and told me to focus on my studies,” he said.

‘Barely two hours of sleep every day’

Al Jazeera spoke to two other BLOs in Lucknow who refused to reveal their identities over fears it could invite the wrath of the government and jeopardise their jobs.

“I have been functioning with barely two hours of sleep every day. On many days, I didn’t even sleep at all,” said a 45-year-old BLO who works as a teacher at a government school in Lucknow.

Another BLO, also a teacher at a village school in the same district, said her phone numbers have been made public and her devices now ring at odd hours. “People call me late at night and ask me to correct their details or find if their name is in another list,” she said.

The BLO said that most people in villages do not keep an electronic version of their documents, unlike residents in cities. “Quite often, when we visit these villagers to collect their details, they would take a long time going through their trunks or cupboards to find their papers. It is a common problem.”

She said BLOs return to their homes in the evening after a long day of work and continue to upload forms online until late into the night. “Quite often, the server does not work, and I upload forms at 4 in the morning to avoid this issue,” the 35-year-old said.

“I would get worried that my mobile phone’s battery will run out, so I would always keep plugging it in to charge whenever possible,” she added.

The BLOs’ biggest concern, she said, was to complete their work within the one-month deadline given by the ECI, a process for which she said they were not given proper training.

“It was just a two- [to] three-hour briefing in which we were told how to collect and upload data. That’s it,” the BLO in rural Lucknow said.

In Uttar Pradesh, the deadline to finish the SIR process has been extended twice: first to December 11, and then to December 26. The exercise ended in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat states on December 14, and will end in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and Andaman and Nicobar on December 18.

Controversial exercise

The eastern state of Bihar was the first to go through a revision of its electoral rolls this year, after a gap of more than two decades. In July, the SIR was launched in Bihar before its legislative assembly elections in November, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged for the first time as the single largest party.

In the run-up to the polls, Bihar’s opposition parties had demanded a rollback of the SIR, accusing the ECI of rushing through a mammoth electoral exercise that could render vast numbers of citizens unable to vote. In September, the ECI published its final voter list for Bihar, removing 4.7 million names from the rolls.

In Seemanchal, a Muslim-majority region in Bihar’s northeast, voter removals exceeded the state average, prompting allegations by opposition parties and Muslim groups that the ECI was especially targeting Muslim voters, who generally do not vote for the BJP, for removal.

The BJP’s thumping win in Bihar triggered accusations by the losing coalition of a “vote chori” (“chori” means stealing in Hindi). Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress party, last month called the SIR “a sinister plan of the Election Commission to destroy democracy”.

In response, Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah said in a speech in parliament that the real “vote chori” happened under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather and grandmother who were also former Indian prime ministers.

As the political debate over the electoral exercise ramped up, it continued to destroy lives. In Bihar, at least two BLOs died during the revision of the electoral rolls.

On November 9, five days after the SIR was announced in a dozen other Indian states and federal territories, Namita Hansda, a 50-year-old rural health worker, died of a stroke while she was on duty in West Bengal’s East Burdwan district. Her husband, Madhab Hansda, blamed the SIR workload for her sudden death.

On November 22, Rinku Tarafdar, a 53-year-old biology teacher recruited as a BLO, was found dead at her residence in Nadia district of West Bengal.

In her two-page suicide note, Tarafdar blamed the ECI. “I do not support any political party, but I cannot handle this inhumane pressure anymore”, she wrote, adding that she was threatened with an “administrative process” if she failed to do the required work.

At least four BLOs died during the SIR in West Bengal. On Monday, the ECI published a draft voter list for the state, which removed about 5.8 million people. The deleted names were marked as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate voters.

‘Barely ate or slept’

Anuj Garg worked as a teacher in a government school in Dholpur city in the western state of Rajasthan. On the night of November 30, he fell to the ground while working at his laptop at his home and died of cardiac arrest. He was 44 and had two children.

“He asked for tea at around 1am, but by the time it came, we had lost him,” his sister, Anjana Garg, told Al Jazeera. “In the last month, he barely ate or slept. We only saw him working without a break.”

Anuj had previously worked as a BLO. But Anjana said the pressure this year was extraordinary. Despite working around the clock, he had received notices from his supervisors warning him to meet his targets, she said, adding that the death by suicide of another BLO in the state had added to his stress.

