Jane Arraf

In the Yazidi village of Tel Qasab, Iraq, delighted neighbors welcome Nofa Khudeda as she walks into the house she fled six years ago when ISIS invaded the region. Khudeda, wearing a beige print dress with a white scarf tied loosely around her dark hair, hands out colorfully wrapped chocolates in celebration.

"It's a beautiful feeling to be home," she says, surrounded by beaming neighbors and relatives who returned a few weeks ago from camps for displaced Yazidis in northern Iraq.

In the village of Solagh in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, surrounded by fields where no crops grow, laborers in masks and white protective suits carefully sift through the sand and dirt of a former fish farm.

They take turns shoveling the sand into a rectangular, coffee table-size wire sifter to make sure they don't lose small pieces of bone.

The Egyptian government is facing an international backlash over the arrests of members of a leading Egyptian human rights organization following a meeting with European diplomats Nov. 3.

Since last week, authorities have arrested three members of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) on charges which include belonging to a terrorist organization, undermining public security by spreading false information and using the Internet to spread false news.

Samah Ibrahim Tanieub is at home on break between nursing shifts in the Jordanian capitol, Amman – two weeks on the COVID-19 isolation ward and then another two weeks in quarantine before she can come home.

The long shifts are particularly difficult for Tanieub because she's a divorced single mother with four children, the youngest just five years old. The work doesn't pay more than her regular salary of about $650 a month but she volunteered for COVID-19 duty and says she loves her job as a nurse.

Jamal Abdullah Naser stands behind the counter of the small grocery store where he works and watches for the first time a video of a wounded teenager, who he believes is his son, just before he was killed by a Navy SEAL.

The ruler of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, has died at the age of 91. Born in an era when the tiny Gulf emirate's economy relied on pearl diving, his life spanned the discovery of oil and Kuwait's emergence as one of the world's richest countries.

Kuwaiti state television announced the emir's death Tuesday after playing Quranic prayers.

Editor's note: This story includes details some readers may find disturbing.

Ftaim al-Saleh's young nieces and nephews play in the dirt near her family's new tent on the road to Amman's international airport. Her own youngest children are buried up the road — four of them laid out in graves on a small, rocky hilltop cemetery overlooking the highway.

The children died in a fire early one morning in June, while she and her husband were in the fields where they work as farm laborers.

Seventeen years after it was stolen, archaeologist McGuire Gibson still checks eBay for a 4,000-year-old stone cylinder seal that he excavated in Iraq in the 1970s.

Um Hiba's trauma over being enslaved, raped and beaten by ISIS after fighters raided her village didn't end when she was freed three years ago. Instead, like thousands of other survivors of the genocide against Yazidis, she languishes, still traumatized, with what's left of her family.

Jordanian Prime Minister Omar Razzaz sits in the front room of his family home in a middle-class Amman neighborhood of traditional white stone houses with small gardens and low walls. Unusually, in a region where senior officials typically live in gated compounds far from public view, the residential street has been kept open to traffic to minimize disruption to Razzaz's neighbors.

Coronavirus cases are spiking sharply in Iraq amid a shortage of supplies that has resulted in protesters storming an oxygen cylinder factory and relatives of patients seizing oxygen canisters in hospitals.

"This is a war against the coronavirus and we have lost the war," says an Iraqi official who has been briefed on the government's response to the pandemic.

When the Museum of the Bible opened three years ago, its founders aimed to engage a wider audience with the Bible and its thousands of years of history.

But the museum's ambitious goals have been overshadowed by a series of scandals, still unfolding, over antiquities — acquired in a five-year international shopping spree — that have turned out to be looted or fake.

A U.S. military contractor in Iraq has abruptly laid off the majority of the U.S.-led coalition's Iraqi interpreters. The move has left many fearing retaliation from ISIS and Iran-backed militias hostile to U.S. forces, and forced some into hiding.

The sudden layoffs — and lack of safeguards or responses to the interpreters' concerns — appear to be the latest examples of how the U.S. has left in harm's way Iraqi citizens who risked their lives with U.S. forces.

U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking the return to Iraq of a roughly 3,500-year-old clay tablet purchased by the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts store chain for display in the Washington, D.C.-based Museum of the Bible. The cuneiform tablet is described as "stolen Iraqi property" in a civil complaint filed Monday.

What happens to a popular travel destination when visitors suddenly stop coming? In Jordan's ancient city of Petra, it makes way for the cats, dogs, birds and other creatures to take over.

Normally, the city teems with Bedouin guides and their animals — camels, horses and donkeys — bringing some of the thousands of tourists a day to the site's tombs and temples carved out of colorful rock more than 2,000 years ago.

Iraq finally has a new government. More than five months after the country's caretaker prime minister announced he would resign amid anti-government protests, Parliament early Thursday approved intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi and most of his Cabinet.

Kadhimi, 53, has the backing of both the U.S. and Iran. He has struggled in recent weeks to win support from influential Iran-backed Shiite political factions. In the end, Kathimi won enough support from Parliament without the backing of at least one key former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who opposed his nomination.

In the ancient city of Petra, Jordan's best-known tourist destination, bird song echoes against the multicolored rock and the elaborate monuments instead of the din of tour groups and souvenir sellers.

The coronavirus pandemic has done what war did not — bring this Middle Eastern country's vital tourism industry to a dramatic halt, and with it, the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Abdul Rahman Labdour and his two brothers worked in a five-star hotel in the Red Sea resort city of Aqaba, Jordan. But with tourism now shut down, on the eve of Ramadan, the brothers set up a tiny pop-up bakery in their hometown of Shoubak, in the southern part of the country.

"Welcome my dears," Labdour, a burly man in a red Ferrari T-shirt and a mask and gloves shouts to passersby, enticing them to buy qatayef, a crescent-shaped pastry synonymous with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. In Arabic, the sales pitch rhymes.

Yemen has recorded its first confirmed case of coronavirus. Aid officials warn the impoverished country already devastated by five years of war will be unable to cope if the virus spreads.

"We are bracing for the worst," Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, told NPR on Friday.

Before the case was announced, Grande said in a phone interview from the Yemeni capital Sanaa that the country would be completely overwhelmed by the spread of the virus.

For centuries, Hindus gathered to burn corpses on funeral pyres along the Ganges River. Jews received condolences at home during a seven-day mourning period. Muslims huddled together to wash the corpses of loved ones in Iraq and across the Arab world.

But global burial rituals are being dramatically changed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Jordan has sealed off its second biggest city and the surrounding province after dozens of guests at a wedding held two weeks ago tested positive for the coronavirus.

Army vehicles drove through the streets of Irbid, about 60 miles north of Amman, Thursday night telling people their city of 2 million was now effectively under military control and not to leave their homes.

The country of Jordan has implemented one of the strictest lockdowns in the world to stop the spread of the coronavirus, forcing most people to stay indoors and temporarily shutting down even grocery stores and pharmacies.

The Middle Eastern country with its 10 million residents has so far arrested more than 1,600 people for breaking the five-day-old curfew, which bans even going for walks or allowing pets outdoors.

Etab Hadithi comes home from work, climbs the steps in an unlit stairwell to her fifth-floor apartment in the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib and points out the doorways of neighbors displaced from other parts of the country.

"These ones are from Deir Ezzor, here from Aleppo, those from Damascus," she says, pausing to catch her breath.