The moment this year I’ll never forget

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, five Guardian reporters on the moments this year that will stay with them forever.

0:24You listen to a daily news podcast, so we don't need to tell you just how quickly the news can move. Charlie Kirk has been shot. An agreed ceasefire in Gaza has come into effect. And our reporters are often very, very busy. Pictures not seen before that were taken on Jeffrey Epstein's private island in the Caribbean. Speaking to sources, recording interviews. We're getting reports of a plane crash in India. Witnessing history unfold in real time. Just weeks after President Trump signed a... But there are always moments that stick with you. Things that you can't forget, weeks, months, sometimes even years later.

1:05Stuff that maybe doesn't even make your article. It's not a headline, it's a little moment. A sound maybe, the sort of thing you lie awake at night thinking about. So as the year draws to a close, we've got a different kind of episode for you today. We thought we'd go to Guardian reporters around the world. The sort of main thing in my memory from that was the family that we met. To ask them about the one moment this year It said a lot about society in general. that they just couldn't shake.

1:56Earlier this year, I travelled to Syria to get a sense of what freedom looked like in a country that had been living under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world for decades. and I wanted to capture what that freedom sounded like. You all know that voice. It's Michael Safi, the former Today in Focus presenter and now host of The Guardian Investigates podcast. And so one night I went to a cafe in central Damascus, not far from Parliament, not far from the Four Seasons Hotel where lots of foreigners stay, called Cafe Al-Rauda.

2:33It's this huge hall full of people men and women sitting around drinking coffee smoking shisha, talking about politics talking openly without fear of the consequences many for the first time in their entire lives

2:53Café Al-Arolda opened in 1938 it's a Damascus institution It's always been this meeting place for intellectuals and journalists and people trying to chart the future of this country. How are you? How are you? I'm Allah. I sat down with the owner of the cafe, a guy called Ahmed Kozarosh, and he told me that in the 1970s, that kind of freewheeling intellectual atmosphere changed really dramatically because somebody new had taken over the country, Hafiz al-Assad.

3:36He said that in the early years of Assad's rule, he learned that some of his staff were secret agents working for the regime. And it became dangerous, impossible to openly talk about politics and not risk being thrown in prison.

3:59But Rauda had a kind of second life because in the year 2000, Hafez al-Assad's son, Bashar al-Assad, took over.

4:10Damascus experienced a moment that's now known as the Damascus Spring, where people were encouraged to form civil society groups to talk up to a point about politics. But as Ahmed Kozarosh told me that night in Damascus, that was a trap. As soon as people did start talking, the bars came down again. The atmosphere in the cafe and across all of Syria was that the walls have ears. Don't talk about politics, not to friends, not to family members, certainly not to other members of the public that you don't know.

4:54He said that the worst years for this cafe was after 2011 when the Syrian revolution started. People would protest and when they were being chased by security forces, some of them would run into the cafe and pretend they'd been sitting there all along having a coffee or that they worked there. Eventually, people started getting arrested in the cafe and dragged out.

5:25I could still see the expression on his face as he talked about that. It hurt him that this place that he hoped to make a kind of centre for Syrian life and civil society had become a place where people were dragged away and thrown in prison instead. Stunning turn of events in Syria. Rebels sweeping that country, seizing power, forcing President Bashar al-Assad to flee. Toppling statues of Assad, cheering the end of the family's brutal absence from India.

5:57Ahmed al-Shirah led the lightning offensive that toppled President Bashar al-Assad. In recent days, he's been trying to allay fears a new government might restrict the rights of women. At one stage when I was there, the new Syrian president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, was on TV giving a speech. You could see people looking at the TV, pointing, shouting at each other. And they were having these loud and rancorous political conversations that even two months before I was there would have been just impossible. It was this very special moment.

6:38It was a really incredible time to be in Syria because we felt like the country was as free as it would ever be. The people who took over, we don't really know their true nature. And so much about their past gives us reason to think that they will eventually crack down on the limited civil freedoms people enjoy. And so it was this moment, the month after Bashar al-Assad had fallen, before this new government had really established itself, that we may look back on as being peak freedom, this incredible moment of hope and possibility in Syria. And I've just felt so lucky to be there and thought, I'm going to remember this forever.

7:16This is the kind of thing when I retire, I'll talk about that I was there.

8:00The Javari Valley, it sort of tests the human ability to understand scale. This is John Reid. He's a writer and journalist who covers Indigenous communities in the Amazon. When I flew over it in a helicopter, we were just flying and flying and flying and the thing was going fast and I couldn't believe how much rainforest was passing underneath.