On the night of December 1, Sarvesh Singh, a 46-year-old BLO in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad district, died by suicide while his wife and four daughters were sleeping in another room. Singh left a note and a final video, purportedly recorded by his wife.

“I failed in this election,” he said in the video, adding that he was losing his mental stability due to a lack of sleep and excessive pressure. In the note, he wrote: “I used to work day and night, but still could not finish my target.”

The ECI has rejected accusations of workloads leading to the deaths of dozens of BLOs across the country.

“The SIR work is very normal. It is not that the BLOs are doing it for the first time,” ECI spokesman Apurva Kumar Singh told Al Jazeera, calling the deaths unfortunate. He said the work was “not overburdening at all”, adding that the ECI was taking required action, without specifying what that action is.

The commission recently doubled the compensation for BLOs to 1,000 rupees ($11) in addition to their salaries, and announced an incentive of 6,000 rupees ($66) upon the completion of an election cycle.

Sapan Mondal, the general secretary of the Kolkata-based Election Staff and Booth Level Officer Forum, said the Election Commission provided no training to the BLOs before pushing them into the enormous exercise.

“When the BLO duty was assigned, nothing was provided, not even devices or data entry operators to help those who don’t know how to work online,” he told Al Jazeera.

As criticism mounted, the ECI on December 1 posted a video on its X account showing a group of BLOs dancing to “relieve their stress”.

The video added to the outrage. Social media users called the commission’s move insensitive. The ECI has not officially responded to the criticism.

Meanwhile, petitions have been filed in several courts against the SIR by opposition politicians, victims’ families and the Association for Democratic Reforms, a prominent watchdog on India’s election processes.

Many affected families said they have been waiting for government support after losing their loved ones, who were often their sole breadwinners.

“We want the money we spent on our father’s untimely death, and a government job for me. Are we asking for a lot?” Harshit asked as he held a 200,000-rupee ($2,200) cheque given to his family by the opposition Samajwadi Party.

US President Donald Trump said he was standing by his White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, after Vanity Fair magazine published interviews in which Wiles revealed internal tensions in Trump’s administration and painted an unflattering picture of the roles played by some of the president’s inner circle.

Trump, who regularly describes Wiles as the “most powerful woman in the world”, told the New York Post on Tuesday that he has full confidence in his chief of staff and that she had “done a fantastic job”.

Vanity Fair published two articles based on the interviews, giving insights into what Wiles thinks about other key figures in Trump’s second presidency.

Speaking about Trump, Wiles described the teetotaling president as having “an alcoholic’s personality” and an eye for vengeance against perceived enemies.

“He has an alcoholic’s personality,” Wiles said of Trump, explaining that her upbringing with an alcoholic father prepared her for managing “big personalities”.

Trump does not drink, she noted, but operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing”.

In his defence of Wiles, Trump said she was right to describe him personally as having an “alcoholic’s personality”, even though he does not drink alcohol.

“I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic,” Trump said. “I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” he said.

Speaking on the Trump administration’s failure to quickly deliver its promise to share information related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles suggested that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, had failed to clearly read the situation with the public.

“First, she gave them binders full of nothingness,” Wiles said of Bondi, noting that Vice President JD Vance had more fully grasped how important the issue was to some people, since he is himself “a conspiracy theorist”.

Of Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files, Wiles said, “We know he’s in the file”, but claimed the file did not show him doing “anything awful”.

Referring to other members of the Trump administration, Wiles called Russ Vought, the chief of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a “right-wing absolute zealot” and branded tech tycoon Elon Musk an “odd, odd duck”, Vanity Fair said.

On Ukraine, Wiles said that Trump believes Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants the whole country”, despite Washington’s push for a peace deal.

Wiles also affirmed that Trump wants to keep bombing alleged drug boats in the waters off the coast of Venezuela until that country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, “cries uncle”.

In a post on X, Wiles called the Vanity Fair story “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history”, saying it omitted important context and selectively quoted her to create a negative narrative.

Other members of Trump’s inner circle also defended Wiles after the articles were published.

Vance said in a speech in Pennsylvania that he and Wiles had “joked in private and in public” about him believing conspiracy theories.

“We have our disagreements, we agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States,” Vance said.