It’s been a challenging time to be part of a humanitarian organization in the U.S. The terms: foreign assistance aid and foreign aid have been discussed a lot lately. But, what do they really mean? Can humanitarian aid to help people affected by conflict and violence—the work we do at International Committee of the Red Cross—really meet an America-first agenda? On today’s episode, ICRC’s Head of the US & Canada Delegation Fabrizio Carboni sits down with Kathryn-Jean Lopez, editor-at-large at the National Review, a U.S. magazine and news website publishing conversative commentary.

Music for this episode was provided by: Tension Music Box by Universfield -- https://freesound.org/s/735313/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

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Since the beginning of time, war has been used as a tool to resolve disagreements. While countless numbers of civilians die in war, the cost of war only gets more expensive each year. In this episode, we look at one of the only programs on the globe that brings together adversaries and allies to talk through ways to reduce the costs of war—in treasure and in lives--and maybe build toward positive peace. We sit down with Tom Geiser, an armed services advisor with the ICRC, and Paul Sotomayor, the deputy division chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command J7.

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In this Digital Dilemmas 2.0: Deepfakes episode, we take a look at two poignant questions: “How do we distinguish truth from manipulation? Who owns the truth?“

We tour a deepfake exhibit created by the ICRC and L'École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the United Nations. Then, we zoom out and look at how dissemination of harmful narratives projected in images, videos, or other information affect communities in conflict and situations violence.

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In a country of more than 100 armed groups, the Democratic Republic of Congo has one of the most protracted and forgotten conflicts in the world. In the latest Intercross episode, we ask what the recent hostilities that started around December mean for the more than 4.5 million people who have been forced to flee their homes? And what is the ICRC’s response? In this episode, we hear from Francois Moreillon, ICRC's Head of Delegation in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC.

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In 2017, a battle raged in Mosul, as Iraqi armed forces and their international supporters fought to dislodge Islamic State fighters from the city. Almost 2 million people—half of Mosul’s population--fled from the fighting. During the battle, over 9000 civilians were killed and more than 130,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. In the latest episode, we hear from the staff at one of the hospitals decimated by the fighting. Then we turn to our team in Mosul and ask: How do largely populated cities like Mosul, after so much destruction and human tragedy, carry on after the conflict ends?

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Following the end of the Islamic State Group’s caliphate in Mosul, Iraq in 2017, hundreds of women and children were detained in facilities throughout Iraq and Syria, and left in a state of limbo, not knowing when or if they would be released and repatriated into third-party countries. In this episode, we meet one family that has at least partly managed to leave detention and the war behind them to find a home in the Kyrgyz Republic with the help of their host community. We then speak to Elena Esanu, the ICRC’s deputy protection coordinator in Kyrgyzstan, to talk about how the ICRC is working in these host communities to build acceptance and help this family and others reintegrate into society. We ask Elena whether this family’s reintegration experience is a blueprint for other countries of origin to follow for families who remain stranded and separated.

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While media images showed the initial destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam leaving thousands of homes underwater and civilians without electricity or clean drinking water, it wasn’t able to show the unexploded ordnances lurking under the surface, affecting untold numbers of people. Today go to the Kherson Region, which has been heavily impacted unexploded ordnances, and hear from civilians and a Ukrainian Red Cross worker on the ground about how the contamination of landmines has frozen every day life. Then we turn to an interview with the Head of Weapons Contamination in Kyiv, Andy Duncan, to explain how this work is the very core of the ICRC’s mandate.

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