8:36The territory is so vast that there are areas of it that are incredibly isolated. So much so that the territory still has somewhere between 10 and 15 groups of people who live in isolation from the modern world, the so-called uncontacted people. Uncontacted peoples or peoples in voluntary isolation deliberately avoid contact with modern society to safeguard their way of life. This is the Brazilian journalist Andre Neto. He reported this story with John. Contact and colonization of indigenous people has pretty much always meant either their extinction or complete assimilation. so the separation is fairly dramatic and that's actually key to their survival because they have not developed the immunities to diseases that are common out here in the wider world so a simple flu can kill a whole community within the space of a week so I was in the Jabari Valley in June of this year and we stopped at a control post where you have to show your papers and show your authorization to be in the territory and a policeman who works at that base was chatting with us and showed us a picture on his phone And the picture was of an audio device.

10:23eyes. Deus é um Deus de amor, portanto, se ele é um Deus de amor, ele me levará para o céu quando eu morrer, which means God is a God of love, therefore, if he's a God of love, He'll take me to heaven when I die. And it continues along this path, discussing death, meeting God, and related topics.

11:01The device is the size of a cell phone. And it is designed by a religious organization in the United States. And the goal is to convert people to Christianity.

11:29This is part of a 500-year story of harvesting souls. Missionaries have been at it since the Portuguese first landed on the shore of Brazil in the year 1500. In the 20th century, the missionaries working in the Amazon tended to be American organizations. The American New Tribes Mission have been operating here for some years. Up the rivers, the only real highway, they bring the nonconformist Christian gospel, Salvation. The leading organization over recent decades is called Ethnos 360. its former name was the New Tribes Mission. It's a challenge and there's a lot of work to be done and the people are very interesting.

12:27We're looking forward to getting to know them better and be able to talk to them better too, so we can tell them more about the Lord. And the New Tribes Mission referred to Indigenous peoples as brown gold. So these human souls were actually something that they saw themselves as mining.

12:55It's been 2 ,000 years since Jesus gave his life for every tribe, tongue, and nation. It's still happening. And yet today, there's still thousands of people groups who remain unreached. The Brazilian government does not allow presiditizing in this kind of protected territories. Its policy dating from 1987 stipulates that isolated groups must initiate any contact. However, the missionaries come and they look at what the indigenous people want and need. Is it health care? Is it education? Is it solar panels? Nowadays, they're bringing Starlink equipment. I've seen in other parts of the Amazon where Christianity is very powerful and pervasive, but the tactics to accomplish it are quite aggressive.

13:51How do you tell people that God sent his only son to die for their sins when they think God is the guy that lives up the river, or if they think someone else created God? They play a long game. The first move may be to leave audio devices in the forest that nobody understands, but they'll be back.

14:48At the start of this year, I went to the world's largest religious gathering in India, the Kumbh Mela. This is The Guardian's South Asia correspondent, Hannah Ellis-Peterson. It's the holiest festival for Hindus and it rotates between four sacred locations. These are places where it's believed in Hindu mythology that Lord Vishnu, a Hindu god, spilled drops of the elixir of immortality during a fight between the gods and the demons.

15:23And the most sacred of these four places is Prayagraj, which is in the state of Uttar Pradesh. on the banks of a sacred confluence of rivers, the Ganga and the Yamana, and also the mythical Saraswati River. And that was where the Kumela took place this year. It's a place where people go to bathe in the river to relinquish their soul from the cycle of reincarnation.

15:54It's kind of impossible to really capture in words what it feels like to be there in amongst so many people This was probably one of the largest gatherings of humanity that's maybe ever taken place The government initially said they estimated around 400 million devotees would come but by the end of the festival in a number that was impossible to verify they said more than 600 million people attended the festival over 45 days.

16:27You know, there are people singing, there are chants from the crowds, you've got these makeshift temples which are built, which are 24-7 blasting out these kind of religious songs. So there's no point, there's nowhere in this expanse where you can find any quiet.

16:51And then when you go down to the banks of the river, which is the most sacred place, you know, as far as the eye can see, people are just squeezed together tightly. It looked like this kind of quilt of human beings, you know, bright colors. And then you had people going into the water, taking this holy dip, having this very kind of sacred moment, and then coming out. some people were just kind of ecstatic some people were crying because they believe it will cleanse their souls and bring them eternal joy and life

17:35the festival had also taken on quite a major political significance which is one of the reasons it felt kind of important to be there and see it for myself. So the ruling BJP government, which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been in power for 10 years and over that 10 years has been pushing a very strong Hindu nationalist agenda. And for them, the Kummela was a powerful symbol of Hindu strength and dominance. The government pumped billions of rupees into the festival. There was a huge PR campaign around it, you know, encouraging people to go.

18:15One of the days that I chose to go was one of the holy days. And this is when the sadhus, who are the Hindu holy men who all gather at the Kummala, take part in a bathing ritual. They run roaring into these holy waters. Historically, these bathing days are meant to be spectacular. But earlier that day, you started to feel it had been crowded before. no doubt, but it started to feel impossibly crowded. You could barely move. The riverbank, you couldn't get access to it. What felt kind of sadly inevitable was there was this stampede and there was this horrific sight where so many pilgrims, many of whom had been sleeping on the floor, were crushed and around 30 people died.

19:12There are some figures which say that it was almost double that. But there was an effort to cover up the true number of the people who died. Definitely kind of cast quite a dark cloud over the festival and the fact that there was this government campaign which had actively promoted so many people to come and possibly not the conditions created for it to be safe for them to be there.

19:53Coming up, we head to Alligator Alcatraz and a court in France where one extremely brave woman finally gets justice.

20:14The Free Birth Society made millions selling a simple message to pregnant women. You don't need ultrasounds, doctors or midwives. You can free birth. But behind the scenes, terrible things were happening. I feel ashamed about this, but I didn't think that the deaths were bad until a year after I left. Subscribe to The Guardian Investigates feed to get all the episodes of The Birth Keepers. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Out now.

20:58So in the middle of July, I drove from Tampa, Florida into the Everglades National Park area along a rural highway that was lined with cypress trees and these kind of beautiful, expansive wetlands to a newly constructed detention centre in the centre of this national park. This is The Guardian's US Southern Bureau Chief, Oliver Lachland. And it just kind of appears out of nowhere. In fact, one of the things that I remember most, we're just seeing these newly erected, extremely large blue signs, official roadway signs that were emblazoned with the words Alligator Alcatraz.

21:43So obviously Trump campaigned during the 2024 election on an agenda of mass deportation. On day one of my new administration, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history. We have no choice. When he came into office, he kind of issued this call to construct bigger detention centres to quickly deport as many people as possible. And Alligator Alcatraz has really become kind of a symbol of Trump's mass deportation agenda. Construction on the immigration detention centre is almost finished, but facing backlash from critics. And it was very hastily constructed in the summer of this year.

22:22Attorney General Uthmeyer says the goal is to have that facility ready to go by the first week of July. It took, I think, just over a week to build it. It's a sprawling tent detention center. The facilities are obviously extremely rudimentary. There are reports from inside of extremely unsanitary conditions, of terrible food, of brutality by guards. And obviously, you know, the key is kind of in the name, Alligator Alcatraz. It's supposed to be brutal. It is, by political design, a harsh place to be. One of the reasons why this was a sensible spot is because you have this runway that's right here.

22:59You don't have to drive them an hour to an airport. You go a couple thousand feet and they can be on a plane and out of here. And the people being brought there are effectively people who are being arrested by immigration authorities. and as we know, the majority of people now in immigration detention don't actually have criminal records. They're being apprehended simply for immigration violations.

23:34When we pulled up, some of the first people we met were a group of protesters. Hi, who are you shooting for? I'm with the Guardian. Oh, you are? Yeah. Oh, it's so nice to talk to you. And people had driven all the way from Miami to come out and just stand and essentially do what we were doing, which was to bear witness, to watch the construction trucks go in and out, to watch buses of detainees being brought in and out as well. But they do bring in busloads of about 50 at a time and vanloads of about 15 at a time, and they keep coming. There was a sort of realisation, really, that in this new era of Trump where there's real sort of lack of oversight and accountability, this was to some people kind of a last resort to feel like they could do something to oppose what was going on there.

24:18This is my third trip out there. Third trip? It's only been open a few weeks. Yeah, I was here yesterday and I was here last Saturday. What brings you out? The fact that I am ashamed of my country for treating good people this way.

24:38These places have an aura about them. The larger ones are in more rural areas. They are often harder to reach, harder for journalists to reach, obviously, but also for lawyers to reach, for families to reach as well. And so I think their remoteness is really by design. It serves a purpose.